Teddy bears on the NHS

16st 8lb, 4.5 units. I owned a few toys when I was a boy, I will admit. To be honest, I have still got most of them. But I never had so many that I lost count of precisely how many Dinky cars, Matchbox toys and Britain’s soldiers I possessed, and I always knew exactly where all of them were.

Nevertheless, the fact that I was immensely lucky and privileged was constantly drummed into me by my elder brother, who grew up in the lean years of the Second World War, and many of whose toys I inherited. One I particularly recall was a toy tank comprising a lump of wood painted green, with a nail sticking out of one end of it to represent a gun. He in turn had been told how fortunate he was by my father, who I seem to recall owned precisely one wooden toy – and that was it. Though of course he did not have room for much more than that, living as he did in a rolled-up newspaper and subsisting mainly on gravel. (A reference to the oft-cited Monty Python sketch that actually wasn’t on Monty Python at all, but At Last The 1948 Show.)

Now, unsurprisingly, my two small sons have so many toys that I half expect an avalanche of them to cascade out onto the drive every time I open the front door. The Boy takes a selection of them off to his nursery (or, as we must now call it, pre-school) quite frequently, and I always have my fingers crossed that some of them won’t come back. Sadly they always do. But then he is quite careful with them, as evidenced by the following conversation overheard earlier this week.

Charlie (setting out a selection of his toy cars on the floor): “You can’t touch that one, Bobby. It’s very expensive.”

Carer (impressed by his vocabulary): “That’s a very big word, Charlie. Do you know what it means?”

Charlie: “Yes. It means you have to leave it in the shop.” He’s not wrong.

The other evening, I came across this teddy bear, which I had never seen before, and asked where it had sprung from.

Mrs H asked if I remembered the night when we had been due to spend an agreeable evening with friends at the Istanbul Grill in Chester, but Charlie had been mucking around on my swivel chair, fallen off and banged his head on a radiator. So she had cancelled the babysitter and spent the evening at A&E instead, while they tried to determine whether this had done him any lasting damage.

The teddy bear had apparently been presented to Charlie by the Countess of Chester Hospital as a token of their appreciation for his forbearance as they woke him up every hour to prod him and shine lights in his eyes to determine whether he was suffering from concussion. (He wasn’t.)

Charlie too had apparently forgotten about this windfall. But he stumbled upon it the other day and the following dialogue ensued.

Charlie: “Look, Mummy, here’s the red teddy I got from the hospital. Maybe next time I bang my head, I could get a blue one or a yellow one.”

Mrs H: “Yes, Charlie. Though maybe an even better idea would be not to bang your head again, so we don’t have to go back.”

Charlie: “Yes, Mummy. But I think I probably will.”

Sadly, I fear that he is most likely not wrong about that, either.

The Lord Mayor cometh

16st 5lb, 1.5 units. What lunacy is this, you may have wondered yesterday, when I wrote of changes of political control on Newcastle City Council back in the days of the electric trolleybus. Surely the place must have been a solid Labour heartland forever?

Well, oddly enough, no. Before the nominally Conservative administration of Edward Heath introduced its hateful local government reforms of 1973, which extended the boundaries of the city, the council had been under Conservative control for a remarkable six years.

Surely only part of this can have been down to confusion caused by the fact that the Conservatives’ campaigning colour on Tyneside was red, while that of Labour was green. (A simple stop – go choice which always seemed to make much more sense to me than the blue and red adopted elsewhere.)

By ancient tradition, the first public duty of the newly elected Lord Mayor of Newcastle upon Tyne was to address the boys of the Royal Grammar School, which I attended. He used to pitch up at morning assembly in his robes, hat and chain, preceded by the city’s mace and sword bearers, and was always assured of a warm reception because his pay off line was to grant the school a day’s holiday.

