My prayer for a summer as glorious as the Northumberland scenery

Legend has it that the mandrake plant screams if it is uprooted. I know just how it feels.

I descend from a long line of non-travellers. The only complication in researching my family history is an occasional, regrettable tendency for ancestors to sneak across the Scottish border, so that the relevant records end up in Edinburgh instead of London.

My father only left the country once, in 1944, at the absolute insistence of His Majesty the King. My more adventurous mother waited until widowhood and old age to try her one and only day trip to France, from which she returned with the fascinating discovery that “they eat frozen peas, just like us.”

As a boy, I was desperate to see the world and had a particular passion for old buildings. My father assured me that there were no finer castles than those of Northumberland, and that I had the greatest cathedral in the world just down the road in Durham.

I thought he was making excuses for his own laziness and lack of experience. Sadly he died before I realised that he had been bang right all along.

Now I find myself advancing similar arguments about the delights of Northumberland to my own family. After four years of marriage and workaday residence in Cheshire, “home” for me remains my bachelor house in the North East and I enticed my wife and sons over for the bank holiday weekend on the Met Office’s promise of stunning weather.

Typically, the strongest sunshine beat down upon the car on the way across.

I was reminded that two years ago we spent a whole August fortnight here watching the rain tip down, while a two-year-old agitated to go to the beach and build sandcastles.

True, it was reasonably pleasant, if breezy, on Sunday at the Milfield Festival of Heavy Horse, which failed to live up to my cynical expectations by actually featuring several horses.

Though my tractor-mad elder boy was a mite disappointed when the commentator’s magnificent build-up to a parade of vintage machines was followed by the sheepish confession that it would not be taking place after all, because the tractor drivers were in the beer tent.

Where I had no need to join them because we had just been treated to a truly magnificent lunch in the adjacent Red Lion by Fleet Street legend David Banks, author of the unmissable J2 Friday column.

I naturally hoped to meet at least some of the huge cast of fascinating characters with which Banksy populates his column, but sadly they all proved to be otherwise engaged. Even Mrs Banks had suddenly felt an urgent call to go for a long walk in the Cheviots, which would have been more understandable if she had ever met me.

By the time Banksy exclaimed “You’ve just missed the Byreman!” as we took our leave at the horsefest, I was beginning to experience distinct echoes of my father’s favourite James Stewart film, Harvey. With the obvious difference that Harvey the invisible white rabbit actually existed.

My family are on their way back to the North West as I write, while I am going to try and prune a large holly tree, with potentially fatal results. As I do, I shall pray not to fall off the ladder and that once, just once, my family will return to Northumberland on a perfect sunny day when it is not blowing a hooley, and say, “You and your dad were absolutely right, this really is the most wonderful place on Earth.” 

The late Michael Winner told a story of a man who prayed each eek for a big lottery win. Eventually the voice of God boomed: “Help me out here, Hymie. Buy a ticket!”

Lord, I have invested in a lovely house, so please help me out by sending us a summer in England this year. Otherwise I am going to have to succumb to a ghastly fortnight on some foreign shore and sell the home I love because keeping it is economic lunacy that would make even Gordon Brown blush.

Meanwhile, I really must explore the possibility of adopting a second name by deed poll. Mandrake has a ring to it.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Celebrating a true North East Winner

This week's column will probably make considerably more sense if it is read AFTER the previous day's column by Tom Gutteridge, which should be accessible on http://blogfromthenorth.blogspot.com/ unless it has been taken down as the result of threats of legal action from the restaurant he was so rude about.

Few things are better calculated to lift the heart on a Monday morning than the emergence of a new North East winner. Though in truth what grabbed my attention in yesterday’s paper was not so much the Government’s carefully stage-managed leak about the expansion at Nissan as the unveiling on this page of our very own Michael Winner, Tom Gutteridge.

First there was his remarkably acerbic restaurant review, closely mirroring Mr Winner’s weekly contributions to the Sunday Times. Part of this at least earned a smug nod of agreement since, not so long ago, when I was lamenting the demise of GNER’s excellent restaurant cars, Tom sent me a spirited defence of the maintained quality and superior convenience of the National Express at-seat service. I was glad to read that he now agrees with me.

Always a generous host, Tom was once kind enough to treat Mrs Hann and me to one of those South Indian meals about which he wrote so enthusiastically yesterday, and it was indeed delicious. However, it seems only fair to add a warning that this cuisine can have less than desirable after-effects for some of us. I struggle to think of a way of describing these without causing offence, but if the “save the planet” cash-in merchants had erected one of their turbines in our vicinity, the Hann family could probably have powered a reasonably sized village for the next 24 hours.

But all this pales into insignificance compared with the statement that Tom is soon to get married wearing a cream suit a size too small for him. Not so much Four Weddings and a Funeral, then, as a comedy remake of Saturday Night Fever with Mel Smith in the title role, in the regrettable absence of Benny Hill. Time to think again, surely. Let me put on record that I am more than willing to lend Tom the black morning coat I bought in John Blades’ retirement sale for my own wedding. This would at least have the virtues of being appropriate wear for an Englishman and just about fitting him.

Sadly I shall not be able to provide an eye-witness report on how the Gutteridge nuptials turn out, but I sincerely hope that they go rather better than the ones for which I wrote a speech on Saturday. My client reported that it had gone down “like a lead balloon … I ploughed through it in disapproving and stony silence.” He was at least kind enough to conclude that this had more to do with the nature of the guests than the quality of the writing, but it still added to my general depression about my prospects.

Over the years I have enjoyed some modest success as a public speaker, carefully confining myself to occasions when the audience was likely to be sympathetic, on the basis of shared experience, and so howling drunk that they would laugh at anything at all. On the strength of this I have occasionally written speeches for others, which have also reportedly gone down well.

The news that I am apparently losing my touch comes at the worst possible time, when I scrabbling around with increasing desperation for some way of supporting my family in the beautiful Whittingham Vale. If it goes on like this I may have to fall back on doing some actual work. Perhaps I should dust off my talk on “The meaning and purpose of financial public relations”, which at least had the crowd-pleasing quality of being almost incredibly short.

Meanwhile my Monday counterpart can simply look forward to the original Michael Winner dropping off his perch, and then picking up the cheesy insurance commercial contract to go with the outspoken restaurant reviews and the distinctive dress sense. Sometimes life just isn’t fair. I wonder whose shoes I could aim to fill?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.