tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88640515774743437172024-03-05T14:37:25.751+00:00Bloke in the NorthThe amazingly unlikely true story of how a grumpy old man and lifelong bachelor won the love of a beautiful young woman and started a family – and all by writing a curmudgeonly blog about his lonely journey to the grave.<br>
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Now who would have predicted that?Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.comBlogger662125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-16226080525529940102018-07-19T15:31:00.000+01:002018-07-19T15:31:05.438+01:00You probably had to be thereYesterday a random tweet from a total stranger inspired me to respond, because I had already faced this presumably quite rare challenge: being best man to a friend for the second time.
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For added complexity and piquancy, as I went on to point out, the bride was also my own ex-fiancée, whom I had met through a lonely hearts ad my PA had begged me to place in <i>Private Eye</i> so that I would stop hassling her for a date.<br />
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At the reception afterwards, several people congratulated me on my very unusual speech, which they took as evidence of an amazingly powerful imagination. But, in fact, every word of it was true. I have no imagination whatsoever. I never have had. I often think how different my life might have been if this were not the case.<br />
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It is also true, as I reported on Twitter, that one of the other highlights of the day was the experience of two teenage bridesmaid sisters who managed to evade all the measures carefully put in place by the Oxford college hosting the reception to prevent them from consuming alcohol. When the younger began to display clear signs of being the worse for wear, her elder sibling wisely decided to take her for a refreshing walk around the city centre. It was an exceptionally hot day so they ducked into Blackwell's bookshop for a refreshing blast of air conditioning, at which the younger girl immediately fainted. Only to be plucked from the floor by a kindly gentleman with a curiously familiar voice, who was enquiring whether she was OK.<br />
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When the girls returned to the reception with their tale of being rescued by none other than Bill Clinton, we naturally treated this as a juvenile fantasy of the highest order. But then we saw the newspapers the next day, and who should have been in town but ...<br />
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Since one or two people have expressed a very mild interest, here is the speech I gave that day, 7 July 2001, at Worcester College, Oxford, for the wedding of Richard and Chris:<br />
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Ladies and gentlemen<br />
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Well, here we are again!<br />
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It was borne in upon me in the run-up to this glorious and happy event that it would be extremely tasteless for me to allude to two things: one, that Richard had been married before, and, two, that I had once myself been engaged to his lovely bride. And indeed it would be tasteless in the extreme. But then, I thought, what else did he expect? Does one book Bernard Manning for an evening in the hope that he will give a lovely reading from the collected works of Beatrix Potter? One does not. Unless, of course, one is Richard, whose increasing detachment from the world might well lead him to confuse Bernard with his distant cousin the Cardinal; who might well assume that the latter is still alive; and who might indeed expect an elevating talk on the general theme of Papal infallibility. On that basis, I strongly advise any members of the Governing Body of Worcester College here present not to allow Richard’s already enormous body ...<br />
<br />
... of responsibilities to be extended to include organisation of the annual Works Outing, Meat Tea and High Class Entertainment, which I know to be such a highlight of your academic year.<br />
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I had thought, if I were ever called upon again to say a few words at one of the rites of passage in Richard’s life, that the chances of heckling and general disruption would be substantially diminished by his enclosure in a stout wooden box. Of course, I did not rate the chances of this very highly because, although I am - and always will be - significantly younger than Richard, a decade ago our relative body masses suggested that he would enjoy an advantage over me in the ancient sport of coffin-dodging.<br />
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Since then, I have to say, the contributions of the Worshipful Companies of Pie-makers, Pastry-chefs and Vintners have considerably narrowed the odds.<br />
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To confirm this, the other weekend I showed a recent photograph of Richard to an old school contemporary of ours, Andy Bardgett, now the proprietor of Newcastle’s most distinguished firm of funeral directors, and the owner of Tyneside’s only turbo-charged hearse. Complete with go-faster stripes.<br />
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Andy felt, obviously without the benefit of deploying his trusty tape measure, that we would be looking at either the Arbuckle, a very fine, roomy fibreboard model with real plastic oak veneer and brass-look plastic fittings, or – for the fatter wallet - the even classier but equally commodious Chesterton in ersatz mahogany. This is, Andy says, ‘a coffin to die for’.<br />
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Both are available at very attractive prices on five-year interest-free credit and with a full money-back guarantee in case of disappointment.<br />
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He also said that he hoped neither of us were wasting a lot of money paying into a superannuation fund.<br />
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Now, you may think I have digressed into an area that is not only tasteless but morbid. On the other hand, when you’ve already written the funeral oration, why let it go to waste? And as for tastelessness, as the world’s greatest entertainer Al Jolson so memorably put it in the very first talkie, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet!’<br />
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So let us get back to the generally recognised duties of the best man. Organising the stag night – no, aborted due to lack of interest. There were some brief discussions about getting the groom drunk last night in the generally approved fashion, though it was finally agreed that keeping him sober for a night would be a more interesting intellectual and physical challenge. And the plans to chain him naked to the Martyrs’ Memorial had to be abandoned owing to our inability to procure a sufficiently long chain. Though Swan Hunter did think they might be able to supply one by mid-2003. Hand over ring at ceremony, tick. Make speech delving back into previous life of groom and causing him serious embarrassment. Ah, yes.<br />
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Those of you who were fortunate enough to hear my previous address on this theme may recall that I compared Richard to the then recently deceased Orson Welles – a resemblance that has in some respects increased over the intervening years. Orson, some of his obituarists pointed out, had apparently lived his life backwards – starting, when barely out of his teens, by making one of the most sensational broadcasts in radio history, and following that up with <i>Citizen Kane</i>, generally recognised as one of the half dozen greatest films of all time.<br />
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His career had then progressed steadily downwards through a series of B films until he wound up in his old age doing voice-overs in a well-known commercial for ‘probably the best lager in the world’.
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My point was not then, and is not now, that Richard had embarked on a similar pattern of progressive professional failure, but that he had in many respects grown younger with the passing years.
When I first met him, as my high-flying academic development in the fast stream of Newcastle Royal Grammar School led to my form being merged with his remedial class, Richard was 15 going on 85.<br />
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He pottered around with a malacca cane and panama hat, taking sepia photographs of steam engines, for all the world like a less talented version of John Betjeman.<br />
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And I shall now quote directly from my earlier address: ‘Rumour had it that he spent the evenings in the attic of his parents’ house ... wearing a powdered wig and practising the harpsichord while sipping a glass of old sack’.<br />
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Now, ladies and gentlemen, there might have been some signs of modernisation and normality in Richard’s life in the late 1980’s, and I cannot comment at all on his harpsichord skills, but let me tell you now: on the matter of that wig, I stand before you astonished at my own prescience. For, as so often in Richard’s life, fantasy is merging with reality.<br />
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That wig has moved through the phases of aspiration, ambition and objective to become a veritable King Charles’s head.<br />
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Admittedly, certain physical changes wrought by the passing years might make it a slightly – though only slightly – less ludicrous affectation now that it was then.
I only realised the seriousness of the situation when Chris told me that Richard had noticed that she had had her hair done (an unusual event in itself – the noticing rather than the hair-do) and had said: ‘I do like your hair. It looks rather like a wig.’<br />
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Is there another man in this room – or, for that matter, the world - who could have made that remark expecting to leave the room alive? And, what’s more, to have intended it as a compliment?<br />
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The mind quite rightly boggles. But, in a world where, after the regrettably brief interlude of Thatcherism, ‘progress’ has come back to the top of the political agenda, Richard has stood firmly before the clock, pushing the hands backwards with all his might.<br />
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Anyone who has wandered innocently into this College, as I have done, to find him in full sail across the quad in square and surplice, cannot fail to imagine that they have stepped back at least a hundred years. Chris, as many of you will know, compares it to living in an episode of that hugely unpopular 1960’s television series <i>Adam Adamant</i>, in which a deep-frozen Edwardian gent found himself brought back to room temperature in swinging London, with all the obvious scope for confusion and complication.<br />
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Except that, in Richard’s case, the period of cryogenic suspension seems to have been more like two hundred and fifty years.<br />
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But there are, of course, some telling anachronisms. For example, he is prepared to draw freely on the best features, as he sees them, of the subsequent decades. Chris tells me that his total lack of interest in the preparations for this afternoon’s service lifted spectacularly when she told him that she intended to have a train with her wedding dress. And sank back with equal speed when he realised what kind of train she meant.<br />
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Many of you may know that Richard recently became the proud owner of a five-inch gauge model of a North Eastern Railway steam locomotive, which is large enough for him to mount and drive. Soon, if my current plans to become a major slum landlord and property owner in Northumberland come to fruition, he will be able to drive his loco around the paddock to the rear of his house, clad in whatever rig might be appropriate for an eighteenth century clerical – perhaps even episcopal – engine driver, with the glorious panorama of the Cheviot Hills spread before him. The epitome of human happiness in Mr Blair’s bold and progressive New Britain.<br />
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And what of the rock on which his future happiness will be based? The lady who, much to the surprise of Arthur the Border terrier after all these years, lately consented to be his wife. She will, I am sure, be tolerant and supportive, for it is the only language he understands.<br />
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And how, you may be wondering, did these two distinctive individuals come together?<br />
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Well, let me tell you a little true story that is all but incredible and takes me back, once again, a number of years.
Twelve years ago, not a million miles from here, an old friend of mine got married. So envious was I of the lifetime of married bliss to which he could look forward, that I undertook a radical stocktake of my own position, and decided, for once in my life, to be decisive. So I placed an advert in the lonely hearts column of <i>Private Eye</i>¸ a copy of which I have here. ‘Educated Englishman ...’ it began ‘remarkably still single at 35’.<br />
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Ah, as I think Shakespeare once observed, if one could but look into the future one would top oneself straight away and avoid a whole lot of unnecessary trouble.<br />
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Ladies and gentlemen, Chris was the least insane – or I should say, in the interests of accuracy, the least obviously insane – of the many respondents to that advertisement. And, long after our own paths diverged owing for reasons which it would indeed be tasteless to explore – since it might reflect badly on me - Richard nobly stepped in and took her from her life of seclusion in rural Northumberland to the glittering heights of academic life here in Oxford.<br />
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And how entirely typical and appropriate, I thought, that Richard should have founded a whole new category for the social scientists here to investigate. Not a man who found his wife through a lonely hearts ad – for they are many in the ever busier and more disjointed world in which most of us live.<br />
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But a man who found his wife through someone else’s lonely hearts ad, thereby saving himself £46.25 – which would have bought a pretty decent case of wine in 1989.
