Leaving Dundee

The Bay Horse at Totnes is cantering again

2020-07-23T16:09:00.000+01:00

When The Bull Inn in the Rotherfold closed in October 2017, a number of its long serving customers found a long term foster home with Kathy, Rob and Jo at The Bay Horse Inn, the pub with a garden at the very top of the town.

The Bull Inn re-opened in December 2019 and though it is an outstanding restaurant with lodging rooms its ambience was such that it didn't appeal to the former Bull Inn afficionados who have now taken up residence at The Bay Horse on a more permanent basis. And why not? the hosts are welcoming (there were a few glitches but these were largely straightened out). The beers and ciders are local and outstandingly well kept. I like The Pandit Ale, a local brew, but I am a letdown on the cider as I drink the Suffolk sparkling draught cider made by Spalls, I thinks it''s refreshing but also I am not enough of a real man to drink the local cider.

The Bay Horse and the The Bull have now re-opened following their closure during these months of special measures caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Bull Inn is providing excellent food again, yet so many in the Totnes area particularly at the top end of the town will be relieved and delighted that The Bay Horse Inn, the traditional, well kept, old fashioned, welcoming pub opens again at 4.30pm today. Any hiatus in human social activity changes the dynamic but The Bay Horse Inn is a pub with a lot of good will supporting it.

The Bay Horse Inn, this morning

Personal matters do not allow to return at the moment but on my birthday in October I am sure to present myself. I may even learn to knit.
All the best to Kathy, Rob, Jo and all the staff. Long may you canter.

______________

Comments

Hello Charles,

Thank you so much. A soft start with a light trot last night - we'll see what Friday and Saturday brings.

Kathy, for
Rob, Kathy, Jo et al.

Ten years of Leaving Dundee

2020-07-15T18:46:00.003+01:00

My vanity led me to writing this entry today, the tenth anniversary of my first blog entry to Leaving Dundee. When I started writing it my fancy may have been that it would be a considered, and weighty, anthology of recollections and reflections of my life and thought. It has not turned out like that. It is not by any definition erudite or scholarly. It is a ragbag of scatterbrained passion, polemic and prolix, but what has amazed and gratified me is that people read it. I don't mean that people in their thousands and thousands follow Leaving Dundee but somewhere between 50 and 100 folk visit the sight on most days and some even make comments.

Popular entries have been tales of my boyhood and school life in Dundee. Others which have been read are those of the fate of a Dundee FC supporter. My political outbursts sometime cause a stir and a number of the illustrations have created amusement and been admired. Tales of family members through the generations are pored over as are recollections of my life after leaving Dundee.

An entry I particularly like because it involves so many people from the Totnes community is A Load of Old Bull: the Tale of a Totnes Inn. This was written after The Bull closed in October 2017. Happy news it was when it re-opened in December 2019, only to shut its doors again in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. Anyway, I know I may be interrupting my flow, but the hot news I have for you is that the Bull Inn is re-opening to serve meals tonight!

Returning to the blog some people have said they quite like the"poetic"doggerel I write, but rather than discuss this further I thought I'd tell you something peculiar. The Leaving Dundee blog consists of about 50,000 words. One of those words, and it is used only once, is "Hitler." The piece containing this word is, I think, mildly amusing, but it's no great shakes, and yet it is by far

the most visited entry. Now tell me what that means?

Finally let me say I have been fortunate in my close family and my wider family, as I have been with my friends, none of these people are perfect but they are all good people.They inhabit these pages.

I was unwell recently and my young granddaughter painted a get well card for me. She entitled her painting - seen below - Sunset, Rough Seas and a Boat with a Flag. That'll do for me.

Bribery isn't even necessary: Labour Party members are meant to lose.

2020-06-21T18:01:00.002+01:00

In recent times, and for a number of reasons, I've been feeling depressed. This has been particularly so over the Labour Party's defeat in the general election last December. I still struggle to understand why the most popular and principled politician in England in 2017 was defeated in a general election just two years later when in my view he was still the most principled and popular political leader in England even though he was unjustly vilified by the media and undermined by the treachery of a minority - yet surprisingly powerful minority - of Labour MPs and officials.
Last week I heard of a dubious, or possibly spurious group (set up and selected by whom? certainly not the membership) which has decided that most of the blame for the election defeat must be placed upon Mr. Corbyn. How wonderful they must feel to be "truly" free of responsibility.

Exasperated by this I sent a letter of protest to the Labour Party leader Sir Kier Starmer, and the Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner, both of whom, (unlike many of us who put up extra funds of money we could little afford for the 2017 and 2019 campaigns), are relatively comfortably off. Neither politician replied. Then I wrote an almost identical letter to the secretary of my Constituency Labour Party here in Totnes. I have not as yet received a reply. Here is the letter.

Dear -

I sincerely appreciate all the efforts which you and others put in to keep the Totnes CLP purring along but, before the Labour Party as it currently stands (or collapses) addresses any issue, it must first deal with the matter of the corrupt “officials” in the Party who despicably & dishonestly counselled against the Party Leader, Jeremy Corbyn & his team. They also built up a spurious case which implied that all those who rejoined The Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn were anti-semite. Until we have clarity, these issues are the only matters on the agenda. Unless it is sorted out we have a Party without a soul tormented by an inner cancer. Blairites and their camp followers have ripped the heart out of our Labour Party. Predictably they are all now silently smug about it.

The Party must deal with this matter now not in some investigation in the middle distance which inevitably would end up in a whitewash.

Yours faithfully,

Charles Sharpe

https://leavingdundee.blogspot.com/2016/03/better-watch-out-for-poetry-feelings.html

I have been left feeling that many members like me carry a sense of having been "stuffed" and nobody really cares. I was reminded of a passage from The Eyrie a novel by the Australian author, Tim Winton.

"We're meant to lose ,and campaign and calculate all we like, the bulldozers still arrive, the agencies wash their hands, the media enjoys its little flash of colour and silent influence and it's back to business as usual.
Like every arm of government it's a servant of industry facilitating its ongoing prosperity. Bribery isn't even necessary. That's the real insult the system works beautifully without it".

Language or Dialect?

2020-06-01T21:00:00.002+01:00

Just after the Scottish Independence referendum in 2014. I had a conversation with a relative of my wife at a family gathering. My wife is English as is my wife's relative. I was telling this person how pleased I was that my home city of Dundee had overwhelmingly voted for Scottish independence. My wife's relative was not impressed with my information. Neither, he said, was he impressed by Dundonians' inability to speak the English language.

"In fact," he said,"your dialect massacres the English Language."

My hasty response was, "No, it is the English language that destroys Dundee Scots." We finished our conversation there. We were both in the huff with each other. On this matter I believe we still are. I calmed down but over the years I have tried to make sense of my omnipotent claim. Convincing or not, here in the following lines, are my thoughts.

Recently I read an obituary in The Guardian for Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the distinguished Caribbean poet and historian. I was interested in something he thought about dialect and language. He insisted that the language spoken by the Caribbean peoples should be regarded as a “nation language" and not as an inferior form of English or as a dialect.

I have similar thoughts about a much older language, Scots. I would go further, I think the language spoken in any locality should be considered its language and not its dialect. To call it otherwise is to presume it is a lesser form of some notional master language. The Queen's English is a fake language.

The language the people of Dundee speak is genuine. It has developed organically through its usage by the people of Dundee. While the language spoken 15 miles away in Forfar is subtly different - and at times a not so subtly - from Dundee's but it too is a genuine language.

You may wonder why I am raising this issue and some may just wonder what exactly my issue is. To explain this I need to go back to Dundee in the early to mid-1950s. If my parents heard me playing with my friends out on the street speaking Dundee Scots, I was hauled inside the house and told speaking like that was common and would get me nowhere. I discovered later that my parents' message was propaganda. Posh English was the language of the world of power, influence, wealth and status while trying to speak it was supposedly the ordinary folk's way of unlocking the door to that world. Well that didn't work out despite the elocution lessons my parents arranged for my younger sister and me to be taught by that snooty lady who had a big house on the Ancrum Road, Lochee.

I am glad that it didn't work. Dundee Scots is the language of my soul even though down here in Devon I have little opportunity to exercise it.

Yet English and Scots speakers can meet together and, with comic results. In the early 1960s, Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who lived in the nearby Castle of Mey, inspected the troops of the Queens Own Highlanders Regiment at Fort George barracks near Ardersier.

Fort George

She walked along the line of soldiers presented for inspection and occasionally had a brief word with one or two of the men. She stopped in front of one Private and asked him if he had a family.

"Eh Ma'am, we have a hoose jist ootside the barracks"

The Queen Mother adopting her woman of the people mode continued,

"And are you comfy there?"

"No Ma'am," the private replied, "Eh come fae Dundee."

Omnes una manet nox

2020-05-28T11:27:00.004+01:00

Formalities over,

visitor gone,

I am free to fart,

walk around in my droopy underpants,

scratch my itchy scrotum,

and cease acting as if I’m in a life assurance ad.

I didn’t ask for old age,

it turned up with food stains down its front,

things grasped or brushed falling to earth,

as I will, oh! but not any more

for the incinerator calls me

to my fiery fate

where released from a hiccoughing hiatus hernia

I no longer struggle to rise from a sofa.

Be still my soul though no one’s on your side

Bear patiently the weight of the unknown

Leave those behind to order and provide

To ponder life and the turn to stone.

