Mister Duffy Changes Trains

 HAPPY HOLIDAYS We are running late with all our preparations for Christmas because we had just over a week in Tokyo in mid-December. We arrived home late on Sunday night. Various stressful issues were waiting for me at work, and as a result, we only got the Christmas tree up and STARTED doing our Christmas cards on Tuesday evening. Apologies to everyone we have missed due to our being all sixes and sevens. This was our first visit to Japan, and it was amazing. Five days holiday, two days work (cancer screening conference). We crammed a decent amount of tourism into the five days holiday. We stayed in Shinjuku, one of the several cities that make up the mega-city of Tokyo, within a couple of metro stops of the giant figure of Godzilla looking over some buildings into the street, the impressive Meiji Shinto shrine in several acres of parkland, the fish market, Tokyo Tower and the scramble crossing at Shibuya, reputed to be the busiest crossroads in the world. We also had a day v...

Sad News   Today, we say goodbye to Shane MacGowan and Alistair Darling. The former, a giant of folk music, the latter a unique Scottish politician.   I’m sure you all remember Shane MacGowan as the singer in The Pogues, pretty much the inventors of punk-folk. If, like me, you have seen them perform live, you will also know that he was a world champion bevvy-merchant. You are probably also aware that because of his impressive and assiduous devotion to alcohol consumption, he has been in the bed next to the door for more than three decades. It is amazing that he lasted as long as he did.    He had a terrific tenor voice, and great presence as a stage performer. Friends who saw The Pogues with Joe Strummer standing in for him all say that the experience was a lesser one. Shane really made the event,  despite the fact that with him as the singer, the band sometimes had to do the last half hour or so without him as his legitimate libations had had the effect of...

  Bump in the Night 2- This Time It’s Personal I have been becoming more and more aware of the looming end of October and I had no idea of a subject for my October blog, and then this afternoon, I realised that I had been a berk and there was a subject staring me in the face: Halloween. Smart boy wanted. In the south and east of England, we often hear the remark that Halloween is an import from America. That’s not strictly accurate. Halloween has been celebrated as long in the UK as in the US. Trick or treating is an import to England from the USA, but trick or treating is itself an evolution of guising, a Scottish and Irish tradition. When I was a child, we would wear fancy dress, and usually a mask, and would go from house to house in our neighbourhood. When the door was answered, rather than saying ‘Trick or treat?’ we would ask, ‘Wantin’ ony guisers?’ If the answer was yes, the guisers would have to perform in some respect, usually singing a song or telling a joke. Girls wo...

                                                        Nine seagulls on a rail on Bognor Regis pier Nine for the Nine Bright Shiners Since this is the ninth month of the year, I thought I might produce some incoherent ramblings related, however obliquely, to the number nine. D’you remember the Dilly Song, also known as the Apostles Song, that begins ‘I’ll give you one-O, Green grow the rushes O’? Like the Twelve Days of Christmas, it accumulates an extra line with each verse until it gets to the twelfth: ‘ I’ll give you twelve, O Green grow the rushes, O! What are your twelve, O? Twelve for the twelve Apostles Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven, Ten for the ten commandments, Nine for the nine bright shiners, Eight for the April Rainers. Seven for the seven stars in the sky, Six for the six proud ...

  Out on the Fen When I first moved to Cambridge in December 1986, I stayed in a rented room and looked out for a flat or small house for sale in the local newspapers. Just think how archaic that is now! You would do all that searching on the internet nowadays. Anyway, in a weekly free newspaper, I think called the Town Crier, I encountered a regular column entitled View from the Fen, by Michael Jeacock. Jeacock was from Derbyshire, where his father, Robert Jeacock, had been first a coalminer and then a policeman. He had worked on the Daily Express in Manchester and London and had somehow ended up working as a freelance journalist and living in Swaffham Bulbeck in East Cambridgeshire, around halfway between Cambridge and Newmarket. He took a great interest in his adopted home of Cambridgeshire and with his wife Janet wrote a guidebook to Cambridge. He was a country boy, deeply conservative in his instincts, and Conservative with a capital C when it came to politics. I don’t ...

                                                             Whitby Doggerel Bank When I was a child, I was much amused by this little rhyme that my dad used to recite. Here’s to my true love, Big Joe White. Went out winching every night, First with me, then with another. To hell with him for a two-faced bugger.   It doesn’t rhyme properly, it doesn’t entirely make sense, but I found it hilarious. It has the hit-and-miss quality of what we used to call naïve painting. The naivety, the lack of subtlety in invective, the imperfect rhyming, and of course the fall-flat-on-your-face bathos of the last line all contribute to its being funny. And as Joseph Bologna, playing a thinly disguised Sid Caesar, says in the film My Favourite Year , ‘In my business, we don’t cut funny.’ Remember that the p...

                                                                                                                                       View across the lake from Varano Borghi Sentimental Journeys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgbKXWcDuOA Using one of the magic facilities of the telly which I don’t understand, Linda is catching up on a previously aired Channel 4 drama series called Before We Die . I got an old-fashioned look when I asked if it was a musical. So I will have a go at this month’s blog. In two weeks, I am booked to give a lecture in the city of my birth, Glasgow. It wil...