Jubilee

So there we were: silver jubilee year and all stood standing in the pissing rain. One or other dignitary — we never found out which — was going to Pigham town hall and we were being lined up against the railings on the other side of the cricket pitch to provide an audience backdrop. The school had special procedures in the event of a royal visit. Not that we ever had a royal visit. Not so much as a diadem since the place was opened 56 years previously, so they reckoned it must be their turn soon. So we were all stood there in the pissing rain staring at the traffic on Talbot Road. 

The instructions were that we were to shout gladly and wave our flags when the cavalcade rode by. None of us had flags so they gave us each a tin of corned beef. Eventually we caught sight of a big black Daimler. We started waving our tins of corned beef and shouting: "God save the Queen!" The Deputy Headmaster ran over. "Pack it in!" he shouted, "It's a bloody funeral!"

So we waited a bit more then the word came: "Here they come!" We waved our tins and gave patriotic cry. "You wouldn't have thought the Queen would have a white Ford Cortina estate would you?" asked wee Paulie Camcraft. Kenny Fletcher wasn't impressed: "If she's going to have a nodding dog on the back shelf you'd have thought she'd have got a corgi, special like," he said. One of the teachers noticed that Michael Donelly wasn't waving his tin of corned beef. "Have you lobbed it at a passing car?" he asked him. "No sir, I've put it down the front of my trousers to keep warm." "You pillock. What do you want to do that for?" "If the Queen turns shirty and starts kicking everyone in the nuts I'll be safe and laughing, sir," he replied.


The teachers kept an eye on Michael Donelly's trousers because they were objects of subversive rebellion. There was a strict uniform code: we were to wear black flannel trousers and flares were absolutely forbidden. Michael Donelly didn't wear flares. Michael Donelly was a mad fan of Northern Soul. Michael Donelly had a pair of black flannel trousers with seventy-two inch bottoms. The teachers regarded them with impotent fury. They had seventy-two inch bottoms *but they weren't flares*. The legs were dead straight; erupting in their full glory straight from the hip. We discovered that he could hide a full set of the text books off the geography teacher's desk balanced on his foot and completely hidden from view for, oooh, hours. Much to the geography teacher's irritation. A tin of corned beef was child's play in comparison.  

The march of progress

Yesterday we marked the 60th anniversary of the conquest of Everest by Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay. A towering achievement in anybody's money.

At the same time I didn't send somebody an email asking: "And how old are we, then? Six?"

We live in exciting times.

I remember when all this was fields

The small niece-child is learning a bit of Spanish at school, which I think is no bad thing. As is the way with these things, it is the purest accident: one of the teachers happens to be Spanish, it's not in the school prospectus. The idea of a school prospectus bewilders me slightly as I'm of that age when you went to your local primary school unless your parents were particularly keen Roman Catapults in which case you went to the nearest R.C. similar. And that was the end of it, none of this trawling through prospectuses, web sites and league tables and poring one's way through the Ofsted reports. Not that I hold much faith in the latter anyway: every school I go past in the course of an ordinary week has a big banner strapped to the front boasting of its Ofsted plaudits ("Sums were enthralling" — Harold Hobsbon). It pisses me off to think that the money schools are spending on Ofsted Plaudit banners could fund a medium-sized county library service book fund for a year.

Anyway… We went to our local primary school, which was good because it was within walking distance, which was good because hardly anyone had a car and them that did only ever used it for their dads to go to and from work.

Our local school was out in the middle of a big field just by the motorway. Over the years the field got bigger and became a school playing field as the wilder edges were given over to dutifully-manicured grass. At the end of the field, behind the first houses of the estate, was a particularly wild stretch full of mustards and thistles and the occasional haunt of lizards. Through this ran the brook which started off from out of nowhere near the cornflake factory and ran for a couple of miles before trickling into the Irwell at Barton. At the school end it was a bit sluggish and fed a small pond choked with water mint. Further up you could squeeze through the railings behind the builder's yard and look for sticklebacks and stray frogs. I wonder how many kids these days get to see a stickleback; it is a concern.

Over yonder, where the shopping centre car park is now, there was a field of Friesian cows, gently a-mooing and chewing their cuds. Behind would be Barton Power Station, a miniature edition of Battersea. I miss that almost as much as the annual air show, three days of random aerospace history to-ing and fro-ing to the aerodrome for the Sunday event. Gypsy moths and a Vulcan bomber were a given. Sometimes there'd be the thrill of a Hurricane or Lockheed Lightning and, just that once, a Spitfire and a Lancaster. Sunday tea time would see everyone standing in their front gardens to watch the Red Arrows and then it was officially over.

Behind the school was the freight line that fed goods to the western half of what was then Europe's biggest industrial complex (that was the reason why we were semi-rural as far as the rates were concerned). Just the other side was a scabby field of scrubby grass, home to partridge, lapwing and many a courting couple. That's concrete now, with a warehouse stuck on it.

Now it's all cropped green fields, car parks and triple carriageways serving the shopping centre. The quiet Sunday afternoon walk behind the church and round to the main road is an expensive leisure complex. And kids trapped in the school run are taken round the shops to socialise them.

I'm under no illusions as to just how rough things were really in the sixties. But the brook at Longford, now culverted and covered over by concrete and beer cans and old mattresses was once lively with yellow flag irises and water boatmen and I don't think much of the swap.

The intellectual rigour of the English sabbath

The quiet English Sunday is an opportunity for sober reflection of the big issues of life and the prolonged digestion of the issues and outcomes of our current affairs media.

Today we have mulled over:

• The merits — or not — of the lamb chop, roast potato and minty peas smoothie;


• Queen Victoria's moustache cup; and


• Cats' bottoms.