My Bannockburn Moment : a driving test saga

2020-05-20T20:29:00.002+01:00

The Coronavirus has pervaded our lives completely. How can it not have? Everyday we hear of the victims of this cruel and deadly virus. On our televisions there are harrowing views of sufferers in hospitals, of victims' relatives mourning loved ones to whom they could bid no adieu; of our own imprisonment within the limitations placed on us by what is called 'lockdown.' In our everyday lives we experience pangs of longing because we cannot be with family members and friends. We cannot give reassuring cuddles. There is so little we can do to assuage the traumas suffered by others and ourselves. .
During this time it can appear that the virus haunts every aspect of our lives. We struggle to escape not only the virus but also the whole social paradigm it has set up. I've wondered if allowing the virus a monopoly of our being is healthy for us. Should we think or talk about other unrelated matters? find moments of escape? Without apologies what follows is an escape for me as I allow myself to wander over past memories which have nothing to do with Coronavirus.

I've always imagined that apart from those who make a decision never to drive a car, everyone has his or her own driving test story. Mine's is such a harrowing tale that I've waited 50 years to tell it and here I set it down as my contribution to motoring history.

I attained the age of 17 years on October 1st, 1962. At my mother's insistence my father reluctantly offered to teach me how to drive and in the later months of 1962 he sat beside me in the front passenger seat offering instruction while I perched tensely behind the steering wheel of his brand new Standard Ensign and attempted to pilot what felt like a noisy live animal with a mind of its own. These early attempts at driving through winding Warwickshire lanes were so dangerously erratic that by February of 1963 my father in order, he said, to keep himself from physical danger and to protect his sanity, decided to bring a halt to his tuition. He had found it hard to control his emotions when we were out together in the car principally because I exercised a propensity to drive into oncoming vehicles.

A Standard Ensign, a car I never took a test in. Granny and Grandad posing with their son's new pride and joy.

This brief early driving experience freaked me out to the extent that I did not lay my hands on the steering wheel of a car for another 7 years. At this time I was living in Gosfield, a village in Essex. The house my wife, my son and I lived in was off the beaten track and so it became increasingly apparent that by learning to drive, we could purchase a car and become less isolated.

I decided to hire a driving instructor who operated from Braintree which was the nearest driving test location. He was a man in his early 40s - who, I remember, felt duty bound to tell me repeatedly that he was a Tory voter - and he always ate a pie, or a cake or a sandwich while he sat beside me. He gave me my lessons in his Hillman Imp, the car in which I would fail a number of my early driving examinations.

My Braintree driving instructor

In fairness to my new tutor these driving lessons took place in a calmer atmosphere than those I had "enjoyed" with my father though there were some hairy moments when disaster was averted only by my instructor's judicious use of the dual braking pedal which was fitted to his car. Nonetheless after about 12 lessons I began to fancy myself as having some competence and I asked him if I should now apply to take my driving test. He was hesitant but agreed that I could proceed given that once my application had been processed I would be offered a test date 4 or 5 weeks hence and that, my instructor said, might give me time to make improvements.

Two o' clock in the afternoon of Thursday, February 27th, 1969, was the time and date nominated for my test and my instructor presented me at the driving test centre in Braintree. My examiner stood erect in the manner of, I imagined, an ex-military man or ex-policeman. The examiners for all my tests seemed to give off this aura. It gave them intimidating authority even though they were invariably civil to me.

A Hillman Imp - a car I failed in

I was nervous throughout my first test. My left leg and foot developed a shuddering shake which was a concern since I needed them to function normally in order to depress the clutch pedal when attempting to change gear. It was surprising to me therefore that I managed to manoeuvre my way through a test punctuated only by two or three near collisions with other vehicles, while only one pedestrian had to jump out of my way to avoid being run over. As I recollect my examiner only used the dual pedal brake system twice during the test. As the examination came to an end I was feeling quite chipper and when I was informed that I'd failed the test I was somewhat disappointed. I was handed a slip of paper which was the assessment form. I found that I had failed on every skill I was required to demonstrate though my knowledge of the Highway Code was deemed acceptable.

When I look back on my first test it is something of an irony that my knowledge of the Highway Code had been its only satisfactory factor for at the end of my second attempt to achieve fully qualified driver status, my examiner asked,

"Mr. Sharpe, how would you know you were entering down a one way street?"

So relieved was I to have another motoring ordeal behind me I momentarily became incapable of retrieving information from my mind. In my panic a response that I thought valid flashed up from the depths of my soul and I desperately spluttered out,

"Well, you drive along the street and when you get to the end of it you look behind you and you'll see a No Entry sign."

My examiner raised an eyebrow and looked at me knowingly.

"This is important you know."

It seemed I may have driven down a one way street the wrong way, or at least given him the impression that I might happily do so. I had failed again.

Following another lacklustre performance behind the wheel I was unsuccessful on my third attempt to gain a full driver's licence but yet just a few weeks later, during my fourth attempt, from the slough of despond came the promise of triumph. A couple of minutes into this assay while negotiating the three point turn exercise, I reversed on to the front lawn of an old lady's bungalow. She was sitting on a bench by her front door and seemed to be in a state of shock following what she had just witnessed. My driving examiner immediately got out and assured himself I had caused no permanent damage and apologised to the old lady explaining that I was a learner driver. He got into the car and asked me to drive off. I was in despair. I insisted that we return to the test centre there and then since it was clear that I had already failed the test. He appeared alarmed at this. He asked me where I had been born.

"Dundee," I replied. He pressed me further.

"And where is Dundee?"

Bemused by this turn of conversation and though I knew the answer, I replied in a questioning kind of way,

"Scotland?" .

"Yes!" he cried stridently, giving me a sense that he had got me back on the right line of thinking. "And what is Scotland famous for Mr Sharpe?"

"Whisky?" I suggested.

Not this,

" No!" he answered, leaving a space for me to provide another response.

"Porage?"

nor this,

"No, Mr. Sharpe, it is famous for its fighting spirit!"

but this !!!

Patriotism welled up within me. Just as Robert the Bruce had done before me, I stirred myself with these words, "If at first you don't succeed, then try, try and try again!" Here was my Bannockburn moment. I determined to go ahead with the test. Certain that my examiner's appeal to my martial nature would not have been made if he had not felt I might succeed in my drive to victory, I was persuaded success was a possibility. I started up the car, drove away as he directed and went on to drive reasonably well with perhaps only a few errors more. When I completed this latest trial by torment, I felt quite emotional. I had completed this test for Scotland and myself! He failed me. This, he said was due to my inability to carry out satisfactorily a three point turn. His duplicity in getting me to continue the test from the point where I originally wished to terminate it embitters me to this day.

In April 1970 not long after this test we moved to Johnshaven, a small fishing village in Kincardineshire, where I had been appointed to a teaching post. Upon my arrival I immediately hired a driving instructor who worked and lived in Montrose where I would be taking my next test. My instructor, who had an Austin 1100, was a man of about thirty years who smoked cigarettes incessantly during my lessons. I was a smoker myself at the time but his style of smoking irritated me. Once he lit his cigarette he would leave it drooping from his lips his rather like Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum used to do in black and white movies. I think he thought he was the essence of cool.

My Montrose driving instructor

I persuaded him to allow me to apply for a test right away. “Och! ye’re no ready yet,” was his response, but he allowed me to go ahead with my test application.

In late May I had my first test in Montrose. I thought it went quite well. I was a little slow reacting to my examiners’ emergency stop gesture and he had to operate the dual brakes once when I pulled out of a side street into the path of a lorry loaded up with sacks of coal. I was failed again but, given it was my first attempt at the test in Montrose, I was not too hard on myself.

I continued my lessons with Bob Mitchum and though he thought I wasn’t really ready for another test I believe he decided I wasn’t ever going to get any better at driving and so he consented to allow me to put in for my sixth driving test.

In the late afternoon of Friday, July 24th, 1970, in the Burgh of Montrose, I presented myself for my sixth driving test. The inspector seemed a rather cold and rigid man and this, when he and I sat in the car, had the effect of re-awakening my old shaking clutch leg problem. Despite this I managed to drive around Montrose making a series of driving errors but none on this occasion required my examiner’s intervention, yet failure seemed certain to me and I waited for the post-test talk in which all my faults would be listed.

“Mr. Sharpe,” he said, “sometimes when I am examining, my boss, the senior examiner, sits in the back of car to check that I am keeping to the standards expected of me while I carry out an examination. Also Mr. Sharpe when I finish work today I am going on a fortnight’s holiday. I have to tell you Mr.Sharpe if my boss had been sitting in with us and if I hadn't been going on holiday this evening you would have failed but I have decided to allow you to pass. "

An Austin 1100 - a car I failed and passed (?) in.

I can't describe how relieved I was to have passed. Yet over the next few hours as I slowly digested my examiner's concluding comments I began to feel that I had gained my driver's qualification in a backhanded way and to this day I am left feeling that I didn't really pass the test. I'm not a real driver.

___________

Contagion and Pestilence: my sermon this week

2020-05-04T16:59:00.001+01:00

As I imagine millions of others have, I've felt depressed in this time of special measures brought about by the advent of COVID-19. I think this is especially so because it is dawning on me that, science or no science, no-one really understands just what is going on.

What I feel, even if, like the science, I don’t understand it, is how much we miss not just our friends but those people who are our nodding acquaintances as we go about - or used to go about - our everyday lives. I met such a person by Totnes’s ancient Northgate while on the walk I take every day as part of my ‘permitted’ exercise. He lived alone, and he wasn't complaining about it, but he had discovered that he missed people. “After forbearing these weeks of self isolation I find that I am missing those I meet in the café or the library or wherever. Whether I live on my own or not, I am a human being. I crave the company of other human beings. Sometimes I think this imposed self-isolation is more like moral blackmail and then I feel guilty for having this thought.”

We said our farewells at the Northgate in the shadow of Totnes castle and I wondered how many plagues the castle had stood sentinel over. I wondered too how the experience of our current pestilence compared with those who had lived through them in the past.

