Dear Old Auntie (BBC)

I thought I had done with blogging, but three things happened in the past few hours which have inspired me to write just this one, if no more. Firstly, I received an e-mail last night from a fellow blogger who seemed genuinely concerned about my latest absence and needed to know that I was okay, health-wise and everything. That was nice, and well appreciated, although I am perfectly well. Thank you, Fhina for your kind thought.

Secondly, while watching the BBC News at around 7-45 this morning I got two further surprises. Two presenters, who I had always thought were the same bloke, were sat facing each other and positively beaming with mutual admiration (what else?). I can’t tell you their names, which is perhaps just as well, although I do believe one is called Timothy.

Anyway, the newscaster partnering my pin-up girl, Susannah Reid, was interviewing today’s sports-caster on yesterday’s hammering the English cricket side had taken from the Australians. Now, seeing these two men together for the first time, it was immediately obvious to me that they were certainly not identical twins. However, they are the same height and build and their personalities are unquestionably similar, as are their speaking voices and they could comfortably be brothers born, say, 30 minutes apart!

Nothing tumultuous about that, I agree, but my third surprise just cannot go unreported and, on its own, would hardly have constituted a post. As usual, I had the subtitles switched on so as not to miss a word falling from the lips of the lovely, simpering Ms Reid. Her constantly widening, challenging eyes as she looks into the camera can be quite disconcerting, too, or so I find, but to get back to the point (yes, for God’s sake, do, you are saying).

The topic had changed from sport to general news, and I was in the act of getting up to go into the kitchen and do the ironing, when the subtitles announced that “Some white parents are seeking to take their children out of schools where there are effing minorities.” I sat back down without taking my eyes off the screen and, yep, as happens all the time, there was a pause at the end of the sentence followed by the correction, “ethnic minorities”. Phew!

I have no idea how many folks might have been watching with the subtitles on at that time, but I guess there were at least a few thousand holding their breath, just like me. As Judith wrote in her book “Wife in the North” just over a year ago, she had arrived here in North Northumberland from Central London to find that the only ethnic minority around here was "a redhead" – probably Crystal Jigsaw? ;-)

Facing the Truth

The first thing I noticed when re-entering the fold last month was the drastic increase in the numbers of Followers’ being featured at the blogsites of just about everybody in my old circle. I would guess that the average back in January would have been maybe around 20, but in June that had shot up quite remarkably with some of you topping the 100 mark.

The next thing I noticed was that all the blank faces (like my own) had disappeared from the galleries of followers when, again at a guess, there must have been a quarter to a third of us shirking the thumbnail-photo element back then. What happened to bring that about, I am wondering? Did Blogger.com put his foot down with a firm hand and declare that enough was enough? But, perhaps there are still a few blank faces knocking about and I have just missed seeing them, because I am not now indulging in nearly as much networking (oops, I mean visiting and reading), as in the past. ;-)

Anyway, that leads me into confessing to a few changes in myself, and announcing a couple of New Year Resolutions (well, it is a bit like a new year for me) regarding my blogging. I have decided to step off the treadmill this time around and forget about my pathetic pursuits of silly little games like ‘A post a day keeps Alzheimer’s at bay’, and proudly commemorating the reaching of each 100 posts, etc.

I will only post on days when I feel like it, which might turn out be as often as before (I don’t yet know) and go networking and leaving comments when the mood takes me, rather than as a regular commitment. Which will certainly result in less comments coming in, but I have already given up counting comments. What, you don’t believe me? I can’t say that I blame you, but that is what a decent break from the love of my life (no, she is still away for another 16 days, I am talking about the B word) has done for me – restored my sense of proportion and reminded me that this is surely how it is supposed to operate. From now on I will be the master and my blog will be the slave, and not the other way round.

Brave words but, hey, it gets better, or should I say worse. Yep, that’s my ugly mug at the top of the page, at long last. But that is my final sacrifice. I believe it will now be a permanent feature of my blogsite profile but, given my technical hopelessness, I can’t at this point be sure. I haven’t succumbed because I wish to sign up as a bona-fide Follower of others or have them reciprocate by following me, because I would honestly rather not.

I have cast off my self-imposed shackles and am now as free as a bird, and feeling really good. Mind you, I don’t know how things will be in, say, a week’s time? ;-)

P.S. Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs! So the photo hasn't appeared after all. Blogger said it would but he is really hopeless at times, isn't he? But, I swear, I did try! I probably forgot to save the page. :-(

P.P.S. A further attempt has seen me get it published, but down the sidebar instead of at the top. I tried switching things around in Layout but no luck as yet. Aren't I just the greatest?

