Roses

I buried my mother today.

Quite literally, I buried my mother. The ceremonials had been done and dusted a few weeks ago and today I placed her ashes in the bottom of a big tub in my father's garden, covered it with compost and planted over it a rose bush that my aunt had bought as a memorial for her. I asked my father if he wanted to say a few words but he said that he'd do it as and when they came to him on his own as he pottered about the garden. Which is more than fair enough.

I'd made the mistake of telling the ex-small object of desire that both parents would probably outlive the rest of us. A couple of weeks later and both were visited upon by the nasty chest infection that was going round. My dad was laid low at home and my mum had to go into hospital. One day she was at in a ward eating cottage pie and trying to play a tune on the oxygen monitors. A couple of days later she was critical on a ventilator. On her last day she had enough strength to be fed a bowl of leek and potato soup and some grapes, and lots of cups of tea. We managed to get the immediate family round to say goodbye, which was a consolation.

When I was making the funeral arrangements I gave my brother the job of coaxing a choice of three pieces of music out of my dad. In the end the choice was good: "Jesu Joy Of Man's Desiring," Mama Cass singing "Dream A Little Dream of Me," and the Beatles' "In My Life."

The other day I dreamt I was doing the reading at my own funeral. It was all rather lovely and I woke up with a tear-stained pillow. These were the three pieces of music:




Be kind to each other.

Music for pleasure

We really do have conversations like this while we're cleaning our teeth...

"Did I dream this or did Max Bygraves die recently?"

"I don't know. Are you sure it was Max Bygraves?"

"No, that's why I was asking."

"Was it the other bloke, the one with the jumper?"

"Val Doonican?" 

"No. The Christmas one."

"Perry Como?"

"No. The other one."

"What other one?" 

"Is Val Doonican dead then?" 

"I don't know. I'll have to look it up on the 'net." 

So long Eddie

R.I.P. Eddie Braben

The passing of one of my heroes. An utter genius of a writer, a great artist and craftsman. We're the better for having had him round.

How could you improve Morecambe and Wise? Well, you could get them to drop the Abbott and Costello personae they often adopted in the fifties and sixties. Then you could write for deep-seated warmth of their friendship. And then you could add the daftnesses of childhood. And you get this:



Here he is talking to Miranda Hart about the experience:



(It wasn't until I read his obituary in "The Independent" that I knew about his head-butting Billy Cotton for not letting him follow Morecambe & Wise over to Thames when they left the BBC.)

It's a shame I don't have any links to clips of any of his radio shows. Mad compendia of music hall malarkey, gorms and grotesques, with Alison Steadman as Miss Tasker ("Shy of men. Always have been...") driven wild by men's thighs and the odd lurch into Comic Cuts surrealism that would lead Eli Woods to cry: "I've done some rubbish in my time, but..." And we'd laugh. Because it was warm and daft and funny.

Thank you sir.

In praise of gentle madness

I was going to write a tribute to the late, great Eric Sykes but Scaryduck has written a blinder.

One of the earliest Sykes scripts I know of was a monologue written for Frankie Howerd on "Variety Bandbox" back in the days when the Light Service ruled the wireless. In it, Howerd had got work in a zoo and the first job he was given to do was to deliver an elephant to an address across town. By bus and tube. Frankie Howerd milking the fits of giggles generated by the mental picture of his trying to coax an elephant up an escalator is a joy and I wish I could find a copy to post on here.

Instead, I'll offer up a piece of gentle silliness from the 1963 Royal Variety Performance:

I wonder if she did do that second house...

R.I.P. Charlie

Tremendously sad to hear that Charlie Callahan (Professor B. Worm) has passed away. His occasional quiet words of support were always appreciated.

Ah... would that it weren't, would that it weren't

Sadly missed already. R.I.P. Robert Robinson

And an affectionate tweak of the whiskers:

In memoriam

Just a very brief, and sad, note to mourn the passing of two of the splendid people on my blogroll. Kaz and Gerald will both be greatly missed for their friendliness and wit.

Sympathies and best wishes to their friends and families.

A child's garden full of intimations of mortality

The small niece child is pondering the mysteries of life, death, God and what not and isn't any too impressed by the big feller's manner of getting things done.

"If everybody dies there'll be nobody left in the world. I don't know what He thinks he's doing..."

In memoriam

R.I.P. the sublimely beautiful Susannah York. Sigh...

And also to football legend Nat Lofthouse.

Susannah York had the nicer legs.

Fantastic Farewell

Been here.

I'm knocking on fifty (but look years younger). I've spent the evening sitting in the rain on a park bench singing my heart out to a particularly cheesy rendition of "The Wonder of You" being sung by a Dead Elvis impersonator as the audience debates whether or not Frank Sidebottom's older kid brother should kill Little Frank (a cardboard puppet) so that he can go into a paper mâché sarcophagus and join Big Frank in the afterlife.

It doesn't get a lot better than that.

R.I.P.