I will accept a cheque by way of reimbursement.<br />
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Ladies and gentlemen, before I move on to reading out the fictitious telegrams which are such a highlight of these occasions, I cannot fail to remark on the sad absence from this occasion of one of Richard’s and my closest friends from our schooldays, the legendary Fat Ted.<br />
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Once again, he is sadly unable to be present today owing to the fact that he hasn’t been invited, but I am sure that if he were here he would like to say ‘Weff!’ to you both, and to give Richard some sound advice for his wedding night which would lead to the early involvement of at least two branches of the emergency services.<br />
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For if it had not been for the wise advice on how to handle the opposite sex that Fat Ted so freely dispensed to Richard and me when we were in our early teens, I am sure that none of us – for I include Fat Ted himself within this group – would have endured so many fruitless years of social dysfunction and non-fulfilment in the general field of human relationships. A non-fulfilment now, thankfully, in Richard’s case, coming finally and triumphantly to a conclusion.<br />
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And now, the moment you have all been waiting for, apart from me shutting up and sitting down. The telegrams:<br />
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CONGRATULATIONS AND THANKS FOR ALL YOUR CUSTOM. That’s from ALL THE STAFF AT THE OXFORD BRANCH OF HIGH AND MIGHTY.<br />
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RICHARD – GOOD LUCK, MATE. I HOPE YOUR SCOUSE GIT OF A FATHER-IN-LAW GIVES YOU LESS TROUBLE THAN MINE. CHEERS. TONY BLAIR.<br />
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TOP TIP FOR YOUR WEDDING NIGHT, STOP. DON’T, STOP. No, I’m sorry, that should be DON’T STOP, STOP. And that, inevitably, is from FAT TED.<br />
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Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure that, given goodwill and tolerance on both sides, a marriage across the centuries such as that we have witnessed today, can be a source of lasting joy to the participants and of inspiration as well as entertainment to the broader world outside. And so, with pleasure in my heart and – no doubt – relief in yours, I ask you to raise your glasses and drink a toast to whatever we are supposed to be drinking a toast to.<br />
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In the absence of any better suggestions, may I propose: ‘Chris and Richard. At least they won’t spoil two houses.’Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-50475356722214880022018-04-08T19:11:00.000+01:002018-04-08T19:12:24.875+01:00The antithesis of entrepreneurshipI know many entrepreneurs, and have worked for several highly successful ones, but I have always known that I could never hope to become one myself.<br />
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Anyone who has ever met me will have recognised immediately that I lack the requisite energy and ‘never give up’ determination. But, above all, I lack the basis killer instinct to make a buck whenever the opportunity arises.<br />
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I recognised the true extent of this deficit earlier today, when I turned to Amazon to remind myself of the price of the one and only book I have published to date. (Yes, I have got a shelf full of them in my study, but just as it seems easier to consult Wikipedia rather than the painstakingly assembled library of reference works directly behind my desk, so I instinctively clicked the link.)<br />
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I had forgotten that <i>The Bluffer’s Guide to Opera</i> is out of print. (There is a new edition, from a new publisher, coming out in June.) Consequently some chancer, sorry entrepreneur, was taking the opportunity to try to shift a copy for an eye-watering £189.83.<br />
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My response on Twitter was instantaneous. Come to me and I will sell you one for the cover price of £6.99. I even felt a bit guilty about this, because I enjoyed a 50% author’s discount when I bought them.<br />
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It took me several hours to realise that anyone with an ounce of business sense would have tried to knock them out on Amazon at £189.82.<br />
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Sadly, I simply haven’t got the trader’s mentality. My one undoubted and entirely theoretical commercial success was in the far bygone days when I used to travel overseas, and would invariably attract envious glances from my fellow tourists as I became a magnet for absolutely amazing offers in every street market we visited.<br />
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The stallholders having mistaken my total lack of interest in ever buying their carpets or whatever for the possession of world class haggling skills.<br />
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I have had an eBay account for years, but never sold a thing, despite currently being in possession of two houses positively groaning at the seams with unwanted tat.
This includes a large collection of vintage model railway equipment that I have been repeatedly assured was a strongly appreciating asset through the 1980s and 1990s, but is now more or less worthless.<br />
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I can follow the logic of the dealers and auctioneers: this sort of thing was collected by men (and only men) who were children in the 1950s, prosperous in the closing years of the century, but are now dying or downsizing. Understandably enough, there is no one else motivated by nostalgia to buy it from them.<br />
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Since I am in the rare position of being an old man with young children, I concluded that I might as well cut my losses and let them play with the trains, instead of trying to sell them. Yet here is a curious thing. I recently built my elder son a larger train set, and have been trying to buy a few additional antique Hornby Dublo accessories to brighten it up. (Being made of metal, they are vastly more durable than the contemporary alternatives.)<br />
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Every time the desired items come up on eBay I add them to my watch list, and adopt my proven strategy of bidding extremely late and unpredictably high. Yet every time I do it I find myself outbid, usually by a substantial margin.<br />
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So clearly someone is out there, in defiance of all logic, paying Big Money for old Hornby Dublo.
As usual in life, things are only head-shakingly worthless when I am the seller.<br />
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By the same token, perhaps there really is someone on this planet mad enough to pay the thick end of £200 for an old edition of my Bluffer’s guide.
I shall find out when my career in corporate affairs comes to its inevitable and surely imminent close, and I am thrown back on selling stuff to try and sustain my family.<br />
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Come on. I’m not asking £189.83. I’m not even asking £189.82. It can be yours for just £150 (plus postage and remarkably expensive packing) and I won’t even devalue it with my signature.<br />
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Then again, you could just hang on until June …
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<br />Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-71455065657556618642017-08-11T15:20:00.000+01:002017-08-11T15:20:05.134+01:00You are old, Father WilliamTo each of us who is fortunate enough to live long enough, there comes a point when we must reluctantly recognise that we are old.<br />
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It is usually quite sudden. I can remember it happening to my father when he was taking my pet Sheltie for a walk around the block in Longbenton in the 1960s. Some lads paused their kickabout, saying “Let’s wait until this old bloke has gone past.” Dad looked around for the old bloke, only to realise that he was it. I suppose he would have been in his late 50s at the time. He came home thoroughly dispirited. I can remember laughing at him.<br />
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For me, it happened on the afternoon of Wednesday, 9 August 2017. I’d had an agreeable lunch with my wife and two sons, aged eight and five, before they headed for a matinee at the open air theatre nearby. (Amazingly, it did not rain.) On my way back to the office I thought I’d call in at B&Q to pick up some paint I’d promised to buy to enhance the appearance of our summerhouse. I also added four bags of potting compost to the legendarily unmanoeuvrable flatbed trolley and headed towards the checkout, where I was intercepted by a solicitous, orange-clad matron with the words:<br />
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“Are you all right, dear? Would you like someone to help you with that?”<br />
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“I’m fine, thanks.”<br />
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“Come to this till, I can open it up for you.”<br />
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Never before in many years of shopping at B&Q have I ever known more than one or two tills to be open, and have often wondered why they installed the other four in the first place. So this was a genuine first.<br />
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“Have you got one of our cards, dear?”<br />
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“No.”<br />
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“Would you like one? You are over 60, aren’t you?”<br />
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“Yes I am, as it happens. But I haven’t got anything on me to prove it.”<br />
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“Oh, you don’t need to worry about that, dear. I can see you are. Only it’s 10% off on Wednesdays for our Diamond Club members.”<br />
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So there I stood, with £80 worth of goods on my trolley, and a straight choice to make between my self-respect and a saving of eight quid (which actually proved to be only six quid, because the compost had already been discounted).<br />
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Naturally I went for the six quid, but still returned to the office feeling far, far older than I had been when I set out, and contemplating a future in which “a nice cup of tea and a sit down” will feature extensively, along with pensioners’ specials at lunchtime, whist drives in the day room, and lively discussions about the deaths column in the local paper.<br />
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To be fair, the ticket office staff at Newcastle Central station regularly asked me “Have you got a card, pet?” when I was still in my 40s, after the stress caused by my demanding clients turned my hair grey somewhat prematurely. But back then I could always kid myself that they had mistaken me for a student.<br />
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Now there can be no doubt. I am a Diamond Club member, my foot is poised on the edge of the grave and the ground feels distinctly slippery. But at least I’ve got Wednesdays sorted for my few remaining months, and I’ll be able to put the savings on home improvement products towards my funeral expenses.<br />
<br />
Everyone to whom I have retailed this story in my search for sympathy has laughed at me, just as I laughed at my father half a century ago. So I have also finally learned the true meaning of karma. And all thanks to B&Q.
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-27717051526678199022017-02-03T17:04:00.000+00:002017-02-03T17:04:25.084+00:00If you go down in the woods todayLast week Mrs H volunteered to drive our elder son and two his school friends to an eighth birthday party. It didn’t seem too much of a challenge, on the face of it: the party was being held within a few minutes’ drive of our house, albeit at an address Mrs H had not visited before. But she had said address, the benefit of verbal directions (“we live in the woods”), and the support of a fully functioning sat nav. What’s more, she had taken the precaution of calling en route at the office of the local estate, from which the house is rented, to make absolutely sure she went to the right one of the two identically named cottages in their possession. What could possibly go wrong?<br />
<br />
Here’s what:<br />
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<br />
Yes, we’ve all read about the people who have driven into canals, onto railway lines, or got their HGVs irretrievably jammed between two ancient and fragile buildings because “the sat nav told me to do it”, but this is the first time I have encountered this phenomenon quite so close to home.<br />
<br />
I don’t think I can do better than to let Mrs H’s White Knight tell the story in his own words:<br />
<br />
<i>I’m not quite sure I can express my sheer delight/awe/dismay in a word that summarises all of the emotions I felt when I realised the true extent of Mrs H’s predicament. I can say, though, that one of my initial reactions was relief: if only that I am not the only man alive with a wife capable of making such a manoeuvre.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>When I first got the call to duty (4.15pm) we still had failing daylight. The message was as clear as it was urgent: three 7/8 year olds and a distraught mother stuck in the deepest, darkest depths of the woods, and the mist was closing in fast.</i><br />
<br />
[It surely goes without saying that Mrs H had got stuck in a spot with zero mobile reception, and had had to walk some way from the car before she could despatch a text message pleading for help.]<br />
<br />
<i>After about 20 minutes “off–roading” I happened on a gaggle of desperately waving children in the near dark of the woods shouting excitedly “Are you in a four-wheel drive?” and “Thank God - we thought we were going to die!” “Thank Christ!” etc. All very biblical anyway … </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
[This is good, as it shows that their education in a Church of England school is delivering at least some of the hoped-for benefits.]<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Behind the young Christians was a fraught-looking Mrs H, obviously downplaying the youngsters’ prophesy of doom had I not found them…. “I’ve got my car stuck up there” (gestures into the jungle). “It’s not badly stuck though!”</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>All very Hansel and Gretel, actually, come to think of it.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>On that cheerful note they all, relieved, jumped into the car and we got back to the house so they could be duly terrified by tarantulas and snakes, this being the order of the day apparently. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I took the opportunity to steal away from the frivolities of the killer animals in our kitchen to see if I could free the vehicle from the mud……..it not being “badly stuck” etc.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Having picked them up in the woods off a moderately muddy but not impassable path (if you happened to be in a tracked vehicle, that is) I had assumed that where I had been pointed towards to find the stuck vehicle must have been on a similar woodland path. I took myself back towards where I had picked them up, to realise that where the car was actually stuck appeared to be on a track further up into the woods, and not accessible by line of sight…….. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Mrs H had in fact decided (because the Sat Nav had dictated) that she turn off what must have been a questionable track in the first place into the woods literally off road. The SAS would have struggled to navigate the course she/the Nav had chosen to take.</i><br />
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<i><br /></i>
<i>A friend helped us pull the car out with his tractor in the dark after we gave up digging it out and trying to move it with his pick-up truck: having exclaimed on first sight “It looks like it’s fallen out of that fucking tree - how did that get there?!”</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I have told my wife never again to describe where we live as “in the woods” in case anyone else takes it quite so literally!</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Brilliant. Simply brilliant. Lifelong comical material.</i><br />
<br />
I find it hard to disagree with that verdict.
