Not me, the OTHER Banksy!

MY name is Banksy; it has been for 62 years. Trouble is, everyone who knows me thinks I’m a spray painting vandal with a penchant for blue monkeys and rats hanging from parachutes.
No, I say, that’s the OTHER Banksy, the graffiti grand master whose work sells – when you can lever it off the local bus shelter or lavatory wall – for half-a-million quid or more. I’m the one whose newspaper column wraps chips and whose Journal photo is used as a target for darts practise at the Red Lion.
They quickly lose interest, of course, which is just as well for me, given that I live within the parliamentary paywall known as Berwick upon Tweed, an art-loving town which adores LS Lowry as an adopted son but brushes away anything after the style of a Banksy.
A couple of weeks ago a restored seafront shelter, famously preserved for posterity as the subject of one of Salford-born Lowry’s matchstick men-style paintings. itself became the object of another artist’s attention.
Overnight, the famous four-foot-tall blue monkey which appears in so many of the anonymous Banksy graffiti works was stencilled onto the shelter wall. It wasn’t the first Lowry subject to be given the animal treatment, either: two years ago Berwickers awoke to discover the lighthouse – depicted by its favourite son back in the 1930s – had been defaced with a circle of painted penguins (another of my namesake’s favourite animal subjects).
Last week the blue monkey disappeared under the onslaught of an outraged town council’s scrubbing brush, just as those penguins were culled two years ago.
But this is the Year of the Monkey up here in Godzone . . . stencilled blue Banksy monkeys have now appeared on a public lavatory in Seahouses and in a bus shelter outside Seton Hall in Tweedmouth. And before the council’s Mrs Mop washes away another work of art just think . . . if it really IS the real thing it might be worth a fortune.
Not worth the millions you’d pay for a Lowry, of course, but certainly up around the half-million mark if it’s a genuine Banksy.
Of course, you’d have to hang the bus shelter on your wall as well. . .

WE call Mark ‘The Mongoose’ because we first came across him nicking eggs from Young Neil’s henhoose. But we forgave him, befriended him and admitted him to Milfield’s domino school. We even found him a wife.
Today, the Mongoose takes sweet Philippa’s hand in marriage; Young Neil’s the best man, ’Er Outdoors and I are barrelling up for the party afterwards and The Lovely Debbie volunteered to bake a meringue. But I fear old habits die hard.
“There was hardly an egg to be found for the meringue,” wailed Debbie. “I think Mongoose has been at it again. And on his wedding eve, too.”
It’s a life sentence, Mrs Mongoose . . . we wish you well!


A RICH farmer – is there any other kind? – gathered his three sons around his deathbed and told them that when he finally passed away he wanted to take some of his fortune with him “just in case I need it on the other side”.
He gave each an envelope containing £100,000 with instructions that they be slipped into the coffin just before the lid was sealed.
After the burial his youngest, a clergyman, begged forgiveness after confessing that he had taken £10,000 from the envelope to pay for church roof repairs.
“In that case,” said the middle son, a doctor, “I’ll admit to taking out £20,000 to buy equipment for my surgery. I’m sure dad wouldn’t have minded.”
The eldest son, a fat cat banker, smiled at his siblings’ nervousness. “I can assure you that I put the full amount in the coffin, just as father instructed,” he said.
“Of course, I took the £100,000 from the envelope first and replaced the cash with a cheque!”

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, July 16 2010

Never say 'never again', EVER again . . .

