I WAS musing the other day on the fact that Britain's so-called 'special relationship' with its North American cousins has so far this decade cost Tony Blair the Prime Ministership, may have lost him the European Presidency job and now looks likely to tip Gordon Brown out of Number Ten, Downing Street.
It shouldn't be this tough being kissing cousins with the USA but it is. Left-wingers (goddammed Commies who believe in state-subsidised health care for all!) deride Little Britain (pop: 60million) as the '51st State' and that got me thinking...
We'd be a damned sight more influential if we were state number 51. We'd certainly be the most populous state (more Congressional districts than any of the current biggies), we'd have two mouthy Lefties (in American terms, at least) shouting for us in the Senate and we'd own a whole Eastern seaboard'sworth of electoral college votes.
Where are Tom Paine, Jefferson and Franklin when we need them to fight the blackguards who belittle us?
No defamation without representation!
Monday 7 December 2009
Rupert, the globe's greatest grifter
I HAVE been conned by Rupert Murdoch before and I’m beginning to believe that he’s pulling the wool over my eyes once again.
The more I hear about his planned Operation Paywall the more I think that, great as he is, the guy is a grifter.
Remember the London Post? No, of course you don’t. Rupert’s vaunted national evening paper never existed, except as a brilliant ‘playwall’ behind which he constructed a weapon which resisted months of siege and won Britain’s greatest publishing war: Fortress Wapping.
For three months I was Assistant Editor (Day Desk) on project leader Charlie Wilson’s Newspaper That Would Never Be; I spent all that time in the USA on a ‘no-expense-spared, go anywhere’ mission to learn how American journalists produced newspapers using computers instead of glue-pots and Biros.
For me, the fairy story ended unhappily with one of those in-yer-face, “Shut the fuck up!” sessions with the unlikely Times editor after I demanded once too often to be allowed home to draw up a dummy and begin hiring production staff if (as I believed was the ‘plan’) we were to launch by October, 1985.
Of course, history has since taught us that the London Post launch, towards which I was working so hard, was Rupert’s equivalent of Churchill’s pre-D-Day inflatable tanks and balsa wood aircraft: Murdoch’s Operation Overlord was a scam designed to fool the battalions of bully-boy print unions.
And me.
Now, I have a horrible feeling he’s doing it again. The Boss (none of his ex-senior execs ever breaks the habit of calling him that) boasted to the world recently that he is determined to withdraw all of News Limited’s titles from Google as soon as he finds a way to erect his paywall.
No sooner was Sky carrying the Master and Commander’s words to the corners of the known world than one of his senior lieutenants, Times editor James Harding, outlined to the Society of Editors how his title planned to start charging a subscription for digital content in the spring.
It went down well inside the conference. A lot of mealier mouths than Murdoch’s are eager for the Citizen Paywall to dump Google, shut off the free news supply and . . . kerrching! A dozen and more digital Daily Deadlosses hit pay dirt again, and the advertisers can go to the devil.
But Keith Rupert Murdoch is an old newsprint man. As Matthew Norman recently noted in the Independent, “for a split second [during his Sky ‘paywall’ interview] Rupert was clearly bamboozled by the admittedly recherché term ‘online’. He doesn't speak the lingo at all, and barely understands it.”
He’s wily, of course. I have been monitoring recent US press comment (via free internet, of course) regarding the news paywall issue, and I’m certain Rupert does the same.
If so, he’ll know that almost universal media opinion across the land that gave us pay-per-view is that paywalls work fine where content is unimpeachably exclusive: The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and The Financial Times are proof of that. So, for that matter, is Sky Sports.
But what about the New York Times? The Grey Lady aches to re-erect the paywall it abandoned in 2007 after a two-year trial produced minimal uptake and only about £5million in annual revenue. What it DID succeed in doing was to induce bloggers to plunder almost at will its resources for public benefit.
Now, with its free-to-all online approach pulling in a steady, if unspectacular, ad revenue the NYT is America’s most popular online newspaper website with 18million unique visitors per month.