Looking towards the Northgate, Totnes

When I returned home, in order to satisfy my curiosity, I looked through my copies of the diaries of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys who both lived in London at the time of the plague in 1665-1666. I discovered there had been fear and terror among all the population, and those who suffered most lived in the most insanitary, crowded accommodation while the threat of poverty compelled them to stay at work in order to feed themselves and their families..

The wealthy took every opportunity to take themselves and their families out of city to their country residences away from the worst ravages of the plague but for most business went on as usual. It is remarkable reading the diaries to find that Evelyn and Pepys, who as government officials remained in the city, seemed just as anxious, if not more so, about a naval battle with the Dutch than they were with the plague. Businesses across the city closed down not as a consequence of any government edict such as we have today but because the owners and their employees had succumbed to the plague. Mainly the poor and the agèd died. Not much changes.

During the 1665-6 plague in London - a city which then had a population of 460,000 - more than 75.000 souls perished. Every day bodies were carted away to mass graves.

London, 1666

A high proportion of the poor and the vulnerable have died in our current plague and this may lead us to question the mantras we hear daily from government ministers, senior scientists and medical officers like “This virus is indiscriminate,” or, “We’re all in this together.” My first thought was to go along with these - as they seemed to me - truisms, but as the weeks have passed I have become less certain. We are seeing patterns develop related to who actually dies and these are beginning to offer some answers to the question, "Why are they dying? Of course the answer is, "Because they caught the virus." Yet we are becoming aware, if we did not know already, that there other issues which make a considered answer to the question more complex. The Government, as we see by its manipulation of statistics would prefer that we did not concern ourselves with these complexities.

The following is an excerpt from Jacqueline Rose’s impressive essay review published in the current issue of the London Review of Books, “Pointing the Finger.” which challenges government propaganda and begins to eke out some painful aspects of the pandemic which our government, our community in the United Kingdom, and the world community should confront.

“Today the insistence is that ‘we’ are all in this together, even as social disparity - the frailty of that ‘we’ - has never been so obvious: in that the gulf that exists between families and those housed in airless, cladded tower blocks, a distinction disregarded by police rounding on people in parks; between the jogging culture of North London and the slums of Bangladesh, where the idea of social distancing , let alone soap and hand sanitisers in abundance, is a sick joke; between the medical care given to the prime minister, assigned an ICU bed at a time of acute shortage while still fit enough - or so we were initially told - to govern and the negligence suffered by Thomas Harvey, a nurse from East London who had worked in the NHS for twenty years, whose family were advised he didn’t need to go to hospital (they called four times) before he died gasping for air in his bathroom.”

COVID-19 may be indiscriminate but in the way we set ourselves up as a community we are guilty of discriminating. We are not all in this together.

We may have lessons to learn that we have not yet formulated, nevertheless, despite all the human disorganisation and frailties that will inevitably obstruct our way, we should be determined to seek these lessons out. They must lead us to learning how to look after each other and how to share things more fairly. This pandemic has thrown a great deal up in the air. We should not let it all fall back in the same place.
I hear people say that this will be the lesson drawn after all this is over and that altruism will outweigh cynicism. If so, it cannot but be a mighty struggle and this time we should not allow the powerful and the selfish to inherit the earth.

_______________

Notes

Jacqueline Rose “Pointing the Finger” in London Literary Review Vol. 42 No. 9 pp3-6 May 2020

This is an essay review of The Plague by Albert Camus.

The Diary of John Evelyn Vol II, 1665-1706

The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Complete) 1660-1683

Ejjercayshun: the thots of Charles Sharpe,(aged 74)

2020-04-26T18:50:00.001+01:00

I have adapted this admittedly polemic article from something I wrote many years ago but the changes which have occurred in the education of our children in these last weeks must have given children, parents and teachers cause to consider how we help children learn. The hiatus may give us time to think if we could, or should, explore other avenues to promote learning. Here I am taking an opportunity to reveal my prejudice.

There is a predominant assumption in western society about the proper way to give our youngsters an education, that is : in formal groups in a classroom with a nominated teacher who has professional training. Yet I don’t know of - and I may be missing something - any universal biological or physiological law which demands that children must be educated by this method or indeed if they should be formally educated at all.

A politically radical of way of looking at this might be to say that schooling as we know it developed from powerful families among the primeval horde deciding that if their offspring were to sustain or build upon the dynasty’s potency and wealth they must learn a thing or two about how to be on the right side of their own kind of God and how to count and defend their money as well as all the other things which flow from that. It was inevitable that this kind of education became more focussed on protecting the wealth and power of “clan rich.” This was achieved by organising and developing learning in groups called schools, which, in the interest of gaining more control of the children were eventually broken up into smaller groups called classes. This exclusive system also kept the little rascals out of their parents’ hair. From this a curriculum grew which kept everyone in place and led those, not sufficiently privileged to attend school and learn, to lag far behind, usually in penury and poverty. These are characteristics evident in the schooling we have in the United Kingdom now.

Those in accord with the idea that education developed in the way I’ve described may also agree that schools are institutions which are used to protect the status quo and the vast majority of our youngsters are educated to look after and sustain the needs of the powerful. Even when eventually, “education for all” was deemed by the powers that be, a not too dangerous path to follow, the schools the rich kids went to were different from the schools the poor kids attended. Over centuries, occasionally those of a socialist leaning have cried out and railed against these matters but nothing much changes and even if they do things soon fall back into their old place.

Accepting that schools, if nothing else, can play
an important a role in the social development of
children I have reluctantly - and shamefully some may say - I have come to an accommodation with this "education" system that defends the current economic and political state of affairs. It is a powerful juggernaut, difficult to stop, but I can never accept that it is based on a valid ethical philosophy of education. I can’t say for definite which of any - education at school, education in the family home or indeed no education at all - is the superior but I have a personal view about how children learn best.

I trained as a teacher in the early 1960s when teacher training was influenced by educationalists such as the Forfar born Scottish educationalist A.S.Neill who suggested that if parents get the emotional upbringing right then intellectual development and learning will follow naturally. Neill also suggested that children learn best and become more imaginative and creative if they are helped to learn through their own natural curiosity and their own discoveries and not by having a narrow taught curriculum foisted upon them. The trouble with children educated in the AS Neill way at Summerhill School is that they become inquisitive, they question things – particularly the status quo – and though society might have time for a few oddballs doing this, it can't tolerate the majority questioning things like the distribution of power and wealth. This is why teachers trained in the 1960s were labelled permissive and have been condemned, certainly in England, as being solely responsible for damned near destroying the education system and thank goodness that Mrs Thatcher came along and saved the nation from the fate people like me had in store for it.

A.S. Neill at Summerhill

As I said, I haven't reached the stage where I think I've got a definite position on where and by whom children should be educated, but you will have guessed I do believe children learn better from a stable emotional base and okay, I'll admit – at the risk of being condemned for envy and not understanding just who it is that has created the quality of life I apparently enjoy – that I think children develop best not only when they are helped to learn through their own discoveries but also by being given a great deal of responsibility in choosing their own learning path.

_______________

Two quotes from A.S. Neill

Kids weren’t designed to sit on their arses for 6 hours a day.

If someone from Summerhill became prime minister I would be deeply disappointed. I would feel we had failed.

In later correspondence with Neill’s daughter Zoë Neill Readhead. the current Principal of Summerhill, wrote saying Neill also used a different version of the quote. He replaced “Prime Minister” with “teacher.” (I mention this along with apologies to my wife, my daughter, my daughter in law and my many friends who are teachers. I hope they know what I'm getting at).

______________

Wider reading

Freire, P (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed New York : Herder and Herder

Neill, A.S. (1962) Summerhill London : Gollancz

Charles William Scott Sharpe 1926 - 1985 : My Dad

2020-04-08T23:21:00.000+01:00

Young Chic Sharpe 1933

Thirty five years ago today my Dad died. I miss him. I think it’s because I have a deep regret that I did not get to know him better. Always known as Chic, he was a brilliant design engineer. He helped design watches for Timex in Dundee, in Waterbury, Connecticut, and in Besançon in the Jura. Later he designed robotic submarines used to set up the oil pipes that were being built under the North Sea.

When I was born in 1945 he was serving as a rating with the Royal Navy in Holland clearing barges of mines left by German forces with the intention of slowing the advance of the allied forces.

As a boy I handed spanners to him every weekend when he was renovating his old cars. I got to know the difference between Whitworth, AF and Metric spanners but I was never as interested in mechanical things as he was. While I was growing up we did have brief conversations but we never got on to discussing deeper things. He had lofty ambitions for me, none of which I achieved. He was quite alarmed when my Mum told him I wrote poems.

Apart from one memorable occasion he kept his emotions close to himself. On rare occasions when he returned from his lengthy - both in time and distance - business trips he would make gestures to engage with us and these left a big impression upon us. In our childhood my two sisters and I didn't dare be cheeky to him although my youngest sister managed to draw out a funny side to this on those Sunday afternoons when we enjoyed family outings to Arbroath.

As a young man he was keen on building model aeroplanes with balsa wood and tissue paper. He would temper the tissue by painting it with something he called “dope”. I don’t know what it was but I remember it had a particular and characteristic smell. I’d recognise it even now. The planes had tiny petrol engines and every Saturday morning he'd take me with him to a park in Forfar where the members of the model aeroplane club met to fly their planes. The noise of the engines was a high pitched rasping whine. It was exciting for a boy of four years old to hear.

Later in my early to mid-teens my Dad took me to watch motor racing. Unlike me Dad was not a man overly interested in sports but motor racing was an exception. We shared a joy in it. We’d get up really early and he’d drive us from our home in Coventry to Mallory Park in Leicestershire, where I first watched a legendary future world champion Jim Clark driving a Lister Jaguar for a racing team called the Border Reivers. Later he also took to me to watch formula one races at Silverstone.

