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?

First published in The Journal, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, November 27, 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.

First published November 20, 2009 in The Journal, Newcastle-upon-Tyne UK