We might, in fact, all have been too easily fooled by Rupert’s apparent infatuation for the idea of ring fencing his internet newspaper properties for a king’s ransom.
Maybe The Boss isn’t so much in love with the internet as at war with it. Perhaps his loathing is directed at the content-plundering Google, which offers no direct return for his well-financed journalism. Could it be that he will eventually settle for a simple slice of the internet action in order to buy time for his precious, but declining print media?
James Harding may be simply following in the footsteps of the non-existent London Post’s Assistant Editor (Day Desk) who once swanned off across the Pond with a pocketful of expenses and a head full of nonsense.
Which Rupert Murdoch will the New Year bring? Prince of Paywalls? Or King of Conmen?
The more I hear about his planned Operation Paywall the more I think that, great as he is, the guy is a grifter.
Remember the London Post? No, of course you don’t. Rupert’s vaunted national evening paper never existed, except as a brilliant ‘playwall’ behind which he constructed a weapon which resisted months of siege and won Britain’s greatest publishing war: Fortress Wapping.
For three months I was Assistant Editor (Day Desk) on project leader Charlie Wilson’s Newspaper That Would Never Be; I spent all that time in the USA on a ‘no-expense-spared, go anywhere’ mission to learn how American journalists produced newspapers using computers instead of glue-pots and Biros.
For me, the fairy story ended unhappily with one of those in-yer-face, “Shut the fuck up!” sessions with the unlikely Times editor after I demanded once too often to be allowed home to draw up a dummy and begin hiring production staff if (as I believed was the ‘plan’) we were to launch by October, 1985.
Of course, history has since taught us that the London Post launch, towards which I was working so hard, was Rupert’s equivalent of Churchill’s pre-D-Day inflatable tanks and balsa wood aircraft: Murdoch’s Operation Overlord was a scam designed to fool the battalions of bully-boy print unions.
And me.
Now, I have a horrible feeling he’s doing it again. The Boss (none of his ex-senior execs ever breaks the habit of calling him that) boasted to the world recently that he is determined to withdraw all of News Limited’s titles from Google as soon as he finds a way to erect his paywall.
No sooner was Sky carrying the Master and Commander’s words to the corners of the known world than one of his senior lieutenants, Times editor James Harding, outlined to the Society of Editors how his title planned to start charging a subscription for digital content in the spring.
It went down well inside the conference. A lot of mealier mouths than Murdoch’s are eager for the Citizen Paywall to dump Google, shut off the free news supply and . . . kerrching! A dozen and more digital Daily Deadlosses hit pay dirt again, and the advertisers can go to the devil.
But Keith Rupert Murdoch is an old newsprint man. As Matthew Norman recently noted in the Independent, “for a split second [during his Sky ‘paywall’ interview] Rupert was clearly bamboozled by the admittedly recherché term ‘online’. He doesn't speak the lingo at all, and barely understands it.”
He’s wily, of course. I have been monitoring recent US press comment (via free internet, of course) regarding the news paywall issue, and I’m certain Rupert does the same.
If so, he’ll know that almost universal media opinion across the land that gave us pay-per-view is that paywalls work fine where content is unimpeachably exclusive: The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and The Financial Times are proof of that. So, for that matter, is Sky Sports.
But what about the New York Times? The Grey Lady aches to re-erect the paywall it abandoned in 2007 after a two-year trial produced minimal uptake and only about £5million in annual revenue. What it DID succeed in doing was to induce bloggers to plunder almost at will its resources for public benefit.
Now, with its free-to-all online approach pulling in a steady, if unspectacular, ad revenue the NYT is America’s most popular online newspaper website with 18million unique visitors per month.
We might, in fact, all have been too easily fooled by Rupert’s apparent infatuation for the idea of ring fencing his internet newspaper properties for a king’s ransom.