Mrs H described it all as “a bit of a ‘mare with the car” while my son’s verdict was slightly more dramatic: “Daddy, we nearly died in the woods!”<br />
<br />
By way of a postscript, over the subsequent weekend one of Mrs H’s front tyres developed what appeared to be a slow puncture. I pumped it up, but it kept losing pressure, so on Monday Mrs H took it to those nice people at the local Kwik Fit.<br />
<br />
Their first question, after examining the car, was “Do you do a lot of off-roading?”<br />
<br />
Because obviously, if you did, your first choice of motor would be a two-wheel drive Nissan Qashqai. We wanted a four-wheel drive model, as Mrs H had before, but at the time of order Nissan had decided that its customers could have a 4WD Qashqai or an automatic Qashqai, but not both in one car, and the automatic gearbox won.<br />
<br />
I would say that we had made the wrong choice, but my own car is supposed to be one of the most capable off-road vehicles on the market, and I don’t think it would have fared any better in the circumstances.<br />
<br />
I am currently on eBay looking for a competitively priced second hand tank.<br />
<br />
I conclude with many thanks to Mrs H’s rescuers, narrator and photographer, and the assurance that I will, without fail, report here with equal fullness and frankness any car-related misfortunes that may occur when I am behind the wheel myself.
How’s that for making myself a hostage to fortune?
<br />
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<br />Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-37514475105236754002016-12-12T14:39:00.000+00:002016-12-12T14:40:35.383+00:00Having Santa arrestedYesterday Mrs H took the boys to the traditional Christingle service in our parish church, then on to see <i>Chitty Chitty Bang Bang </i>at the Lowry in Manchester, while I lay on the sitting room sofa attempting to pull myself together from the total exhaustion that has afflicted me since Friday.<br />
<br />
Luckily a friend of our older son was able to use the theatre ticket I had bought for myself.<br />
<br />
The boys having made donations to the Children’s Society during the church service (which is to say, having handed over the candle-shaped cardboard collecting boxes that Mummy had filled for them), Mrs H attempted to interest them in another good deed: buying extra Christmas presents for needy children.<br />
<br />
“Will that be with our money?” Charlie, the elder, asked suspiciously.<br />
<br />
“No, Mummy will pay for them.”<br />
<br />
“But why do we need to buy presents for other people?”<br />
<br />
“Well, because these are for children who might otherwise have nothing at all on Christmas Day. How would you feel, Jamie, if you came down on Christmas morning, and Santa hadn’t left you anything?”<br />
<br />
Jamie, aged four, had no doubts about that.<br />
<br />
“I’d ring the police and have Santa arrested,” he replied.<br />
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<br />
Continuing a robust turn of phrase for which he has become noted in the Hann family. Indeed, we can recall only one recent concession.<br />
<br />
Jamie has a particular aversion to having his hair washed and, subsequent to that, receiving the attentions of a nit comb. (Head lice, a phenomenon completely unknown to me and my childhood friends in 1950s Newcastle, are now commonplace even among the denizens of overwhelmingly middle class church schools in Cheshire; which seems odd given the vast improvement in standards of personal hygiene over the intervening half century).<br />
<br />
In the course of these regular bathroom battles, a certain amount of personal abuse tends to be directed at Mummy.<br />
<br />
During one of these recently, Mrs H provided a summary: “Yes, I know, I am the worst, unkindest, most cruel and evil Mummy that ever lived.”<br />
<br />
Jamie looked at her coldly and replied: “I never said you were evil.”Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-44790716297414206942016-11-01T16:55:00.000+00:002016-11-08T16:56:40.210+00:00This is all your fault, MummyToday we lunched at home and took our walk at the far end of the beautiful Breamish valley. It must have been getting on for 20 years since I paid my last (and only) visit to the waterfall called Linhope Spout, but I was conscious that it was pretty and, more importantly, that the three-mile round trip there and back should be within the walking abilities of both the children and our 15-year-old Border terrier.<br />
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Though, to be honest, I seriously doubted whether we would actually make it to our intended destination.<br />
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These doubts seemed well-founded when we reached the bridge in the little hamlet of Linhope, about 20 minutes after starting our walk, and the boys noted the water tumbling over a few rocks in the stream below.<br />
<br />
“That’s it. We’ve seen the waterfall! Let’s go back!” they announced.<br />
<br />
But Mummy was made of sterner stuff than that, and insisted on persevering. So we secured their reluctant agreement to walk up the grassy hill on the path that led away from the tarmac road. Towards the top of this we came to a well-worn sign that read “Linhope Spout ¼”. The inaccuracy of this became clear some way further on, when we passed another sign pointing in the opposite direction that read “Hartside 1”, Hartside being the place where we had parked the car, close to a sign that correctly declared the total distance to Linhope Spout to be 1½.<br />
<br />
“Come on, team Hann!” said Mummy, enthusiastically. “It’s only a quarter of a mile! We can do this!”<br />
<br />
So we set off, with the expedition naturally dividing into two parts. The first, or pathfinder, group comprised me, my seven-year-old son and heir, and our three-year-old Border terrier. The second consisted of Mummy, the four-year-old child and the aforementioned geriatric dog, who has the turn of speed you might expect from a 105-year-old blind human.<br />
<br />
As the ground descended on the approach to the Spout the boy lost sight of me and began to doubt his mother’s sense of direction.<br />
<br />
“Mummy, we need to go straight on!”<br />
<br />
“No, we turn right. I saw Daddy go this way.”<br />
<br />
“No, it’s straight on!”<br />
<br />
“Look, there’s a sign. It’s pointing this way.”<br />
<br />
“No, no, no! You’re going the wrong way! We’re lost! Lost in the hills! I’ll never see Charlie or my house ever again! Ring Daddy!”<br />
<br />
“I can’t ring Daddy.”<br />
<br />
“Oh for God’s sake don’t tell me you’ve forgotten to bring your phone!”<br />
<br />
“No, it's just that the reception isn't very good here and ...”<br />
<br />
“This is all your fault! If you hadn’t walked so slowly we wouldn’t have lost them in the first place!”
<br />
<br />
And so on and so forth until the Spout finally hove into view with an elderly man and a small boy standing beside it, and a smaller boy started trying to hurl himself down a rocky slope to join them.<br />
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We took a commemorative photograph and made our way back to the car shortly before nightfall, with approximately half of us moaning all the way as we went.<br />
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<br />Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-42723914263318399632016-10-31T16:40:00.000+00:002016-11-08T16:44:24.891+00:00Pining for the truant catcherThe rural local authorities of Cheshire, in an act of collective madness, decided that this week would be their school half term. A week after everyone else’s. Which was no doubt good news for those teachers and parents looking to secure cut-price tickets to jet off to somewhere slightly warmer than the UK. But it was decidedly bad news for those of us who had elected to stay here, given that pretty much all the preserved railways, castles, country houses, petting farms and other child-friendly tourist attractions that had been enthusiastically touting for business all last week put up their shutters and closed for the winter at dusk on Sunday.<br />
<br />
This left us with two main options to keep our little darlings entertained during our holiday break in Northumberland: pub lunches and healthy walks. A key objective of the latter being to tire them out in the hope that they might sleep slightly later than their traditional 6am BST (or, as it became yesterday, 5am GMT).<br />
<br />
Today we went to an establishment in Newton-by-the-Sea that bills itself as a “gastropub”, something I have always found more than a little off-putting. Many years ago I observed from the top deck of my bus to and from school the opening of a modest little shop by the Cradlewell in Jesmond that billed itself as a “high class tailor”. Even as a schoolboy, I harboured grave doubts about that business. Would an establishment that really was “high class” need to proclaim the fact on its fascia? I was very surprised when, years later, a friend from a more prosperous family than mine told me that his father had all his suits made there, and it was actually pretty good.<br />
<br />
The “gastropub” had its pretensions quite effectively deflated by my friend The Secret Diner (food critic of <i>The Journal</i> in Newcastle) <a href="http://www.secretdiner.org/2015/08/the-joiners-arms.html#more">more than a year ago</a>. At the time I thought he was being frightfully unfair as I only ever ordered the fish and chips or seafood chowder, both of which were ace. I also appreciated the reliably prompt and efficient service, which becomes of critical importance when one is in charge of two small human beings who will become “hangry” if their needs are not satisfied at high speed.<br />
<br />
Considerable disappointment thus ensued when the pub proved to have seriously downgraded both its signature dishes, and I ended up paying £16.95 for an absurd (and dangerously hot) “bin lid” thinly smeared with a “chowder” in which the main ingredients appeared to be flour and undercooked, sliced potatoes.<br />
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Perhaps it wise, in the circumstances, that the staff had also developed new skills in the avoidance of eye contact.<br />
<br />
Still, no one has yet managed to spoil the beach at Low Newton and we spent a pleasant and surprisingly clement afternoon watching the children running around and getting as much of the North Sea as possible inside their wellies.<br />
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Though it was a little disappointing that we did not receive a visit from the uniformed individual who featured with such regularity in the comics of my childhood: the Truant Catcher. I could, of course, have patiently explained that my children were enjoying a legitimate holiday, in much the same way as I explain nearly every day that I am not, in fact, their grandfather. On the other hand if he had come all that way with a big net and a van with barred windows, it might have been cruel to deprive them of an educational experience of unjustified incarceration.<br />
<br />
Tonight, for the first time in my life, I carved a pumpkin lantern. It took about ten minutes, compared with the couple of evenings I used to spend attacking a turnip (as we call swedes on Tyneside) with a blunt kitchen knife 50-odd years ago. We lit the candle and awaited callers, having armed ourselves with a couple of bags of fun-size chocolate bars from Iceland in Alnwick.<br />
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Unsurprisingly, in the middle of nowhere in rural Northumberland, absolutely no one came.Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-83779542853808695072016-10-17T14:01:00.000+01:002016-10-17T14:01:45.858+01:00In trainingI can’t explain how I acquired my love of trains. It certainly wasn’t nurtured by my parents, who most definitely preferred cars. Understandably enough, as my mother’s father had been a champion cyclist whose Alnwick cycle shop gradually developed into a small chain of north Northumberland garages; and who, as a pioneer motorist, could proudly claim to have driven the first car to reach a number of valleys in the Cheviots (I forget exactly which).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Ford's Garage in Alnwick; grandfather in straw boater</i></b></span></td></tr>
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My father, meanwhile, had earnestly saved the earnings from his first job until the glad day when he was able to walk into a garage on Northumberland Road in Newcastle city centre, and drive back to Philip Street in the West End in his first car. No driving lessons or test in those days. Just hand over the cash and get on with it. I don’t know exactly when that was, but I can remember him telling me that the price of gallon of petrol at the time was 1s (5p), and that the nation came close to rioting when it shot up to an eye-watering 1s 1½d (5.6p).<br />
