Mummy says: "It's only weather"

Among the blizzard of emails from online retailers last week was one that boldly proclaimed, “Dads never stop being dads”.

I felt compelled to reply, pointing out that the fatal heart attack he suffered in February 1982 seemed to have stopped my own dad playing his paternal role quite effectively.

Never a highlight of the Hann social calendar even before that unfortunate turn of events, Father’s Day then slipped into total obscurity for a full 30 years until my own children were old enough to take an interest.

For a time at least I shall never go short of handmade cards and shop-bought mugs proclaiming their devotion.

Modern, bogus, commercial, American invention though it is, I cannot deny that there is something rather pleasant about being the family’s centre of attention for a day – all right, for an hour or so in the morning – even if my place as an old and wise voice has already been supplanted by our just six-year-old budding Einstein.

“They’re very dangerous, you know,” he observed the other day when his younger brother became mildly hysterical following the discovery of a daddy longlegs in his bedroom. “Look, it’s already started building a web!”

We tried pointing out that daddy longlegs construct webs about as often as elephants practise macramé, but it did no good.

Not made by an elephant to the best of my knowledge

Events followed a similar course a couple of days later, when the boys returned home from nursery and school just as the sky was darkening.

“This is actually true, Jamie,” the Sage informed his brother. “When it goes dark like this it means there is going to be an actual storm. It really does.”

Jamie howled. Though like Greece leaving the euro or the UK quitting the EU, the threatened storm never actually arrived. Jamie accordingly perked up, and was heard observing, “Mummy says it’s only weather, Charlie.”

Naturally and appropriately, Father’s Day was but a footnote to the main event of the weekend, a “Knights and Princesses” birthday party for my elder son and heir, luckily held at a local soft play area rather than at home.

This avoids all the embarrassment of stress-related drunkenness leading to the sort of behaviour likely to result in one’s children being taken into care.

Even better than that, when I asked whether my presence was required at the party, I got the response, “You can come if you want, Daddy, but you wouldn’t like it.”

I was impressed to find so much wisdom in one so young, though slightly less bowled over when he approached his mother the morning before the event, after she had been up half the night baking, and announced, “Mummy, someone’s eaten a bit of my birthday cake.”

Looking and sounding innocent is quite difficult when you also have chocolate crumbs around your mouth. This tends to focus suspicion, in much the same way as walking into a police station to report a murder while clutching a blood-drenched knife. Luckily Mummy discovered that it is amazing how much damage you can conceal with icing.

While they were out at the party I applied myself to setting up the travelling post office on the boy’s model railway. The sort, long since vanished from real main lines, that picks up and deposits mailbags as the train goes around.

I always wanted one myself as a child, and envied the cousin who did. Bearing in mind that this is a toy designed for kids, and came with a reasonably comprehensive set of instructions, I suspect that the two and a half hours it took me to get it working may be some sort of record.

Still, it was worth it to see his face when he got home.

You may wonder why I am waffling on about my family when Europe’s currency is on the brink, extremism and terrorism are rife, benefits are being slashed and many thousands are marching against austerity.

It’s because I can do little to influence any of those and because, as David Cameron once said (though it is hardly an original thought), “Nothing matters more than family.”

Being a parent is the single most useful and important thing any of us is ever likely to do. I recommend it.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Are you foreign?

At the start of last week’s rather grand dinner the posh old lady to my left caught my eye and gestured across the circular table.

“Is that your wife over there?” she asked.

Mrs Hann had made a bit of an effort for the occasion, so I felt a certain pride in confirming that it was.

A previous occasion on which some effort had been made. Not by me, obviously.

“She looks foreign? Is she foreign?”

“Well, she was born in Manchester. But both her parents are from Iran. Or as they would say, Persia.”
There was a short pause for browsing and sluicing before conversation moved on. This time it was the place card in front of me that engaged her attention.

“Hann. Is that your name? It sounds foreign? Is it foreign?”