Maybe The Boss isn’t so much in love with the internet as at war with it. Perhaps his loathing is directed at the content-plundering Google, which offers no direct return for his well-financed journalism. Could it be that he will eventually settle for a simple slice of the internet action in order to buy time for his precious, but declining print media?
James Harding may be simply following in the footsteps of the non-existent London Post’s Assistant Editor (Day Desk) who once swanned off across the Pond with a pocketful of expenses and a head full of nonsense.
Which Rupert Murdoch will the New Year bring? Prince of Paywalls? Or King of Conmen?
First published in Press Gazette, December 2009
Sunday 6 December 2009
Hate the war, not the warrior
MAYBE it’s because Coldstream is only a mile or two down the road from my home that I took in the death of the latest British soldier in Afghanistan with a heavy heart. Perhaps it’s because he was a local lad.
Whatever it was, the news of Acting Sergeant John Amer, proud Coldstream Guardsman from Sunderland, husband of adoring wife Sue and the father of a young daughter who will know her father no more hit me harder than most.
He was the 99th British soldier to die this year; the 236th to die since we invaded in 2001. But the statistics are nothing compared with the loss his family – indeed a whole battalion of grieving families – is feeling as this awful conflict escalates.
I hate this war with a passion. Any right-minded person in a civilised society would lament the passing of these brave young soldiers – and they are all young people of my son’s and daughter’s age – as well as regretting the toll of civilian casualties that is being inflicted.
Trouble is by the time our despair at the never-ending casualty figures – desperately badly wounded men and women as well as the dead – and our growing opposition to the war reaches the front line it translates into a lack of regard for the men and women who are fighting OUR conflict and whom WE sent to that barbarous land.
Make no mistake: I hate this war and its horrifying consequences. But I’m proud of the lads and lasses who answered the call unhesitatingly.
There is an opportunity to communicate our pride and thanks to those serving men and women: next Tuesday, more than 200 men and women from the Second Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers are to march through Ashington and Morpeth to celebrate their homecoming after a six-month tour of duty which has seen seven of their comrades killed and a dozen badly wounded.
I am proud to say that men and women from my village and from the surrounding area are travelling south to raise a cheer for our returning heroes. I will try to be on the streets of l unchtime Morpeth to see them home.
It is a small act of homage I urge you to make, moved as was I by the words of John Amer’s grieving widow:
"John was the best father our daughter could have wished for. This cruel world has taken a hero . . . the pain of losing him is overwhelming."
SCIENCE is playing God again. For the first time, meat has been produced in a laboratory from a pig’s cells as boffins struggle to play biblical one-upmanship by feeding the five billion.
Lab chops, anyone? Or a portion of Shepherd’s Pi, perhaps?
WHEN the Acer computer I bought at John Lewis developed a fault I took it back to the store for repair under their two-year guarantee.
But after nothing had happened for five weeks I called to complain.
John Lewis were wonderful: they tracked my computer through the Acer repair system – then hit a brick wall. Acer had moved their call centre off-shore to India and even John Lewis couldn’t get a reply to their inquiries,
After eight weeks they called to offer a refund or a replacement. I chose a substitute computer: “Anything but an Acer,” I pleaded.
Sure enough, my Dell replacement has arrived with all the bells and whistles I wanted . . . and one small hitch.
ANOTHER call centre in India!
SHADOW foreign minister David Lidington was outraged when Iran detained five British sailors who had strayed into Iranian waters (I use the term ‘sailors’ loosely for a bunch of yachties sailing in war-torn waters with no GPS, no engine spares and – to my mind – no bloody sense!).
“It is completely unjustifiable!” thundered the Tory tyro. “There was no justification for them being arrested.”
I can’t wait to hear what he has to say next time five Iranians beach their raft on Brighton’s British sands!
Whatever it was, the news of Acting Sergeant John Amer, proud Coldstream Guardsman from Sunderland, husband of adoring wife Sue and the father of a young daughter who will know her father no more hit me harder than most.