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We simply never travelled by train. My first ever journey by rail was with my father on a third rail electric train from Newcastle to the coast when I was eight or so, secured after much nagging by me. For a main line trip I had to wait for my mother to take me on a day trip from Newcastle to York. From the fact that I can distinctly remember one of British Railway’s very last steam locomotives pottering around the station while we were waiting for our return train home, I guess that was in the summer of 1967 when I was 13.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZb-7rCjCY80VnPkd-P9T4OPAXgQsub1HbPA4EIvrKVCu2zOvLTpJO3jncIZWvW9h_iRKgsCZGzZxSSfmJquVVk7x-PpWTIRqjqJyKQheS7Ph5vEmtOUwXpAsKmZDJA5ChLghjOptBJQQ/s1600/camping+coaches.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZb-7rCjCY80VnPkd-P9T4OPAXgQsub1HbPA4EIvrKVCu2zOvLTpJO3jncIZWvW9h_iRKgsCZGzZxSSfmJquVVk7x-PpWTIRqjqJyKQheS7Ph5vEmtOUwXpAsKmZDJA5ChLghjOptBJQQ/s1600/camping+coaches.jpg" /></a>Once they indulged me by obtaining a brochure to satisfy my rail obsession by spending a summer holiday in a camping coach on a rural branch line, but the plan collapsed when my father grasped that they were only made available to those who reached them by train.<br />
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Still, they did buy me train sets (first Hornby O-gauge, then second-hand three-rail Hornby Dublo) and take me for walks. From the start, my favourite outings were always to the East Coast Main Line, a mile or so from our house. Particularly to the sidings at Little Benton, where there were usually steam engines to be observed chuntering up and down sort coal waggons and hoppers as the expresses between London and Edinburgh thundered past. My mother was fond of trying to convince me that the clangs of shunting were rumbles of distant thunder, requiring us to head for home without delay.<br />
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I loved the sound and smell of steam locomotives from my first encounter with them. As I grew a little older, I also came to appreciate the living history they represented, with a fair part of the motive power in the Northumberland coalfield having been designed and built before the First World War, yet still gamely plodding on into the 1960s.<br />
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Against that background, it is easy enough to understand how my seven-year-old son comes to be something of a rail enthusiast. Though perhaps not a particularly well-informed one. Over-exposure to <i>Thomas the Tank Engine </i>led to a certain amount of devastation when he finally grasped, just over a year ago, that regular main line express trains are not still customarily powered by steam.<br />
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The seeds do not always take root, either. My four-year-old has been subjected to exactly the same drip of pro-train propaganda, but still prefers cars. Particularly racing cars.<br />
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Even so, having two die-hard rail enthusiasts in a family of four certainly constitutes a quorum, and permits me to indulge my own fancies while pretending that I am doing something nice to please the children.<br />
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Two weekends ago we spent a most agreeable day in the National Railway Museum in York, which I can heartily recommend to any parent. Unlike the national museums in London it is not what Jeremy Corbyn would doubtless call ram-packed. Even though entry is – rather bizarrely to my mind – completely free.<br />
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The exhibits and attractions kept the boys’ boredom at bay for several hours, which is frankly one hell of an achievement, and the cafeteria does a very decent pork and black pudding sausage roll. What’s not to like? They were also very nice about retrieving my younger son’s souvenir sticker book from the roof of a carriage when he dropped it there from a footbridge, remarking as they did so that it was a remarkable achievement to have got it to lodge where he did.
Minutes after the man with the grab on the end of a long pole had gone away, another child managed precisely the same feat.<br />
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The next day, after a comfortable night in a friendly pub in Kirbymoorside, we took steam trains from Pickering to Whitby and back on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, spending long enough at the seaside to enjoy fish and chips in the Magpie Café and take a bracing walk on the beach.<br />
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I have been a member of the NYMR preservation society since 1973, when the best it could offer was a diesel multiple unit ride from Grosmont to a little way beyond Goathland, but I had not visited the line for well over a decade. It was a most enjoyable experience, particularly on the outward journey. Because my sons have the compressed attention span of the internet generation and their view of return journeys tends to be “been there, seen that”. Or, as the elder wearily put when I tried to encourage him to take another look out of the window somewhere in Newtondale, “Trees, bracken, bracken, trees, trees, trees.”<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-size: small;">An image from the outward journey</span></i></b></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>A latter-day camping coach on the NYMR. Next summer's holiday sorted?</i></b></span></td></tr>
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Perhaps the single most annoying thing about the elder boy is that he is even more observant than I am, and virtually impossible to catch out. Because even the things I feel sure he cannot possibly have seen because he has been, at best, half paying attention, have all been clocked, absorbed and stored away in his capacious memory banks. “I told you so” is fast becoming one of his favourite phrases or sayings.<br />
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We had one bit of unfinished business at the end of that weekend in Yorkshire. Although we had duly seen and admired the fastest steam engine of all time, <i>Mallard</i>, we had not encountered what has become the most famous locomotive of them all.<br />
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So it was lucky that I had also managed to secure perhaps the last four tickets on the final train of <i>Flying Scotsman</i>’s weekend stint on the East Lancashire Railway late yesterday afternoon.<br />
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It would be fair to say that even the child who prefers racing cars was highly excited.<br />
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We counted the minutes on the platform at Bury Bolton Street station until the legend drifted into view, and we were the first to take our booked seats on its train, the best part of half an hour before it departed.<br />
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The boys admired the scenery of the Irwell Valley – both industrial and rustic – all the way to Rawtenstall, where they wisely did not join me and the rest of the passengers in disembarking to try to take identical photographs of the locomotive.<br />
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On the way back, as ever, ennui set in, alleviated a little by an iPad. But then Mummy went to stand by an open window at the end of the carriage, where the boys joined her. And as the shadows lengthened, the elder boy was heard to say, “Mummy we’re on the actual <i>Flying Scotsman</i> and it's getting dark, could this day get any better?”
On the strength of which, I feel entitled to mark the day down as a success.</div>
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Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-47281254985174938352016-07-20T15:29:00.000+01:002016-07-21T15:33:40.098+01:00CorrectI had an enlightening conversation with the four-year-old over breakfast this morning. First he imparted a great deal of information about dinosaurs, including several that I had never even heard of; then he gave me a run-down of the main categories of animal classed as reptiles.<br />
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“Do you know, Daddy, what is the largest lizard?”<br />
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“Is it a Komodo dragon?”<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbxAbNs-ur2JK6QwdssaIB2TN86eqFH8U1zZ26T8N0i2zXd6alZ_hGcw4LXFo7xdXfvqnLrqCHrz2DIVSe1cbaDSvTIx-dshtoZYtT0BkGi7J2m3DALtfA7uFyD_QSL43_MWKxN5WKymU/s1600/IMG_1742.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbxAbNs-ur2JK6QwdssaIB2TN86eqFH8U1zZ26T8N0i2zXd6alZ_hGcw4LXFo7xdXfvqnLrqCHrz2DIVSe1cbaDSvTIx-dshtoZYtT0BkGi7J2m3DALtfA7uFyD_QSL43_MWKxN5WKymU/s400/IMG_1742.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Apologies if these aren't actually Komodo dragons, but they're definitely lizards and definitely in Chester Zoo</i></b></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
He gave me a look of shocked surprise and said, “Correct!”<br />
<br />
Then added helpfully, “That means you were right, Daddy.”<br />
<br />
“I’ve seen a Komodo dragon. They have them at Chester zoo.”<br />
<br />
He looked surprised again, then changed the subject to his best friend at the pre-school he has just left. He loves playing with his best friend but sometimes another boy comes along that his best friend prefers to play with. But this other boy is going to a different school in September so my son’s best friend will have to “stick together” with him in future.<br />
<br />
It’s nice when life works out like that, isn’t it? I wish it had happened to me more often.Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-25532096129442681682016-07-17T15:09:00.000+01:002016-07-21T15:33:05.970+01:00Having to make one's own bedI have now cunningly wangled two peaceful weekends in Northumberland constructing a bunk bed. The first, to be fair to me, was utter hell: seven solid hours of unremitting toil bolting, gluing and screwing the individual beds together. I returned to Cheshire exhausted and with a large bandage on the second finger of my right hand, to compensate for the skin still adhering to my screwdriver.<br />
<br />
I showed the following picture to a so-called friend who said, “Oh, you’ve just been assembling a flat-pack! I thought you meant that you’d actually made the things yourself!”<br />
<br />
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<br />
Yes, because I am exactly the sort of chap who would know how to go about cutting and planing virgin timber to make a bed.<br />
<br />
Anyone who is so blithely dismissive of the effort involved in building flat-pack furniture has clearly not spent long enough doing it. Though in truth, any time is too long. I would much prefer to have bought a ready-made bunk but could not find one. Which may be just as well, as it would have need disassembling to get it up the stairs and into the bedroom, thereby taking us roughly back to square one.<br />
<br />
The instructions did specify that putting the thing together was a two person job. In fact, the only small but critical phase that required any support was lifting the upper bunk on top of the lower one. By an immense stroke of luck two friends proposed calling in for tea yesterday and were able to help me do this. They even brought a top class lemon drizzle cake with them.<br />
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<br />
<br />
We needed the bunk because our sons’ bedroom is too small for two full size single beds, and they have outgrown their cot beds. We do have another bedroom already equipped with two full size single beds, but it is downstairs, right next to the sitting room, and we assessed that there would be zero chance of their actually going to sleep there until we went to bed ourselves.<br />
<br />
Now everyone warns me that we have set ourselves up for a nightly battle over who is going to sleep in the top bunk. The manufacturer’s instructions specify that the top bunk must never be occupied by a child under the age of six. My four-year-old thinks he has agreed a rota with his seven-year-old brother. So it is Elfin Safety versus Democracy. I wonder which of those will come out on top?
