Things that go bump in the night

I blame The Dick Van Dyke Show. Or possibly Bewitched. At any rate, I’m sure that it was one of those wholesome, 1960s, American family comedies that introduced us to the dreaded transatlantic concept of ‘trick or treating’.

In my childhood we just used to wander round the Fairways estate in a disconsolate sort of way, holding turnip lanterns. I realise now that this must have been an authentic folk custom because we met the crucial test that Thomas Hardy set to identify genuine West Country morris dancers from Victorian revivalists: we exuded misery as we went about it.

It wasn’t seen as a fund-raising opportunity. That was reserved for ‘Penny for the Guy’. What a contrast with 2006, when 31 October brings you the annual convenience of being mugged on your own doorstep.

All over the country tonight, terrified pensioners will be huddled behind their sofas with the lights off, pretending to be out, while the bolder spirits will be lurking behind their own front doors with Army surplus flame-throwers poking out through their letter boxes, preparing to cackle in an appropriately maniacal way as they yell ‘How’s that for a trick, kid?’

The supernatural itself will, as usual, not be much in evidence. In 50-odd years, I’ve only had three encounters that seemed to defy rational explanation, only one of which could be deemed vaguely scary. So the occult comes pretty low down my league table of terrors, well below Gordon Brown, Osama bin Laden, teenagers and dentistry.

Shortly after I moved to my current home, I pulled over on a narrow road to allow an old man to pass with his horse and cart. Only when I looked up after completing the manoeuvre, he wasn’t and never had been there.

A couple of years later, shortly after my mother died, my then partner and I were walking our dog when he ran off, wagging his tail furiously, and gave an effusive greeting to someone or something that neither of us could see. My mother loved that dog. Who else could it have been? And, yes, he has done a number of other mad things over the succeeding 14 years, but he’s never pulled another stunt even vaguely like that.

More recently, I was sleeping soundly in an Oxford college when I was rudely awoken by the bedside lamp apparently being hurled at me. It was 2 a.m. on an uncomfortably clammy midsummer night, yet the room was as cold as a walk-in freezer. Having dined well, I didn’t spend too long thinking about this, but pulled the covers over my head and went back to sleep. The following day, I discovered that it was but the latest in a long series of similar incidents reported over many years, often at precisely the same time of night. Though mercifully less dramatic than some of them, which tended to involve doors being opened unexpectedly by disembodied hands.

All these things had been reported by intelligent people who had probably drunk more than is good for them. Maybe that explains it. All I know is that, although I have been back to that college for other dinners, I’ve always spent the night in an hotel.

According to a TV documentary last week, some of us will never have the opportunity to walk the earth again on Hallowe’en, because we shall never die. Just hang on until 2029, presumably pass some hugely divisive test of suitability, and your brain will be downloaded to a computer so that you can think great thoughts or play snap for all eternity. At least until some passing cleaner pulls your plug out. Listening to the wide-eyed scientists who are so looking forward to this – the sort of men whose idea of work is controlling rats by putting electrodes in their brains – it is hard not to agree strongly with Evelyn Waugh’s dictum: all fates are worse than death.

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Real History Boys

At the start of this month I went to a London preview of the film of The History Boys. The author himself was there, doing his celebrated impersonation of Alan Bennett. And it was a good night out – if not quite as gripping as the original play. It was also a strangely eerie experience for someone who actually spent an extra term in the sixth form of a northern grammar school preparing for the Oxbridge scholarship examinations in history, albeit a decade before the film is set.

They don’t have entrance scholarships at Oxbridge any more, of course. Far too elitist in an age that prefers to focus on dumbing down, increasing diversity and improving access. Though, funnily enough, more northern working class children got into Oxford and Cambridge in my day than now, thanks to those dreadfully divisive grammar schools. A system that was enthusiastically smashed up by politicians of both major parties on the grounds that, if an opportunity can’t be made available to absolutely everyone, it must be denied to all.

Here I’d like to state a few controversial facts. First, academic education is inevitably elitist. Second, some children are too thick to benefit from it. Third, sending the thickoes to fringe institutions re-branded as ‘universities’ and handing them BSc degrees in lawn maintenance or macramé is achieving absolutely nothing for this country either socially or economically, and risks making us an international laughing stock.