AT LEAST it will never again be THIS bad on the Mirror I thought, on that dismal bloody Sunday in 1992.
It’s either job cuts or the death of Mirror Group, I told myself on Day One of my editorship as I carried out the board’s instruction to immediately end the employment of all casual journalists at the paper.
In the weeks that followed, that once-imperious redtop tabloid’s fight for life was disrupted by almost daily emergency chapel meetings and votes of no confidence in both management and me.
But it has to be this way, I told my senior execs, coaxing from them names of staff who could be ‘let go’. Management was looking for something like a fifty per cent cut in the 400-plus staff; I was fighting to shed ‘only’ a third.
Upstairs, in the ninth-floor stateroom that Robert Maxwell had abandoned before his fatal midnight dip in the Med sat the man who was calling the shots: not David Montgomery, the chief executive who hired me home from Australia that wintry November; and not Charles Wilson, who had picked me up at Heathrow and ushered me triumphantly into the editor’s office at the exact moment Monty was firing my predecessor, the talented but argumentative Richard Stott, over breakfast at Claridge’s.
No. Dwarfed by Maxwell’s enormous desk, sitting in the old cheat’s chair, was a man from the accountancy firm Arthur Andersen, international undertakers to the business world. The Official Receiver was in.
How I survived that winter at war with the men and women I’d worked alongside as a sub in the Seventies I’ll never know: good ol’ Banksy, their laugh-a-minute mate from yesteryear, had come back to his true home at the Mirror. All would end happily ever after.
Only it wouldn’t. It couldn’t. The paper was overstaffed, overpaid, run for six days by casuals while staffers enjoyed long lunches and a four-day week. Driven by Montgomery’s unblinking (but laudable) pledge to replenish the plundered pension fund and return the Group to profit, journalists and management went to war.
Unhappily, I was Field-Marshall Montgomery’s battlefield general in that newspaper’s valley of death. It was a bloody awful job but someone had to do it. And it would be the Mirror’s War to End ALL Wars, wouldn’t it?
Sadly not: eighteen years later we are here again, in exactly the same hole. Only this time it is circulation and advertising revenues that have taken a nosedive, not the proprietor.
Its greatest rival, the Sun, enjoys a 20p price advantage over the 45p Mirror – five pence more even than in my day – and its closest circulation rival, the 20p Daily Star, now breathes down its neck: just 400,00 copies behind the Mirror’s 1.24million, with a threatened price reduction to 10p this month.
The paper’s BAJ chapel is talking strike action: no change there, then. “The company is proposing to rip the heart and soul out of the national titles . . .no alternative but to ballot . . . job will turn into a sweatshop.” Echoes of eighteen years ago.
And the management? Big pay rises for chief executive Sly Bailey and co-directors while Mirror Group continues to make a £60million operating profit. You can see why the boys in the brown stuff get hot under the collar.
What the Mirror DOES have is dedicated, if fearful, employees and in Richard Wallace a talented editor who produces as good a newspaper as is possible with ever-dwindling resources.
Battle lines, however, are firming. Once again a Mirror editor will find himself stranded in No Man’s Land: no friends, no cash, not enough staff and precious little management support.
Editing the Mirror, for the past 35 years, has been a matter of managing its decline; when I first joined the paper in 1973 its best years were long gone and mid-to-late Seventies Fleet Street wiseacres joked that Sun and Mirror were racing in opposite directions to see who could reach three million copies first.
The race is on again. This time it’s the Daily Star coming up on the rails while the Mirror threatens to wobble off the tracks.
And this time the winning post is a leaner-looking ONE million mark.

SHOCKJOCK Nick Ferrari to replace Piers Morgan as the smoothie-chops loose cannon on Britain’s Got Talent?
The rumour doing the rounds in broadcasting circles might just be a wind-up but don’t expect any yeas or nays from the Simon Cowell camp or from network home ITV – they’re just waiting to see if ex-Mirror editor Morgan is wooed the American way by an offer from CNN to replace veteran interviewer Larry King.
If that does happen Morgan’s life will go stateside as he juggles the CNN job with his job as a judge on America’s Got Talent. That will leave an empty space alongside Amanda Holden and Old King Cowell on the BGT team that’s just made for Ferrari, LBC’s growly, jowly Sony Award winner.
Although he laughs off the idea, Ferrari is the perfect replacement: like Piers, an ex-journo who’s in love with talent and telly and, like Piers, a former Sun Bizarre columnist.
If the biggest loudmouth in British broadcasting DOES get the gig, remember where you read it first and stand by for a rebranding: Britain’s Got Tyrant!
First published in Press Gazette, July 2010

World Cup? It's the Hun wot won it!