The Lord Mayor of 1982 with his ceremonial attendants

We always knew which side of the political divide he came from as soon as he opened his mouth: the Tories were invariably posh, Labour broad Geordie. We privileged schoolboys used to suppress a smirk in the latter case, though there were a few unseemly giggles the time that a particularly short-sighted socialist kicked off with “Noo then, lads and lasses …”

A master shared with us afterwards the ultimate Labour Lord Mayor story, from before the Second World War. Having been greeted by the then Chairman of the Governors, the Mayor pronounced that: “The Chairman ‘n’ aa has a lot in common. He’s Orl Porssy and aa lives in Porssy Street.” Which is borderline hilarious if you know that (a) Earl Percy was (and still is) the eldest son and heir of the fabulously rich Duke of Northumberland, and (b) Percy Street was at that time a notorious slum.

The Combined Cadet Force used to provide a guard of honour on the street outside the school as the mayoral limousine drew up. After a formal inspection by His Right Worshipfulness, they would march off round to the back of the school to the stirring regimental march of the Durham Light Infantry.

Towards the end of my time at the place this went spectacularly wrong, when a group of mild hooligans (collectively known, I seem to recall, as “The Ledz”) procured a stout length of chain and a padlock, with which they secured the side gates of the school as the junior troops approached.

As a traditionalist, an arch respecter of authority and a thoroughgoing coward, I naturally dissociated myself from this disgraceful action and cannot claim to have observed the result. However, I do remember being assured by one eye-witness that the sight of the CCF band and the following rifle-bearing cadets gamely marching on the spot with no place to go, as their leaders’ faces turned red with fury, was tear-inducingly funny.

Balls to the trolleybus

16st 5lb, 7.0 units. Yesterday Mrs H made me take The Puppy to the vet’s to have his knackers lopped off. Naturally I was in no doubt who she really had in mind for this painful operation when she nominated The Puppy as my surrogate.

I hated the idea as much as I am sure The Puppy would have done if he had been consulted about it, and I spent the whole day at the office in a thoroughly bad mood - which is to say, an even worse mood than usual - with my legs crossed.

I will never forget the trusting, happy look on the little chap’s face as I left him in the hands of the vet after his pre-med injections.

Nor his dazed, puzzled and more than a touch resentful expression when I went to pick him up again in the evening.

I tried kidding him that it was all for his own long term good, like Angelina Jolie’s double mastectomy, but I could tell that he did not believe me.

The plain fact is that it is for our own convenience and protection, hoping to avoid a repetition of the horrific dog fights that broke out a decade ago when our current Dog was a puppy himself, and decided that the time had come to adjust the pecking order between himself and my senior Border terrier, now deceased.

Round One: a lull in the previous generation's battle to be Top Dog

Unfortunately for him age and guile always triumphed over youthful strength and vigour, and his unprovoked aggression invariably resulted in the young pretender limping around with a bandaged leg for a week or so. We finally had him neutered, on veterinary advice, in the hope that this might calm him down, but by then he was two years’ old and the die was well and truly cast.

My recollection is that he only finally gave up attacking the senior dog when the latter was struck down by dementia, and so was plainly not worth bothering with.

Still, while yesterday was undoubtedly a bad one for The Puppy, it was in other respects a good one for me, as I took delivery of my birthday present to myself: a prime piece of nostalgia, spotted on ebay and acquired in the face of stiff competition from absolutely no one at all, which was a surprise to me though I dare say it will not be to anyone else.

I used to stand under one of these every evening after my day’s indoctrination into the glories of the British Empire, and the might of the Royal Navy, at Akhurst Boys’ Preparatory School in what was then the rather posh and peaceful inner suburb of Jesmond, in Newcastle upon Tyne. (You may think I exaggerate about Akhurst, but I distinctly remember the red-splodged map on the wall of the headmaster’s classroom, and the fact that he gave us a morning off lessons so that we might join him in watching the televised launch of Britain’s first nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, in 1960.)

It cost 2d on one of the numerous 33, 33a or 43 trolleybuses from the stop opposite Acorn Road to another at the bottom of Osborne Road. Here I got off and walked around the corner to spend another 3d catching a 38 or 39 to Swarland Avenue in Longbenton, where my mother would meet me. (In those days, before the invention of paedophilia, the only obstacle to even a five-year-old covering the whole three miles between school and his front door all on his own was considered to be the danger of crossing Benton Road without someone to hold his hand.)