Having got that off my chest, how accurate is The History Boys? Well, it’s not much like the Royal Grammar School in 1971. We didn’t work like navvies all term. Sauntering in for one lesson per day was more like it. Nor did we receive the attentions of any serial gropers. (Yes, I know I could have been the exception, as no-one wants to grope the fat one, but I’ve checked with a number of my contemporaries and they all say the same.)

But the real difference is this. The most daring thing anyone does in the film (apart from the groping and ‘coming out’) is to light a cigarette. Not a drop of alcohol crosses anyone’s lips. There could hardly be a greater contrast with my own days in the sixth form, which were positively awash with beer.

At the RGS in the early 1970s, we had a civilised understanding: the boys went to the Collingwood about 400 yards from the school, and the masters went to the Brandling next door. Every lunchtime, every evening. We must have spent the afternoons reeking of beer, though I don’t recall anyone being obviously the worse for wear.

The proudest moment of my school career – far better than being handed the lower sixth history prize by Lord Robens – was the day that some act of petty vandalism led to the Collingwood temporarily barring schoolboys. As we walked disconsolately towards the door, Betty the landlady called me back. ‘Not you, Keith. You’re a regular.’ I was 16 at the time, and I’ve been trying to replicate that feeling of social acceptance ever since.

It must have been so for generations. At a school reunion dinner many years later, I ran into a man who had gone up to Cambridge, in the early 1950s. On his first day, a friendly don told him to come to his house if he found himself out of college after hours, rather than risk impaling himself drunkenly on the railings. He asked whether the don made this offer to everyone. ‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘Just the boys from your school.’

The RGS is all changed now: co-educational, forward-looking, brimming with high-tech facilities. The desks on which we were taught are literally in Beamish museum, and there is a powerful rumour that they have even painted the lavatories. There are no Oxbridge scholarships for the boys and girls to win. So what I’d like to know is: does this allow them to spend even more time in the pub?

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

What have you got to hide?

It’s quite difficult to write a vaguely topical column that doesn’t risk offending someone, and these days there are so many sensitive minorities one has to worry about. Virtually everyone, in fact, apart from fat people, who are apparently fair game for anything. Though this may be a special editorial dispensation because I am, as my tailor kindly put it last week, ‘a little portly’ myself. After all, comedians from minority groups seem to be free to describe themselves in words that would provoke riots if they were used by outsiders.

During the eight weeks that I’ve been away, pondering on these matters, I’ve channelled all my creative energies into growing a beard. I knew it had worked when I spent an hour or so having lunch at the next table to the esteemed editor of this paper, and he completely failed to recognise me. So I reckon I should be pretty safe if this article results in the declaration of a fatwa by, say, the members of the Alnwick & Rothbury Secret Eaters pie-guzzling club. With my beard and newish multi-focal glasses, the biggest risk I now run will be from bowler-hatted extremists mistaking me for Gerry Adams.

I’m a bit of a pognophobe myself, ironically. Whenever I see another man with a beard, I think (a) lazy so-and-so, and (b) what has he got to hide? Similar arguments apply to other forms of facial and head covering, whether it be the ubiquitous hoodie, the balaclavas favoured by animal rights fanatics, or the Muslim ladies’ veil. As a libertarian, I think that everyone should be allowed to wear what they like. And if the veil annoys the more rampant female liberationists among us – well, too bad. They could always assert their freedom and independence by wandering around topless, to show the less progressive how it should be done.

Alternatively, if we want to avoid civil war, we could all adopt that old maxim: if you can’t beat them, join them. I mean, which would you rather encounter in Narrowgate as you try to make your way round Alnwick? A Secret Eater in tight leggings and an fcuk T-shirt, or one in a voluminous burka? Exactly. Very slimming, black is. Added to which, extensive tests have proved that it is impossible to insert a pie into the mouth while wearing an outer garment that covers the entire body, apart from a narrow slit for the eyes. Over time, this could prove to be the greatest advance in public health since the discovery of penicillin, and the salvation of the NHS.

We could also crack the whole ‘oppression of women’ issue if men started wearing them, too. I’m quite prepared to take a lead on this, if only for the pleasure of thinking how much use the billions of pounds worth of CCTV cameras dotted around the country will be once the burka becomes our universal uniform. It’ll also be great fun when we turn up at our local cop shop to be registered for the Dear Leader’s cherished ID card scheme, and explain that it is against our deepest principles to take them off.