He was the 99th British soldier to die this year; the 236th to die since we invaded in 2001. But the statistics are nothing compared with the loss his family – indeed a whole battalion of grieving families – is feeling as this awful conflict escalates.
I hate this war with a passion. Any right-minded person in a civilised society would lament the passing of these brave young soldiers – and they are all young people of my son’s and daughter’s age – as well as regretting the toll of civilian casualties that is being inflicted.
Trouble is by the time our despair at the never-ending casualty figures – desperately badly wounded men and women as well as the dead – and our growing opposition to the war reaches the front line it translates into a lack of regard for the men and women who are fighting OUR conflict and whom WE sent to that barbarous land.
Make no mistake: I hate this war and its horrifying consequences. But I’m proud of the lads and lasses who answered the call unhesitatingly.
There is an opportunity to communicate our pride and thanks to those serving men and women: next Tuesday, more than 200 men and women from the Second Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers are to march through Ashington and Morpeth to celebrate their homecoming after a six-month tour of duty which has seen seven of their comrades killed and a dozen badly wounded.
I am proud to say that men and women from my village and from the surrounding area are travelling south to raise a cheer for our returning heroes. I will try to be on the streets of l unchtime Morpeth to see them home.
It is a small act of homage I urge you to make, moved as was I by the words of John Amer’s grieving widow:
"John was the best father our daughter could have wished for. This cruel world has taken a hero . . . the pain of losing him is overwhelming."
SCIENCE is playing God again. For the first time, meat has been produced in a laboratory from a pig’s cells as boffins struggle to play biblical one-upmanship by feeding the five billion.
Lab chops, anyone? Or a portion of Shepherd’s Pi, perhaps?
WHEN the Acer computer I bought at John Lewis developed a fault I took it back to the store for repair under their two-year guarantee.
But after nothing had happened for five weeks I called to complain.
John Lewis were wonderful: they tracked my computer through the Acer repair system – then hit a brick wall. Acer had moved their call centre off-shore to India and even John Lewis couldn’t get a reply to their inquiries,
After eight weeks they called to offer a refund or a replacement. I chose a substitute computer: “Anything but an Acer,” I pleaded.
Sure enough, my Dell replacement has arrived with all the bells and whistles I wanted . . . and one small hitch.
ANOTHER call centre in India!
SHADOW foreign minister David Lidington was outraged when Iran detained five British sailors who had strayed into Iranian waters (I use the term ‘sailors’ loosely for a bunch of yachties sailing in war-torn waters with no GPS, no engine spares and – to my mind – no bloody sense!).
“It is completely unjustifiable!” thundered the Tory tyro. “There was no justification for them being arrested.”
I can’t wait to hear what he has to say next time five Iranians beach their raft on Brighton’s British sands!
First published in The Journal, Newscastle upon Tyne, December 4 2009
Friday 27 November 2009
Those CAN'T be age spots, I'm just a kid!
I’VE been feeling my age of late (Bus Pass plus One, since you ask). I’ve had two hospital appointments already this week and I took a funny turn in the village shop.
Not that there was anything wrong with me. Two different symptoms checked out by two different specialists produced two clean bills of health. And the funny turn? Just low blood sugar, according to kindly shop assistant Margaret Mole, for which she prescribed sweet coffee with a Kit Kat. And wouldn’t take a penny for them.
“Medical emergency,” she assured me. “We never charge for emergencies.” Hmmm, must remember that when I start to need Viagra.
Talking of which reminds me of my junior reporter days when I interviewed a couple celebrating their diamond wedding anniversary.
“What keeps you so young?” this earnest youth asked the spritely couple.
“Regular sex,” said the old man, with a twinkle in his eye. “Nearly every day of the week.”
“Wow! Nearly every day?” I gasped, hugely impressed.
“Yes,” said the old rogue with a wink. “Nearly on Monday, nearly on Tuesday, nearly on . . .”
And there’s another thing: women, especially young ones, have begun offering me their seats on the bus. They even talk to me. When I was young the only female company I ever encountered had white hair and needed helping across the road.