If I walked through the quiet streets of Jesmond to Churchill Gardens, I could pick up the 38 or 39 there and the journey only cost a total of 2d, leaving me a shiny, octagonal, brass threepence to spend on sweets. When the weather was good I almost invariably did so, setting me on the slippery slope to obesity which has been my natural habitat ever since.

Most of my contemporaries tell me that they are completely baffled by my love of trolleybuses, but I liked everything about them. The hum of the motor, the boom of the trolleys as they passed over frogs and crossings, the ritual of the conductor hopping off to set the frog for the correct destination (“Pull lever for Benton” it said on the traction pole shortly before the Heaton Road junction; I shall now look out for that sign on ebay to extend my collection) or wrestling with a long bamboo pole to restore power when the trolleys came off the wires.

I was gutted when they turned the Benton routes over to motorbuses in 1964, and on Saturday, 1 October 1966 I sat behind a phalanx of swaying nerds in raincoats as a number 35c made its way from Shields Road to Delaval Road on the very last day of trolleybus operations.

We were going there anyway for tea at my Auntie Maisie’s on Benwell Lane, and I spent much time peering through her curtains at the small crowd taking photographs at the trolleybus terminus nearby, assuring four profoundly unimpressed adults that they were missing the chance to see history being made.

On mature reflection, their memories of the Second World War probably made the demise of the urban electric bus seem just a little bit of a sideshow.

Only one thing puzzles me slightly. In my elephantine memory, the wording at the bottom of the sign was either “Fare Stage” or “By Request”, not “On Request” as pictured. I wonder whether it was the subject of a fierce Big versus Little Endian debate on Newcastle City Council, and changed with political control of the authority?

Even so, I was very pleased with, and proud of, my sign. I was also proud of myself for not bidding for the obvious companion piece, a Newcastle Corporation Transport bus stop sign of similar vintage, which came up on ebay at the same time from another seller, with a considerably higher starting price, but attracted no bidders at all. (They used to put “Newcastle Corporation Transport” on the bus stops because there were many other bus operators plying the same streets – Gateshead & District Omnibus Company, United Automobile Services and the splendidly titled Tyneside Tramways & Tramroads Company, to name but a few. But they did not bother on the trolleybus stops, I assume because no one but the Corporation has access to the wires.)

I propped my smart yellow sign up on the fireplace and showed it to The Puppy, in an effort to cheer him up, but it did not work at all. His brown eyes flashed but one word back at me. And that word was “Bollocks”.

Thinking Pepys

16st 4lb, 3.0 units. Yesterday morning I received a heartfelt appeal on Twitter: “Still miss starting days with bloke in the north, so to speak. Wife, 2 children, 2 houses, various jobs no excuse. Think Pepys!”

Since this came from someone completely unrelated to me by either blood or marriage – indeed, from a lady I have never even met – I thought it behoved me to sit up and take notice.

I must confess that it came as something of a shock to realize that I have not written a single word in this blog since December last year. In my defence, I have not been completely idle on the writing front.

For a start, there is my OTHER blog of columns from the excellent Newcastle Journal – www.keithhann-whyohwhy.com - which is faithfully updated nearly every week. I remain baffled as to why that blog has far fewer followers than this one which, as we have already noted, I rarely get around to writing at all.

Then there has been my output of assorted annual reports and press releases for clients, begging e-mails to my bank and so on. Plus I actually wrote a book last summer, which they told me would be out in time for Christmas, though I will admit that I made the schoolboy error of not asking them to specify WHICH Christmas. It will be published in August, if Amazon can be believed (and it’s not an issue of tax liabilities, so I suppose it might be trustworthy information).

So why the silence here?

As my correspondent notes, I do indeed have a wife and two children, though as a famously and shamefully neglectful husband and parent of the old school, whose attitudes were formed in Newcastle upon Tyne circa 1959, I cannot claim that they have deprived me of all that much potentially creative time.

Two houses, yes. One owned and much loved in the far North, the other rented, on the grounds of proximity to my main source of income, in what I consider to be the North West (though the BBC, to my horror, insists that my “local” programmes are those of the Midlands).

