Mister Duffy Changes Trains

The Milk of Human Kindness A few things have happened this week. My dear friends Kevin and Barbara Connelly have had a bereavement: Barbara’s mother died, after a long period of frailty and infirmity. Our thoughts are with them. On a happier note, I had my 65 th birthday, for which number one son came up from London and Margaret and Andrew came down from Keighley, West Yorkshire, accompanied by their highly strung dog, Cassie. Margaret is Linda’s older sister, and the two are very close. It is always lovely to see them, and it was fun playing host for a couple of days. If you asked them if they had any children, Margaret and Andrew would say no, but they would be wrong. They took in Linda and her younger brother John when their mother died. And they have been second parents to both of our children, Bill and Tom. There have always been toothbrushes and other maintenance kit items (a fairly long list when the kids were little) for them at Margaret and Andrew’s house. As our boys got old...

Old Git   I’m now in the countdown to my 65 th birthday, which is on this coming Monday. I have just taken over as head of department at my work. What am I playing at? I’m an old baldy guy. I look in the mirror and I see my dad. It used to be that you retired at 65. And my taekwondo instructor wants me to attempt to grade up to second dan in December. This means more stress, more sparring, more self-defence training, and more opportunities for my classmates to kill me. I could really do without this at the same time as taking on more responsibility at work. Linda says I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to (I didn’t reply, ‘You’ve changed your tune,’ as I want to live a bit beyond 65, so I’m not taking unnecessary risks). Anyway, it’s true in theory that I don’t have to do what I don’t want to, but… I have no complaints about my age, not that there would be any point. Poverty and ill health go together, and there are areas in the UK, notably in the very deprived and margina...

  Another Life I think I may have mentioned that in the early 1980’s after having been ignominiously dumped, I decided that if I were to accept another short term job, it would be overseas, to help me forget, like Laurel and Hardy joining the French Foreign Legion in The Flying Deuces . Due to a happy concatenation of circumstances, I ended up getting several months’ work in Singapore in 1985, courtesy of the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon. I once heard a fascinating radio interview with the Scottish footballer and one-time manager of Manchester United, Tommy Docherty. He came out with a number of wise observations, including (and I think I remember the quote exactly), ‘Stress is not being the manager of Manchester United. Stress is being the manager of Halifax Town.’ Another one, rather more pertinent, was the admission that the first thing he had learned from his national service in the army was that he wasn’t as tough as he had previously thought. This rang ...

  Haunting Melodies What pieces of music do you find haunting? I’m sure this is very personal, dependent on what Jeeves called the psychology of the individual. I was trying to think of what music particularly haunts me recently, and how my choices would have changed as I have aged. I first became aware of popular music in the early 1960’s, when we lived in Kinglassie, a coalmining village in central Fife. I think we moved there in 1960 or early 1961, and we had previously lived in Malta, of which I have plenty of memories, but none of music. We had this big chunky radio, which had at one time had a glass panel with the usual stations of the time on it: Luxembourg, Kalundborg, Moscow, Hilversum, and so on. You twiddled the knob, and the needle moved along behind the glass panel. However, four children of lively and active personalities had meant that the glass panel had long since been smashed. One of my parents had inserted a bit of cardboard cut from a shoe box behind the nee...