What else tells me my clock is ticking? Well, to my once cheerful “See you later!” I’ve started adding an ominous “. . . if I’m spared”. When driving I no longer need to watch the speedometer; my eyes are glued, instead, to the onboard computer’s fuel economy meter.
The other day I was overtaken by a Lambretta rider. In a headwind!
MY concerns for our non-existent country post offices and declining Royal Mail standards were hardly helped by the news that, not for the first time, one of the so-called ‘replacement services’ – a twice-a-week, two-hour temporary counter open in the old chapel at Scots Gap – was “closed due to computer failure”.
Once more, disgruntled users had to make the trek to Kirkwhelpington – and a shop where at least the post office is still graced by the friendly face of sub-postmistress Eileen Rogerson – as a result of Post Office Counters’ crazy cost savings
And thank-you, Royal Mail, for finally delivering DVD film clips and my presenter’s script from a foreign TV production company for whom I was to make a TV documentary.
We filmed the documentary exactly one month ago; it will be screened this weekend. The package was posted first class on October 14; it arrived . . . yesterday.
Pony express? Our Royal Mail has become the Royal Mule!
CHAMPAGNE Socialists of the world unite! Over dinner the other evening the Sisterhood – Gilly the Radical and Susan the Luddite – were cackling about a friend of a similar age and political tendency who stomped into her bank determined to bring down the global financial system.
“I want to withdraw ALL my savings,” she demanded. “And I want the money in cash. NOW!”
“Certainly, madam,” said the unperturbed capitalist bank clerk. “But for such a large transaction you will need to be able to identify yourself.”
“No problem,” announced Comrade Customer, rummaging in her handbag and pulling out an old-fashioned face powder compact.
“Yes,” she said, after a moment staring hard into the mirror. “That’s definitely me!”
I PAY my council rates to have my rubbish removed, the potholes in our pavements repaired (Crookham’s are a disgrace!), our children educated and our old people cared for.
What I DON’T want from Northumberland County Council is a 32-page, glossy, full-colour monthly propaganda magazine which threatens the existence of local independent media while providing only extra pulp for the recycling plants.
Question: how many people and how many pounds are we wasting on producing and distributing 144,000 copies a month for the recyclers?
Not that there was anything wrong with me. Two different symptoms checked out by two different specialists produced two clean bills of health. And the funny turn? Just low blood sugar, according to kindly shop assistant Margaret Mole, for which she prescribed sweet coffee with a Kit Kat. And wouldn’t take a penny for them.
“Medical emergency,” she assured me. “We never charge for emergencies.” Hmmm, must remember that when I start to need Viagra.
Talking of which reminds me of my junior reporter days when I interviewed a couple celebrating their diamond wedding anniversary.
“What keeps you so young?” this earnest youth asked the spritely couple.
“Regular sex,” said the old man, with a twinkle in his eye. “Nearly every day of the week.”
“Wow! Nearly every day?” I gasped, hugely impressed.
“Yes,” said the old rogue with a wink. “Nearly on Monday, nearly on Tuesday, nearly on . . .”
And there’s another thing: women, especially young ones, have begun offering me their seats on the bus. They even talk to me. When I was young the only female company I ever encountered had white hair and needed helping across the road.
What else tells me my clock is ticking? Well, to my once cheerful “See you later!” I’ve started adding an ominous “. . . if I’m spared”. When driving I no longer need to watch the speedometer; my eyes are glued, instead, to the onboard computer’s fuel economy meter.
The other day I was overtaken by a Lambretta rider. In a headwind!
MY concerns for our non-existent country post offices and declining Royal Mail standards were hardly helped by the news that, not for the first time, one of the so-called ‘replacement services’ – a twice-a-week, two-hour temporary counter open in the old chapel at Scots Gap – was “closed due to computer failure”.