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-17684221369312647922016-07-10T15:03:00.000+01:002016-07-21T15:32:22.979+01:00Trains in the gardenIt all started with the Boy complaining that the train table in his bedroom was too small. He wants more tracks and, to be fair, I can see his point. Two ovals and three sidings on a 6’ x 4’ sheet of plywood afford limited opportunities for creative play in 00 gauge. We could buy him a bigger baseboard but there isn’t room for anything much bigger than 8’ x 4’, and with the best will in the world I can’t see that making a massive amount of difference towards fulfilling his ambitions for a locomotive roundhouse, turntable, marshalling yards, tunnels, bridges and so forth.<br />
<br />
So in a moment of madness I said, “We could always build a railway in the garden.”<br />
<br />
In truth, this has been a not particularly secret ambition of mine since I was a small boy myself. At my parents’ house in Longbenton it got no further than constructing an embankment through the rose bed, which I had to keep explaining away as a novel decorative feature. The tracklaying gang never materialised owing to pocket money budgetary constraints.<br />
<br />
In my own house in Northumberland I went as far as to design the back garden with raised flower beds specifically intended to accommodate model railway tracks. There is even a hatch into the conservatory, through which trains were intended to steam to an indoor station complex. But as with so many grand Victorian railway schemes, progress rapidly ground to a halt owing to a critical lack of funds. Combined, in my case, with indolence and technical incompetence.<br />
<br />
Back then I also lacked the wonderful excuse of having children to play with the trains. Now that that gap in my life has been filled, it is surely now or never for a garden railway.<br />
<br />
But what sort? The Boy’s first thought was simply to extend his 00 gauge network outside. Which would be handy in terms of the capital outlay required, but seems slightly impractical when every falling leaf would carry with it the risk of a catastrophic derailment. Something chunkier, perhaps with the possibility of using actual steam motive power, would surely be preferable. Though sadly neither the length of the garden or the depth of my pockets are compatible with building the sort of thing on which even small boys can ride.<br />
<br />
As a starter for ten, I bought a book and a set of DVDs from a garden railway specialist shop (yes, there are such things) in Buckinghamshire. Those DVDs have now been watched so many times that I know every scene, and every word of the commentary, off by heart.<br />
<br />
The Boy is wildly enthusiastic. His younger brother, who usually claims only to be interested in cars and animals, has discovered that he quite likes trains after all. Even more remarkably, Mrs H has started making positive noises about how we could run the trains along a dwarf wall around the lawn that would blend nicely with the garden, and stable them in the shed when they are not in use.<br />
<br />
As an incentive to get started, I received from the boys a £100 gift voucher from the garden railway shop for my birthday last month. And serendipitously this week Mrs H and I found ourselves attending the opera at Garsington and staying with friends who live only about five miles from the shop. After a long and fruitful conversation with the proprietors we came away with an LGB starter set, some extra track and a supply of steam oil, and we are now the proud owners and operators of a small oval railway on the lawn.<br />
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<br />
The Boy is eagerly telling his friends that we will soon have five, six or seven tracks heading all over the garden, and stations representing different countries.<br />
<br />
I think this is highly unlikely. But given time and perhaps a lottery win I think we may reasonably aspire to have a garden railway worthy of the name within the next year or two. Watch this space for further reports.
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-13365367181210740022016-04-18T15:05:00.000+01:002016-04-22T15:06:40.744+01:00Winning the lotteryIf there is one thing I have learned from the white heat of the technological revolution, it is that it is always a seriously bad idea to consult an electronic device while in bed.<br />
<br />
Even if one manages to avoid accidentally flicking the switch that will unleash a tsunami of top class pornography, the chances of getting to, or back, to sleep are as close to zero as makes no difference.<br />
<br />
So very unlike my experience of the good old-fashioned book, magazine or newspaper, any of which are more or less guaranteed to bore me into the deepest of slumbers within minutes.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, when I woke in the early hours of this morning, I found that I could not resist sneaking a quick look at my iPad. Because I knew that, at 00.30 precisely, the Government was releasing the results of a lottery far more valuable and important than Camelot’s EuroMillions: the allocation of primary school places for September 2016.<br />
<br />
I would have found out then if only my device had remembered the necessary password, as it is supposed to do but rarely does. So I put temptation aside, screwed my eyes shut with the determination of a Border terrier fixed on laying down some zzzs in the face of bright sunshine and some nearby pneumatic drill action, and checked again shortly after 6 when I was up and about in the normal course of events, and able to access the Top Secret Folder in which my passwords (all different, constantly changing and fiendishly hard to guess, obviously) are stored.<br />
<br />
And there was great rejoicing in the House of Hann for the child previously described in these pages as The Baby, but now clearly overdue for promotion to The Boy Mk 2, had secured a place at our first choice school.<br />
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<br />
In reality this should have been no surprise given the operation of sibling preference and the fact that the school, though excellent in every respect, is not oversubscribed. A consequence, I imagine, not just of its being located in a fairly sparsely populated rural area but also almost on the boundary between two of the unitary local authorities into which our county was split by Labour in 2009. The fact that one of them came under Labour control last year suggests that there might have been some method in their apparent madness.<br />
<br />
I pressed the “accept” button with alacrity and rushed to share the good news with the other members of the family, who all received it with total indifference. Because they had assumed (correctly as it turned out) that this was what was going to happen all along.<br />
<br />
Personally, I feel that my pessimistic “what could possibly go wrong” mindset is of great benefit in allowing me to enjoy moments of elation when things do actually go right.
On the downside, there was no one interested in sharing the bottle of Champagne I had reserved for this happy occasion.
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-26074357692767940412016-04-17T14:59:00.000+01:002016-04-22T15:01:07.544+01:00A day out with ThomasMe: “Would you like to go and see Thomas the Tank Engine, boys?”<br />
<br />
Boys: “No.”<br />
<br />
Me: “Why not?”<br />
<br />
Boys: “We’d rather stay at home and play on our iPads.”<br />
<br />
(Technically Kindle Fires, but who am I to undermine their credibility in the playground?)<br />
<br />
Me: “Well we’re going anyway.”<br />
<br />
Boys: “Awwwwww.”
So it was that we drove to Llangollen and shelled out £52 – that’s fifty-two English pounds, more than I earned in a week in my first job – to chug to Carrog and back in the sort of 1960s Diesel Multiple Unit which I always hated so much when it was the mainstay of British Rail in my younger days; plus shunting back and forth in Llangollen station yard in a brake van propelled by a very reasonable simulacrum of Thomas himself.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>I would like to emphasise that this is NOT a selfie</i></b></span></td></tr>
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There was a puppet show and face-painting as well, but the boys quite reasonably consider all that sort of thing beneath their dignity. All they really want to do is go into shops and buy toys, with scant regard to price, quality or the fact that they already own most of the items on display.<br />
<br />
I managed to persuade them that there was no point forking out hundreds of pounds we have not got to buy model locomotives that I already possess, gathering dust in my loft in Northumberland.<br />
<br />
I assembled a large collection of them in the early 1990s, confident that I was making a brilliant investment for the future. And indeed auction results did seem to suggest that vintage Hornby trains were an appreciating asset, for a time.<br />
<br />
Only those prices were driven up by sad old men, like me, satisfying a lifelong yen to own the coveted toys they could never afford when they were children.<br />
<br />
A quarter of a century on, the same sad old men are dying or downsizing, and there is no one particularly interested in buying the collections they built up. Hence I am consistently advised that my models are worth less than I paid for them.<br />
<br />
Might as well let the children wreck them, then. That is, after all, what they were designed for. And at least it will give them some fun away from their iPads for a while.
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-86808495280877248502016-04-15T14:44:00.000+01:002016-04-22T14:45:53.506+01:00Northumberland versus New YorkIn the Hann family, we believe in democracy. So we held a vote on where to spend the school’s Easter holiday (that was not actually at Easter) and the results were as follows:<br />
<br />
Me: Northumberland (1 vote).<br />
<br />
Mrs H and Boys: New York (3 votes, no spoilt ballots).<br />
<br />
After various attempts to have the result weighted by age or otherwise set aside I came up with an ingenious compromise: they went to New York, while I went to Northumberland. I even helped them on their way by allowing them to use the air miles that have been lying idle since I last banked with an organisation that gave them away on credit card transactions, approximately two decades ago.<br />
<br />
I drove them to Manchester airport for their first security check-in of the day, given that they were travelling via Heathrow and would have to repeat the whole rigmarole there. I cheerily waved them off, but no one thought to look back and wave to me.<br />
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<br />
<br />
Apparently it was all great fun, though the elder Boy did manage to slip between the platform and the train while navigating the subway in the rush hour; luckily a couple of passers-by hauled him to safety. This tale improves with every telling (“Mummy, I could feel the wheel on my leg, starting to move”).<br />
<br />
Other highlights included Central Park Zoo, the High Line, the Transit Museum and the Empire State Building. I refrained from pointing out that remarkably similar attractions could be found in the UK, without making a seven-hour trans-Atlantic flight.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Proudly demonstrating their Geordie ancestry: two boys in T-shirts while everyone else is muffled in winter coats</i></b></span></td></tr>
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<br />
Most evenings they went to the same restaurant near their hotel and ate pizza. After their third visit, Mrs H suggested that maybe they could try somewhere different the next night.