Lovely House, Bye!

The girl from the Estate agent’s office phoned yesterday morning to tell me that a couple were interested in looking at the house. They would like to come at any time after 3pm or any time at all tomorrow (today). A viewing appointment was agreed for 3.30 yesterday.

I put the phone down. Hmm…’or any time tomorrow’? They must be either fairly local or holiday visitors. We entertained a handful of seasonal viewing visitors last summer and picked up one or two telltale signs of those known in the trade as ‘timewasters’, but who I prefer to think of as just ignorant and thick-skinned nosey buggers.

I could be wrong, of course, condemning them merely on a hunch, but if you want to place a bet on me ever hearing from them again I will gladly give you good odds. Punters, as I have come to call them, who are positively beaming and far too bright and cheerful on the doorstep, are not a good start if you are actually keen on selling your home (which I am not).

Then, as the conducted tour is accompanied throughout by a chorus of ooh’s and aah’s and OTT compliments in every room, you become pretty certain that they are not here to conduct business. Hell, if we are to believe that our average pigsty is that good we are going to hold out for top dollar, aren’t we? I hadn’t even vacuumed or dusted, having satisfied myself that my weekly sweep of two days previously was still looking, well, fairly good (you must remember that Mrs Billy is away in the USA for 30 days).

The lounge was ‘lovely’, the kitchen ‘fantastic’ and the garden shed ‘unbelievably large’. After covering the ground floor level I led them upstairs where the built-in wardrobes were ‘deep and spacious’ and the small, third bedroom was ‘not small at all, really?’ I invited them to linger and look around again on their own before following me down and doing the same there. “Oh yes, thanks, that’ll be lovely.” Ah, but, they were down the stairs less than 20 seconds behind me and, while he muttered the usual about having things to think about, she was clearly ready to hit the street again.

They had not asked me one question about the price (in this time of maximum fluidity rather than fixed?), our own plans or hopes relevant to the time factor or, in fact, on anything at all. I halted their unseemly rush in the porch. “I didn’t even get your names”. So they gave me their shortened first names, and I had to ask again for their surname. “And where do you live, if I may be so bold?” Oh, they were in temporary accommodation in the caravan park we could see from our rear bedroom window, but they hailed from Lancashire. There was just the slightest element of fluster as they waved their goodbyes.

Now, I know what you are thinking. They might have behaved in exactly the same way if they had made their minds up from the start that ours was not the house they were looking for, for whatever reason(s). Personally, I don’t think so, we have been in that position ourselves a couple of times over the years and have apologetically and diplomatically said just that – sorry, but it’s not quite what we are looking for – and left.

No, my wife will recognise the situation exactly when I tell her all about it on the phone -I think. I won’t, however, mention that for the first time ever I failed to blitz the place with spit and polish – have it shining like shit on a barn door, because it really was perfectly clean and tidy. Just to be on the safe side I might blacken their characters a tad, though that would be a rotten thing to do, right? Hey, but then again,why take silly chances?

Driving Miss Daisy

History shows that thankfully, someone, somewhere, always comes up with an idea or invention which saves the planet from the looming disaster of the day. Well, we are still here, aren’t we? Early this morning my eye was caught for a few minutes by one of those scientific TV programs, which happened to be featuring a new type of tiny bubble-car with an equally small carbon footprint.

It probably does 200 miles to the gallon (I didn’t catch that bit) and counts among its tricks an ability to fold up even smaller to commandeer an impossible-looking parking space, and to also turn 120 degrees ‘on the spot’ to help extricate itself from parking spaces and, presumably, traffic jams on the road.

Personally, I wouldn’t want one, which is easy for me to say at my age, with the grim reaper certain to get here long before the roads become entirely grid-locked but, while I am still around, I wouldn’t mind somebody inventing some way of saving local drivers from the annual influx of summer tourists who, for the large part, seem to leave their common sense and road manners at home.

Okay, so nobody forced me to move to a mini seaside resort within the most beautiful county in the land, and I do appreciate having eight months of every year when I virtually have the roads to myself, believe me. I thank my lucky stars as I hear on the car radio the traffic news about the daily accidents and snarl-ups on the urban carriageways down south. And that is only in Newcastle! But I don’t need telling about the M25 and M4, etc.

My main complaint about the punters is their slow driving. Of course they want to partake in some sight-seeing - a major requirement of any holiday and not just the motoring variety, but they do not purchase the right to sit at the head of a line of cars doing 30mph in a 60mph zone and obstinately refusing to check their mirror, knowing quite well what they are going to see.

