Goodbye, cruel world

They say that all good things must come to an end, though happily the British monarchy is testing this theory to its limits.

However, I feel sure we can all agree that there comes a time when we should bid farewell to the seriously mediocre.

So it is with this Tuesday column, which concludes today after a run of 387 over 7¾ years. A distinct advance on the nine months that Journal editor Brian Aitken predicted would be the longest I could possibly keep it going when I started.

At least I had a good innings, as they like to say in the day rooms at twilight homes.

I realise that my departure will come as a hammer blow to my beloved aunt and the handful of mainly elderly enthusiasts who buy The Journal every Tuesday simply to keep up with my ramblings.

On the other hand, it may lead to a modest spike in sales of Aldi budget champagne to fans of wind turbines and Gordon Brown (if he has any left).

While the world at large will naturally receive the news with the massive indifference I deserve.

I knew I was on to a good thing personally after my second column, published fortuitously on Valentine’s Day 2006, won me a hot date with an attractive PR woman plus a letter of sympathy from someone in sheltered accommodation in Rothbury.

In those days I was a solitary curmudgeon, winding down in the depths of the countryside after some years of toil in the City of London, and was able to prove my “green” credentials by having no children. This more than offset the fact that I burned lots of coal, ate huge numbers of animals and drove a Range Rover.

Then several remarkable things happened. A column I had written for the business pages called “The Chief Executive’s Handbook” went modestly viral enough to bring me to the attention of a youngish female accountant at Iceland Foods’ head office in Flintshire.

The fact that I knew her chief executive prompted me to ask him whether the e-mail she sent me had come from a fictitious troublemaker or a genuine eccentric, and he confirmed that she was the latter.

This touched off a correspondence that was supercharged by the fact that I had started writing a blog – a development that had prompted several derisive messages from Journal readers ridiculing me for wasting my time in such a futile manner.

Yet it played no small part in the chain of events that ultimately led to our marriage in February 2009 and the subsequent birth of two healthy sons.

All of which goes to show that you should always expect the totally unexpected, and never accept conventional wisdom about what constitutes a productive use of your time.

Of course, it has its downsides. I turn 60 in June next year and had been looking forward to paying off my mortgage, putting my feet up and doing a bit of pottering around on my senior citizen’s railcard.

Now I am scrabbling for more work and hoping that my sadly defective heart may keep going for another 20 years or so, to see my boys through university.

Luckily my wife’s employers have sprung to my aid, as viewers of the recent reality TV series on Iceland will have noticed, by granting me the use of a refrigerated broom cupboard as an office, and allowing me to pretend that I am in charge of their PR.

However, it is not pressures of work or the lure of short-lived TV stardom that have led me to call a day on this column. It is simply a change in production scheduling which creates a deadline I cannot meet.

It is sad that The Journal will no longer host the country’s premier agony aunt and most obscure misery uncle on the same day, but it was great while it lasted. Thank you so much for your readership and support.

Luckily for me I’ve landed a new job, starting next week. I’m going to be writing a Wednesday column for The Journal. But don’t despair, wind energy cheerleaders. Brian confidently predicts that it will last an absolute maximum of nine months.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A true confession: weddings make me ill

I have a shameful confession to make: I have always hated weddings. For the further good of my soul, I suppose I may as well admit that I have never much cared for christenings, either.

Indeed, the only one of life’s conventional ceremonies that I can just about bear is a decent funeral, not least because no one has yet suggested that it might be a good idea for the congregation to mill around for a couple of hours while a professional photographer takes pictures of the deceased.

I cannot remember when I developed this aversion, but I must have worn it like a badge because most of my close friends, when they began to get married 30-odd years ago, did not include me on their invitation lists. Why would they? Socially inept, disastrously lacking in small talk and liable to say something shockingly inappropriate to a delicate maiden aunt, I must be every wedding planner’s worst nightmare.

Then I finally got married myself at the age of 55, and must reluctantly admit that I quite enjoyed the day. Mainly, I suppose, because it afforded me the opportunity to make a 15 minute speech to an audience who were drunk enough to laugh at some of my jokes.

One wedding I did quite enjoy

I know no better feeling in the world than this, and if I ever win the Lottery I shall hire the refurbished Theatre Royal to perform a night of stand-up comedy, offering a free half bottle of spirits with every ticket given away.