I could have reeled off my spiel about how I can trace my direct ancestors in my corner of Northumberland to the 1630s, and that I used to correspond with a nice old boy in the New Forest who could produce evidence of Hanns there back to the twelfth century.

I could have further explained that experts claim “Hann” is a mediaeval diminutive of “Jonathan” though, if that is indeed the case, I have never understood why Hann should be so rare and the other obvious surnames derived from Jon so very common.

So I just developed an extraordinarily keen interest in talking to the lady to my right instead.

The fact is, though, that we can all be what we want to be and see what we want in others.

Presented with one of those pesky official forms that ask about your ethnicity, my wife will tick “white British”.

Yet other options are clearly available, given that the disgraced Iran-born police commander Ali Dizaei managed to rise to the top of the National Black Police Association.

When one of my friends told me that I was the last person she’d have expected to marry a black woman, and I replied that my wife wasn’t black, I got: “I know, but you’re not allowed to call them coloured these days, are you?”

Even I was shocked when a colleague only last week described his personal trainer as “a half caste”, blissfully unaware that this is a term long since consigned to the banned list along with quadroon and octoroon, Mongol and spastic.

Apparently their training sessions are enlivened by regular arguments about why this gentleman chooses to define himself as black, when he could equally validly claim to be white. As, indeed, could President Obama.

But why should it matter either way?

Our hearts were surely all warmed last week by the tale of the Sikh traveller at Cologne airport who was delighted to be described as “a fellow Englishman” by a Geordie who stood him a cup of coffee, most appropriately on St George’s Day.

At the same time we were apparently meant to be outraged by reports of the US civil rights activist who has spent years pretending to be black when she is, in fact, white.

What harm exactly has that done? Whatever turns you on, baby, as they used to say.

Personally I’m with Lord Palmerston who reacted to the intended compliment “If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman” with the immortal “If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.”

Palmerston’s title was Irish and his estates there included Mullaghmore, where he built the castle and harbour from which Lord Mountbatten sailed to his death.

But Palmerston no more saw himself as Irish than the first Duke of Wellington who, in reference to his birth in Dublin, famously observed “Because a man is born in a stable, it does not make him a horse.”

As a Northumbrian as well as an Englishman, I consider myself a member of two of the finest clubs in the world; truly a double rollover jackpot winner in the lottery of life.

As in all decent clubs, a waiting list for membership may be appropriate, but they should not be exclusive on any prejudiced grounds.

Any time Alex Salmond wants to call himself English, I shall welcome him with open arms. If only I can reach that far.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Little Englanders: right again?

During the last referendum campaign in the UK, in which we in England were denied a vote, did you ever hear the advocates of Scottish independence derided as “little Scotlanders”?

No, me neither. Yet we will surely hear a lot in the months ahead about how “little Englanders” threaten our future prosperity and security by advocating British withdrawal from the European Union.

How did Scottish independence come to be marketed and widely accepted as a progressive aspiration, and British independence as an entirely reactionary one?

It clearly represents a failure of leadership and communication by those tending towards the “no” camp before the referendum starting gun is fired.

And I fear that this failure is all too likely to continue if the loudest voice in the “no” campaign is that of Nigel Farage.

UKIP is brilliantly typecast to play the role of Labour’s “loony left” in the referendum of 1975, convincing moderate voters that if they are on one side it would be better to be on the other.

Nigel Farage with pint, 2015

Tony Benn with pipe, 1975

How easy it will be to characterise the advocates of independence as backward-looking, fearful xenophobes, and the EU’s supporters as optimistic representatives of the future.

Which is ironic, given that little could be further from the truth. The EU is a sclerotic 20th century creation, fixated on building a single nation called Europe.

They didn’t invent the euro to make our continent richer, but to drive it towards their obsessive political goal of “ever closer union”.

The current shenanigans with Greece are duly demonstrating that you cannot have a single currency without a single treasury and tax system, just as they were designed to do.