I have spent a fair amount of time in the last few months tidying up the former with a view to putting it on the market and applying the proceeds to acquiring a family home in the part of the world where we actually spend the greater part of our time at present. Well, nearly all the time in the case of the rest of my family, since the vast majority of my sojourns in the North East are of a solitary nature.

Where that house ought to be became clearer last month when we learned that The Boy had secured a place in the Church of England primary school that had been his parents’ first choice when filling in the council’s application form (even though it came under the aegis of a different local authority), and had the added advantage of being the only school, of the four we dragged him around, that he said that he might be prepared to consider attending.

Needless to say it is located in one of the more expensive and attractive parts of rural Cheshire. Where I would estimate, on the evidence to date, that house values per square foot are approximately 100 per cent higher than in north Northumberland.

So we could either saddle ourselves with a large mortgage that I stand no chance of ever paying off (which, in the sad absence of the likes of Northern Rock, we might well struggle to find anyone willing to advance to us in the first place). Or massively downsize and chuck away most of the stuff that I have spent the last half century and more carefully accumulating.

There is, of course, no difficulty at all in identifying the Right Thing To Do under these circumstances. But, as so often in life, head and heart find themselves in conflict. Particularly when almost every thing I do to make my Northumberland home more appealing to potential purchasers also make it more attractive to me.

Top of the list here has been engaging a regular cleaning service, after 24 years of staunch resistance to the idea. Along with the now well established innovation of a gardener, this removes the prime disincentive to having two homes: that horrible sinking feeling on arrival when one grasps that the place is a total mess and that most of one’s stay is going to have to be devoted to sorting it out.

So it may yet be Bloke in the Proper North for a bit longer, then. Watch this space, as Pepys would never have said.

To join the Twitter debate, please follow @keithhann

What on earth have we done now?

16st 0lb, zero units. Yesterday we went for lunch to perhaps my favourite pub in the whole of Cheshire. I know this may seem hard to square with the claim that I consumed no alcohol during the day, but we had dinner guests at home on Saturday and I drank so much (just to be sociable, you understand) that today I couldn’t face anything stronger than fizzy water. So we can safely rule out boorishly drunken behaviour as the cause of our mysteriously increasing unpopularity as lunch wore on.

I should explain that this pub is located on a hilltop with stunning views and boasts such assets to the perfect pub as a real fire, excellent food, a fine selection of real ales and – up to now, at any rate – helpful and charming staff.

It all started so well. The young women who greeted us at the bar when we walked in smiled warmly enough, showed us to our reserved table near the fire and kept smiling as she took and delivered our order for drinks. By the time we had consumed our starters she wasn’t smiling. By the end of the main course her face bore a distinct grimace. When I asked for coffee I felt myself lucky not to have it thrown at me. And when I went to the bar to pay at the end and gave her a perfectly generous tip, out of sheer force of habit, she had developed a loathing of me so strong that she could not even bring herself to say “thank you”.

Now, to be honest, I am quite used to this sort of thing. I have an undoubted knack for rubbing people up the wrong way. But, on this occasion, it was clear from the way that she almost kicked them as they followed me off the premises that the charming Mrs H and our boys were at least as much the target of our ire as I was. And the really, really puzzling thing was that neither of us could even begin to work out what we had done to upset her so much.

We hadn’t failed to say “Please” and “Thank you”. We hadn’t shouted “Hoy, you!” or waved at her in an imperious sort of way. We had eaten up all our food and shown our appreciation, though admittedly The Boy, in particular, had taken rather longer about it than seemed to suit her. But when we booked the table for 12.15 they had warned us that they would “need it back” at 2.15 and we were off the premises very shortly after 1.30, so tardiness can hardly have been the critical factor.

Was it The Baby’s messiness? There was, I will admit, an unfeasibly large amount of crumbled bread under his high chair. We never appreciate just how messy he can be until we go out, since at home we have a Border terrier on permanent standby to hoover up anything edible before it even makes contact with the carpet.