My favourite story about his boyhood is of an occasion in 1936, when, at the age of 10 years, he took his father’s Beardmore car and drove it several times around the square in Letham, Angus. I am told his friends were very impressed with this, and I heard that my Grandad Sharpe was very angry about it, but I suspect he was in fact proud of his precocious son.

My father's full name was Charles William Scott Sharpe. It was a name which had been used for a number generations alternating with George Muir Sharpe which was my Grandad's name and if tradition had been followed George would have been my name too but Dad decided I should follow in his footsteps and carry his name. Family folklore has it that the original Charles William Scott Sharpe made a name for himself in the mid-19th century as the harbourmaster at Sydney in New South Wales. I've never found any evidence to substantiate this but it makes a good story to pass through the generations of our family. I have no idea how my namesake got to Australia!

My Dad and my Mum were married for 40 years. He was a young father: only 19 years old when I was born but Mum and he worked hard to make us a strong family. On the whole I think they succeeded.

In the way that he could I think my father loved me. I love him. He inhabits my dreams still and though he didn't live as long as I have - I am 74 years old - I still see him as a man to whom I would defer.

My Dad died of cancer the pancreas at the age of 58 years. I wish I'd got to know him better.

To be continued....

A story about Donald Trump: sources not yet established

2020-03-29T20:55:00.001+01:00

This afternoon a friend of ours told us a story about Donald Trump. She told it over the phone because in these times of special measures she couldn't enter our house but fortunately her voice could. I've confessed all this in case it entered your mind to report me for illicit association. Here is the tale and please forgive me if you have already heard it from another source. As far as I know it is not fake news. I hope too that it is not overly cruel.

Five people were flying in a plane, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, the Pope, Angela Merkel and a ten years old boy. The plane developed a fault and was destined to crash but there were only four parachutes to share among the five passengers.. Donald Trump shouted “ I’m a certified genius, the smartest guy on the planet so I must have one!” and he grabbed his and jumped out of the plane. Boris Johnson declared “I’m the prime minister of the United Kingdom so I must have one!” He grabbed one and jumped out. The Pope cried “I am the leader of the catholic world, I must have one!” He took one and jumped. Angela Merkel said to the boy “I’ve led a long life and you have your life before you, you should have the last parachute. The boy replied “No we can both be saved. The cleverest man in the world just jumped out of the plane carrying my schoolbag.”

A Parable For Our Time? A Paddle In The North Sea

2020-03-25T18:00:00.001+00:00

Even the clearest instruction loses clarity when it engages with the human beings it is intended for. As someone may have said before, if you make a plan be assured that once human beings are asked to implement it, it will go wrong.
I am reminded of a time in the early 1970s when I was teaching in a boarding school for boys between the age of 8 and 13 years. The school was situated by the North Sea on the east coast of Scotland between Dundee and Aberdeen.
On the occasion I am recollecting the weather had been for some time very wet and the sports grounds were so waterlogged it was deemed impossible to play rugby or any kind of game on them. After a couple days of this the younger boys, lacking any exercise, were becoming restive. This perturbed the headmaster and his wife to the extent that they asked the boys if they had any ideas of their own for outdoor activity. The boys said that they would like to go down to beach to play in the rock pools. The beach adjacent to the school was rocky and slippery and the headmaster was anxious about this but tended to want go along with the boys' wishes while his wife was anxious for the boys' safety and concerned that they would be soaked and catch a cold or worse.
As well as her sincere concern for the boys she worried that news of such an informal escapade would get back to the boys' parents and that in consequence the school's reputation might suffer. Her anxiety was heightened because the boys insisted that they be allowed to paddle in the sea. What, they protested, would be the fun of going down to the sea and not being able to paddle? An impasse had been reached and the headmaster and his wife asked the deputy headmaster to join them and after the three had huddled together for about half an hour they hatched a plan.
The three junior teachers who had been charged with the responsibility of supervising the expedition were called together for a briefing. I was one of those teachers. The deputy headmaster was entrusted to deliver this briefing. He informed us the boys had been told they could paddle in the sea and that they were somewhat over-excited about it. No such expedition had ever previously been ventured and we were informed some very strict rules would be laid down. It was explained that in order to keep them warm the boys would wear their full school uniforms as well as their belted raincoats. We were told too they would wear wellington boots and be allowed to paddle into the sea to the depth of three inches but that under no circumstances were they to allow sea water to enter the inside of their Wellington boots. This rule was reinforced to the boys by the headmaster and we three teachers were ordered to ensure that our charges complied.

The scene of the maritime catastrophe on a fine day

On some days the sea in those parts can be rough and at other times still and calm. On this occasion it was neither. I estimated the height of waves to be between a foot and eighteen inches high. We were with a group of about 40 boys between the ages of 8 and 10 years. I leave it to your imagination how the expedition fared.
The boys enjoyed their afternoon but the headmaster's wife was apoplectic with rage when we returned with 40 saturated boys. It was made quite clear to my two colleagues and I that we had been 'entirely responsible for the afternoon's catastrophe' and thought of any future littoral outings must be banished from our minds.

Life in the time of coronavirus

2020-03-15T18:56:00.002+00:00

March 15th, 2020

Search my memory as best I can, yesterday was the worst Saturday afternoon of my life. There was no football match to go to and none to listen to on the radio. There was a dystopian void as I gazed into the middle distance at a loss as to know what would fill the emptiness of my life. It was all so incomprehensible. I had never known anything like it. Football had been postponed indefinitely because of the coronavirus pandemic and the havoc the latter has caused is even more incomprehensible to all of us.

Life as we have known it has been indefinitely postponed. Human beings the world over are in a state of panic. Nothing like this has ever happened before or if it has we didn't all know about it at the same time.

The wifie* and I were out shopping early this afternoon. You can do that nowadays. Sunday is just as loud as all the other days now. When in the mid-1950s as a boy living in Dundee Sundays were quiet days, some went to Kirk, some went for a stroll in the park but most sat in front of the television to watch ITV the new channel which had split the BBC's monopoly. ITV screened programmes on Sunday afternoon! Well, I never! when it first happened it created quite a social splash but we did still talk about other things.

Today my wife and I have only talked about the coronavirus and its impact. Indeed when she and I went out to the Asda supermarket in Paignton to purchase some essential items, (which we failed to do because of the mass purchasing frenzy brought on by the fallout from the current crisis), the virus was all that people were talking about. Even other topics of conversation are in the context of their relationship to the virus. It is as if we cannot allow ourselves to think of anything else. A mass hysteria has overtaken the human world. If something like the coronavirus ever happened in the past the news of it passed more slowly but now everyone can know about it immediately.

It is to be hoped that the human imagination is such that the time will not be long in coming when our thoughts are directed to issues other than the coronavirus but for the time being the collective psyche of our community is at a loss as to how to deal with it. It is too difficult to assimilate at the speed we receive information. There are scientists but they have no definitive answers. There are politicians but their foresight as ever is not even as good as ours.

I've read today that people like me - someone over 70 years old - will soon be required to put ourselves into exile from our fellow human beings because we are more prone to contracting the virus and developing life threatening diseases from it: diseases which are expensive to treat. We are seen as a threat to our fellow human beings. We are viewed as lesser human beings : untermensch I believe the Nazis called them.

I think most people who like me, are over 70 years of age have the guts to change and perhaps to sacrifice their lives that a younger person should live but I for one would prefer to be trusted to do it of my own volition and not because some smart Alecs order me to do so. They say they've listened to the panacea they call 'science' and we are seduced. Yet, Science is not entirely objective, it is as subjective as any human inquiry. There are huge areas of the physical and psychological qualities of life on our planet that scientists do not, or have not, chosen to research. It may be that these potential fields for research are of little interest to the profit makers.

Human beings are not solitary creatures. Before birth we are contained inside another and from birth we are dependent on a relationship with another and, later on, further relationships with others and this continues through life. Few would wish to die alone, either physically, or emotionally.

"No man is an Ilande intire of itself; every man

is a peece of the Continent, a part of the Maine..

....any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in Mankinde;"

Meditation XVII

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

John Donne, 1624

* Old respectful Scots word

______________

Parasite, two short reviews

2020-02-28T22:53:00.001+00:00

Hi Charles,

I finally caught Parasite at the Paignton Vue last night. Surely this will be the only time a South Korean film will ever be shown in a cinema chain more in thrall to Star Wars, Marvel super heroes and audiences that are more captivated by what they intake orally than visually.

The film was top drawer. I'm always a sucker for a film that includes a class commentary but was more impressed with the effortless way the film traversed a number of genres. It begins as a con artist film as the family skilfully insert themselves into the Park household and then incorporates comedy, thriller, drama, and finally, tragedy elements as the plot builds momentum. And what a plot it is. Throwing the audience completely off kilter once the Kim family have their feet under the table, the narrative switching up gears, continuously defying expectation and laying out it's critique of class and status. A lighness of touch in execution which gradually adds layers of dramatic weight and subtext.

In short, what a fantastic piece of cinema. At the risk of sounding old (I do turn 40 in August!) it is rare for me to watch a film nowadays and get "that feeling". By this I mean that overwhelming sense that on leaving the cinema and strolling home that you have seen something unique. Even better was that I watched this with an audience who were as immersed as myself in what was unfolding in front of them. Some may have purchased their tickets off the back of the best picture Oscar buzz but subtitles, or no subtitles, quality story telling will always shine through.

Hope you enjoyed the film as much as I did. Catch you in The Bay soon.

Regards

Justin

Dear Justin,

It was great to meet with you again last Friday. Thank you for your acute observations on Parasite. I found that I agreed with you on the ideas you put forward. Below is an extract from my journal which gives my thoughts on the film but they are far from being as comprehensive, cogent, well developed and as insightful as yours.

