A Contribution To The Danny Baker Show
This morning Danny Baker on his BBC Radio 5 show, asked for contributions about decorating the smallest room in the house.
In the 1960s, my parents were thinking about moving. They saw this nice house in Palmers Green, which had a totally black toilet, with black walls, floor and even a black suite.
They didn’t buy the house! I should say that even with my father’s excellent decorating skills, he was totally daunted at the prospect of removing all that paint. I even heard him talk about the house, years later.
I was invited to discuss this on air with Danny and he said, he’d once used the same colour for a kitchen.
He said, it was a disaster! especially, as the gloss paint he used wouldn’t dry and he’d even painted the lino.
There could be use though, for this crime against good taste.
If say your partner is keen to move and you are totally against it, what better way of putting off buyers, than to paint the toilet black.
It would also be a good way to get even with your ex-spouse in an acrimonious divorce, especially, if they got the house!
Real Fans Don’t Like Certain Teams
I’m a real football fan, who has followed the game probably since about the age of six or so, when my father first took me to White Hart Lane. One of the early games I saw was when Newcastle and the legend, Jackie Milburn, were visitors. I think Spurs won and I do know that Ted Ditchburn, their goalkeeper was outstanding and that Jackie Milburn missed a penalty. Other teams, I saw in the fifties and early sixties with my father, included Leeds with John Charles and Stoke City with Stanley Matthews. I watched most Cup finals of that era on the television, but the earliest I remember is probably the Manchester City v Birmingham City final of 1956, when Bert Trautmann broke his neck and Don Revie played as a deep-lying centre-forward.
my father had had a long history of both playing football and supporting Spurs. He always said, that he first went to Spurs in a pony and trap, and hisfather paid a boy to hold the horse’s head during the match. i think too, he’d been at the 1921 Cup Final.
I started going to Ipswich when my parents moved to Felixstowe. Usually, I was taken by the next door neighbour as getting between Ipswich and Felixstowe in those days wasn’t easy by public transport. As I was living in London most of the time, I still cycled to some of Spurs home matches and later at Liverpool University, I visited both Everton and Liverpool and quite a lot of teams in the area, including Manchester United, Preston, Leeds, Blackpool, Blackburn and Burnley. I didn’t carry a camera as I do now, so there is no record of the visits to the old grounds. Some were very rudimentary and far inferior to how they are today. I remember that getting to Old Trafford involved getting a steam powered shuttle train from the centre of Manchester. I think this was probably, when I took the train from Huyton.
Over the years, I’ve developed a dislike of certain teams. I won’t mention them all, but the usual suspects are there.
This last few weeks, I’ve been watching the story unfold at Cardiff City. I don’t like bullies and I very much feel that the club, the fans and the manager have been very badly treated.
So I felt quite a bit of delight, when Sunderland scored their second goal tonight at Cardiff.
To not win couldn’t have happened to a more deserving owner!
Would I Go Back To Biarritz Again?
Of course I would!
Especially, if I could be guaranteed some weather like I had just experienced. The temperature had been about 14 °C with a humidity of over 50%
I do wonder about my father’s health. He suffered from a similar catarrh to that I’ve suffered for the last couple of years and he had lots of skin problems. He always put the latter down to the solvents he used in his printing business. I’m pretty certain he was a coeliac too, as I must have got the genes from somewhere.
I also remember him saying once that he had been to Biarritz. So did he go because he felt healthy there, as I just had?
I don’t know and there’s no-one I can ask who knew him, who’s still alive.
But as I seem to feel better in Biarritz, if I think I need a break in the winter, I think I’ll go.
Trains seem to take between five and six hours from Paris and there seems to be at least one train every hour.
A Pre-Match Meal In Ipswich
Yesterday, it was football at Ipswich at 19:45 due to SKY, so it was an early train to avoid the rush hour and a pre-match meal in Pizza Express on the waterfront.
PX is the only really coeliac-friendly restaurant in the town centre. I’ve yet to find a good Indian one, close to the football ground.
PX was heaving, so it does appear that the demand might be coming up in the town, which in my view and those of some of my friends is a restaurant graveyard. I always wondered if East Suffolk people go to bed early, ever since my father and I used to walk home from his club in Felixstowe at about 21:30 and see all the houses cmpletely dark.
But getting to and from the quay and PX in the dark is a walker’s nightmare, with uneven pavements and all sorts of barriers everywhere. How many drunks will tip into the dock?
However there did seem to be a lot of good development going on at the waterfront, but knowing Ipswich as I do, I doubt that it will be complete for upwards of five to ten years.
The quay might end up as a good place to go, but it’s not that close to the town centre, the railway station and the other attractions in the town, like Christchurch Mansion, the Wolsey Theatre and the football ground.
If ever a town was crying out for a free circular bus-route that ran around the town centre like Manchester’s Metroshuttle, it is Ipswich!
At least though the meal was good and walking down the hill to the restaurant from the station was easy, even if I didn’t find the quickest route back to the football ground in the dark. In the light, I’d have had the liths to guide me!
