Ain’t that the dog’s bollocks!?
Lines inspired by a regrettable but necessary visit to the vet…
Today has been quite a shocker
For Rolo, the chocolate-brown cocker,
‘Cos the unhappy mutt’s
Lost both of his nuts.
No wonder he’s gone off his rocker!
Postscript: a similar fate previously befell my ice-cream buddy’s rabbit, Kratos. You can read about it here.
Wor Jack’s deed
As my Kendal-based Geordie mother is the nonogenarian Matriarch of the British side of my family, I have, in recent years, had to accompany her to a number of funerals in her native Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as those of her generation have died before her (‘before’ as in ‘pre-deceased’ not ‘in front of’). Consequently, I know the area around the Whitley Bay and West Road crematoria rather better than I would wish, particularly as I hardly know the rest of the city.
On such occasions, once I’d met up with the Matriarch in Kendal we had a 100 mile drive to Newcastle, so we usually set off in good time, which, on an early trip to the West Road crematorium, is how we discovered what became for us a modern tradition: a pre-funeral ‘greasy spoon’ lunch and cuppa in what is now Margaret’s Café in Fenham. A seemingly unprepossessing little place, but I rather like it, and it has a 5 star food hygiene rating to boot!
Anyway, the reason for this funereal discourse is that I read in Newcastle’s online daily, the Chronicle Live, that the recent funeral service for the Leeds and England footballer, Jack Charlton, was held at the West Road crematorium. I suspect there were no takers for a pre-service cuppa at Margaret’s that day, but as a widely-revered and down-to-earth ‘local boy’, it strikes me as much the sort of place that he may have frequented, if only very occasionally.
The Leeds United of Charlton’s era was, in today’s terminology, an ‘uncompromising’ team (if they couldn’t stop ’em, they’d chop ’em) and due to his stature and elongate neck he was often baited as a’ big dirty giraffe’. He later proved to be a hugely successful manager of the Irish soccer team where his success and ‘man of the people’ persona endeared him to the nation. Unlike his famous uncle, ‘Wor Jackie’ (Jackie Milburn – a three times FA Cup winner with Newcastle in the 1950s), Charlton never turned out for the Toon, but it was still nice to read of him being remembered in the north east as ‘Wor Jack’.
Here’s the limerick:
There once was a tall centre back
Who cut-down his opponents’ attack
Fans said, with a laugh,
“He’s a dirty giraffe”,
But full-time has now blown for Wor Jack!
Postscript: ‘Tis a little known fact that Wor Jackie was actually Wor Jack’s first cousin once removed, not his uncle as usually stated.
On opening your vowels…
The British side of my family hails from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the northeast of England, Walkergate to be precise, so I was interested to read this week that, along with Liverpool, it is one of the larger, urban northern English regions that has retained its regional accent in what researchers have described as a developing ‘pan-regional “general northern English” accent among middle-class northerners’.
As a middle-class northerner of the semi-rural Cumbrian type, I too recognise that I now speak in ‘generic northern’ rather than the Kendalian of my youth, and that is due to ‘University-isation’ and living north of Fife for the last 40 years. I do have an audio recording of the 11 year old ‘me’ speaking in my pre-adolescent high-pitched, native tones and, although I try not to, I am told that I sometimes revert to type when visiting my childhood home, albeit in a deeper register.
All of which brought to mind a memory as a first-year pupil at Kendal Grammar School in the early 1970s, of our ‘old-school’ English language teacher (Stan ‘Whacker’ Wilkins) asking each of us in class, sequentially, to pronounce a letter of the alphabet. I can’t remember the letter that I had to utter, but I do recall that it was Peter Stainton that started us of with ‘a’.
When we had finished, Whacker took great delight in chiding us for our poor speech; in particular those for whom it fell to say ‘a’, ‘j’, ‘k’ and ‘o’ were demonised. Their sin was in not closing the vowels or consonants with, to a Cumbrian, a vowel-like ending. I don’t mean open or closed in the truly linguistic sense, I mean simply in their pronunciation. So, for example, we didn’t close ‘o’ with a ‘w’ sound, we just truncated it and could have carried on making the same sound until our breath ran out.
Whacker’s resonse struck me as unfair at the time, but it did lead to a few post-dinner, lavatorial comments about not opening our vowels in class, all of which brings me to today’s limerick…
Amidst some cacophonous howls
A northerner with unstable bowels
Soundtracked a farce
As he spoke through his a***e
When told not to open his vowels
Postscript: The recently-disgraced academic and TV historian, David Starkey, attended both the same primary and secondary schools as me, albeit it many years before. His recollection of Kendal Grammar School from the 1950s, below, would contrast strongly with my recollections of it in the 1970s!
“Kendal Grammar in Cumbria was a school of ancient foundations, dating back to 1526. It is now Kirkbie Kendal School. Most of our schoolmasters when I was there tended to err on the side of severity. It was not a savage school, there were hardly any beatings (I remember only two), but the atmosphere was masculine and fairly aggressive.” See TES, 2007 for more.
The only reference that I could find of Starkey’s time at Castle Street primary school is here from the Westmorland Gazette and, believe it or not, yours truly is pictured in the artcle along with my brother, Sally Collett, Christopher Nelson, Nigel Duffin, Julie Park, Paul Bateman, Margaret Robbins (my bête noir) and others.