"This evening we are off to Dartington to watch the Oscar winning Parasite.

"It was a superb film: a tragic farce, though not so farcical as to divorce itself from true emotional experience . Its content and atmosphere showed not so much how culturally different South Korea is from the UK but that the vast gulf between the rich and the poor is certainly universal. The film developed other interesting themes. One such is that all human beings are parasitic and live off other people and significantly the rich live off the labour of the poor.

"In a very dramatic flood scene we were reminded that the poor of this world also always seem to end up in the shit.

"All the principal actors were excellent in their parts. We are there with the human beings they bring to life.

"Given the current American political governance it was a brave but, in my view, right choice by the academy. I’m pleased it won the Oscar.

"I rate it in the top 25 films I’ve seen which is saying something for I’ve been watching films since I first went to the pictures at the Rialto in Lochee in 1950. I must make that list of my top 25 films. At first thought the films I’d include in a catalogue of films I have my self seen are, High Noon; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Point Blank; Lust,Caution; Brokeback Mountain; Ju Dou; Bonnie and Clyde; Morgan, a Suitable Case for Treatment, African Queen and more. I guess I couldn’t do a list of 25. It’ll need to be a list of 100, but it may be that lists are no measure, just another list living off the perceived wisdom of a previous one."

I hope we meet up soon,

Best wishes,

Charles

___________________

ps I offer my thanks to Justin Frost for his insightful and concise review of the film Parasite.

Parasite, a South Korean feature film shot in 2019 which was adjudged the best film in the 2020 Oscars. It was directed by directed by Bong Joon-ho.

Missing the Target: should have gone to... In February when we could go where we liked.

2020-02-18T20:31:00.002+00:00

Yesterday was a difficult day. I decided to leave for Brixham quite early in order to visit the NatWest Bank in Paignton (there is no longer a NatWest branch in Totnes) to deposit a sum of money, and then to stroll around Brixham harbour prior to fulfilling an appointment I had in that town.

Before leaving home I was about to make a phone call to a prospective client when my MacBook Air laptop asked me if I would like to update the IOS operating system on my iPhone. I agreed and started the update. I was given a message that there were items in my iTunes folder which could not be transferred because they had not been purchased from Apple. I pressed the “continue” button and at that stage my phone froze and I was no longer able to access it, or the data stored in it. I could have coped with this until I got expert help but unfortunately I had promised to call my prospective client and his telephone number had been on my iPhone. I didn’t want to let him down so I walked quickly to the lower end of town and sought help from the mobile phone shop there and from Quay IT, the computer company in Totnes. Neither could help me. I was now running very short of time but since the EE shop which provided me with my mobile phone and its accompanying contract is in Paignton and since I intended to visit my bank there and that it was on my way to Brixham, my final destination, I decided I would risk taking a few minutes to pay the shop a visit.

My original intention had been to make the journey by bus but I remained determined to make the phone call to my prospective client and the only way I could keep on schedule was to look out for a taxi to take me to Paignton. I almost ran - the last time I actually ran was about 20 years ago - to the taxi stance on The Plains at Totnes. A car was parked there. The driver, a woman, didn’t seem interested in me as a potential customer so impatiently I opened the front passenger door and made to get into the car. I was about to tell her my destination when I saw how horrified she was. “Oh! You’re not a taxi are you?” “No,” she replied and after a moment or two she seemed to see a funny side to what had happened. I apologised and slunk off in a high state of embarrassment.

If you know Totnes you will be aware there are two parking bays on the Dartmouth Inn side of The Plains, one is for taxis and the other is for the public. You've already guessed which one I, in my anxiety, had landed upon. After a few minutes of waiting, I boarded a legitimate taxi at the proper taxi stance.

I was becoming fearful of being late for my appointment in Brixham but was still determined to try to do all that I had hoped to do. When the taxi driver dropped me off in Paignton I rushed to the EE mobile phone shop on the pedestrianised Victoria Street, burst into it, and pulled out my phone and asked an attendant if she could help me fix it. At that moment I spotted numerous pairs of spectacles displayed around the walls and it came upon me that I’d entered the wrong shop. I was in Specsavers which is adjacent to the EE shop.

At least those who witnessed my inverted take ("he did go to Specsavers") on the "should have gone to Specsavers" television advert, appreciated the comic nature of the incident and when I did get into the EE Shop, a young man there gave me good advice which allowed me to fix my phone when I returned home. Though I didn't have time to saunter around the harbour, I got to the bank, fulfilled my appointment in Brixham, and I was able in the early evening to contact my prospective client and arrange an appointment. All lived happily ever after.

Easy mistake to make.

On further reflection about what happened yesterday I was inclined think my missing the target represented further evidence of a speedy decline in my mental acuity caused by advancing years and that may well be so.

Yet I was consoled by a boyhood memory of being driven home (probably from Arbroath or Broughty Ferry) one Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon. I was about eight years old and my parents stopped the car across the road from our favourite fish n’chip shop Soave’s on Lochee High Street. They told me to get two fish suppers for themselves and two thruppenny bags of chips for my sister and me. I was urged to “hurry up about it”. I dashed swiftly across the road through the double doors into the shop, ran up to the high counter and cried, “Can I have two fish suppers and two thrupenny bags of chips, please?” As the words came out of my mouth, bursting out around me was the laughter of men who were sitting at tables scattered around the room. Another man, who also seemed to think me worthy of amusement, was standing leaning against the counter and I noticed he and the others were drinking from glasses containing an amber coloured liquid. The man behind the counter said to me, “Sonny, ye’re up the wrang dreel, try next door.”

I’d never been in a place like this before but I was informed later I had run into a pub: The Burns Bar. Aware that I had blundered I sheepishly left the licensed premises, looked across the road to our car and saw that my parents and my sister seemed to think my discomfiture was very amusing. I went next door to Soave’s, got the fish n’ chips and when I’d returned to the car I handed them, and the change, to my Mummy.

_______________

A love lyrics list for Valentine's Day

2020-02-14T00:15:00.001+00:00

Yesterday I was out in Totnes and would you believe it, I met my wife in the greetings card shop. What was she doing there? What was I doing there?

For fun I decided to make a random list of songs with the word "love" in their title and in their first line. It may amuse you to read the list or to guess who composed the songs or performed them. See how far you get without using your search engine. I hope you can enjoy a few moments of romantic escape with it

This is the reason I was in the greetings card shop but don't tell my wife

Here is the love list :-

Just you and I know true love ways,

Love, love will tear us apart again,

Love me tender, love me true,

My love is like a red, red rose,

Love you so bad,

Love and affection,

Only love can break your heart,

I'm in the mood for love,

Love, love me do,
Love letters straight from your heart,

Words of love you whisper soft and true,

Young love, first love,

You always hurt the one you love,

I'll never love again,

Your heart is open to love and regret,

All you need is love,
What's love got to do with it?

That's how strong my love is,

To know, know him is to love, love, love him,

I'll never fall in love again,

Will you still love me tomorrow?

Les mots d'amour,

Ain't no cure for love,

Chanson d'amour,

When will I be loved?

I feel love,

I'm not in love,

You can't deny there's a spectre of love,

Don't say you love me,

Should have been loved,

I love it when you call,

It must be love, love, love,
I want to be loved by you, just you and nobody else but you,

You made me love you, I didn't want to do it,

and,

Love is the sweetest thing.

Happy Valentine's Day!

In Memoriam : Prudence Cat, who Died February 1st, 1999

2020-02-01T18:29:00.001+00:00

21 years ago today, Pru, our much loved cat died. Like all - I imagine - special family cats she was ‘something else’. Here from my journal is an account of her last days.

Thursday, January 21st, 1999

I took Prudence to the vet, the one whose premises are just below the East Gate at the top of Fore Street. He says her weight loss is a consequence of a cancerous tumour in her stomach. He wanted to put her to sleep there and then. I told him today was my wife’s birthday and she would want to say good bye to Pru. I informed him I would bring her to him tomorrow.

Monday, January 25th

We didn’t take Pru to see the vet on Friday, as he had advised me to do, because she was still purring and does not seem to be in great pain but I took her to him today because she continues to lose weight loss due to her stomach tumour. Again he said we should allow him to put her to sleep there and then. It was an unbearable feeling - Pru has been an integral of our family life for almost 20 years - and I mentioned to him she was still eating a little and sleeping. I agreed to bring her in if we thought her condition had further deteriorated.

Friday, January 29th.

Pru dodders on purring but hardly eating and is now never sleeping. She is an old cat losing all her feline dignity and grace. We wonder whose needs are being met by us keeping her alive.

Saturday, 30th January, 1999

Pru has developed a cough.

Prudence, Lady Totnes: always hoping to improve her position

Monday, February 1st, 1999.

Prudence Cat, also known as Pru, the Empress of Wellbury, Dowager of St.Albans and Lady Totnes was put to sleep this evening. Pru, a British Blue, was a snob, and she was in the main disdainful of other cats and most human beings. She tolerated us but she was ashamed that she was supported by folk who lived in a small end of terrace semi-detached house when she should have been with the well to do in a great country mansion. When any people who visited us looked reasonably wealthy, she, being the British Blue that she was, would moanfully chatter away to them saying that she ought to be better placed than she was.

Notwithstanding this, she was, in spite of her irritable nature, our family cat for over 19 years. She came to us when she was about a year old because we had a friend who knew Pru's first owner who said she had one too many cats and so was keen to divest herself of Pru. Of course it wasn’t put to us as harshly as that when we agreed to take her in but it was something that we very quickly came to came to understand.