The irony of this little rant is that, far from being a local businessman or anyone with even occasional deadlines to meet, I am retired and mostly just chauffeuring Mrs Billy to those lovely shops in the nearest towns. Actually, it isn’t me at all who glares at those ignorant buggers as we finally get to overtake them, but the boss. What, you think I have no case? That shopping isn’t important? Really? Will you marry me?

On my Jack(son)

It is exactly a week since I put Mrs Billy on a plane to Indianapolis and it will be another 23 days before I pick her up again from Newcastle Airport. We had made a number of trips together to her sister’s family in either Indy or Clearwater (Florida) for some 30 years until 2006, when I decided I’d had enough of being cramped on long-distance flights and suffering the harassment of waiting in airports.

Since then she has continued the visits on her own, but 2009 sees her stepping up the ante from two weeks to just over four. Can you sense a spot of moaning coming next? Not from me, you can’t, I can assure you. True, I am starting to miss her after the first week, which is par for the course, and that will undoubtedly get worse before it gets better, but I think my sister summed it up for me yesterday when she wrote in an e-mail that she has never minded too terribly, either, when left on her own, being a person who “enjoys her own company”, albeit up to a point.

Maybe it is in the genes, but that, of course, is only one side of the coin. The other is that I am just so happy that my trouble & strife is with people she undoubtedly loves and is certain to be enjoying life over there. She has her medical problems and, in fact, we could only find one Travel Insurance Company to take her on, but her less serious and more painful conditions do tend to disappear while she is there.

Her niece and her husband have an outdoor pool which we believe must surely have some beneficial effect, but I think we both know that being daily celebrated in the company of family and their friends as a ‘favourite aunt’ also has a lot to do with her guaranteed spell of health and happiness. You are probably thinking that we could all do with a bit of that every year and I would agree with you, but being a favourite uncle does not, perhaps, have quite the same historical and magical association, or indeed intimacy.

Anyway, where is this leading? Oh, yeah, now I remember, I simply had to come upstairs to the computer and escape the blanket assault being waged by the TV and my morning paper on the death of Michael Jackson. While I am always ready to sympathise with the grieving relatives and friends of anyone suddenly deceased, I cannot help but be a little sceptical of the media’s motivation when it comes to reporting the demise of those they had previously brainwashed us into recognising as celebrities. I guess the word which covers it for me is ‘sensationalism’. It seems nothing sells newspapers or attracts TV audiences quite like it, but doesn’t it get on your wick?

However, we should never speak ill of the dead, so I will say only this on Michael, he was a really good dancer.

God's Country

Ben Southall, the Hampshire man who was last week appointed to “The best job in the World”, as the temporary caretaker of Hamilton Island, off the Queensland coast of Australia, for only 6 months and with a salary of £74,000, has since announced that he will be joined by a friend – another Ben (Patterson), from Beadnell, which is all of two miles down the coast from where I am sat.

Apparently the job entails identifying and assessing the sporting potential offered by the island and its surrounding islets, and their daily lives will entail a whole lot of sailing, surfing, swimming and barbecueing. Hey, it wouldn’t suit everybody, including me for one, hence Master Southall had to beat off only 35,000 other candidates!

But, of course, while he has my congratulations and best wishes it is the other Ben, the local lad, who has captured my interest. I don’t know him, never heard of him, but I understand he actually comes from Swinhoe, a hamlet on the edge of Beadnell, of all places, ye bugger! You see, there has been a bit of a thing going on between me and Mrs Billy of late, regarding that village just to the south of us, and ‘Beadnell’ has virtually become a buzz-word inside our car.

If we are going anywhere south of here, which happens on 75% of the occasions we get the old wheels rolling (there is only Berwick to the north, the North Sea to the east and nowhere with more than one village shop to the west), then our road skirts the edge of Beadnell on leaving and returning.

The thing is that I have convinced myself that Beadnell has a special place in the heart of the Almighty, who somehow manages to keep a few rays of the sun directed right onto at least one section or another of it, on days when the rest of this area is blanketed in dull and dreary weather. I began noticing these shafts of sunlight, or rather their effects, last Summer on our return journeys as the village came into view just after passing through Swinhoe. Naturally, I pointed out the anomaly to my loving wife who, in turn, and just as naturally, pooh-poohed my ridiculous theory. But that is what wives do, right?

This summer, however, with both of us on the lookout for the apocryphal ‘end of the rainbow’, she is weakening in the face of mounting evidence and slowly coming around to my line of thinking, not that she would ever admit it to any third party. She wouldn’t hesitate to deny me three times before the cock crowed (my, but aren’t we being biblical today?), even at the risk of my being carted off by the men in white coats.