GIVEN everything those funster punsters in the Murdoch press have done in the past I was actually disappointed they didn’t reprise their 1992 ‘It’s the Sun Wot Won It’ post-election headline by tagging England’s World Cup defeat: ‘It’s the Hun Wot Won It!’
By jingo! No sooner had the bingo balls been plucked from their velvet sack to announce England’s inevitable (and by now traditional) pairing with Germany than normally sane headline writers headed for the bunkers, pulled on their tin hats and plastered page after page with salvo upon salvo of xenophobia.
One has come to expect it from the tabloids (indeed, your own Little Englander has launched many a nationalistic sporting broadside himself) but this time even the posh papers were at it: The Times and Telegraph thundered about “war” and the Independent concocted a convoluted tribute to England’s goalscorer with ‘A Goal from Defoe - Now for the Foe!’ Geddit?
Actually, my favourite piece of pithily pungent propaganda was not aimed at the foe we faced in two world wars but at an ‘old enemy’ of far longer standing. Neither was it written by a paid hack like me; this was the work of that English everyman, the otherwise nameless poet we might call William Wordsmith.
Plastered on the outside wall of a pub in Cambridge were the words: ‘So it’s Germany v. England and the French have gone home . . . ring any bells?’
Racist? Possibly. Insulting? Most certainly. But also honestly, stingingly funny and quintessentially English in a Dad’s Army kind of way.
And the match result? Predictable. Captain Mainwaring’s men would give a whole regiment of Rooneys a run for their money.

MY mate Domino Joe is a man for all seasons. A former landlord, he quit the bar to open a barber’s shop and has never regretted it: a nine-to-five job and the removal of constant exposure to alcohol have improved his dominoes no end.
But while his drinking has dropped off, his quick-thinking business acumen and fast-talking patter have actually improved.
Mike the Treasurer, a long-haired former maths professor who now looks after the village hall books, went to Joe for his two-monthly shearing and happened to sit next to a customer with slightly less hair than a billiard ball.
“How come HE has to pay seven pounds the same as me?” asked Mike. “He’s nearly bald.”
Joe thought for no more than the time it took to cull Mike’s quiff.
“Search fees,” he sniffed.

SO much for the USA’s much-trumpeted embargo on all things Cuban: the Cleggs from Hexham sent holiday postcards from Havana on May 7 which arrived in New York three days later and in Crookham . . . YESTERDAY.
Hasta la vista, baby!

AS storytellers go, my friend John has few equals. Born and bred in the Borders, he eventually worked for the Mirror in London as a rather grand management executive, though a bit before my time.
A bit of a toff, our Mister Benn as we villagers call him – yes, his real name – has a fund of stories from the Sixties and Seventies when he commuted from his Surrey home to the capital.
He vividly recalled an explosion of protest from a fellow rail traveler – bowler hat and pin-stripes, rolled umbrella and a copy of the City’s Pink ’Un in hand – over the delay caused by a train-bound motorist whose Rolls Royce stalled, jamming the car park entrance.
“Damned cheek of the feller!” roared the military type. “Ought to be ashamed of himself.”
Mister Benn was more sympathetic: “I don’t suppose he could help breaking down.”
“Not what I mean at all,” said the bowler hat. “A chap who uses a Rolls for station work is the sort who’d go hacking on a Derby winner!”
First published in The Journal, Newcastle, on July 2, 2010

Byreman's bar-room spat with Klondike

THE Byreman hates wind turbines; ‘Klondike’ Barry is all for them. Two farmer friends with views which not only divide the bar of the Red Lion but also illustrate the great gulf in public attitudes to renewable energy.
Where do I stand? Well, I’m instinctively in favour of energy production which, where possible, doesn’t depend on polluting fuels like coal and wood and dangerous elements like nuclear. On the other hand, I sympathise with many folk in north Northumberland who fear the march of wind turbines across one of the loveliest parts of Britain is driven by developers aiming to rack up huge profits without properly costing the damage to our quality of life.
But a new factor has intruded into the equation: freedom. Russia’s dispute with Belarus which temporarily disrupted gas supplies this week was a repeat of the crisis of 2008-2009 when, in that bitterly cold winter, Moscow’s pricing dispute with Ukraine left much of Europe short of gas.
How does that affect Berwick or Belford or Bishop Auckland? As North Sea gas expires, Britain depends more and more on gas imports. By 2020 an estimated 90 per cent of our supplies may well be coming through a pipeline from Moscow.
We’re already in hock to the Middle East and America for our oil supplies, to Australia and Canada for our strictly controlled uranium rations and to countries like South Africa, Russia and Columbia for our coal.
The idea that a spat in the old Soviet bloc could lead to someone in Minsk or Kiev turning off the gas should send a chill down all our spines.

ALWAYS look on the bright side: at least raising VAT from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent makes the maths calculation a whole lot easier!