Once more, disgruntled users had to make the trek to Kirkwhelpington – and a shop where at least the post office is still graced by the friendly face of sub-postmistress Eileen Rogerson – as a result of Post Office Counters’ crazy cost savings
And thank-you, Royal Mail, for finally delivering DVD film clips and my presenter’s script from a foreign TV production company for whom I was to make a TV documentary.
We filmed the documentary exactly one month ago; it will be screened this weekend. The package was posted first class on October 14; it arrived . . . yesterday.
Pony express? Our Royal Mail has become the Royal Mule!
CHAMPAGNE Socialists of the world unite! Over dinner the other evening the Sisterhood – Gilly the Radical and Susan the Luddite – were cackling about a friend of a similar age and political tendency who stomped into her bank determined to bring down the global financial system.
“I want to withdraw ALL my savings,” she demanded. “And I want the money in cash. NOW!”
“Certainly, madam,” said the unperturbed capitalist bank clerk. “But for such a large transaction you will need to be able to identify yourself.”
“No problem,” announced Comrade Customer, rummaging in her handbag and pulling out an old-fashioned face powder compact.
“Yes,” she said, after a moment staring hard into the mirror. “That’s definitely me!”
I PAY my council rates to have my rubbish removed, the potholes in our pavements repaired (Crookham’s are a disgrace!), our children educated and our old people cared for.
What I DON’T want from Northumberland County Council is a 32-page, glossy, full-colour monthly propaganda magazine which threatens the existence of local independent media while providing only extra pulp for the recycling plants.
Question: how many people and how many pounds are we wasting on producing and distributing 144,000 copies a month for the recyclers?
First published in The Journal, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, November 27, 2009
Friday 20 November 2009
Dare to Disagree
PLEASE, internet users, repeat after me: I will NOT stand by and let ridiculous, racist lies go unchallenged.
Yes, I know I’ve banged on about this before (remember the whopper I uncovered about Starbucks allegedly refusing to serve coffee to our troops in Iraq because “they didn’t support the war”?), but I’ve had another round robin, just as insidious.
I won’t insult you with the details, save to say it involves a Muslim woman in a bourkah allegedly berating a supermarket checkout girl for wearing “an English flag pin”, and then being taken to task for her “impudence” by a man in the same queue.
No names, no supermarket identified, no town or country revealed. In fact, it had a distinctly American feel about it, despite constant references to “our English troops” as if there were no Welsh, Irish or Scots serving out there.
It could just as easily have been fictionalised and circulated by the BNP (British Nasty Party) and its leader Nick Griffin, who, if Essex voters are really as stupid as I think they may be, might one day be known as Britain’s Barking MP.
Anyway, by the time it reached me this piece of trash had infected at least 25 other web users in the chain, who had added their chorus of agreement and passed it on without pausing to question its provenance.
To each of those recipients I expressed my doubts regarding the email’s authenticity (not least because to have captured the volley of direct quotations it repeated verbatim would have required a tape recorder or 150 words per minute shorthand) and begged each of them to distribute my feelings to anyone else they believed had received the message.
A waste of time? I don’t think so. I can’t believe our brave men and women on the front line would wish to hide behind such a tissue of vicious lies.
COUNTRYFILE, BBC2’s weekly touchy-feely trip to Britain’s rural pastures, came up our way last weekend and the arrival of the presenter for lunch at the Red Lion in Milfield caused quite a stir in the back bar.
“It’s that John Noakes!” whispered Old Bob, deep in his cups remembering Blue Peter. One of the darts players insisted he’d just shared the Gents with Michael Aspel. “Nah, it was Mike Neville,” argued his pal, a great Look North fan.
Quietly, poor John Craven (formerly of Newsround, for all you sixty-year-old teenagers) paid for his lunch and slipped, unrecognised, out of the pub.
POSTAL dispute or no postal dispute, a well-earned word of praise for the postman who managed to deliver a letter which was not only NOT addressed to us by name but which also carried entirely the wrong postcode.