Today, as we approached Swinhoe on our return from Alnwick, I informed her that the Beadnell anomaly had again manifested itself last night while I was driving back from my weekly Bridge night. “It was 9-40pm, pet, dusk, and I had the side-lamps on even though the sun was down on the horizon and had been blinding me at times as the road twisted and turned. I was glad to be finally on that eastern stretch and have the bugger behind me as I drove through Swinhoe and breasted the slight rise on the road towards Beadnell.

“You are not going to believe this, but that large house in the centre of the village – built only a few short years ago - was lit-up like a bloody Christmas Tree while the rest of the place was getting quite dark! The hole in the cloud couldn’t have been bigger than the size of a football and, the angle, well, there was hardly one at all. Like I said, the sun was right down on the horizon behind me. It defied all logic.”

Today it was nearer 3-40pm and daylight, though not what anybody could call sunny, as we neared the anticipated vista. However, there wasn’t a sun’s ray in sight as we began our descent towards the village and I was feeling quite miserable and let-down by our maker, until we began the second phase of the road’s drop towards sea-level and the first houses, previously obscured, came into view. “How about that, then?” I cried out, pointing across the intervening field on my right.

Okay, so it wasn’t looking anything like miraculous, but those first few houses were the only ones in the County, I swear, enjoying a snatch of good old sunshine at that moment. I felt vindicated as the road reached the shoreline and we turned north towards a very dull-looking Seahouses. I glanced sideways, seeking some reaffirmation of her faith, however slight.

“Yeah, okay, but it wasn’t exactly breathtaking, was it?” She offered in flat, disinterested tones.

Swenglish

We received an e-mail yesterday from two old Swedish friends of ours, Kjell and Berit Sjostrom. We first met about 30 years ago when Kjell was an officer in the Gothenberg Fire Department and a brigade sports organiser, and I was a counterpart in the Tyne & Wear Metropolitan Brigade HQ here in Newcastle.

I forget which outfit had first approached the other, but we had arranged a Meeting covering a number of possible sporting events and it was agreed that we would host the first one with a return meeting in Gothenberg to be held, hopefully, the following year. It quickly became a regular, if not always annual, major event on the calendars of both organisations, with athletics, golf and football forming the main events, and it still flourishes today, although the originators are all well retired by now.

Anyhoo, as we say up here, whilst my own reference as a sports organiser was to be comparatively short-lived, Kjell knew when he was onto a good thing and never failed to come to our home to socialise, bringing a colleague or two with him. We might all go out for a game of golf, followed by a meal and a few drinky-poohs so, naturally, we were always pleased to see him (them).

I have never allowed him to forget our inaugural meeting when I had introduced him to Mrs Billy, and he immediately stepped forward, clasped her to his chest, and planted a long, passionate kiss on her lips. He was counting on me (us) putting it down to the strange customs of some foreigners, of course, and he would have got clean away with it had I not taken a quick look at his colleague who was struggling to disguise his amusement

Boy, did I show him how it should be done a couple of years later when he, in turn, introduced me to Berit. He has called on us quite a few times over the years when here for the inter-brigade sporting contest and, on other occasions, with Berit and/or Niklas, their younger son, on short holiday breaks, while we thoroughly enjoyed a week over there as their guests some years ago.

He is well-known to T&WMFB officers, serving and retired, not least for his own particular version of what he proudly calls his ‘Swenglish’. It was, of course, hilarious in those early days but, as you can see from yesterday’s e-mail, below, he could now almost pass for a Geordie or, dare I say it, a mackem. Here it is, entirely untouched, not nearly so amusing as 30 years ago, but I’m sure you can use your imagination.

“Hello Con and Bill!!

It was very nice to recive your very long mail with lot of information from your side of the sea. Bill write so very "spirituel"and we have had a very good time Berit and I when we read and translate it. And thank;s so mutch for the attachin photos of our oldest friends in England-still very nice looking –born -34 and -37 we do not belive it!!And o my GOD!! we missed the celibration day-75 years young 8 june???!!!

CONGRATULATION from all of us in the Sjöström clan!!

Now we have midsummer in front of us and we shall as usal drive up to Göteborg and have a traditional midsummerparty outdoor-with raw fish in a special way and to that we drink lot of snaps-you have tested it but you like snaps better than the fish-do you remember??

Once again to both of you-we love you-take care and have a nice summer!!

All Our Love

Berit and Kjell XXX”

Blogging friends, you should read my Swedish! I will send them a copy of this, knowing that they will love it.