FAREWELL to the magic number sixty-five, we’re all going to have to wait a little longer for our pensions. Future generations might even have to work beyond seventy if we’re to dig ourselves out of our recessionary hole in the ground.
Humbug! Some of us have been ignoring retirement age for years. My illness-enforced disappearance from the workforce means I’m busier now with my writing, broadcasting and voluntary work than I ever was when officially ‘employed’.
I’m not alone: consider the energy and ambition of two remarkable Northumbrian women I bumped into this week as they helped launch a fantastic tourist enterprise on our glorious coastline.
Gilly Banyard, founder of the Penny Plain chain of clothing stores, started looking round for a new project as soon as she ‘retired’. She quickly found one: three derelict farm buildings staring across the causeway that separates Holy Island from the mainland.
They are derelict no more: with all the energy that built Penny Plain into a leading catalogue clothing company, Gilly has created in her Lindisfarne Bay Cottages three ‘Homes and Gardens’ havens of luxury with the finest views in the county.
Celebrating the launch her friend Mary Manley, another ‘swinging sixty’ who turned Alnwick’s railway station into the massively successful Barter Books, scoffed at the idea of retirement as she raised a champagne toast.
“Retire? Not a chance!” they chorused. “Work’s too much fun!”

APPARENTLY the company which makes those annoying little St George World Cup flags that motorists insist on clamping to the front windows has received complaints that they are blown away by the slightest breeze (a bit like the team they support, you might say!).
Indeed a London pal claims he counted more than a dozen broken pennants littering a two-mile stretch of dual carriageway last weekend, although he admits that was immediately following the Algeria fiasco.
Still, he believes it was due to a design fault. Despite my eternal optimism I feel forced to point out another, equally damaging design problem: there is no way of flying these flags at half-mast!
First published in The Journal, Newcastle, on June 25, 2010

Country pubs fail the B-test

YOUNG Farmer’s Night at the Red Lion was a gloomier affair than usual this week; among the young farmers (average age: 68) faces were long and silences ponderous.
Indeed, a poor night on which to introduce My Daughter the Actress’s putative in-laws to the kind of cheery welcome upon which one can normally count up here in Paradis sur Tweed. Doom was in the air: instead of beef and barley, the talk was of breathalysers.
Few doubt the wisdom of Sir Peter North’s government-commissioned report, which concluded that halving the legal limit of drivers’ blood alcohol would save another 160 lives per year. Most, however, foresee such a revision leading to the rapid demise of that great British institution, the country pub.
My immediate area has already lost one formerly thriving hostelry, despite the fact that it once offered hearty food round the clock, five B&B rooms for tourists and a booming drink-and-dominoes economy. It now stands closed and near-derelict, its swinging sign a notice board for tattered circus posters and its car park a magnet for rubbish.
Transport links after 6pm do not exist; it’s a case of drive to the nearest pub (four miles distant) or don’t go out. This is the way communities die. Tourism is fine in the summer but in winter driving to a pub for one drink seems pointless. And a country pub without patrons to fill its car park cannot survive.
The Byreman and I, close to Methodist in our approach to drink-driving, are confirmed car-sharers: he drives and stays ‘dry’ one night; I do the same on the other. But a more organised approach must be found.
Anyone care to run a Pub-Bus service two nights a week?

I HAVE watched football in some rum places but the last place I ever expected to view the World Cup was in the Grand Ballroom of the Royal Festival Hall in London’s posh cultural quarter, the South Bank.
Spilling wet-cheeked from a concert celebrating the life of the late Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle (mother of Rufus and Martha Wainwright and a diva in her own right), I was confronted by two enormous screens playing out the England-USA match to hundreds of lager-swilling culturistas who similarly stayed to drink and cheer.
Never again do I expect to witness a Mexican wave within that cultural cathedral’s hallowed halls, nor hear the massed choir chanting “Inn-gerr-land! Inn-gerr-land!”

ELFIN safety has gone doolally, as my friend Margaret the Do-It-Herselfer discovered the other day.
Needing a length of wooden dowel to complete a job she popped into the nearest hardware chain store – I won’t say which one, but you have to mind your Ps and Qs in there! – and bought a piece in the only length available which was, you might know, too long for her car.
“Would you just saw it in half?” she asked at the checkout?
“Sorry,” she was told by an assistant in one of the country’s biggest DIY tool shops. “We’re not allowed to use the tools . . . elfin safety!”
In the ensuing verbal kerfuffle the manager had to be summoned. He at least, bright chap, provided the solution . . . he simply snapped the wood in half.
And all the little elfins lived safely ever after!