In an interview in London I was once asked what was the best cultural event I'd ever been to. I answered that I'd seen Shakespeare in Stratford; von Stroheim in Edinburgh; opera, dance and all sorts of theatre but the single best cultural event I'd ever been to was a Frank Sidebottom gig in a working men's club in Timperley. The audience were all grown-ups with all the cares of the world about their shoulders but for a couple of glorious hours they were allowed out on licence and were eight years old again, laughing and singing and joyful in their tomfoolery.

This is by way of an entirely inadequate thank-you.

Godspeed, Chris.

Layers of regret

A friend. a good friend long since passed from us, once got more than usually annoyed with me when in her cups two hundred miles away and rang me in the middle of the night to give me an ear-bashing. She had decided, quite rightly, that in my timidity and cowardice I was damaging the feelings and self-esteem of a very attractive Scotswoman. And so I was and did.

(It is my way: my problem is that I actually like women very much. When I find my feelings moving from friendship to passion I'm afeared of ruining a friendship by saying something stupid and scaring the poor woman to death. I find it vanishingly unlikely that my feelings would be reciprocated and am consequently very hard work indeed and Extremely Trying To The Patience. The one time in my life that a woman has literally thrown herself at me in a fit of passion I thought she'd slipped on her high heels and that the subsequent tears of anger and frustration meant that she'd hurt her ankle. She reminded me of that for years.)

My friend on the 'phone had seen enough the previous weekend and wasn't going to shilly-shally any:

"Hello love, are you OK? Why are you ringing at this hour?"

"Ooh, you do annoy me! I've decided you need a good talking-to. Are you listening? Next time you see her this is what you do..."

"Oh. Right. Thank you for that. You know, if I'd ever done that to you you'd have given me a thick ear."

"If you'd ever done that to me you'd have deserved a thick ear. Now have you been listening to me? What have I just told you?"

And so on. For another half hour.

I don't know how we got into the habit. I'm not even sure which of us did it the first. Every so often when we'd get together one, other or both of us would bring along the current object of affection for approval. At the first opportunity, one would lean over to the other and whisper: "Well? What do you think?" We'd been doing that for a dozen years before I realised it myself.

My friend was a wonderful mixture of keen intelligence and apparent innocence. As wild as little strawberries, she was a humanising influence on me and she recognised that the attractive Scotswoman was both a civilising influence and somebody who'd put up with a bit of my routine stupidity without indulging me in it. And when I got that last, consoling, kiss on Blackfriars Bridge I realised, too late, that she was dead right.

My friend managd better. We all knew when she finally found the elusive "Mr. Right." As they told me stories of their adventures and their plans for adventures to come I leaned over to her, winked and whispered: "He's the one."

"Oh yes? How are you so sure?"

"You let him call you 'babe'."

Losing somebody at sea is a strange thing. It sounds like carelessness and there is no ceremony of closure. I find it difficult to let go at the best of times and the fantasy of its being an unfortunate happenstance with a happy ending was a difficult one to chase away. How long was Alexander Selkirk on that island? In my dreams I'd have a million-and-one questions, nearly all of which would already have been asked in wearisome and/or distressing detail. And in my dreams I'd just ask the one question: "have you time for a cup of tea?"

In a sane and just world she'd be surrounded by cats and kids and empty yoghurt pots with odds and ends stuffed in them. It isn't and she isn't and it is to be regretted.

The Black Pig sails for the sunset...

We are at that age, so it should come as no surprise the the sparks of the creative genius that lit up our childhood are fading one by one. It is still something to be mourned and their work celebrated.

And so it is that we now say goodbye to John Ryan, the cartoonist who created Captain Pugwash.

We'll not have an airing of the urban myths about the naughty names this day. Let's just appreciate the splendour of innocence.

In memoriam

I was going to do a tribute but the Dotterel's done a better one already.

And Scarlet. Time for bed, Baby Clanger.

Ray Lowry

We have lost another of our great cartoonists and artists with the passing of Ray Lowry the other day. Just thought I'd mention it.

Valediction

Better than me will write mourning the passing of Humphrey Lyttleton but I couldn't let it pass disregarded here.

I shall miss his dry delivery in "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue," though we should be grateful for such a long and hilarious run. But mostly, I should be most grateful to him for his long-running jazz programme on Radio 2 which introduced me to some glorious music in the years before record companies relased their back-catalogues on CD.

A very civilised man.

Intimations of mortality

I've always liked the idea of a full-blown New Orleans-style jazz funeral, with a full retinue of musicians marching in synchopated time, starting out with a selection of King Oliver numbers up to the last lap towards the cemetary, at which point the line parts to allow the undertaker to get to the front. Taking the lead in the parade, and doing the vocals, he would then lead the band in a final rendition of "Mood Indigo." I've always liked that idea.

But one must be practical. More realistically, I think I'll settle for a fifty-strong all-girl brass kazoo band playing "Zippady Doo Dah."