Howzat?
A few weeks ago, my former boss emailed me to say “Now, don’t take this the wrong way (I know you will), but Marigold Hotel with Henry Blofeld was on TV last night, and I thought of you!”
Her allusion to Henry Blofeld, or Blowers as he is known to aficionados of BBC Radio’s Test Match Special (TMS) cricket commentaries, was (I hope!) due to her bemusement over several years when a colleague and I used to discuss cricket in the margins of team meetings.
I replied that, “I’m not sure about being conflated with ‘Blowers’. He is after all an old f*rt that talks about cricket and rabbits-on endlessly with anecdotes (that only he finds amusing) whilst not letting others get a word in edgeways. Along with that he prefers things the way they used to be, and is forever eyeing his next slice of cake. Ah, my dear old thing… now I see!”.
Anyway, I’m sure that like me, my ex-boss will be delighted to know (hah!) that international cricket is now back after its Covid 19 hiatus and that currently the West Indies are playing England at Hampshire’s home ground, the so-called Ageas Bowl.
The Test Match is being shown on Sky Sports, to which I don’t subscribe so I can’t watch it; however, the Graun has reported on it and has paid glowing testimony to the events on the first day. Not to the cricket itself, but to the Sky Sports’ experts’ discussions when, predictably, rain stopped play.
Chief amongst the pundits is Michael Holding, a former West Indies fast bowler and one of the awesome foursomes of fast bowlers in the Indies’ pace attack of the 1970s and 80s (Holding, Roberts, Holder & Daniel or Roberts, Holding, Garner & Croft or Marshall, Roberts, Garner & Holding; there were others too, so take your pick).
Not for Holding the light-hearted, and admittedly humorous-at-times, tittle tattle of the BBC’s TMS commentary box, but some acute observations around racism and Black Lives Matter.
As Andy Bull wrote in the Graun,
You can’t understand the history of cricket without understanding the history of empire. You can’t appreciate the rivalries between these, and other, teams, without appreciating the relationship between our countries, what’s been given, and what’s been taken. You can’t understand the hostility of Michael Holding’s bowling without understanding what made him so angry, you can’t appreciate Frank Worrell’s grace as a captain without knowing something of the prejudice he faced, you can’t value the violence of Viv Richards’ batting without a sense of what he was fighting against.
Fortunately, the Sky Sports channel has put Holding’s observations in front of its paywall and you can see and hear him here, it’s powerful stuff.
The channel then followed on (see what I did there?) by posting a compelling video on YouTube in which Holding and Ebony Rainford-Brent (the first woman of colour to represent England at cricket) talk about their experiences of institutionalised racism. This was the video to which Holding made reference in his live-to-air comments.
This is serious stuff, so well done Sky Sports.
On a much less serious note, and changing channels to the BBC, Michael Holding was also an innocent party in one of the most-cited-but-apocryphal quotes in TMS and cricketing history.
Legend has it, and it is only legend, that in the 1976 Oval Test Match between England and the West Indies, when Holding was bowling to Peter Willey, an England all-rounder, the TMS commentator, Brian Johnson (aka ‘Jonners’), voiced the immortal words that comprise the last line of this week’s ALAW…
His commentary was dull until he
Expounded out loud and quite shrilly
That the ball was in play
Which led him to say
“The bowler is Holding, the batsman’s Willey”!
Postscript: The 1976 England versus West Indies test series was noticeable for the aggression of the Indies’ fast bowlers, Holding, Roberts, Holder & Daniel, and their frequent use of bouncers; short-pitched deliveries that bounced dangerously high. One could understand their aggression as during an episode of the BBC’s Sportsnight programme shortly before the test series was to start, Tony Greig, England’s South African born captain had stated:
Sure, they’ve got a couple of fast bowlers, but really I don’t think we’re going to run into anything … You must remember that the West Indians, these guys, if they get on top are magnificent cricketers. But if they’re down, they grovel, and I intend, with the help of Closey [Brian Close] and a few others, to make them grovel.
Amazon’s intro to Grovel!, David Tossell’s book on cricket’s summer of 1976 puts it well:
When England cricket captain Tony Greig announced that he intended to make the West Indies ‘grovel’, he lit a fire that burned as intensely as the sunshine that made 1976 one of the most memorable summers in British history. Spurred on by what they saw as a deeply offensive remark, especially from a white South African, Clive Lloyd’s touring team vowed to make Greig pay. In Viv Richards, emerging as the world’s most exciting batsman, and fast bowlers Michael Holding and Andy Roberts they had the players to do it.
Greig acknowledged in his forward to Tossell’s book that he had got it badly wrong, whilst also denying that his South African background was behind his comment and that there was no racist tone intended. Well, he would, wouldn’t he, but even if true it reeks of the sort of historical and cultural ignorance that leads to and underlies the unconscious bias that can belie even the saintly; a significant part of the issues that Michael Holding raised in his live piece to air.
The world’s gone potty!
Some words inspired by the breakage of a relative’s newly installed toilet seat when subjected to the ‘wriggle test’…
There once was a lassie who wriggled
On the loo so much that she giggled.
She fractured the seat
When she sat to excrete
‘Cos her bum cheeks both wiggled and jiggled!
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