GEORDIE philanthropists Brian and Shirley Burnie bade goodbye to their beloved Doxford Hall after donating all of the proceeds from the sale of what is now a fantastic hotel and spa to their new charity, Daft As a Brush Cancer Care.
A charity auction raised thousands more, no thanks to Yours Truly: my £75 top bid for a 1919 edition of a yellowing Daily Mail was trumped, would you believe, by the TV reporter who was covering the auction for BBC2’s The One Show.
Was I upset? Was I heck!
The Daily Mail was never worth £80, even on its best day.
First published in The Journal, Newcastle, July 18 2010

Squirrel Nutter-kin and the foxes

FALLOUT from the distressing London attack in which twins were badly bitten by an intruder fox as they slept in their cots might well persuade townies to change their minds about the nationwide fox hunting ban.
It certainly tells us countryfolk a thing or two about life in the big city.
For a start it’s a lock-up lifestyle. “I don’t know why anyone would leave their patio doors open in London,” one ‘fox expert’ told the BBC. “I certainly wouldn’t.”
Secondly, it’s a city that’s as full of nutters as it is of foxes (10,000 furry little fiends at the last count). They are pronounced ‘cute’; people leave food out for them, charities exist to rescue and tend the injured animals.
Lastly, there’s a kind of ‘darling fox denial’ campaign cranking up among the lunatic fringe of urban animal lovers. “This fox did not go ‘on purpose’ to attack the children,” wrote one of them, appropriately named Nutkin (might that be Squirrel Nutkin?), in a London newspaper.
“Any injury would have been accidental and we need to be more responsible about how we treat wild animals in areas of human habitation.”
In other words, WE are the violent intruders.
When I lived in inner London, four miles from Kings Cross, foxes were an everyday sight in my hundred-foot garden in Highgate. One warm spring day I watched dogfox, vixen and three cubs gambolling on the back lawn.
A charming sight, certainly. But surely one more suited to the wilds of Northumberland than to the suburban streets of North London?


FARMERS up here aren’t what they once were: the generation following in the cart tracks of old horny-handed sons of toil like The Byreman are more familiar with broadband and computers than bullocks and combine harvesters.
My dear friend Morebottle (so named for his accelerated consumption as closing time approaches) spends the earliest hours of each day poring over his laptop to check last evening’s closing future prices on the Chicago Commodities market. If tatties are up he’s happy; if they’re down he’s as miserable as a pork butcher on Good Friday.
Child of the Techno Age that he is, he couldn’t help showing off the latest ‘app’ on his iPhone – a decibel meter which measures noise levels.
“We were using a pneumatic drill on the farm the other day and it recorded a level of 92dBA,” intoned Morebottle knowingly. “It meant we had to wear ear protectors.”
So how did the Red Lion Sunday domino school rate? Wow! It peaked at 102 when Joe the Barber scooped the jackpot and held a steady 85 average throughout.
A pint of your best and a pair of earplugs, landlord!

SERVES her right, I suppose, but a somewhat bewildered Mrs Banks brought home a packet of potato crisps she’d been given in her picnic pack on completing the Alwinton Round charity walk last weekend.
“What do I do with these?” she asked, tossing my way her bag of – wait for it – Barbecued Kangaroo flavoured crisps. Yes, I really DID say kangaroo!
Leaving aside the fact that among the ingredients listed on the bag – potato, garlic, paprika, onion, smoke flavouring and so on – there wasn’t the merest mention of anything resembling ‘roo, who on earth would even KNOW what a skinned and scorched Skippy tastes like?
Crocodile Dundee, certainly; Kylie, possibly. But surely no one doing the North of Tyne Search and Rescue Team’s fundraising walk could distinguish the taste of a wombat from a wallaby? So wasn’t there a choice, I asked Mrs B. Was there nothing approaching what European tastebuds might recognise?
“Oh yes,” she replied. “I could have chosen French Baguette with Garlic, or German Bratwurst flavour, or . . .”
Strewth! Pass me a Skippy dipper, cobber.
First published in The Journal, Newcastle, July 4, 2010

Spot the (sports) story . . .