But one of the few downsides of marrying a much younger and more sociable woman is that wedding invitations start flooding in. We have been invited to more of them in the last couple of years than in the whole of my previous life.

I haven’t attended that many, it is true, excusing myself from a number on the grounds of illness. And not a diplomatic sniffle, either. On several occasions, I have genuinely been laid up in bed when I should have been making polite conversation outside a church in morning dress or waiting, with one eye on my watch, for the usually pretty gruesome spectacle of “the first dance”.

For a supposedly intelligent man, it has taken me a surprisingly long time to twig this simple fact: weddings actually make me ill.

We spent last weekend at one: a handsome couple, clearly much in love, getting hitched in a reassuringly small and simple ceremony. Being a civil event, it was also amazingly short. Even so, I managed to behave with such curmudgeonly ill grace in the course of the day that my wife has forbidden me to accompany her to the next wedding we were scheduled to attend on Saturday.

I have been doing my best to look suitably contrite, rather than punching the air and shouting “Result!”

But the plain fact is that I have always been an abominably selfish, party-loathing social pariah, and it is too late to try and change that now.

The secret, a happy old lady told me, is just to go on getting older. “Once you are over 80 you can get away with anything. If you want to go somewhere, people say ‘Ooh, isn’t she wonderful, doing that at her age!’ And if you don’t fancy something, you can excuse yourself on the grounds of infirmity and no one thinks twice about it.”

I always knew it. When I was 14, and other boys’ role models were football players and rock stars, I always wanted to be the prematurely aged John Betjeman, pottering about with a walking stick and a Panama hat.

Henceforth I shall declare myself an honorary 80-something, a Betjeman without the talent. Thinking of sending me an invitation to a wedding, or indeed any other sort of party? Please save yourself the price of a stamp.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Changing by accident, or design?

One of the most important lessons any father can teach his son is surely this: you can’t win.

No matter what you say, write or do, you are sure to upset someone. And even if you read 99 ecstatic reviews of something you have produced or performed, it will be the single negative comment that sticks in your mind forever.

So it was last week, with my admittedly soft-hearted (but not, I hoped, soft-headed) piece about the birth of my boy Charlie. Several people kindly wrote to tell me they had enjoyed it, but two said quite the opposite. One of my few remaining clients claimed that it had even made the agenda of a board meeting, at which “We all agreed you are going soft and missing so many political opportunities. What about the Speaker, hostages, Gordon Brown etc?”

That was easy enough to deal with. I have seen ample evidence that my views on the current Prime Minister have delighted some readers quite enough (though I am right, by the way) and I can think of nothing useful to say about the fate of the Iraq hostages (though I agree that this consideration has not prevented me from tackling a number of other issues over the years).

As for the Speaker, my opinion could be expressed in a single sentence: if you don’t want to wear the uniform, don’t apply for the job. Or perhaps two: in what way does it add to the dignity of the Commons to have its chair partially occupied by a midget dressed like the colour-blind second master of a slightly dodgy preparatory school, whose wife has distinctly suspect taste in ties as well as husbands?

Yet we have something in common, Mr Bercow and I, because the reason he is so detested on the Conservative benches is that he has changed: from Enoch Powellite “send them back” right-wing hard nut to gay-hugging liberal, either under the soothing influence of his relatively Amazonian partner or as part of a naked, long-term pitch for the prize he has now attained. And the burden of the complaints against me is that I have changed, too.

My second and more disturbing critic last week put it thus. “I don't know if you've noticed it but you've now done an almost complete role exchange with Wife in the North. She is basking in her success as a literary personality and writing about her speaking engagements and career; while you are writing sentimental columns about spouse and family.”

If we believe Mrs O’Reilly (and why not?) she started her instantaneously successful Wife blog to stop herself going stir crazy when faced with the horror of relocating to rural Northumberland with three young children and an absent husband. Though, given her professional background as a journalist and TV producer, it would have made equal sense for her to begin it as a carefully researched and brilliantly targeted literary money-spinner.