Fear will be the “yes” campaign’s weapon of choice in this referendum, just as it was the main asset of the “no” camp in Scotland.

Not sure about the chains imagery, to be honest

Prepare to hear much about the four million jobs at risk, regional development funding that will be lost, new trade barriers erected, a fatal loss of influence and dangerous isolation in the world.

All of which is cobblers, since the rest of the EU sells more to us than we do to them, and the funding they so generously dish out is but a fraction of the money we pay to them in the first place for the privilege of membership.

The “we will have to obey them anyway so we must have a seat at the table when they are drawn up” argument about EU rules and regulations does not stack up because there is ample evidence that our influence is already minimal.

We have to comply with US regulations to sell to America, and Chinese regulations to sell to China, and I don’t recall anyone arguing that our non-participation in devising them is a fatal barrier to trade there.

Throughout my lifetime we have been beset by the belief that Britain is in terminal decline and that we need to cling to the skirts of nanny EU for fear of something worse.

It is high time we took stock of our many advantages as the world’s fifth largest economy and the home of its most widely spoken language and premier financial centre.

We have some of the world’s finest universities and a track record of innovation in science, technology and culture that is simply second to none.

Why on earth do you think that so many immigrants from the EU and elsewhere are desperate to be here?

Our many natural advantages mean that we are uniquely well placed to forge new trade links with the faster growing world outside the EU, and to become a more optimistic, confident and successful country than we have been at least since the end of the Second World War.

Unlike this newspaper and the Prime Minister, I have not absolutely made up my mind which way I shall vote, but my inclinations are clear and they are solidly based on hope, not fear.

If anyone dares to call me a “little Englander” I shall politely point out that this was mainly used as a term of abuse against those who opposed the Boer War to expand the British Empire in South Africa.

So from the viewpoint of any self-respecting modern liberal, weren’t the little Englanders absolutely right?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A modest birthday wish

When did Newcastle-on-Tyne become Newcastle upon Tyne?

That was the question posed on a Facebook page I enjoy visiting to look at old photos of the toon.

It was the cue for a lot of fiercely patriotic Geordies to assert that it had always been called Newcastle upon Tyne, at any rate since it stopped being called Pons Aelius.

Reminding themselves, for good measure, that it had been a proud county in its own right and never a mere part of Northumberland.

The finest street in England ...

... leading to the finest riverside in England ...

... via a magnificent railway arch ...

... bearing the world's least likely warning sign

Clearly no one recalled, as I do, a decree being handed down that we should stop calling the place Newcastle-on-Tyne, which was the normal form when I was a small boy.

I can’t remember whether it came from the City Council or the Post Office, and remarkably in the age of Google and Wikipedia I can find no record of he pronouncement being made, but I guess it was around 1960.

I do distinctly remember my father moaning about having to change the wording on our letterhead, and the postmarks on all local mail changing to the longer and grander form of “upon Tyne”.

A few years later my dad had occasion to moan again when the introduction of postcodes demanded another print job, and I was grateful for his blood pressure that the change in the county boundaries in 1974 did not make him print the things again.

Because although we were shunted from Longbenton in the historic county of Northumberland to North Tyneside in the new-fangled and bogus county of Tyne & Wear, our postal address remained “Newcastle upon Tyne”.

We lived yards from the city boundary and I cherished the grand sign bearing the coat of arms and the legend welcoming visitors to the “City and County of Newcastle upon Tyne”.

The road sign was much better than this; shame I never took a photo of it

It was one of those distinctive things, like yellow buses, the Tyne Bridge, singing Blaydon Races, and displaying unquenchable loyalty to an underperforming football team, that set Newcastle apart and gave me a surge of pride in my birthplace.

Which was, indeed, described as “upon Tyne” on my 1954 birth certificate.

I must admit that I have always thought of Newcastle as being part of Northumberland, not least because of the large, white LNER signs precisely halfway across the river on the King Edward Bridge, proclaiming that that was where Durham ended and Northumberland started.