They initially agreed, then The Boy Mk 2 came up with an even better idea: “We’ll go to the same place, but I’ll order something different.”<br />
<br />
As for Northumberland, it was very nice on the one and only day that the sun shone.<br />
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I missed them. I await an indication that they missed me.Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-14209870541980857312016-01-12T16:10:00.001+00:002016-01-12T16:10:36.809+00:00By working as a teamI was sitting in my non-functioning geriatric’s reclining chair by the gurgling log-burner in our kitchen early yesterday evening, a Bloody Mary by my side and <i>The Times </i>on my lap, when my elder son and heir unexpectedly appeared in the chair beside me.<br />
<br />
Now 6½, The Boy looked both intensely earnest and slightly odd. Though any concerns about the latter were swiftly dismissed when I remembered that he had recently lost both his upper front teeth, happily in the natural course of events rather than in a playground scrap.<br />
<br />
“Daddy,” he began, as he usually does. “Jamie wants to have 101 Dalmatians …”<br />
<br />
I was about to point out that we had already bought him the DVD, but was afforded no chance.<br />
<br />
“… and that means we’ll have 103 dogs with the two we’ve already got, so we need to buy a really big house and garden.”<br />
<br />
“OK, and how are we going to be able to afford that?”<br />
<br />
“By working as a team,” he responded, nodding earnestly, for all the world as though he had progressed overnight from primary school to a full-time career as a motivational speaker.<br />
<br />
“Do you have a great money-making idea, then?”<br />
<br />
“Yes, we can do it easily by working as a team. I’ve got £25.19 in my money box, Mummy’s got £30 and Jamie’s got £6.21. How many pounds have you got, Daddy?”<br />
<br />
“More than Mummy.”<br />
<br />
“How much more?”<br />
<br />
“Lots more.”<br />
<br />
“So can we buy a bigger house, then?”<br />
<br />
“How much do you think a bigger house would cost?”<br />
<br />
“Ooh, maybe two thousand pounds?”<br />
<br />
“Charlie, do you know how much this house cost?”<br />
<br />
“No.”<br />
<br />
“Three hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds.”<br />
<br />
“Wow!”<br />
<br />
“So a big house somewhere round here would cost getting on for a million pounds. Do you think we could raise a million pounds?”<br />
<br />
“Yes.”<br />
<br />
“How?”<br />
<br />
“By working as a team.”<br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Clearly I should have asked: "Why does he want Dalmatians when the Border terriers are so perfectly colour-coordinated with the furniture?"</i></b></span></td></tr>
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<br />
Shortly afterwards I heard him talking to his younger brother and Mummy upstairs, and got out of my chair and wandered up to eavesdrop and then intervene.<br />
<br />
“Jamie, Daddy says he’s got LOTS of pounds, so maybe we can buy a bigger house and you can have your Dalmatians.”<br />
<br />
“No, I said I had lots more pounds than Mummy. More than £30, that is.” (Quietly amazed that Mummy has any pounds at all, since she is even more famed for not carrying cash than Her Majesty The Queen.) “So I really don’t see how we can afford to move. We’ve got two houses as it is and we can’t really afford to keep those.”<br />
<br />
“Yes, we can.”<br />
<br />
“How?”<br />
<br />
“By working as a team.”<br />
<br />
I’ve always been a solitary writer and sole trader myself, but I look forward to this exciting new experience. Though at the risk of sounding cynical, I’ve bought a Euromillions ticket for tonight and suspect that there is slightly more chance of it yielding the price of a mansion than Hann teamwork.
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-52956653342712243972015-08-18T15:19:00.000+01:002015-08-18T15:21:12.101+01:00For you, the holidays are overI returned from holiday late on Sunday, after an inevitably long drive from Northumberland that was considerably lengthened by road works on the A1 south of Morpeth.<br />
<br />
Locals have angrily taken to Twitter to cite the resulting chaos as evidence of the need to make urgent progress on the Government’s pledge to dual the A1. Ignoring the fact that the problems afflict one of the bits that was dual carriageway already, until someone decided that the peak holiday travel season would be a good time to close half of it down.<br />
<br />
As I walked through the front door two freshly bathed small boys hurtled down the stairs, yelling greetings. The younger shouted “Charge!” and literally flung himself from several steps above where I stood. Given my age, slow reactions and legendary lack of co-ordination it was something of a miracle that I actually managed to catch him.<br />
<br />
“It’s a trust thing,” Mrs H explained. “It shows how much he trusts you.”<br />
<br />
I remarked that it could easily have made him much better acquainted with another sort of trust. The one that runs our local hospital.<br />
<br />
At any rate I feel able to mark down the fact that they were clearly pleased to see me as an indication that our two week family holiday in Northumberland had been a success.<br />
<br />
Much more of a success, certainly, than our previous attempt to spend two fun-filled, sun-filled weeks on the golden sandy beaches of England’s premier stretch of coast. On that occasion we spent 13 days out of 14 watching rain lash horizontally against the conservatory windows, while the 14th day of brilliant sunshine was naturally the one we had arranged to spend indoors with friends in Newcastle, in anticipation of the deluge continuing.<br />
<br />
It wasn’t sunny, as such, all the time. But it was generally dry and warm enough to be outdoors without either pullovers or displeasure.<br />
<br />
We spent a fair bit of time on the beach, at Alnmouth, Seahouses, Bamburgh or Druridge Bay. The last was the greatest revelation: I had forgotten just how beautiful it is.<br />
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<br />
We spent nearly every half decent summer Sunday there when I was a child, driving in my Dad’s white Ford Consul or later green Morris Oxford, with Grandma H (1881 - 1973) in the back, always clad in black like the granny in Giles’s cartoons.<br />
<br />
Out of the car boot came a primus stove encased in an old biscuit tin, on which Dad would first heat up Heinz cream of tomato soup, always diluted with milk, then brew tea for the grown-ups while I tucked into the packets of tinned salmon sandwiches. Then it was off over the dunes for an afternoon on the beach and in the sea while Grandma dozed in the car.<br />
<br />
I have an abiding memory of discovering buried treasure in the sand one day: a hoard not just of old pennies but of shillings, florins and half crowns. My Dad offered to look after it for me. I never saw it again. With hindsight it is only fair to add that it might have fallen out of his trouser pocket in the first place.<br />
<br />
Anyway, our days on the beach were just like that, only minus my late parents, the primus stove, the buried treasure and the canvas windbreak that might actually prove rather a good investment for 2016, if I still own a house in Northumberland and am permitted to return there for my holiday.<br />
<br />
The boys would certainly be in favour. I asked the elder yesterday morning if he had enjoyed the break and he said he had.<br />
<br />
“Would you like to go back again at half term?”<br />
<br />
“Yes.”<br />
<br />
“I think Mummy wants to go to Majorca.”<br />
<br />
“I don’t want to go anywhere they don’t speak English! I like it here!”<br />
<br />
As Mrs H often observes, it was just like I had been shrunk and started speaking in a higher pitched voice.<br />
<br />
The irony is that she also says that she shows him pictures of Majorcan villas and hotels, with swimming pools and sandy beaches, and asks if he would like to go there. And he says he would, very much. So long as he can make himself understood. “I don’t want to spend my time pointing at things!”<br />
<br />
On the one hand this desire to please both parents by telling them slightly different things might point to a future career in diplomacy.
On the other, I don’t think that a refusal to converse in anything but English is necessarily going to constitute a strength with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office selection panel.<br />
<br />
Our nearest State secondary school brands itself as a “specialist language college”. So I suppose I’d better stop writing this blog and apply myself to something more remunerative, with a view to saving up to pay his school fees somewhere else.
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-15469318628464736882015-07-08T20:29:00.000+01:002015-07-08T20:29:15.435+01:00And that's why I are threeThere was a gentle knock on the study door as I was wading through my daily delivery of press cuttings this morning.<br />
<br />
“What is it?”<br />
<br />
The senior boy, who plays the role of shop steward on such occasions, replied: “Daddy, Jamie would like some paper to draw on.”<br />
<br />
“Come on in, then. Jamie, how many sheets would you like?”<br />
<br />
Of course, I already knew the answer. Three. It is always three. Because, as you may well have heard, “I are three.”<br />
<br />
A couple of days ago he asked Mrs H, “Mummy, do you know why I are three?”
She shook her head and received a pitying look.<br />
<br />
“Because I’ve been one, and I’ve been two. And that’s why I are three.”<br />
<br />
I think you will find that his logic is impossible to fault.
<br />
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<br />Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-49380639090871928872015-07-06T17:03:00.000+01:002016-01-12T17:36:18.317+00:00All's well that ends wellOur drive back from the perfect wedding on Sunday was enlivened by an exciting combination of mechanical brinkmanship and domestic drama.<br />
<br />
My new Land Rover Discovery Sport, acquired at the end of March, had lulled me into a false sense of security by not going conspicuously wrong within a few hours of exiting the showroom, as Land Rovers usually do.<br />
<br />
So I was surprised when a red warning light and the words “Restricted Performance” flashed up on the dashboard as I was driving in the fast lane of the M25. Though, being the M25, “fast” equated to approximately 15mph. Which isn’t even fast for a pushbike.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-size: small;">Like this, it was. Only red.</span></i></b></td></tr>
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<br />
After a while, though, the pressure of traffic eased enough for me to able to accelerate. Only I couldn’t, at any rate with my customary ease, because the car would not change gear properly. I quickly established that this could be overcome by jabbing the accelerator pedal in a way that apparently encouraged it to do so.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile a missed call on Mrs H’s phone proved to be from the lady charged with looking after our darling boys for the weekend, asking where I keep my tools. This is never a good sign.<br />
<br />
Specifically, she was looking for a large screwdriver to remove the door handle from our bedroom, because “it wasn’t working any more” and our younger son was stuck inside.<br />
<br />
I suggested that this might more likely have something to do with the bolt underneath the handle, which it duly proved he had used to lock himself in.<br />
<br />
Could he unbolt it, though?<br />
<br />
Silly question.<br />
<br />
After a wide-ranging discussion on whether the bedroom windows were open (possibly) and whether we had a ladder long enough to reach them (definitely not) Mrs H had the brainwave of ringing our friendly local builder, who kindly drove around to the house and released the child from the room using a traditional combination of science and targeted violence.<br />
<br />
We were advised that the boy emerged from the room with a broad grin on his face.
His older brother, meanwhile, admitted that the reason Jamie had run into the room and locked the door behind him was that he had taken it upon himself to brush the child’s hair before they set off to visit their grandparents.<br />
<br />
“I just wanted him to look smart,” he said, knowing full well that the only thing Jamie hates more than having his hair brushed is having it washed.<br />
<br />
Still, all’s well that ends well.<br />
<br />
And so too with the car, which I nursed as far as Beaconsfield Services before turning off the engine and turning it back on again. At which, as I expected, the warning light disappeared.<br />
<br />
Still having the best part of 200 miles to cover to get home I rang the experts at Land Rover who said, among other gems, “No warning light, no problem … Yes, that often happens … Good luck, Mr Hann.”<br />
<br />
So the solution to my motoring problems has become the same as the one to all my IT issues. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”<br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Untroubled by mountains, floods, blizzards ...<br />the M25 at 15mph, on the other hand ...</i></b></span></td></tr>
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<br />
Over lunch on Monday I told the story to a colleague who owns an equally new Range Rover Sport.