I began mine shortly afterwards with mildly satirical intent, to amuse myself and in the very faint hope of perhaps one day appealing to a passing publisher. There has been absolutely no luck on that front, but it did reel in something I had never budgeted for: a beautiful young wife, closely followed by a handsome son. I have not consciously changed any of my views, but it is the sort of thing calculated to adjust the perspective of even the most dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon.

I would be prepared to bet that “It’s funny how things turn out” was not a phrase on Mr Bercow’s lips as he was “dragged reluctantly” to the chair last week. I would not dream of speculating whether my fellow North blogger has changed, if at all, by accident or design. But I can claim for this Bloke a most conspicuous lack of careful forward planning.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A tale of the unexpected

Do something unexpected. It was never advice that appealed to me, as a lifelong bachelor and dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon. Yet in February I astonished my friends by marrying a beautiful woman who is young enough to be my daughter (though luckily she isn’t). Even more remarkably, I find myself looking forward to the birth of my first child in July, a month after my 55th birthday.

Like many people, I had taken stock of my life as I approached my half century. By then I had worked in the City for 25 years, mainly as a PR consultant to companies in various sorts of difficulty (if they weren’t when they appointed me, they soon were). Thanks to my brilliant insight that the London property market was hugely overvalued by the mid-1980s, I commuted every week between a poky rented flat in Pimlico and a spacious but inexpensive house in Northumberland. I was overweight, over-stressed and taking a daily cocktail of drugs for hypertension, depression and thrush (the last, admittedly, only because of a ludicrous mix-up at the pharmacy).

Sod it, I decided; I’m going to pack this in and spend more time with my Border terrier, walking the hills and finally writing that Big Novel. On the plus side, I lost weight, relaxed and weaned myself off the pills; on the minus, I became relatively poor. Not a word of the Big Novel got written, but the local paper kindly gave me a weekly column and I set up a couple of websites to keep my writing hand in, notably a daily blog about my sad decline called Bloke in the North.

Just before April Fool’s Day last year I received an email in response to a spoof advertisement on www.keithhann.com (a site created in 2004 for the sole purpose of discouraging potential PR clients, and thus one of my few undisputed successes). This contained the unlikely claim that the sender had “a friend” who was interested in applying for the vacant position of my wife, girlfriend or carer.

Yeah right, I thought. Particularly when the writer seriously overplayed her hand by claiming that her friend was a six foot tall, 35-year-old, blonde, buxom nanny. The only thing that prevented me from pressing the “delete” button on this obvious wind-up was the fact that the sender claimed to work for a company that had once been a client of mine. So I forwarded the email to her Chief Executive, who confirmed that she really did exist.

There ensued a bizarre correspondence about the alleged friend – who was, as it turned out, entirely genuine. But I fell in love with my initial correspondent’s way with words, which suggested that she possessed a sense of humour almost as peculiar as my own. Something made all the odder by the fact that she had a name that read like a nasty accident on a Scrabble board, and had spent the first ten years of her life in Iran. How could someone from such a different background and culture have acquired the mindset of a northern club comedian and a repertoire of old jokes that would put even the late Bob Monkhouse to shame?

I simply had to see her to find out, even though we lived 222 miles apart. Luckily for me she had started reading Bloke in the North, and found it amusing enough to think that it might be worth meeting me, even at the risk of upsetting her friend. She later admitted that her reaction on walking into the restaurant for our first date was “Oh God, he looks like someone’s dad!” But she bravely went through with dinner, and by the end of it the first of many subsequent dates had already been arranged. Our shared sense of the ludicrous swept all before it.

Months later, she asked what had first attracted me to her and I explained that it was simply that her first email had been so very funny. “But didn’t you notice?” she said. “I just copied all your own lines off your website and repeated them back to you.”

The important lessons to be learned from this strange little story are therefore as follows. Never laugh at your own jokes. Never dismiss blogging as a complete waste of time. Never assume that you are too old to need contraception. And never dismiss the possibility that even something as completely unexpected as true happiness might be lurking just around the next corner.

Now all I need to do is sell my house, relocate to Cheshire and go back to work until the age of 80 to support my new family. All in the teeth of the worst recession for a century. Still, compared with finding a gorgeous, loving and hilarious wife like Maral that looks like a piece of (wedding) cake.

Originally published in SAGA Magazine.