When she arrived at our house she had cat flu which she proceeded to pass on to the cat we already had, our beloved Sooty. Sadly cat flu proved too much for Sooty and she died about a week after Prudence crossed our threshold. She was a great hunter with a gigantic final pounce that captured most of her victims. She could catch a squirrel as easily as she could a bird, rat or mouse. In addition to these murderous ways Prudence disgraced herself on many occasions when not so well off strangers visited the house. She often shamed us when dear friends, (though always those who were not by nature sympathetic to felines) visited the house, but she kept her most maliciously violent behaviour for veterinary surgeons.

It was sad tonight to see that she had become so weak as not to be able to draw even the smallest drop of the vet’s blood, something she had achieved in a most vicious manner on each of her previous visits to the vet’s surgery. Indeed when first he experienced her volatile nature the vet insisted that if we wished to bring her to the surgery again we must phone up to make an appointment so that he could arrange for an additional person to assist him in handling her. Tonight though she was too weak to maim the clinicians she did have the last miaow : she pee’d all over them. That’s my girl!

She was my cat though my wife might not agree with me but occasionally she would say that I loved Pru more than her. Now, only I know the truth. I loved her and eventually over the years she grew to love me some of the time. Pru, wherever you are, the Daddy loves you.

Prudence Cat

______________________________

A Man's a Man for a' That - Robbie's birthday again

2020-01-25T16:33:00.000+00:00

Last night I sang A Man's a Man for a' That at the annual Burns celebration held at the Bay Horse Inn at Totnes in Devon. I apologise to those who had the sound of my singing imposed upon them but the unfortunate failings of my voice could not destroy the grandeur of this anthem. I feel the themes taken up in the lyric are just as relevant today as they were in the.late 18th century and in my vanity I took an opportunity to express them. I have written another longer piece about A Man's a Man for a' That so I make only a few observations here.

Robert Burns was a radical influenced by events like the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783 and by the political turmoil in France that led to the French Revolution in 1789. A Man's a Man for a' That, was published in 1995 and Burns used it to convey his egalitarian ideals. Those who were in power when the song was first circulated believed it to be a revolutionary song. Burns, who was then employed as a government Customs and Excise officer was fearful of being arrested as a subversive, published the song anonymously.

In my view it is the first socialist song. It was sung by the celebrated - Dundee born - folksinger, Sheena Wellington at the re-opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. In 1707 the parliament closed for a wee while.

Paulo Nutini provides a spirited rendering of the song. Last night at the Bay Horse Inn, readers may be relieved to know, there were a good number of talented singers, musicians and reciters so my performance represented only a brief drop into mediocrity.

Is there for honest Poverty

That hings his head, an' a' that;

The coward slave - we pass him by,

We dare be poor for a' that!

For a' that, an' a' that.

Our toils obscure an' a' that,

The rank is but the guinea's stamp,

The Man's the gowd for a' that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,

Wear hodden grey, an' a that;

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;

A Man's a Man for a' that:

For a' that, and a' that,

Their tinsel show, an' a' that;

The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,

Is king o' men for a' that.

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,

Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;

Tho' hundreds worship at his word,

He's but a coof for a' that:

For a' that, an' a' that,

His ribband, star, an' a' that:

The man o' independent mind

He looks an' laughs at a' that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,

A marquis, duke, an' a' that;

But an honest man's abon his might,

Gude faith, he maunna fa' that!

For a' that, an' a' that,

Their dignities an' a' that;

The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,

Are higher rank than a' that.

Then let us pray that come it may,

(As come it will for a' that,)

That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,

Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.

For a' that, an' a' that,

It's coming yet for a' that,

That Man to Man, the world o'er,

Shall brothers be for a' that.

___________

My wife's birthday and George Orwell

2020-01-21T23:38:00.001+00:00

Today is my wife's birthday. She was born on January 21st 1950 on the day George Orwell died.
I'm don't know if in some ethereal way she was responsible for this but in my opinion on that day the world got a fair exchange.
She was never down and out in Paris and as an exceptional swimmer she was never coming up for air.
She has successfully helped many students preparing for examinations to read Animal Farm. And in the way Eric Blair might have done, she also sees through the bluster of others.

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

Insincerity may be the enemy of clear language but with its blood brother capitalism, it is also the enemy of freedom and is allied with slavery. This is the statement I believe Orwell and my wife are making.
Insincerity is represented by the employer who says, "I'll pay you a fair day's wage." Yet he doesn't. He creates small print or invents conditions that he says have been forced upon him. He knows that you need the money, that you are desperate, and so he short changes you. When he no longer needs you, he discards you.

The books I read in 2019

2019-12-31T23:45:00.006+00:00

Recent hogmanays have seen me writing down a few of my reflections on the year past. My ruminations usually start as an attempt at rational discussion which - quite unconsciously on my part - segue into a rant. If I tried the same this year it would be one hundred per cent all rant so I've decided it will be much less wearing if I penned something innocuous - a list. Even so, I accept that lists themselves are not without contention.
Umberto Eco liked lists. So do I, but there any comparison of myself with the great Italian thinker and author ends Here is a list of the books I’ve read in their entirety this year. If I make little comment on some it does not mean I didn’t like them. Indeed if I finish a book it means that I gained from it.

I have compiled this list because I think the readers of lists like then to consider what their list is or would be and how it would differ from those of others. Our lists are special to us. What follows is not a spectacular list but it's my list.

The books are entered in the order I read them. My code for the list is F = fiction, NF = non-fiction which includes essays and academic studies and P = poetry.

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Winter Ali Smith (F)

Spring Ali Smith. (F)

David Hockney cover eh? Must have cost a bit

These are the second and third books of a quartet. I read Autumn last year. Through Elizabeth, her principal character, Ali Smith gives us home truths about the referendum/Brexit world and how it really was and is. We await 'Summer.'

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Child of the Jago Arthur Morrison (F)

"There was a thickness in his voice and a wildness in his eye."

An enthralling novel of the 1890s about the poverty in working class life in the slums of the East End of London. Expect a tale violence and crime as well as scenes from family life.

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Sisters Brothers Patrick De Witt (F)

A feral Lonesome Dove.

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Mrs Osmond John Banville. (F)

John Banville does his impression of Henry James.

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A History of God Karen Armstrong (NF)

Karen Armstrong lucidly pursues the narrative of the strands of thought and beliefs that have brought us to the Gods we have now.

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In search of Alan Gilzean The lost legacy of a Dundee and Spurs legend David Morgan (NF)

This was a gift from my grandsons who know I am mad about Dundee Football Club. Gilzean, a native of Coupar Angus, was one of my heroes. I gulped this down.

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Dunbar Edward St. Aubyn (F)

A well written modern re-run of King Lear. Inevitably the plot is predictable.

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Kudos Rachel Cusk (F)

The concluding part of an exceptional trilogy. The first two books were Outline and Transit. Cusk is an original. In my view no one is writing about the human predicament, especially as women experience it, the way she does.

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In a House of Lies Ian Rankin (F)

As ever Rankin provides a thundering good read : insightful, suspenseful and exciting. Rebus is in a different role but still at heart himself.

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Murmur Will Eaves (F)

A fictional account of the life of Alan Turing : difficult but persuasive.

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Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence James Lovelock (NF)

The celebrated centenarian scientist suggests we can use
artificial intelligence (even if it supersedes our own).

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Selected Poetry Samuel Taylor Coleridge, compiled by, and with an introduction by Richard Holmes. (P)

All the great poems are here: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan and as well, as the surprise of Coleridge’s sonnets'

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A Weekend in New York Benjamin Markovitz (F)

A fading professional tennis player deals with family matters in late August/early September when the US Open Tennis Championship is being played out in New York City.

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The Turn of the Screw Henry James

Still as frightening as when I first read it. It stands up well to a re-read. He really likes long sentences.

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Coventry Rachel Cusk (NF)

A thoughtful collection of essays by a great novelist. I’m still thinking about the essays.

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Our Need for Others and its Roots in Infancy Josephine Klein (NF)

A wide ranging study about the basis, development and significance of early relationships , written more about human beings than John Bowlby's attachment theory, as profound as the latter may be.

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Theatres of the body - a psychoanalytical approach to psychosomatic illness Joyce Macdougall (NF)

This book is what it says on the cover. It deals with outward symptoms caused by neurosis which in my view still rests at the core of psychoanalytic thinking, but it is accessible to the general reader.

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Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe with an introduction by Will Self.

These remain gripping gothic stories: 'The Purloined Letter' 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' together with impressive poems like 'The Raven.' I got interested in reading Poe again because I discovered he had for a short time attended a school near Clissold Park where our eldest daughter and her family live.

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Attention Seeking Adam Phillips. (NF)

Psychoanalyst and celebrated essayist explores attention seeking and finds guilt and shame. Writing very much of today, still, the writing of Adam Phillips reminds me most of the work of the 17th century poet John Donne. Phillips's mode is metaphysical.

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The Diary of a Bookseller Shaun Bythell (NF)

The enchanting, humorous and moving journal of a Wigtown bookseller contains sadness and joy. A book that raises serious issues about the way publishing and bookselling are going but at the end of the day this is a couthie book. It’s my book of the year.

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Normal People Sally Rooney (F)

This is a rite of passage novel as Irish students make the transit from school in a small to middle-size Irish town to university life in Dublin. I am beginning to understand how different is student life today from my own over 50 years ago.

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Crudo Olivia Laing. (F)

You can see it was bought on the cheap, but that is not its nature

This is a raw meat novel. It’s a short text and at times I struggled to understand it but I liked the author’s approach which was a kind of stream of consciousness which throws out many powerful images of life in 2017.

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The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis José Saramogo (F)

In my view folks should read anything they can of this great Portuguese author.

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The Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought Erich Fromm (NF)

Fromm provides a readable and careful re-examination of Freud’s major theories.