Then there was the fact that Northumberland County Council based itself next to the New Castle, in what is now the Vermont Hotel, until the end of the 1970s. If, as I must accept, Newcastle was recognised as a county in its own right in 1400, it seemed odd that it took the council nearly 600 years to take the hint and move their base to Morpeth.

(They should, of course, have gone to Alnwick, which as any fule kno is the true county town of Northumberland, but that is a story for another day.)

A claim undisputed in Alnwick

Finally, and critically for a royalist like me, Newcastle did not have its own Lord-Lieutenant, but was part of Northumberland for this purpose. Though I note with pleasure that the first Duke of Northumberland, when appointed to this role in 1753, was titled “Lord Lieutenant, Custos Rotulorum and Vice-Admiral of the county of Northumberland, and Lord Lieutenant of the town and county of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.”

It seems a shame, given this quirky history, that we have not managed to create any pleasing apocryphal tales, like the widely-held misconception that Berwick-upon-Tweed is still at war with Russia over Crimea. Maybe we should work on that.

One fact on which we can all sadly agree is that is Newcastle formed part of the county of Tyne & Wear from its creation in 1974 until its welcome abolition in 1986. Why it retains a vestigial existence for ceremonial purposes, such as the Lord-Lieutenancy, is a total mystery to me.

Just plain wrong. Good riddance.

I am very proud to be a Novocastrian, Northumbrian, Englishman and Briton. But I can no more identify with Tyne & Wear or NewcastleGateshead than with the European Union.

Today, coincidentally, is my 61st birthday. If anyone else can remember the official clampdown on “Newcastle-on-Tyne” and let me know who issued that order and when, it would truly make my day.

mail@keithhann.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Referendums add to the gaiety of a nation

Anyone who doubts that history repeats itself would do well to take a look at Harold Wilson and the great European referendum of 1975.

Wilson led a government that had been returned with a slim majority, and a party that was divided on Europe. His way out was to argue not that membership of the European Economic Community was wrong per se, but that the Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath had secured entry on totally unacceptable terms.

So Labour “renegotiated” those terms, secured a few footling concessions, declared a famous victory and put the result to the great British public in a referendum with, inevitably, the more positive and appealing “yes” option being for continued membership of what was then generally called the Common Market.

Nearly every apparently sane mainstream political leader campaigned for a “yes” vote. The “no” camp was dominated by the barmy Labour left, though it also contained a few obvious nutjobs from the Tory right, the by then Ulster Unionist Enoch Powell, and – intriguingly – Plaid Cymru and the SNP.

Small wonder that I was conned into voting “yes”, along with 67.2% of my fellow electors.

We were reassured by entirely dishonest claims that continued membership involved “no essential loss of British sovereignty” and also strongly influenced by what appeared to be the economic reality of the time: that Britain was stuck in perennial doldrums while the Continent powered ahead. Can we blamed for fancying a share of that prosperity?

I can’t say that I have regretted my decision ever since, though I have certainly done so since the political nature of the European Union project became impossible to ignore from the late 1980s. 

Today the UK political background is eerily similar to what it was 40 years ago, and the master plan in Downing Street is clearly exactly the same: claim success in the “negotiations” and campaign for a “yes”.

The difference today is that it is the UK which is doing pretty well economically and the rest of the EU that is in the doldrums, mired in the entirely predictable consequences of its economically illiterate, politically driven euro project.

Whether this will have any impact on the outcome I rather doubt, given that every business voice that can be wheeled out in support of the EU is already burbling on about the vital importance of our continued membership.

Just remember, won’t you, that most of those making this case also told you that the UK would be finished if it didn’t join the euro when it was launched in 1999? An issue on which they have since fallen curiously silent.

I for one will take some convincing before I repeat my mistake of 1975, though I am at least open to reason.