I shall go again in the light!
Racism In Moscow
One of the stories dominating the news on my trip north was the racial abuse of Yaya Toure in Moscow by so-called fans of CSKA Moscow.
I shall be looking forward to the fifth of November and the return fixture in Manchester.
Knowing Manchester City fans, they might come up with an unusual and probably humorous protest, that everybody, except racists, will applaud.
As my father often said, there’s nothing that bigots, fascists and bullies hate more than ridicule.
Ed Milliband and the Daily Mail
We all have skeletons in our families. Mine is my uncle, who was one for the ladies and was always in trouble. During the Second World War, he actually had a bigamous marriage, from which there were children.
My father’s political leanings were very much Tory, but to the left of the party. He would probably have views like Kenneth Clarke today. But my father was a passionate anti-fascist, probably because of his partly Jewish ancestry. He was also one of the most non-racist men I have met of his generation. I can’t remember too well, but I don’t think he liked dictators and as he had names for them all in his Cockney poetry.
A couple of weeks ago, I met a man of my age, who said that his father was a died in the wool communist, who never condemned Stalin till the day he died. He joked about it, but I suspect that was because he was rather embarrassed by his father supporting Stalin. Alexei Sayle joked about his parents hard-line communism on The One Show last night.
I would suspect that the Milliband brothers, are in some ways embarrassed by some of the views of their father. Most of us have a similar view about our own father, although, I don’t think I ever heard mine, pontificate on anything controversial in a way, that we would find politically incorrect. Some of my mother’s views were not so acceptable?
All politicians live in glass houses, with everything they do, don’t do or have done under the greatest scrutiny. And all of their ancestors come under close scrutiny.
Just as the political views of Denis Thatcher, Alfred Roberts, Tony Booth and other related to previous Prime Ministers, have been important to the Press and the scandal-loving British public, Ralph Milliband‘s political views would come under scrutiny from a paper like the Mail, the Express or the Sun. Especially, as some on the left have hard left views very unacceptable to those in the Labour Party, who want to bring it into the twenty-first century.
So in my view the Milliband brothers should have clean about the more unacceptable views of their father years ago, and perhaps joked about it in a more sympathetic medium, as Alexei Sayle and others have done. I don’t have this problem with my father, but anyway, I’m not a politician and my father wasn’t either, so it’s not important.
Now that the Daily Mail has attacked Ed Milliband for his father’s views, the story is out in the open. The Mail’s behaviour since has been unacceptable, but Ed Milliband’s keeping it going is in many ways making it worse. I haven’t seen any comments from his brother. But then David’s in the United States, where communist connections bring a different reaction.
After all, everybody in the country now knows the full story of Ralph Milliband and it will play a large part in the next General Election. Those to the right will play the Reds under the bed card and those on the hard left will play their Class War one.
In my view though, Ed Milliband has shown a lack of judgement in how he handled his father’s views. Compare it with the way Tony Blair handled those of his father.
Today there is this report on the BBC entitled Ed Miliband urges Daily Mail owner to examine ‘culture’.
It’s not the culture of the Press that needs examining, it’s the culture of the country, where most people seem to value celebrity tittle-tattle well above real issues. Just look at the sales of celebrity magazines!
Ed Milliband is now on BBC Breakfast going on about it again.
Does he not know, when it is time to stop fanning the flames of an out-of-control fire?
The MacDonald Gill Exhibition In Ealing
I was going to Ealing to see the Macdonald Gill exhibition. There’s more about the exhibition and an example, here on the BBC
The MacDonald Gill Exhibition In Ealing
It was very much worth visiting. I seem to remember one of his maps, prints or posters somewhere in my past.
Perhaps, it was in an Underground station or my father had one in his print works. He had the machines to print large posters and I wonder if before the Second World War, he’d actually been asked to print some.
I’ll never know, as his print works is long gone.
It’s All Dropping Into Place
If I look at my father, he had breathing problems and I suspect so did his father as he suffered from asthma and died of pneumonia and other complications in his forties. Both were pretty heavy smokers and my grandfather was a heavy drinker too. My father used to tell stories of picking his father up late at night from various clubs in a very bad state and that’s probably why my father was a sensible drinker and why he brought me up to be the same. I never for instance ever saw my father drunk. My father’s only addiction other than his pipe, was industrial strength menthol catarrh tablets, which he consumed virtually all day, to try to get his throat clear.
As a child, I suffered similarly with my breathing and throat at times, but then we lived in a cold house, heated by electric fires, which must have made the air exceptionally dry. From about the age of eight, I had a south-facing room with big picture windows, which was very warm at times. I regularly, lost a term, usually the spring one, in my schooling. My doctor had no idea, about what was the problem, so they took my tonsils out, which was an all-purpose remedy in those days.
Things improved when I got to about twelve or so, and my parents just felt, I’d grown out of it. It could be that we were spending increasing time at Felixstowe, where my parents had bought a house to retire to, or it could be that I spent more and more time at my father’s print works in Wood Green. Who knows why? I don’t even have any medical records from that period, as my medical records restarted some time about 1969. So you can see why I’m all in favour of computerised medical records, which the patient can access when and where they want through the Internet!