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Inequality What can be done? Anthony B. Atkinson (NF)

Following a comprehensive examination of how capitalism has bred extraordinary inequality, the late lamented and renowned academic Tony Atkinson suggests ways we can, as Joni Mitchell might sing, 'get back to the garden'.

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Michael Marra Arrest This Moment James Robertson (NF)

An imaginatively presented biography of Dundee’s bard.

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The Blue Suit Richard Rayner (NF)

I was given this book as a Christmas present. It is a memoir of a Yorkshire boy who gained a place at Cambridge University in the 1970s. I read it in two days. It is compelling reading but the confessions of criminal and shameful acts put me in touch with some of the shameful things I did as a student and still can’t admit.

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Down to the ground, down to the ground: more maturational angst

2019-12-28T15:34:00.001+00:00

In all human development different stages of life introduce characteristics that come to represent them. The infant’s desire for the breast, the child’s desire to be thought of as good by his or her parents, the teenager's search for identity and what seems to adults (with all too short memories) the adolescent’s over concern with personal appearance, and indeed, the demands of parenthood are just a few of the elements which influence life's vicissitudes. I might, and will now go on about another element: approaching elderliness. This is the staging post where I am currently positioned on my journey to.........well, wherever.

Many will be aware of common signs of ageing such as going to a room to do something particular but on entering the room finding that the purpose for being there has been forgotten. My mind has developed this trait to a more advanced level and now I find when I do eventually remember the reason I entered the room I discover that I am in the wrong room to do it.

This is but a trifling matter when I compare it to one of the issues I really want to discuss here and that is the case of my trembling hands. They begin to shake when I hold on to objects like cups or cameras and because of this shakiness my handwriting has become illegible. In the age of the personal computer that should not pose a problem but I find that my shakiness influences my typing accuracy on the keyboard. I am continually correcting typing errors when my shaky finger only partly hits the intended letter key and also touches the neighbouring key. This means I am ever making spelling corrections. Of course I can always use the App which types to the sound of my dictation but I find that with my Scottish accent the spoken word does not always equate with what eventually appears in the text.

Associated with this phenomenon is the propensity with which all the things I need and use, preternaturally fall to the floor of their own volition. This is not only when I am holding them, picking them up, or putting them down but they are also under instruction from Isaac Newton when I walk past them. It may be a poltergeist - I don't know - but I can tell you the ensuing bending down to pick them up is a struggle. It's alright if I have my long handled metal gripper nearby but it's seldom to be found in a handy position because it too deliberately and frequently falls to the floor and hides itself in places it can't be found.

Hand level object evolving into a low level one seeks a hiding place

When I am out and about and pull my wallet from my pocket, all the contents of the wallet: my debit, library, senior rail and others cards, inevitably fall to the pavement, or descend to the floor of the shop or café I happen to be in at the time. Occasionally they have fallen down street drains which has complicated matters to a point of impossibility. All this is an embarrassment to me and though I am grateful that younger, and sometimes not so very much younger people come to my rescue and bend over to pick up and return to me whichever of my belongings have obeyed the law of gravity, what is most shameful for me is the idea these thoughtful people have assessed me as one who looks as if he will struggle to bend down to pick up what I have dropped. I can feel diminished by this. It's not good for the ego, yet I eventually come around to thinking "Damn my ego! I needed someone to help me.”

These often deliberatedly dive from my wallet

For some reason the proclivity for things to fall down brought to mind the repeated phrase, “down to the ground, down to the ground.” It has become a line I can’t get out of my head and it is from a great Joan Armatrading song Down to Zero .

. I first saw and heard Joan Armatrading perform in February,1985 at the City Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne. She entertained us magnificently on that night. Her wide ranging, lyrical voice electrifies her songs. She's a great musician and peerless poet/songwriter. Down to Zero is not about the ageing process but more about sustaining self-belief in the face of adversity and certainly that has a great deal to do with growing older.

I hope the song will inspire me to gee myself up and to act on an aphorism of another great woman, Mary Ann Evans, (also known as George Eliot), who proposed, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” Well, maybe.

Le Taureau nouveau à Totnes est arrivé

2019-11-27T15:54:00.000+00:00

The Bull Inn on the Rotherfold in Totnes is springing back into life. Mrs Geetie Singh Watson and those who have supported her in this achievement are to be congratulated. People who read this blog will know the inn closed two years ago. It has been missed by its customers and for many more it was sad to see a historic building of such social significance in our community have no life in it.
The Bull has had many patrons over its hundreds of years of offering hospitality to local people and to those in passage. There are any number of Bull Inns scattered across the United Kingdom and they are invariably very old hostelries. The Bull Inn at Totnes is no exception. It is likely that there has been an inn on the site since cattle were first brought to market on the Rotherfold. The inn is situated near the junction of the old road to Plymouth and the road to Kingsbridge so it was an important staging post for travellers.

It has been depressing to see it empty for so long and it was pleasing one evening in early October as I walked down from the Bay Horse Inn to look across the Rotherfold and see lights on at the inn. Of course the illumination was for tradesmen working late on the interior yet it was the first sign of night life at the establishment I had seen for over two years.

The first signs of night life

In recent weeks and days the exterior has appeared to be reaching its new finished state.

This last week when peeping through the windows it could be seen that tables and chairs for future diners have been set out, beer pumps have been fitted and polished, staff have been training and now, as I write, final rehearsals are taking place.

The Bull is in the ring!

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Post Script

A number of worthies in the town who might wish for anonymity have been advising the good burghers of Totnes that the Bull Inn will open on every ensuing day in October, November or on December 1st, or 2nd or 3rd or... Soon they will be proven. right!
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Sorry We Missed You: Ken Loach, the Scourge of the Gig Economy

2019-11-17T16:44:00.002+00:00

Sorry We Missed You : released November, 2019; Director, Ken Loach, Screenplay, Paul Laverty.

Cast

Last Sunday afternoon we visited The Barn Cinema in the idyllic setting of the Dartington Estate to watch Ken Loach’s moving and harrowing film Sorry We Missed You. Like his last film I, Daniel Blake action is set in Newcastle upon Tyne - a far cry from Dartington - and it concerns the struggles of the Turner family, Rickie and Abbie, the parents, Seth, a 17 year old son and Lisa Jane, a 12 year old daughter.
Both parents work with exploitative companies who demand they be self-employed. In having no choice but to work in this way Rickie and Abbie have no contracts which would offer them humane working rights. Constantly overworked they are at the mercy of these 'gig economy' companies and ever under the threat of loss of work or fines should they be unable to fulfil their almost impossible schedules. If they are ill, they must find a replacement to do their work and if they can't they must pay the company a fine which is then used to finance a replacement.
In the opening scenes we discover that as a result of the uncertain economic climate brought about by the years of austerity, Rickie has found it difficult to find long term employment and has flitted from one short term job to another.
Determined to build a more secure future Rickie is persuaded by a friend to take on a franchise with a parcel delivery company. To do this he must have a van to deliver the parcels and is only able to finance the purchase of a van by asking his wife Abbie to sell her car which with some reluctance she agrees to do.
On first turning up at the delivery company's depot, Rickie is told by the unbending and pitiless depot gangmaster, Gavin Maloney, how his time and work will be controlled by the schedule set by the black phone he gives to Rickie. Maloney makes it clear that the phone is a valuable and critical piece of equipment for it provides proof of the punctual delivery of packages.
Abbie Turner is a self-employed carer for a social care agency. Her duties involve providing support to the elderly and the disabled in their homes. She carries out her care in a sincere and conscientious way, but a consequence of the sale of her car is that she must travel by public transport to meet with her clients, (the latter a word she hates to use to describe the people she helps) which makes her working day even longer than it had been.

To make enough for family life to be financially feasible, Abbie and Chris work 14 hours a day for 6 days a week. This places great strain on what is not a perfect but a good enough loving family. Chris and Abbie, are increasingly unable to find sufficient time for their parenting duties, and cracks begin to appear in what up to now has been a strong family edifice. Son Seth, a friendly and sensitive young man with a passionate yet thoughtful interest in his street art, is suspended from school and Lisa Ann, a smart bright articulate girl begins to wet the bed. Rickie becomes angry and aggressive in reaction to these family frustrations and at a critical moment he strikes his son. A family taboo is broken.
The fallout from these developments define the denouement of the film as we witness the collapse of a once loving family. There is a heart wrenching crescendo in a scene set in a hospital where Rickie has gone after he is beaten up by thugs who have ransacked his van and smashed his black phone. While waiting for medical attention in A and E Rickie calls Maloney using Abbie's phone. The gangmaster insists Rickie must pay £1000 for the black phone and that he must find someone to finish his work schedule for the day or he will be fined. On hearing this Abbie calls Maloney and in a verbal assault upon him, (which we as watchers all relish hearing), she tells him with a barrage of expletives how cruel and inhumane he is. On reflection Abbie is ashamed of her use of foul language. Another taboo has been broken. Rickie, injured, and in the thrall of the fear of financial disaster leaves the hospital and returns to work ignoring his wife and children's desperate protests against this.

The potency of this and a number of previous Loach films is that they are about ordinary people struggling with the distress caused by government legislation or, as is the case of this film, the dearth of effective legislation to protect workers from exploitation.

Watching the film we encounter characters whom we recognise and know from our own day-to-day lives. Many of us will see ourselves in them. We sympathise and suffer with them.

Contrast Sorry We Missed You with the trailers of the other upcoming films we watched before the screening. These were about 'tough' Americans shooting and blowing up things to save the world from the Russians while another was about even more Americans saving the us from alien invasions. Films like these, as most commercial films seem to do, depict a violent, weapon toting world which has little to do with our every day experience. They are exercises in violent excess. Certainly there is violence in Sorry We Missed You but it is commensurate to a narrative with which we can associate.