There are plenty of empty shops in Alnwick (though not as many as there will be once Aldi and Sainsbury’s open up) and as a public service and a money-making opportunity, I’m going to take one on as the first north of England branch of Burkas Are Us. We’ll stock a full range of sizes (extra large, huge, enormous) and colours (black, coal, incredibly dark grey). And as a special opening offer, I’ve just procured an unusual line in burkas from the USA. These ones are white, and come complete with a funny pointy hat. I reckon they’ll be just the thing to wear when participating in that other ghastly American import: trick or treating on Hallowe’en.

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Things can only get better

Don’t tell me, it’s been the worst fortnight of your life. You turned up at the airport with the family just as all hell broke loose on the security front, and were stuck in a queue for over three hours. At least that gave you plenty of time to re-pack all your hand baggage into the big suitcases destined for the aircraft hold. How relieved you felt when those eventually shuffled off down the conveyor belt, never to be seen again.

Determined to make the best of things, you persuaded the kids that they’d find a nudist holiday a refreshing and mind-broadening experience. And it wasn’t going too badly, either, until the forest fires forced you out of your hotel to huddle by the waterline, trying to recover from the effects of smoke inhalation.

Yes, it was unfortunate that you got kicked off your plane home for making those politically incorrect remarks about the two Middle Eastern gentlemen who were sitting next to you, wearing heavy coats and constantly looking at their watches. But surely you must have realised that they were only having a bit of fun when they inflated their sickbags and burst them with a satisfying pop? At least the taxing overland journey back to Britain was more environmentally responsible.

As you finally staggered into the house, what a comfort it was to pick up the newspaper and read Sir Ian Blair’s pronouncement that his boys and girls are doing such a terrific job that it is now safe to leave your doors unlocked. Which you duly did when you went out for a celebratory dinner. Now you find yourself studying an insurance claim form which makes it clear that they won’t be reimbursing you for the entire contents of your house, since it was your own fault for failing to secure it.

Of course, you should have read the small print more closely. And realised that Sir Ian, as Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, was talking about the crime-free paradise that is London. Not Newcastle or Sunderland. Mind you, not wishing to be outdone, the Chief Constable of Northumbria may well be poised to tell us that it is now quite all right to leave our cars out on the street with a full tank of petrol and the keys in the ignition. Though I don’t think I’d risk it if I were you.

Any pronouncement from that unfeasibly PC PC, Commissioner Blair, needs to be treated with a fair amount of caution. He is, after all, the genius who went on Radio 4’s Today programme to boast about his force meeting the ‘gold standard’ for preventing terrorism, about an hour before the 7 July suicide bombs last year. Then there were his unfortunate comments about Jean Charles de Menezes, executed at Stockwell station in what turned out to be a disastrous case of mistaken identity. It is quite hard for the casual observer to work out how on earth he keeps his job.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder if he isn’t actually a spoof figure, dreamt up by our own local hero Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, to make his own stint as head of the Met seem like a golden age of commonsense coppering.

Still, it could have been worse. If you’d been away a bit longer, you might have come back to find that your house had been deemed empty by one of Ruth Kelly’s gauleiters, and confiscated to provide much-needed accommodation for some of those half million economic migrants from eastern Europe. You remember, the ones that the Government said would never come here, attacking those who suggested they might as xenophobes and racists.

Now they say that they’re ‘good for the economy’, which means that they’re keeping wages down for the rest of us, including you. And this from what was once the party of organised labour. No wonder you’re starting to think that perhaps a bomb really did go off on the first day of your holiday, blasting you into an unrecognisable parallel universe.

© Copyright Keith Hann, 2006.

Written for The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, but deemed unsuitable for publication.

Must the terrorist always win?

I owe my reader(s) an apology. Yes, I know that’s true every week, but this time there is a specific reason. Last month I suggested that the chronic unreliability of the East Coast Main Line train service meant that flying might be a feasible if environmentally irresponsible alternative. How wrong I was.

I booked four flights, but only took one. Things got off to a bad start when I made the idiotic error of pitching up at Newcastle International Airport at 1.30pm, thinking that this was a time at which one might be able to obtain something resembling lunch. How silly of me. Still, the hour’s delay in the departure of my BA flight to Gatwick gave me plenty of time to muse on my folly over a very expensive fizzy pint and packet of crisps.