I also find that I am warming to the idea of referendums in general. They may be expensive and introduce the risk of dumb people making the wrong choice, rather than the one preferred by the man in Whitehall who knows best.

But they do help to encourage real public engagement in political issues: witness the high turnout in Scotland last year. And, as Ireland proved so convincingly last week, they can add greatly to the gaiety of a nation.

Back in the 1970s we endured real agonies debating whether a referendum had any place in the unwritten British constitution. It was condemned as an assault on Parliamentary sovereignty, and the sacred principle that thick people elect slightly less thick people to take all the important decisions for them.

Today the agonising has been narrowed down to whether EU citizens resident in the UK should be allowed to participate, which is a bit like debating the franchise on a turkey farm just in advance of Christmas.

And, bizarrely, whether 16 and 17 year olds should be allowed to vote. In the same news bulletins where we hear appeals to trace 16 year old girls who have run off with older men or headed for Syria to be jihadi brides.

Because in those instances they are still children who cannot be held responsible for their actions. 

Exactly. You can’t have it both ways. So I say yes to referendums, and no to votes for children.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

What are laurels for, if not resting on?

I don’t know about you but I for one am completely fed up with politics.

Not particularly the Westminster variety, which has a certain grim fascination as all those insiders who knew all along that Ed Miliband was completely useless break cover to rain blows on his still twitching corpse.

No, I am thinking more of the everyday sort of political manoeuvring and conniving which seem to feature so strongly in the way many of us choose to conduct our lives.

Getting the edge over a colleague for that promotion or pay rise, taking credit for something you didn’t actually do, sneaking the children into a better state school, trying to catch the attention of those who dish out gongs at Buckingham Palace …

So many of the aspiring middle class seem to devote their entire lives to these games, and I find it really hard to understand. Both because it is not my own way and because it is ultimately pointless.

I have never raised my own sights particularly high. School friends will vouch that my only sporting ambition was not to be picked for the team. True, I was notably good at passing some types of exam many decades ago, but only in subjects that required no real effort.

Any work ethic I ever developed was firmly based on fear of pedagogic sarcasm or mild violence, rather than a personal desire to do well.

We called him "Beater" Bertram for a reason

I have drifted through my non-career motivated only by a desire to attain a certain standard of comfort and to die peacefully in my own bed. So far one out of two doesn’t look bad. And if it means so much to others to gain kudos for the few things I have got right along the way, good luck to them. They are welcome to it.

Only they do need to realise that ambition is a drug and the appetite for success can never be satiated.

I have one friend who started in life with literally nothing and, through decades of hard work driven by burning ambition, is now a billionaire. He confirms that the drive for betterment is an absolute and hardy perennial.

If you have that mindset it doesn’t matter whether your current obsession is getting your family out of your parents’ front room and into a modest house of your own, or looking with envy at the next plutocrat’s bigger yacht. There will always be something that gets in the way of sitting back contentedly and enjoying what you have already got.

A man who would surely have loved to see Ed as "Britain's first Jewish Prime Minister"

So if you are a go-getter intent on shinning up the greasy pole remember that you’re never going to be satisfied and there are many things more important than career success, like spending time with your family or visiting those places and doing those things you always really fancied trying one day. 

There’s no point waiting until you get the terminal diagnosis to start drawing up your bucket list, and you are a very long time dead.

Whenever I make the mistake of thinking I am at risk of screwing up something important, I remember a valuable saying of my mother’s: “It will all be the same in a hundred years’ time.”

100 years ago: Alnwick 1915, with my grandfather's garage in the left background

I offer that to Ed, Ed, Vince, Douglas, Danny and all the other political losers by way of consolation. Perhaps they might like to have it engraved on a monolith in their gardens as a handy reminder.

Of course, if I’m honest, I did once have a small list of personal ambitions. To get married and have children: tick, belatedly. To publish a best-selling comic novel: no chance. To win the lottery: ditto. 