I can remember my late teens very well and can’t ever remember going to the doctor or feeling unwell, especially at University in Liverpool, whilst working at Enfield Rolling Mills or in The Merryhills, or generally riding about on my bicycle.
I certainly didn’t feel ill, either in the early years of my marriage to C, either in Liverpool or in Melbourn near Cambridge. The first entry on my medical record, is a visit to the doctor in Melbourn about excessive diarrhoea, which looks like a classic glutening.
However things got a lot worse, when we moved to Shannon Place in St. John’s Wood. The flat was damp and cold and I can remember going to the doctor with lots of knee and arm pains. He recommended knee surgery, which I didn’t accept.
But then when we moved to the eleventh floor in Cromwell Tower, everything got better and in the three or four years we lived there, I never saw the doctor on my own behalf. But the flat was comfortably warm and the air was very fresh.
We then lived in Suffolk for forty years and only at odd occasions did my breathing problems come back.
That is until Celia died and I think in certain ways I reverted to my childhood habits; like wrapping myself in the bedclothes, keeping the house as warm as I could and avoiding going out. I started getting what looked like hay fever soon after C died in 2007.
Since my stroke and also since moving to London it has got a lot worse, but I’m now in a particularly airless house with little ventilation.
It might need to have heat recovery ventilation. Wikipedia says these are the benefits.
As building efficiency is improved with insulation and weather stripping, buildings are intentionally made more airtight, and consequently less well ventilated. Since all buildings require a source of fresh air, the need for HRVs has become obvious. While opening a window does provide ventilation, the building’s heat and humidity will then be lost in the winter and gained in the summer, both of which are undesirable for the indoor climate and for energy efficiency, since the building’s HVAC systems must compensate. HRV introduces fresh air to a building and improves climate control, whilst promoting efficient energy use.
Certainly, a proper system will be better than I’ve got now.
Letterpress Rules OK
This is an older post, that I have re-dated and brought up to date.
My father was a printer. And he was all letterpress. He would have used machines like this Original Heidelberg, although his two were probably older.
Original Heidelberg
Letterpress printing with movable type is one of the classic technologies that was invented in the Middle Ages by Johannes Gutenberg.
Movable Type
I spent most of my childhood in that printing works in Wood Green. I used to set the type for all sorts of letterheads, posters and brochures, but perhaps my biggest claim to fame, is that I used to do all of the handbills for the Dunlop tennis tournaments, that were held all over the UK in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Sadly, I do not have one of those handbills. If anybody has one, I’d love a photocopy. I’ve searched for years for one, but none exist. Even the archivist, who wrote the history of Dunlop, knows nothing about the tournaments and couldn’t find any reference to them.
I also learned to read and write with poster letters. These are of course backwards and you’d think that it would have caused me to have some sort of reading and writing problem. I suppose it may be one of the reasons for my atrocious handwriting in that I learned that printing, computers or typing is much better from an early age, but it did give me a strong mental alacrity in turning images through 180 degrees.
This involvement in letterpress also left me with some habits and pedantic actions.
For instance, I always refer to exclamation marks as shrieks, which I have inherited from my father.
I’m also very pedantic about spelling and some aspect of structure like apostrophes and plurals. I spell words with the proper use of ae and oe for instance. I spell archaeology with the diphthong and not as archeology. The difference is explained here.
The one thing I don’t seem to have inherited is my father’s good handwriting.
My father also had one of the oldest proofing presses, I’ve ever seen, but sadly there are no images of it. Mpst old ones you see tend to be Columbias made in the UNited States.
Proofing Press
This one is from about 1850 and was at least fifty years younger than my father’s. His probably ended up in a scrapyard, when a museum would have been a better bet. Printing museums are rather thin on the ground and there isn’t even one in Heidelberg! Although I did find a whole section in a museum in Belarus.
Wartime Printing in Belarus
My father’s letterpress business died.
Offset litho technology was coming in and because of the bizarre purchase tax system in operation in the 1950s and 1960s, it was cheaper for companies to do their own printing. Tax on plain paper was zero, but if it was printed it was 66%, so work it out for yourself. VAT would have solved the problem.
But now letterpress is coming back and like the printer who provided the pictures in this note, it is doing well.
There is nothing like the feel of a properly printed card or letterhead! And you can do so many clever things with a proper printing machine, like score, number, decolate and perforate.
A few years ago, I met one of people my father used to deal with at Enfield Rolling Mills. He explained how my father would use his skills to create production control documents and cards, to smooth the flow of work through the factory. That was the pinnacle of production control and workflow of its times.
It is a strange irony, that I made my money by writing software for project management. Is it in the genes?
You Can Go And Do It Yourself
There is an article in the comic of the Times today about Jamal Edwards and he uses this phrase and they say it could be his motto.
I like it! And it could have been my motto!
My father always used to say that we’re all the same, sitting on the toilet and to never be afraid of approaching anyone.
The Anonymous Widower 