Nice one, Neil Lyons. But who was the silly sender who so poorly addressed our letter? Why, the Royal Mail, of course!
FARMERS up this way have a woeful sense of priorities but, I have to admit, there’s a certain worldly wisdom to these two tales I picked up at Young Farmers’ Night in the local.
First one concerned an old boy who came across his brother lying in the field, stiff and cold and dead to the world. Asked later why he left his collie to watch over the body while he carried on over the fields, he pointed up the hill and said:
“I spotted a ram on his back up there . . . coulda cost me money if I’d left HIM lying!”
Then there was the shepherd who, summoned by his wife’s screams, arrived to find she’d been bitten by the dog.
“That’s the second time this week,” she sobbed. “He’ll have to go!”
The old herd scratched his chin. “There’s a lot of sheep to be fetched down,” he said, and set off with the collie to round them up and pen them.
And THEN he shot the dog.
Yes, I know I’ve banged on about this before (remember the whopper I uncovered about Starbucks allegedly refusing to serve coffee to our troops in Iraq because “they didn’t support the war”?), but I’ve had another round robin, just as insidious.
I won’t insult you with the details, save to say it involves a Muslim woman in a bourkah allegedly berating a supermarket checkout girl for wearing “an English flag pin”, and then being taken to task for her “impudence” by a man in the same queue.
No names, no supermarket identified, no town or country revealed. In fact, it had a distinctly American feel about it, despite constant references to “our English troops” as if there were no Welsh, Irish or Scots serving out there.
It could just as easily have been fictionalised and circulated by the BNP (British Nasty Party) and its leader Nick Griffin, who, if Essex voters are really as stupid as I think they may be, might one day be known as Britain’s Barking MP.
Anyway, by the time it reached me this piece of trash had infected at least 25 other web users in the chain, who had added their chorus of agreement and passed it on without pausing to question its provenance.
To each of those recipients I expressed my doubts regarding the email’s authenticity (not least because to have captured the volley of direct quotations it repeated verbatim would have required a tape recorder or 150 words per minute shorthand) and begged each of them to distribute my feelings to anyone else they believed had received the message.
A waste of time? I don’t think so. I can’t believe our brave men and women on the front line would wish to hide behind such a tissue of vicious lies.
COUNTRYFILE, BBC2’s weekly touchy-feely trip to Britain’s rural pastures, came up our way last weekend and the arrival of the presenter for lunch at the Red Lion in Milfield caused quite a stir in the back bar.
“It’s that John Noakes!” whispered Old Bob, deep in his cups remembering Blue Peter. One of the darts players insisted he’d just shared the Gents with Michael Aspel. “Nah, it was Mike Neville,” argued his pal, a great Look North fan.
Quietly, poor John Craven (formerly of Newsround, for all you sixty-year-old teenagers) paid for his lunch and slipped, unrecognised, out of the pub.
POSTAL dispute or no postal dispute, a well-earned word of praise for the postman who managed to deliver a letter which was not only NOT addressed to us by name but which also carried entirely the wrong postcode.
Nice one, Neil Lyons. But who was the silly sender who so poorly addressed our letter? Why, the Royal Mail, of course!
FARMERS up this way have a woeful sense of priorities but, I have to admit, there’s a certain worldly wisdom to these two tales I picked up at Young Farmers’ Night in the local.
First one concerned an old boy who came across his brother lying in the field, stiff and cold and dead to the world. Asked later why he left his collie to watch over the body while he carried on over the fields, he pointed up the hill and said:
“I spotted a ram on his back up there . . . coulda cost me money if I’d left HIM lying!”
Then there was the shepherd who, summoned by his wife’s screams, arrived to find she’d been bitten by the dog.
“That’s the second time this week,” she sobbed. “He’ll have to go!”
The old herd scratched his chin. “There’s a lot of sheep to be fetched down,” he said, and set off with the collie to round them up and pen them.
And THEN he shot the dog.
First published November 20, 2009 in The Journal, Newcastle-upon-Tyne UK
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