Oh, and to have a column in the best regional daily paper in the country. I was immensely privileged to be given that honour many years ago now, but it was still great to have The Journal’s outstanding qualities recognised at last week’s Regional Press Awards.

Well done, all. Take a break, enjoy your success, and don’t obsess about where the next award is coming from.

In fact, do the precise opposite of what my teachers at the RGS were always warning me not to do, and have a really good rest on your well-deserved laurels.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Who is really the nasty party?

Laws have been passed to protect people from abuse on account of their race, religion or sexual orientation, but Tories are still fair game.

Hence it should be no surprise that so many voters clearly lie through their teeth about their intentions when opinion pollsters come calling.

To many on the always self-righteous left, anyone who does not share their views is inhumane to the point of being downright inhuman.

I particularly remember the venom of the privately educated rich kids with whom I watched the results of the two 1974 elections on a flickering black and white TV in Cambridge, as each contest failed to deliver the Labour landslide they were confidently expecting.

The howls when Cambridge stayed Conservative were partly offset by one particular Labour gain. “At least they have civilised people in Oxford,” huffed Georgina.

I imagine Georgina’s trust-funded children in the front line of that mob baying obscenities and scrawling graffiti on war memorials in their attempted anti-Tory putsch at the weekend.

Because the election was clearly rigged, right? And if it wasn’t, then the stupid electorate was misled by the Murdoch and Rothermere press with their lies and scare tactics. Because every decent, caring human being is a socialist at heart, aren’t they?

Well, no they’re not. And no matter how many times the history lesson gets repeated, the left never seems to learn that England is fundamentally a conservative country.

Heaven knows there are enough clues scattered around, like the enduring hereditary monarchy, our collective love for unspoilt countryside, and the fact that Labour’s only landslide successes in my lifetime have been under a leader who made the party’s pitch significantly more conservative.

Yet still the cry will go up in some quarters that they lost because they weren’t left wing enough. Yes, that will be exactly why UKIP managed to hoover up so many of their traditional supporters on Thursday. Good luck with repositioning to offer even more red-blooded socialism. Oh, and next time maybe try choosing a leader who looks like a potential Prime Minister rather than the head teacher of failing comprehensive.

I have never understood what possessed Theresa May to acknowledge that characterisation of the Conservatives as “the nasty party”. True nastiness is found on the extremes of both left and right, not in mainstream Conservatism.

If the Tories really wanted to destroy the NHS don’t you think they might have done it by now, given that they have been in power for 40 out of the 67 years it has been in existence?

Left wing idealism rarely proves compatible with competent administration, as we have seen in a succession of Labour-run authorities over the years and most recently and strikingly in the now ejected Green council in Brighton.

The most interesting post-election Tweets I saw contained two maps. One compared Labour constituencies in England and Wales with the former coalfields, and the overlap was almost perfect, with the sole exceptions of London and Kent.

The other compared the political map of Scotland in 2015 with that of Ireland in 1918, when a Sinn Fein landslide swept the country outside Ulster.

Was last year’s failed independence referendum Scotland’s equivalent of the Easter rising of 1916?

Of course the parallels are not exact. Scotland already has its own parliament and the SNP’s MPs intend to take their Westminster seats, as Sinn Fein refused to do

I also think there is unlikely to be any popular demand to partition Dumfriesshire, Cydesdale and Tweeddale so that it can remain within the UK (though I am altogether less sure about Orkney and Shetland).

Even so, statesmanship of a high order will be required to prevent Scotland following Ireland through the exit door from the United Kingdom.

Do I see David Cameron as the great statesman who can pull this off? No, but I reckon he has far more chance than Ed Miliband ever would have done.

And who, a week ago, confidently saw Mr Cameron as an outright election winner?

Except in the Blair years, my lifetime experience of election nights has been of Tories exceeding expectations. Yet even I did not have the confidence to bet on it.

So have this one on me: “Typical stupid Tory”.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.