“Happens all the time,” he said. As though it were perfectly normal to pay around £80,000 for a luxury motor car and have to turn it off and on from time to time to keep it moving.<br />
<br />
We wound down from our trauma by taking the boys for a short walk down the lane by our house: the younger on his “new” trike (£10 from the local swapshop on Facebook) and the elder on the shiny new scooter he had been given for his birthday. It had remained in its box until now.<br />
<br />
While he was much excited by its shininess, and the light-up footboard, he proved to be handicapped by having no idea how to use it. This was, apparently, the scooter’s fault. So much so that he rapidly dumped it by the roadside and pronounced it “Bloody rubbish.”<br />
<br />
“Where did he get that word from?” I asked.<br />
<br />
“John Cleese says it in <i>Charlotte’s Web</i>,” Mrs H replied.<br />
<br />
Amazingly putting me in the clear once again.Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-21033770973913927302015-07-05T16:59:00.000+01:002015-07-08T20:28:49.832+01:00Just perfectWe went to the perfect wedding yesterday. Which is a pretty remarkable thing for me to write, given that I normally don’t like weddings at all.<br />
<br />
My age and outlook have combined to give me a decided preference for funerals, where there is usually the chance of joining in a rousing hymn or two, and an even better excuse for getting drunk after the service.<br />
<br />
Added to which, I was effectively banned from attending weddings for some years after I was deemed to have behaved so appallingly anti-socially at one in particular that I couldn’t be trusted to go to any others.<br />
<br />
This one, though, was very special. Held on the lawn of a lovely hotel in Sussex, it benefited from perfect weather, a gorgeous bride, handsome groom, world class music and some very entertaining fellow guests.<br />
<br />
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<br />
I particularly enjoyed talking to the elderly great aunt who believed that everyone in the world who aspired to receive a British tourist in their country should learn to speak English. While over the wedding breakfast I derived great pleasure and comfort from the company of the distinguished (knighthood, FRS) scientist whose travel ambitions were strictly limited to the occasional outing from his palatial home in Cambridge to his moated manor house in Suffolk. An approach to “abroad” curiously similar to my own.<br />
<br />
There were some excellent and heartfelt speeches, too, particularly from my godson the groom. He told the company that he was ignoring a strict instruction from his bride to talk for no more than five minutes, and was taking as his model the 25 minute speech I had delivered at my own wedding.<br />
<br />
I was later moved to check my wedding script, and found that it should have taken no more than 17 minutes to deliver, even allowing for drunken stumbles and pauses to allow the gales of appreciative laughter to wash over. Clearly it just seemed like 25 minutes to those in my audience.
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-36137613766822517192015-07-02T22:44:00.001+01:002015-07-02T22:44:47.851+01:00Are I two, Mummy?Today we are officially halfway through 2015, meaning that I am officially a useless blogger for having failed to post anything at all since last December.<br />
<br />
In my defence I am an old man, with the inevitable ravages of age on my energy levels undoubtedly exacerbated by obesity.<br />
<br />
I never said it was going to be a good defence.<br />
<br />
Still, there is undoubtedly some progress to report. Yesterday, when Mrs H picked our now six-year-old boy up from school, his form teacher mentioned that there was a letter for us in his book bag.<br />
<br />
“Yes,” said Charlie proudly. “I’m going to be in Form 3 next year!”<br />
<br />
“That is supposed to be a private letter to your parents, Charlie.”<br />
<br />
Still, at least it demonstrates that he can read, and that the taxpayers’ investment in his education has not been entirely wasted.<br />
<br />
I guess it also demonstrates a modicum of curiosity and initiative, neither of which is altogether unwelcome.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile his younger brother is three, and very focused on being so. Quarter him a sandwich for his tea and he will only eat three pieces. Offer him a sweet and he will demand three as follows:<br />
<br />
“Are I two, Mummy? Are I two? No, I are three. So I have to have three sweets.”<br />
<br />
Last week we decided that the time had come to begin giving the six-year-old some pocket money, and fixed on £2 a week as an appropriate starting rate.<br />
<br />
“What about me?” asked the three-year-old.<br />
<br />
“Do you think we should give Jamie some pocket money as well?’ asked Mrs H.<br />
<br />
“Yes,” said Charlie.<br />
<br />
“All right, Jamie. You can have two pounds a week as well.”<br />
<br />
“No, I have to have three pounds, because I’m three.”<br />
<br />
“Well that’s not fair because I’m only getting two pounds, and I’m six.”
And so on.<br />
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<br />
<br />
We had my 90-year-old aunt to stay last weekend, and on Monday I picked her and Jamie up from home before collecting Charlie from school.
Shortly afterwards, in the fairly narrow lane between the school and our house, we met a bus coming the other way at some speed.<br />
<br />
“Oh, shit!” yelled Jamie from his car seat in the back.<br />
<br />
“Is that a nice word to use in front of your Great Aunt?”<br />
<br />
“No,” said Charlie. “But once Mummy said ‘Oh, shit!’ so now Jamie always says ‘Oh shit!’ when we nearly hit something.”<br />
<br />
Whether it’s confidential letters or the occasional expletive, nothing gets past these children.
Given that they live with me, the only puzzle is that their conversation does not consist entirely of barrack room swear words and politically incorrect allusions. Mrs H suggests that this is because “even they know it is wrong” and are therefore clearly more mature than I am.Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-24349827971757325242014-12-19T15:09:00.000+00:002014-12-19T15:09:04.806+00:00You silly old man<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
My elder son had a meltdown yesterday evening because I told him he was five-and-a-half.<br />
<br />
“No, I’m not. I’m five-and-a-quarter.”<br />
<br />
“Well, you <b><u>were</u></b> five-and-a-quarter. But today is exactly six months since your birthday, so that makes you five-and-a-half.”<br />
<br />
“I’m not, I’m not, I’m <b><u>NOT</u></b>. Five-and-a-quarter is more than five-and-a-half, and I’m <b><u>FIVE-AND-A-QUARTER</u></b>!”<br />
<br />
His mother chipped in to try and explain which number was bigger than the other, and I attempted to introduce the concept of five-and-three-quarters, but it was all to no avail. So we gave up, as we usually do. The boy is five-and-a-quarter and may well remain so until he turns six, or possibly 16. It’s much easier that way.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile my younger son had a meltdown this morning because he doesn’t listen to a word I say. He’s endearingly small, so I have a tendency to call him things like “little chap” or sometimes “Babos”, a name devised for him by his elder brother.<br />
<br />
He does not like these descriptions at all because: “I’m a big boy!”<br />
<br />
This morning I remembered for once and addressed him as “big boy”, but I still got in response “You silly old man! I’m a big boy!”<br />
<br />
To be fair, he’s much closer to the truth in the first part of his analysis than he is in the second.<br />
<br />
I’m still waiting for an improvement on his memorable announcement of a couple of weeks ago: “You silly old man, you don’t know anything. I’m two. I know things!”<br />
<br />
I certainly thought I knew everything when I was a child, but I don’t remember developing a sense of intellectual superiority quite so early. In fact, at two-and-three-quarters, I am pretty sure that I regarded my mother as the fount of all knowledge and was so terrified of my father that I hardly dared to speak to him at all.<br />
<br />
Now I’m 60 and am increasingly conscious that I know almost nothing. It’s lucky that neither of my children read this blog, or they’d be almost certain to post comments eagerly agreeing with me.Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-15565180257394065182014-10-17T15:26:00.000+01:002014-10-17T15:26:08.097+01:00Daddy, you don't understandI don’t know which idiot introduced my children to the world of <i>Milkshake</i> on Channel 5. Until recently they had seemed perfectly happy with CBeebies, which offers a similar mix of cartoons, interspersed with commentary from preternaturally cheerful young adults. I enjoyed observing these to see if there were any conceivable diversity box that the HR department had failed to tick when making their selection of the “talent”, but I never managed to catch them out.<br />
<br />
Critically, being on the BBC, CBeebies also contains no advertising breaks.<br />
<br />
Now my boys benefit from <i>Peppa Pig</i> and <i>Thomas and Friends</i>, the undoubted highlight of their morning viewing, which even a trainspotter like me has to admit captures many essential aspects of British steam railways very accurately. If one can overlook the fact that locomotives, carriages and wagons don’t actually speak.<br />
<br />
However, they also get bombarded every fifteen minutes or so with an intense burst of advertising, from which I deduce that the campaign for gender neutral toys really does have a very long way to go.<br />
<br />
This morning I noticed that the evil capitalist advertisers had already started sowing the seeds of what might constitute an ideal Christmas gift. So, as a distraction technique from something that looked likely to prove particularly expensive, I interrupted my elder boy’s consumption of his boiled egg to ask whether he had given any thought to what he might like for Christmas this year.<br />
<br />
“Yes, I’ve made a wish,” I thought he replied.<br />
<br />
“A wish, eh? Well, I hope your wish comes true.”<br />
<br />
He gave me a penetrating look. “No, Daddy, I’ve made a <b><u>LIST</u></b>.”<br />
<br />
“Well, the thing is, Charlie, Mummy and Daddy have just bought this house and we haven’t got any money, so you might not be able to get everything on your list this year.”<br />
<br />
He had been sitting some way off on the pew we inherited when we bought our converted chapel, having left space for Mummy to sit down between us. Only she was too busy making his packed lunch to do so.<br />
<br />
But now he moved along right next to me, and brought his face unusually close to mine. He was wearing the pitying look of someone addressing a very confused elderly person, and he spoke clearly and slowly.<br />
<br />
“You don’t understand, Daddy,” he asserted. “You don’t <b><u>NEED</u></b> any money to buy Christmas presents.”<br />
<br />
“Really. Why’s that?”<br />
<br />
“Because Santa makes them.”<br />
<br />
Having thoroughly depressed myself by taking a look at my bank balance this morning, I very much hope that he turns out to be right.
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-89955595169235477402014-04-29T09:46:00.000+01:002014-04-29T09:46:59.937+01:00Curls are for girlsObviously the Hanns occupy a progressive household in which huge efforts are made to avoid sexual stereotyping. Nevertheless our boys manfully persist in playing with model trains, cars and farm animals rather than dolls. Though they do at least make an occasional stab at cooking, both with plastic ingredients and with the real thing.<br />
<br />
Reports from families blessed with daughters suggest that they face far greater challenges in persuading their little charges to eschew pink and take an interest in things mechanical rather than furry and frilly. One of Mrs Hann’s contemporaries was reduced to mild despair last week when her five-year-old daughter announced, with the know-all air of everyone her age: “Don’t be silly, Mummy. I can’t be a doctor. I’m a girl. I have to be a nurse.”<br />
<br />
Still, at least we continue to strike one outstanding blow for equality. Best described by the long-suffering Northumbrian who had the misfortune to follow my family around a series of shops in Rothbury a couple of weeks ago. As the circus created havoc in the queue for the till at the Co-op, he said to Mrs Hann sympathetically:<br />
<br />
“Ye knaa, it could’ve been worse. Ye could have had two boys!”<br />
<br />
“I have got two boys,” Mrs Hann replied rather coldly, at the same time making a mental note that it was probably time to do something about the younger boy’s hairstyle, which lies at the root of the recurring confusion.<br />
<br />
Like his elder brother (and indeed his father at a similar age) young Jamie had at that time a full head of winsome blond curls. Charlie and I both had haircuts that did for ours when we were two or thereabouts. Up to now Jamie has resisted, clasping his hands to his head and crying “No my hair!” when anyone suggests applying some clippers to it.<br />
<br />
The photograph that graced my last entry was actually taken as long ago as last September, and was chosen because it was the only photograph I had to hand of him with his chief comforter Ni-ni (pronounced to rhyme with pi or, for that matter, pie. He chose the name himself because his mother handed the thing to him last thing every evening with the words “Night night” and he reasonably assumed that this was the name of the toy.)<br />
<br />
Until Saturday morning he looked like this, with curls so long that they could easily be made into a pigtail:<br />
<br />
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<br />
And then on Saturday Mrs Hann took him to the hairdresser, with her heart hardened to resist his protests and turn him into a stereotypically short-haired boy.<br />
<br />
At this point I intended to follow the above “before” shot with an “after” photo. But as it turns out I don’t actually need to bother you with that, because only a real expert would be able to tell the difference.<br />
<br />
This is because Jamie kicked up such a monumental fuss that it was decided by all concerned that it would be easier just to leave his hair long until he himself decides the time is right to make it otherwise.<br />
<br />
Shoppers of Rothbury and Malpas please be warned that the pretty little blonde girl in the dungarees may actually be a boy, particularly if he is holding hands with a white-haired Operation Yewtree suspect who is pretending to be his father.