Was it the fact that Mrs H borrowed a chair from a neighbouring table, in order to satisfy The Boy’s demand that she sit between him and The Baby? Not that anyone was sitting at said table at the time, so it didn’t seem a particularly heinous crime to us.

Or was it perhaps a horrible case of mistaken identity, caused by confusing me with one of those elderly child molesters that feature so prominently in other media’s coverage of the BBC these days?

I don’t suppose we shall ever know. The sad thing is that, until we do work it out, our favourite pub looks like being off limits, at least until staff turnover bears our waitress off on its ever rolling stream to a more appropriate niche, like looking down her nose at the customers at a high class boutique in Tarporley.

On the plus side there is still the pub in the slightly less stunning location where the food and ale are also excellent, and where the £100 tip I left on the huge bill for The Boy’s christening lunch three years ago is still remembered with such fondness that the staff all greet us as long-lost friends the moment we walk in.

Yes, I think that has to be the answer.

Looking at the dead people

16st 3lb (I blame that columnists’ lunch – no, feast – at Caffe Vivo), 6.0 units. This morning after breakfast The Boy announced “Mummy, I want to go and look at the dead people.” So they went into the sitting room and Mrs H pointed out the two sepia photographs of my parents as small children, taken I would guess a little over 100 years ago when they were two or three. My father wears a sailor suit and “With love from Little Harry” is written in ink in a corner of the picture. My mother wears the sort of smock in which the Edwardians used to dress children of both sexes. The Boy thought his deceased grandmother was very pretty.

Then they moved on to a picture of my parents together outside their front door in Longbenton, taken a year or two before my father died in 1982. And finally a late snap of mother in her wheelchair in the front garden of my house in Northumberland, with a Border terrier on her knee. “She’s holding my doggie!” said The Boy, so Mrs H had to explain that it wasn’t in fact our current pet, but a predecessor called Arthur who was then just a puppy but is now, well, for want of a better word, dead.

The Boy nodded. He’s got his head around the concept now.

“She looks very like Daddy’s Auntie, doesn’t she?” he concluded of my mother. Both are, or were, octogenarians; and both have white hair. There the resemblance ends, really, and it could hardly be otherwise since they are completely unrelated; my aunt is my mother’s brother’s widow. Still, it left The Boy satisfied that one of life’s mysterious loose ends had been cleared up.

Dead? What, like a fly?

16st 0lb, 6.1 units. While I was driving to Newcastle and enjoying an epic lunch with some of my fellow weekly columnists on The Journal, Mrs H was attempting to keep our children amused by taking them to visit their grandparents. Or, as The Boy calls them, Grandpa and Me.

Because, as he was learning the names of his nearest and dearest, the rest of us were careful to identify ourselves by our names or our roles, as in “Come to Daddy, Charlie”. Grandma alone made the mistake of saying “Come to me” and now has to live with the consequences. Quite possibly for the rest of her life.

It has taken him three and a half years to get there, but it has now finally dawned on The Boy who these older people (though, to be fair, only very slightly older than his Daddy) are. He sought confirmation of his suspicions on the way home.

“Mummy,” he began, “Grandpa and Me are your mummy and daddy, aren’t they?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Well, then, who’s Daddy’s mummy and daddy?”

We had been anticipating this question.

“You know those pictures of the old people in the sitting room?”

“Yes.”

“They’re Daddy’s mummy and daddy.”

“But why do they never come to see us.”

“Because they’re dead.”

“Dead? What, like a fly.”

“Not exactly.”

“Dead? Like the mouse Melody deaded? [a reference to our beloved cat] Why are they dead?”

“Well, they were very old and they died. That’s what happens to people when they get very old.”

“Does everybody die?”

“Yes, I’m afraid they do.”

“Oh. Well who looks after Daddy, then?”

At this point Mrs H could quite reasonably have asked The Boy what he thought she did all day, but instead she clutched at the straw of the previous generation and drew his attention to my Auntie, a lady whose birthday we celebrated today. It would clearly be indelicate to reveal a lady’s age, so let’s just say that she won’t see 87 again. The notion that Auntie looks after me, in the regrettable absence of my Mummy and Daddy, seemed to satisfy him. Now I just have to break the news to her.