This moving film has political implications but first and foremost it is a film about good people in a good family being destroyed by the 'gig economy'.

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R.D. Laing,the idea of 'withness' and PIP assessment, the idea of 'againstness'.

2019-10-31T23:55:00.000+00:00

The following is an extract from my Journal for Wednesday, May 22nd, 1997. It offers my brief reflection on the Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, R.D.'Ronnie' Laing (1927-1989) who was something of a cult figure in psychotherapeutic and wider circles in the 1960s and 1970s. A controversial figure he was sometimes described as being part of an 'anti-psychiatry' movement. I believe I may have made this entry because I had just read a biography of Laing by John Clay, R.D.Laing: a Divided Self: a Biography.

1997

"I want (or as our former prime minister, John Major was wont to say 'I wunt') to read more of, and about, R.D. Laing and his works. I have some sympathy for his approach which promotes the idea that we must be empathic and live 'with' the emotional disorders of others and not manage them antagonistically by locking people away in either a physical or drug induced sense.
In 1965, to fulfil his ideas, Laing established Kingsley Hall in the East End of London as a therapeutic community for troubled adults. The drawback to this - in my opinion - right approach to mental health, is that it can take too heavy a toll of some carers. It draws enormously on a carer's emotional resources. How are these replenished? This was achieved with the support every member of the community gave to each other. Not everyone survived the process and in Laing’s own personal case, in some measure he buried the emotional difficulties he faced in alcohol, drugs, and sex.

A word which Laing and his followers often used to describe their approach to helping people overwhelmed by emotional problems is 'with'. They would say that it was important to be 'with' the person being helped - empathising, recognising and accepting the other’s personal construct of the world and the feelings this induces in them.

My view is that Laing’s work has been marginalised because an empiric world wants a more detailed analysis of how this 'withness' is measured. I do not know if Laing or anyone else has explained the state of 'withness' in specific terms, though it seems to me the methodology for making such a measurement might prove difficult because "withness" is an active inter-personal process and each relationship has a unique symbiosis.

To the sceptic 'withness' is a notion which lies somewhere between dubious and spurious. 'Withness' is considered a vague, hippie notion without a valid place in the field of psychiatry. For the latter only science can offer true answers. Nevertheless the sense of togetherness that 'withness' implies is surely something to which we aspire.

Laing and his followers may have been marginalised for other reasons. The whole psychiatry lobby, backed as it is by the institution of mainstream medicine, together with the drugs manufacturers who enjoy their profits so much, is a powerful one, and unlikely to allow drugless interpersonal therapy to hold sway in the field of mental health."

2019

In the main my thoughts about Laing and his works are the same today as they were then.My observations about his personal life though true, may unfairly mask a life of achievement and, in commenting on his declivities, I should also record that he was a talented pianist, an enthusiastic tennis player, but most of all he was an original thinker and author exemplified best by his classic text The Divided Self.

My own observation is that Laing's concept of 'withness' is one which we as a human community would wish to adhere to in wider aspects of our daily lives. We want to secure a good education and health for all: for those who are doing just about well enough and particularly for those who are struggling.
It is then, a strange paradox to find we have voted for a government which, though we are a wealthy country, is stripping our public services while replacing and diminishing them with private profit making provision that is not up to the task. In my view our government seems to act in a spirit of 'againstness' rather than 'withness.' This is exemplified by its attack - made in our name - upon our most vulnerable fellow citizens, those with various kinds of disability. Our government, through the Department of Work and Pensions, hires private companies to deny needy people essential financial support. The companies, who operate what is called the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessment process, increase their profits every time they make an assessment that someone should be stripped of his or her PIP. The latter is not only left impoverished but to feel that she or he is a liar and somehow a fraud.
Though the United Kingdom is a wealthy community, offering financial support to vulnerable people takes its toll on everyone who pays taxes, but the altruism in giving this support shows a 'withness' to which we, as UK citizens aspire. We have no wish to be cruel to others. We want to help each other. Don't we?
On December 12th, 2019, if that is when our next General Election is to be, we must vote for a government of 'withness' and not one of 'againstness.'

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Only in Totnes....

2019-10-16T19:33:00.000+01:00

A few Sundays ago I walked along the River Dart from the Dartington Estate towards Totnes.

The River Dart flows gently by the Dartington Estate

When I reached the Totnes Bridge I climbed the steps up to street level and walked to the nearby Morrisons supermarket to fetch a copy of our Sunday paper The Observer. Before walking home on the steep ascent of Fore Street and the High Street, I called in for refreshment at the Royal Seven Stars Hotel . Once my thirst had been quenched I began to scale the East Face of Totnes. For an ageing and not particularly fit person like myself, it's a stiff climb so when I reached the East Gate I had to stop for a breather before continuing my sojourn. Some minutes later and almost home now, I reached the summit at the Happy Apple store where momentarily I imagined I was experiencing an altitudinal illusion, for there, at the opening of Apple Lane, a pony and a dog, both tethered to a cart were illegally parked.

Illegally parked

On spotting their owner, a young man, a carter in his early thirties I would say, I immediately informed him of his misdemeanour and he laughed. Mockingly the two homeless men sitting on the pavement just outside Happy Apple alleyway warned of the terrible fate that would befall me if I were to grass the carter up. As is said around these parts, "Only in Totnes....."

Life in the Afternoon: a Francis-Barnett and Brinklow '62

2019-10-01T20:58:00.003+01:00

A few weeks ago I was in The Bay Horse Inn at Totnes musing over motor bikes with AR, a friend who is a keen biker and whose late departed and fondly missed father, DR - once an illustrious habitué of the soon to be re-opened Bull Inn at Totnes - had also been a daring race rider in the infamously dangerous Isle of Man TT races. AR explained to me that over the years many racers at the Isle of Man circuit had been fatally injured after losing control of their bikes and being thrown off at high speed.

I told AR that the only motor bike I had ridden - on a summer's afternoon in 1962 - was a 1955 Francis-Barnett Falcon 70 which had a two stroke 197cc Villiers engine. It had been manufactured in Coventry where I then lived. I can spume this froth because my best friend at the time, RH, provided it for me on a number of occasions before and after he purchased this motor cycle.

The Francis-Barnett Falcon 70 also lovingly known as a Franny Barnett

RH left school at the age of 15 (as one could in 1962) to take up an apprenticeship at ‘The Dunlop’ where tyres were manufactured for cars and motor bikes but he gathered the money to buy his two wheeled steed by using what others might think were ghoulish methods. His wages as an apprentice were insufficient to allow him to save up for a motor bike but on weekday evenings he and I worked as part-time gravediggers and the money for that was good. I wasted my monetary substance on riotous living but RH was sensible and saved enough from his grave digging wages to purchase his Franny Barnett in the Spring of 1962.

One weekend at the height of summer that year we decided to go camping and used his motor bike as our means of gaining our destination. I rode pillion to him and we pitched our tent near the village of Brinklow, in deeper Warwickshire.

On Friday evening at the Raven Inn, Brinklow, RH, who looked 18 was served with a pint of shandy while I looked my age and was served with a lemonade. We listened to the bibulous patrons of the pub, informally, but in loud unison, sing, as was the custom in those days, all the old folk ballads, as well as the songs of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Patsy Kline, Petula Clark The Everly Brothers, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith et al.

Next day my friend, cheered by the bonhomie of the previous evening, generously asked if I would like a shot at riding his motor bike. I was very nervous about it but enough of me wanted to go along with the idea that I agreed to it. For my trial we found an unmetalled track off a quiet lane between Brinklow and Stretton under Fosse.

Before I continue I should give you the warning that we were living in the pre-compulsory crash helmet era and I was helmet free as I mounted the bike and tentatively twisted the accelerator. I was relieved to find that though the motor bike felt bulkier, balance-wise at least, it was like riding a push bike. I had accelerated to a speed of about 15 to 20 mph when the bike seemed to take on a mind of its own and just at a point where the track turned right I found I could not follow it and rode straight on into a wooden five bar gate. The Franny came to an abrupt halt. I was thrown high into the air over the gate and while still in flight I did an involuntary somersault and miraculously landed standing on my feet facing the direction of my travel. Someone disinterestedly watching this might have thought it was an acrobat's circus stunt. It wasn’t. If I owned any wits, they I had now been well and truly scared out of me. For a moment while suspended in the air I had thought life was about to turn into death. I’ve never ridden on a motor bike since.
I survived the incident unimpaired and apart from the need to make a few twists to the metal of the front mudguard the Franny Barnett was also largely undamaged. RH sportingly accepted responsibility for the accident saying he should have had "the sense not to allow an idiot" to ride his bike. The old gate was a little battered but still capable of its function to keep livestock secure in the meadow.

After my crash I would say the gate at Brinklow was in slightly better nick than this one above Princetown on Dartmoor

I slept only fitfully on the night that followed my rocket-like launch into the afternoon Warwickshire sky, and in a fragmentary moment of sleep, no doubt haunted by my experience, I dreamt of the tragi-comic death of a young man who, wearing no crash helmet, loses control of his motor bike at high speed and crashes into a farm gate and narrowly avoids - by exercising extraordinary agility - landing on his head upon a colossal boulder, which would have, had his head collided with it, broken his skull into smithereens. Like me, the young man in my dream lands on his feet. His is a magnificent, cinematic feat - the zenith of the career of any stuntman - but regrettably, on landing, our acrobatic hero surprises and enrages a bull which is inconveniently positioned near to our hero’s landing point. Fearful and alarmed by what it fears is an attack from the skies, the bull charges towards him and gores him, thus causing his slow and bloody demise.

OK, you may now have concerns about the darker reaches of my mind, but I was only 16 going on 17 at the time, had just survived a potentially fatal mishap and, in those days, I had been reading quite a bit of Hemingway.

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