The only refreshing thing about the journey itself was that, instead of the litany of implausible excuses conveyed by tannoy on GNER, the pilot cheerily announced that he had as little idea as we did why the flight was late, as he’d only just got onto the plane himself.

Then there was the insufferable young prig in the next seat, the bus from the plane to the terminal, the transit to the other terminal, and the train journey to where I actually wanted to be. When I finally got there, I looked at my watch and reflected that I could have driven from home just as quickly, with considerably less stress and discomfort, and at lower cost. ‘Right,’ I said to myself, ‘That’s it. I shall never fly again.’

Having consigned the tickets for my next journey to the bin, imagine my delight when the would-be terrorist incident of 9 August led to the flights concerned being cancelled, so that I qualified for a full refund. Thanks, lads.

Although I am one of the few beneficiaries of this alleged plot, I do wonder whether they ever actually intended to carry it out. After all, as things turned out, they garnered as much publicity and caused as much chaos and inconvenience (if rather less grief) as if they’d actually consigned a thousand fellow travellers to oblivion. And conveniently avoided that presumably buttock-clenching moment when the suicide bombs had to be detonated.

It would have been much more of a victory over the terrorists if we’d just shrugged our shoulders and carried on as usual, rather than having our airports filled with armed police and a host of restrictions imposed that make flying even less of a joy. Last week we were only a step away from making every air passenger strip naked and submit to an intimate body search before stepping on board the plane. And as soon as some fanatic devises an ingestible bomb, I dare say they’ll want X-rays, too.

Instead of the Government issuing edicts to every airline, why not allow a little consumer choice into the equation? WhatTheHell airlines could be set up with the unique selling proposition that you could take whatever you liked on board as hand luggage, with the downside that you stood a greater risk of being blown to smithereens mid-flight. It would be interesting to see how it fared.
In more phlegmatic times, when the air raid warning sounded, theatres and cinemas would warn their audiences so that those who wished to head for the shelters could do so, and then the show went on. It would be good to get back some element of free choice, otherwise the terrorist will win every time, even if the outrage is aborted.

Of course, it’s jolly convenient for governments who want to keep tabs on us to have these terrorists as an excuse for ever-increasing curbs on civil liberties – an outdated concept, John Reid announced, literally the day before the alleged plot was uncovered.

No wonder some cynics are asking: are the Government and terrorists really fighting each other, or are they in league against the rest of us?

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A drug off the market

Say what you like about Harold Shipman, he did wonders for waiting lists. But he didn’t do a lot for the trust that patients place in their doctors. Now it is apparently becoming harder to obtain effective pain relief, as many GPs are unwilling to carry morphine-based drugs in case they end up fingered as the next stethoscope-wearing mass murderer.

Even before that blew up, it was alleged that some British cancer patients are dying in agony because of a shortage of diamorphine, the most powerful painkiller. This has apparently been a problem since early 2005, when production problems arose in the Merseyside factory that met 70pc of UK demand.

The odd thing about this particular NHS crisis is that diamorphine is merely the proper, medical name for heroin, which seems to be freely available on the streets of virtually every town and village. What sort of administrative genius does it take to create an official shortage of something the country is awash with?

The answer, according to various campaigning websites, is that the British health authorities insist on buying their injectable diamorphine only from two licensed suppliers, and in the most expensive form. As a result, we end up paying many more times for the stuff than health authorities overseas, and still can’t get a reliable supply.

I don’t know whether those claims are true, but anything about the NHS that suggests wastefulness always seems to have the ring of truth to it. How else can an organisation which has had such massive additional funds poured into it over the last nine years still be failing to deliver patient satisfaction in so many areas?

If I had my way, the supply of diamorphine would improve overnight because I’d legalise its supply. I can’t see what we achieve by making drugs illegal, thereby placing the weak-minded in the hands of criminal suppliers. These provide them with products of dubious quality which are often more dangerous than the real thing. They also charge outrageous prices which create a whole new cycle of criminality as addicts steal to fund their habit.