Birthday honours

We are slightly out of sorts, we are, by the concept of Sir Bruce Forsyth. Nothing against the man, please understand me, but not an easy one for my household to get its head round. We are actively outraged by the idea of Sir Tom Jones and the cold grim reality that in five or six years' time it'll be Dame Lulu.

I've long argued that it's more than time that Nicholas Parsons got a knighthood. The Small Object of Desire objected on the grounds that Peter Shilton hadn't got one for "being lovely." Even she had to admit that he couldn't have one before Gordon Banks. We agreed to disagree, eventually, over the merits or not of Sir Nobby Stiles.

John Inman and Roy Barraclough should both be made Dames of the British Empire for their services to pantomime.

As should Jeremy Paxman.

Operation Errol Flynn

When my grandfather was pinned down by sniper fire in a banana grove in Burma I wonder if he ever imagined I'd be sat here watching a train called "The Spirit of Osaka" taking Chinese white goods to what used to be the Empire's largest industrial park.

When Diana Dors ruled the world

My dad was playing on the swings with my small niece.

"Dinosaurs were very, very big," she said.

"Yes they were," he agreed.

"They were HUGE. And very, very fierce. Dinosaurs were very, very big and really fierce."

"Ooh yes."

"I've seen a dinosaur's bones. I saw a dinosaur skeleton. We went to the museum and we saw a dinosaur skeleton. It was huge. And I touched its claw. But it was all right because it was only the skeleton."

"Very good. Did it have big teeth as well?"

"It had very big teeth. But I wasn't scared: there aren't any dinosaurs any more. They died out. They all died out a long, long time ago."

"Well, that's a relief, isn't it?"

"It must have been very scary when you were a little boy, with all those dinosaurs running around."

Kissproofed

I'd forgotten it runs in the family. My father was telling my wee niece a selection of the usual daft stories when he reminded me of one I'd completely forgotten.

The 1960s for so many of us was more Sheila Delaney than Carnaby Street and it was all black and white up to the summer of 1968 when Mrs. Gmerek brought in some tubs of lime green and mandarin orange paints and infant class 3 tried to go psychadelic. By then we were living in the flats in the suburbs. Before then we'd shared my nan's terraced house in Old Trafford, five yards away from where it became Hulme and Manchester corporation rates. Times were hard but they had their sense of the ridiculous to help them get by. Which is how it came to pass that one day my mum and nan had the fright of their lives as an ugly old tart popped her head round the doorway and said: "Hello dearies! What's for tea?"

It was my dad, dolled up in my mum's Max Factor war paint and with granny's shawl round his head.

There it would have been, just another daft little thing in the scheme of things but for one unforeseen happenstance.

The lipstick wouldn't come off.

Max Factor industrial strength kiss-proofed carmine lipstick. (I have quizzed my mum about this and she says she'll tell me about it when I'm older.) Nothing but time would shift it.

Which is how come my dad turned up at the plumber's yard the next day with cute little red rosebud lips and two rouged circles on his cheeks.

Church

My dad's gone back to the church. Which is to say that he never actually turned his back on it, he's just not been very often in the past forty years. When we moved up here in the sixties the two churches within half an hour's walking distance were a tad clique-y and unfriendly and not really warranting the walk.

He's found himself a nice church and the only problem now is getting a lift to it, happily provided by one or other of the in-laws. And he likes it just fine as the church has a pleasant congregation and a congenial vicar.

But he is having problems with the religion.

"They don't say the kyrie eleison," he tells me. "And it's all in English!"

My father, you see, was brought up High Church. And the High Church Anglicans of the thirties and forties make the Vatican look like a particularly Spartan offshoot of the Wee Frees. This was in the old Manchester before they knocked down the old terraces to build new slums, decanting the broken-up communities to diffused estates in the care of community centres and the occasional bus back to the homeland. Back then each street corner had a church, a pub, a tobacconists and a chip shop; all man's daily needs within reach of a harsh word. The churches were bought and paid for by Eminent Victorians. Each was magnificent and, frankly, vainglorious, straining spires poking their way through the yellow smog that paid for them. And, for reasons I no longer recollect, they were all High Church. (Back then you were either High Church or Chapel, anything in between was too wishy-washy for anyone to have any truck with). Even in those days of depression when Sunday best spent the rest of the week in the pop shop the priest's vestments were elaborate and splendid with very nearly a stole a week in complications of the liturgical colours. When I was little we'd be taken in Saint Gabriel's on the Saturday afternoon shopping trip down Alex Road. We'd have a look around the church, to be sure to bow to the lady as directed and then back to the shopping.

Well, they're all knocked down now. Or else turned into bijoux city apartments. So all we've got left now are nice little churches filled with pleasant people who don't do the Latin. But if that fills the need then that's all that really matters.

Remembrance Sunday

There went a phase in the seventies and eighties where Remembrance Sundays were regarded as anathemae of The Left as they Glorified War. In this, as in so many things, I was out of step with the comrades who now steal the last pennies from the pockets of the common man. I have always seen Remembrance Sunday as a commemoration of the far-too-many poor ordinary blokes who lost lives, limbs or reason in the awfulness of war. And some type of public consolation to their families and friends.

It is moving and disturbing to see the war memorials in even the smallest of villages, each and every one with long rolls of the names of the local fallen. The breadth and extent of the losses are astonishing. I cannot help wondering what type of world it would have been had they survived.

Critical moments in history

Not for the first time I wonder how history would have been changed had Adolf Hitler not lost the Saddleworth Open Shin-kicking Final in 1919.

Outfoxed by Robin Catbush, the wily Morpeth Maestro, he turned his back on the game and took up politics because the boots were a better quality. Would the world have been a better place had he been not so embittered?