Mister Duffy Changes Trains

  More Lost Worlds and Old New Years I know I said I wasn’t going to do a blog this week. Well, here it is. Actually, that broken promise reminds me of something. I once attended a wedding reception where the meeting and greeting was done by an Elvis impersonator. I don’t know what height Elvis was, but this particular looky-likey was about seven feet tall, and was dressed in the white spangly suit of the Vegas Years. After getting over the initial shock of having my hand shaken by this giant, I then had to sit through him belting out what seemed to be his hundred best tunes. After a while he would precede each number by an apologetic announcement that this would be his last of the evening. Well, as you might say about the above, promises, promises. He went on and on and on. I wondered if I had died and gone to Elvis Hell. And I was driving so I couldn’t anaesthetise myself against the experience. I hope the bride and groom don’t read this. Sorry, that was a digression. I hav...

  Christmas Stories and Lost Worlds There was a time when the kids were aged between six and sixteen years old when I seemed to be continually ferrying them to piano lessons, guitar lessons, taekwondo lessons, you name it. A fellow-parent, reminiscing on the corresponding period in her life remarked, ‘It seemed like I was living in the car.’ Towards the latter end of this period, number one son was learning music theory from a jazz guitarist called John Cherry, who lived, coincidentally, in Cherry Hinton. On Wednesday evenings I would drive him there, and while Bill had his lesson, I would do the crossword in the Robin Hood, a pub on the corner of Fulbourne Road and Queen Edith’s way. I’d just have a coke, I was driving, I hasten to add. One Wednesday in early December 2009, I had dropped Bill off at Mr Cherry’s house and gone round to the Robin Hood. As I parked the car, I noticed a fluttering of snow. When I emerged from the Robin Hood an hour later, the snow was falling he...

  A Generation Thing Like Linda and myself, number two son Tom does cryptic crosswords, and he is pretty good at them. For the most part cryptic crossword clues rely on your having a reasonable vocabulary and being able to figure out the wordplay in the non-definition part of the clue (anagrams, hidden words, acrostics etc). However, there are clues which rely on some general knowledge (Shakespeare, the bible, commonly used foreign words or phrases). On one occasion, when Tom was stuck on a particular clue, I had a look and suggested reeds, as there was a reference to the finding of Moses in the clue. Tom still didn’t understand until I explained about Pharoah’s daughter finding the infant Moses among the reeds in the Nile. ‘Didn’t you know that?’ I asked. ‘Never heard of it,’ he said. Now, we did not give our kids a religious upbringing. The closest we got to that was Santa Claus, and they were pretty sceptical about him from an early age. However, they still went to the...

  Desert Island Discs I’m feeling a bit frazzled for a number of reasons this week, so I am suffering from a lack of imagination as to what to put in my blog. Consequently, I am going to subject you all to another set of YouTube clips. I don’t suppose I will ever be on Desert Island Discs on the radio, but if I were, this would be my selection of eight. 1.        Peaches en Regalia , by Frank Zappa. This has such a bright, joyful, first-day-of-the-holidays feel about it. This judgement on my part may just be a psychological result of the fact that I think I first heard it on the first day of the holidays when I was around thirteen years old. Anyway, it is bright, melodic and exciting. It is from the album Hot Rats, which was a departure for Zappa, no low comedy or atonal grunting, just strong melodies and terrific musicianship. I remember my old pal Kevin Connelly saying that this showed what Zappa could do when he wasn’t messing about. Anyway, thi...

Guilty Pleasures No, not those ones. Mind your own damn business. In the late 1980’s, expectations were high that we were on the brink of discovering strong nutritional links to cancer, and consequently, clear and simple dietary guidelines to reduce one’s risk of developing certain cancers. I recall attending a meeting discussing one of the difficult issues of the time (and still a difficult issue), that of actually measuring people’s dietary habits at an individual level. There are obvious reasons why measurement of dietary intakes is difficult, involving patterns of recall of intakes on the part of the subjects of the research, and general difficulties in assessing amounts consumed and frequencies of consumption. Consumption not be done about it? Apologies, I had a sudden return to my childhood there. But there are more difficult issues, involving human psychology. Number two son, who is a psychologist, informs me that there is a phenomenon known as demand characteristics, whereby th...