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-82992609158637748252014-04-25T17:44:00.000+01:002014-04-25T17:44:04.120+01:00The rest of you are all rubbishTime is no longer gently trickling away, like sand through an hourglass. It is going in a roaring gush, like a lavatory supplied by a Thomas Crapper high level cistern with a knackered ballcock.<br />
<br />
In little more than a month I shall be 60, and drawing my pension. Admittedly only the occupational pension of £728 per annum I apparently earned in five years’ hard labour at a City stockbroking firm between 1978-83. The partners’ Antipodean heirs and successors sportingly went to some considerable trouble to track me down and advise me of this windfall, which was very decent of them. It must, I suppose, have been a non-contributory pension scheme as I certainly wouldn’t have volunteered to set aside any of my meagre income to provide for an old age I was convinced I would never live to enjoy.<br />
<br />
At that time nuclear war still seemed a very real possibility. One of the incidental attractions of relocating from central London to north Northumberland in 1986 was that it seemed to afford a slightly greater chance of surviving the inevitable holocaust. Shortly after I moved <i>The Guardian</i> published a map showing the USSR’s nuclear targets in the UK, in order of priority. Number one was Heathrow airport, from whose shadow I had just escaped. Number two was RAF Boulmer, linchpin of the UK’s air defence system, located on the Northumberland coast about ten miles from my cottage. I realised then that I was doomed.<br />
<br />
But life is full of surprises and so I now find myself approaching the happy day when I can get my hands on a Senior Citizen’s railcard, yet with two children under the age of five.<br />
<br />
They delight me much more than I delight them, on the evidence of recent conversations.<br />
<br />
A couple of weeks ago the elder boy announced that he loved Mummy and my wife and I thought it would be a good idea to explore whether such sentiments were more widely shared.
So I asked two-year-old Jamie whether he loved Mummy and received an unequivocal “no”.<br />
<br />
Pursuing the theme, I asked for his view on Daddy, his brother, grandparents and the family pets, all with the same result.<br />
<br />
“So who does Jamie love?”<br />
<br />
There followed a long pause.<br />
<br />
Eventually, after much thought, he ventured. “My love Ni-ni.” (His name for the Jellycat toy leopard from which he has been inseparable almost since birth.)<br />
<br />
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<br />
“My love Iggle Piggle.” (Another soft toy.)<br />
<br />
“My love Old Piggle.” (Iggle Piggle contains some electronic gizmo that means it can’t be machine washed and it is, in consequence, absolutely filthy. So I took him to Toys ‘R’ Us and bought a new one with a view to putting the original in the bin. Predictably, we now have two filthy Iggle Piggles which have to be carted around with him at all times.)<br />
<br />
“My love Peter Rabbit.” (A fourth soft toy borrowed from his brother.)<br />
<br />
“My love Becca.” (One of his key workers at nursery.)<br />
<br />
Then silence.<br />
<br />
“Anyone else?” I asked, hopefully.<br />
<br />
“No. The rest of you are all rubbish.”<br />
<br />
A view confirmed when I went to collect him from nursery the other evening (something I rarely do) and was greeted by tears and a thrust-out lower lip.<br />
<br />
“Not you! Mummy!”<br />
<br />
“Come on Jamie,” said an emollient nursery worker. “It’s Daddy! You love Daddy!”<br />
<br />
“No my don’t! Daddy’s stupid rubbish!”<br />
<br />
I had to bribe him with two miniature Milky Bars to get him into the car.<br />
<br />
So if you see a suspicious elderly man in a three piece suit with a watch chain laying a trail of sweets to tempt a sweet, curly-headed child into the back of his car, please don’t call the police straight away. At least not until you have checked that it isn’t me.
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8864051577474343717.post-39069889128157456002014-01-07T16:49:00.000+00:002014-01-07T16:51:34.157+00:00Depression? What do I know?I have just filed my first newspaper column in four weeks. I could not produce one for 18 December because I was too depressed to think, let alone write. Then 25 December was out, for obvious reasons, and on 1 January I was still pretty depressed (it’s enough to get anyone down, New Year) and fundamentally couldn’t be arsed.<br />
<br />
I alluded to my depression in my last column of <a href="http://www.keithhann-whyohwhy.com/2013/12/a-brief-glimpse-of-high-life.html">11 December</a>. I have suffered from it for more than 40 years and during that time I have tried pretty much every therapy available apart from electric shock treatment and a frontal lobotomy. I have seen psychiatrists, psychotherapists, cognitive behavioural therapists and counsellors; taken Prozac and at least two other anti-depressant drugs; read countless articles and books on the subject; and tried a wide range of self-help measures from teetotalism and a tightly controlled diet to binge eating and getting monumentally pissed.
So I think I know a fair bit about depression by now.<br />
<br />
And yet, every single time I write a word on the subject, up pops at least one angry letter to the editor asserting that I am not taking the subject seriously enough, and have no idea what I am talking about.
<br />
<br />
To me, frankly, this is like some slurring bloke in a Cambridge pub telling Stephen Hawking that he knows fuck all about cosmology.<br />
<br />
This time the letter to the paper came from a Newcastle city councillor, lumping together my column with something written a few days later by the self-styled poet Kate Fox: “Both writers I felt seriously under-estimated the impact that this condition has on the individual, their family, friends and employer. Eating a bar of chocolate is no solution to this devastating illness as Kate implies.”<br />
<br />
Well, he’s right there. Eating a bar of chocolate won’t cure your depression, but it may well raise your spirits temporarily – as the trip to London I described on 11 December did for me, before the dark clouds descended once more.<br />
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On the whole I have found that a complete change of scene is one of the more effective specifics against depression. The difficulty is the complete unpredictability of the condition. There have been times when drinking a couple of pints of beer with a friend has lifted me out of the deepest pit of gloom; many more when I simply could not face drinking with anyone; and others when I have accepted the drink and the well-intentioned company and left the pub far more miserable than when I went in. And done nothing at all for the mood of the person or persons I was with.<br />
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I <b><u>THINK</u></b>, after all these years, that I discern some patterns. I am much more likely to succumb to depression in the winter months, when daylight and sunshine are in short supply. The prospect of events I loathe, like conferences and parties, always induces gloom (so the combination of winter and the festive season is invariably bad news).<br />
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I have also formulated the following simple self-help rules, which I have shared with others and know that they have proved positive for them, too:<br />
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<b>1. Get up early. </b>Don’t lie in bed feeling sorry for yourself. It only makes things worse.<br />
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<b>2. Take exercise.</b> The single most positive thing anyone can do to drive away depression is to take a long, brisk walk – ideally in the hills.<br />
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<b>3. Don’t overeat.</b> (Says the 16 stone porker with a lifetime’s supply of chocolates stacked up by the sofa at home.)<br />
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<b>4. Don’t drink</b> – though, as noted earlier, moderate tactical intakes of alcohol may help to shift a stubbornly low mood.<br />
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<b>5. Read a good book</b>: it’s got harder and harder to find the time, as we all become more and more addicted to social media, but getting really involved in a genuinely “unputdownable” book has proven itself time and again as a wonderful way to raise morale.<br />
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Now, I know all that from long and bitter experience, but it did not stop me from spending the best part of December lying around feeling miserable, unable to kick-start myself out of my torpor. As a fellow sufferer remarked to me over Christmas, it’s like walking in treacle. You can’t think straight, you can’t work, you don’t want to socialise, you know you’re going to be lousy company and it seems fairest all round to stay at home alone.<br />
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Getting out of the house for a walk seems like torture. The first half mile or so is almost unbearable. But persevere and I guarantee that you will start to feel better.<br />
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Similarly, going back to work is hell. I did it yesterday morning, and every single task I attempted took at least twice as long as it should have done, and left me convinced that I had made a complete hash of it. In the days when I worked as part of a team I would shout and scream at people on the slightest provocation on first days back like this, and reduce them or me (or both) to tears.<br />
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Yet the reality is that the quality of my written work does not suffer if I can just force myself to produce it. Bizarrely, I have come up with some of my best humorous material at times when I have been almost prostrate with depression.<br />
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And, as with the walking, perseverance brings its rewards. It is now the afternoon of Day 2 and I am feeling better, able to answer the phone without dread, engage in a spot of banter and work my way through many of the tasks that I have now been putting off for a month because I could not face them.<br />
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I may come across in print as being unsympathetic about depression, because I am quite unsympathetic to myself. Fundamentally, I know that I am a lazy sod who hates parties, so saying “I can’t go: I’m depressed” is almost too convenient an excuse. But like the bloke who set out to get himself repatriated from Colditz by pretending to be mad, and duly ended up in a British loony bin, the symptoms are no less real and painful for perhaps, to some extent at least, having wished them upon myself.<br />
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Why am I writing this? Because I do know about depression, and I thought it might be useful to set out why, and some of the lessons I have learned. If you are feeling as miserable today as I was a few weeks ago, try getting up and going for a walk. And if you really can’t face it, maybe think about trying it tomorrow.<br />
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The other reason is that far too many people are too embarrassed to acknowledge their condition. I used to be that way myself, blaming my absences from work on stomach upsets or flu (with the inevitable result that I would be stricken with a genuine stomach upset or flu shortly thereafter, and would be bereft of a convincing explanation). It is so much better to be honest and upfront. You’ll be amazed how many people respond by saying that they have suffered from depression themselves, or have first hand experience of it in their families.<br />
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At any rate, I have never encountered anything but sympathy and have somehow managed to hold down a reasonably pressured and well-rewarded job for 35 years despite my periodic bouts of misery.
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But then, as my wife likes to remind me at least once every day, I am a very lucky man.
Keith Hannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11731343774180793742noreply@blogger.com1