Instead of trying to ruin the poppy farmers of Afghanistan and the coca growers of Colombia, why not make the whole thing legal and subject to tax, as we do with other drugs like alcohol and tobacco? Victorians from the Queen down were frequent users of laudanum, a tincture of opium sold freely over chemists’ counters, and I don’t recall society being brought to its knees. At any rate, it was certainly in no greater a mess than we are today.

The only time I might have taken an illegal substance was at university in the 1970s, when peer pressure led me and countless others to smoke what was alleged to be cannabis. Also then popularly known as dope or … a rude word for excrement. I remain convinced that what my friends were actually sold was the latter, as it had never had the slightest effect on me. The claimed reactions of others were, I believe, just a form of mass hysteria.

One of my chums decided to secure an undoubtedly authentic supply by growing his own marijuana plants from budgie seed. By the start of the Easter vacation he had quite a promising collection of little seedlings, and asked his landlady if she’d mind watering them while he was away. When we got back, they’d been transformed into a collection of thriving tomato plants, suggesting that they had come to the attention of someone in authority with a knowledge of botany and a sense of humour. They weren’t much of a smoke.

So I won’t be rushing round to Mr Tall’s pharmacy in Rothbury to buy some heroin in the unlikely event that the Government takes my advice and makes it legal, thereby putting a fair chunk of the police force out of a job. However, if I am ever unfortunate enough to develop cancer, it would be jolly comforting to know that I could.

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Who ate all the pies?

At last a subject on which I can write with real authority: fatness. I have been on the plump side all my life. As a schoolboy, I was one of the two boys in my class who sometimes enjoyed the soubriquet ‘Fatso’. Yet looking at the pictures of us from 40 years ago, I realise that we were positively slim compared with the lard-buckets waddling through today’s school gates.

Tootling around the national motorway network at the start of the current school holidays, during a period of exceptionally hot weather, I was repeatedly appalled by the sights that greeted me in motorway service areas: grotesquely fat and horribly underdressed parents feeding fizzy pop, burgers, chips and sweets to their revoltingly obese children, many of whom looked like they might well burst before they got back onto the road.

Why would anyone do this to a child? Surely even someone of the meanest intelligence must realise that it is damaging their health? Nor is it doing anything for their prospects of happiness, in a culture where, as the mass of the population has got steadily fatter, the ideal of beauty and sexual attractiveness has become ever more scrawny. There’s no place now for Rubenesque curves. What we want is ribs that you can play like a xylophone.

I’ve yearned for years to have the sort of body that would enable me to walk boldly onto a beach and hear beautiful women sighing ‘Phwoar’ rather than ‘Ugh’. Yearned, but never quite enough to do much about it, at least since I came to the conclusion about 20 years ago that I actually preferred a good dinner and a bottle of fine wine to a night of passion. Mainly because the head chef and sommelier don’t expect you to stay awake for a couple of hours after the meal, listening to them describe their neuroses and hopes for the future.

Still, my doctor keeps telling me that I will almost certainly contract that Type 2 diabetes if I don’t do something to get my weight down. Of course, developing the condition and having both my legs sawn off – as my mother did – would be one sure-fire way of losing a couple of stones, but it would probably take some of the fun out of life. So I’m making a few efforts, like taking the stairs rather than the lift (not a hard choice, since I don’t actually have a lift), and riding a bicycle on the 10-mile round trip to collect my daily Journal. True, it’s one of those bikes with a tiny electric motor to assist it, but then I do live at the top of a ruddy great hill and, as Messrs Tesco are always telling us, Every Little Helps.

The important thing is to encourage the dieter, as my schoolmates did all those years ago, through consistent, ritual humiliation. Don’t be fooled by any of that stuff about obesity being something to do with glands or genes. It’s caused by shoving more pies through the cakehole than the body requires for its normal functions, and the solution is to eat less and take more exercise.

So next time you see a really fat adolescent in a motorway service area, or a rather chubby man wobbling up a Northumberland hill on an electric bike, feel free to enquire who was responsible for clearing out the local pie stall. Make them feel small, and maybe they’ll find the willpower to become smaller. You may get a certain amount of abuse back, particularly if you’re talking to me, but remember that you’ll be doing them a favour and performing a wider public service. After all, where on earth are we going to find the money to rebuild all our trains, theatres, hospitals, mortuaries and crematoria if we can’t find a way to stop our descent into a nation of the morbidly obese?

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.