IT always comes as a shock to beancounters when negotiations with editors over World Cup or Olympics travel budgets founder on the same rocky argument.
“But you’re sending a team from the sports desk AND a team from the news desk,” wails the Man in the Pin-stripe Suit. “Surely it’s a sports story and can be covered by sports writers?”
“Not so,” replies the editor. “The sports writers will simply cover the sport.”
“Perfect!” yells the frantic money manager. “You’ll get what you want and we’ll save half the costs.”
“Afraid not, old boy,” says old smoothie-chops. “What we will GET is the organisers’ PR . . . what we will MISS are the bust-ups, the drugs scandals, the misbehaving WAGs and the drunken orgies.”
Mahogany Row sees sense in the end, of course: they agree to half the budget you asked and, as your application was for double the amount required, honours are even.
The Triesman Affair, on the other hand, was what one infamous Sun editor would have called “a reverse ferret”. The Mail on Sunday sting that ousted the noble Labour Lord from his chairmanships of the Football Association and of England’s team bidding to host the 2018 World Cup was a rather tawdry kiss and tell, obtained by means of a recording device hidden upon the person of a self-styled ex-girlfriend.
Now, if an editor is prepared to sidestep the tenth commandment of the PCC’s Code of Practice (Thou shalt not “seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using clandestine listening devices”) then we might at least expect a little more than a one-sided account of the old guy’s snogability in the back of a Wembley passion wagon.
Because, as one of Britain’s best investigative reporters yelled down the phone at me, “That was NOT the story!”
Since we worked together on the Express in Manchester in the Seventies, Andrew Jennings has spent forty years as an investigative reporter and documentary film maker. He’s a Panorama reporter now, with a string of glittering prizes including a Royal Television Society Award for his Channel Four investigation into Olympic corruption. That said, Jennings prefers to boast of the six-year ban imposed by a vengeful IOC and the current ‘freeze’ he’s suffering in dealings with FIFA President Sepp Blatter.
In other words, he’s a man worth listening to. So I listened.
“There’s something funny about this whole episode,” he began. “Stings are definitely an in-house, DIY operation. You don’t trust amateurs. You would NEVER ‘buy in’ a sting, that’s not something we’d ever do at Panorama.
“If an alleged ex-lover came to you with a tape you’ve got three choices: turn her away, turn her over or toss her a fee and investigate the allegations yourself with your own people.
“You trust your own staff, your fake sheikh or whoever. What you need is an experienced team that can get the story and who know what to do if and when it goes pear-shaped.”
Unsurprisingly, the MoS was letting its scoop do the talking: “he might think that but we couldn’t possibly comment”, was the official response from Peter Wright and his triumphant crew. But in Derry Street’s nearby watering holes journos shrugged off criticism of their tradecraft.
As they see it, this was a case of a slighted old flame getting lucky: she records the conversation to prove their relationship and, in the process, the head of the FA and World Cup bid badmouths the Russian and Spanish FA.
Kerr-CHING! It’s jackpot time.
To be fair to Wrighty and his team, the MoS did follow up their scoop a week later with a spread on bribery at the top of the international game.
Meanwhile, Jennings dismisses the scorn sports writers poured on Triesman’s claim that Russia might be prepared to help Spain pay off referees in the 2014 Wold Cup in exchange for Spain supporting Russia’s bid in 2018.
“Vladimir Putin is determined to stage the World Cup. It’s like a Big Willy contest with other world leaders but the difference is he’ll put money behind it. He won’t just go the extra mile; he’ll do a global circuit.
“He’s already won the 2014 Winter Olympics for Russia [at Sochi, a Black Sea resort] and now he wants the World Cup in 2018.”
Jennings is irrepressibly confident that there really is a big story behind the Triesman tittle-tattle. “I talk virtually every day with fellow journos, ‘football blazers’ and spooks,” he says. “This sort of talk comes up all the time.
“Too many sports journalists say nothing, afraid that if they spill the beans they’ll ‘lose access’. I’d warn them to produce or they’d lose their bloody jobs!
“It is utterly hypocritical of these self-regarding reporters to utter faux rage over Triesman's comments when such allegations are common currency in every press box, every bar and wherever a hack meets another hack, inquiry agent or football official.”
Strong stuff! But I commend to you the Jennings unrelenting output which so enrages the sporting Establishment.
It can be found on the maverick award investigator’s website at www.transparencyinsport.org.


I CAN’T help feeling that Murdochs père et fils have a hit list of enemies they’re working through in alphabetical order: having done their best to blitz the Barclay Brothers and bombard the BBC they’re now aiming their bile at the British Library.
Young James’s attack on the Library’s plan to digitise and make available behind an online paywall three centuries of Britain’s national newspaper collection is surely both outrageous and – in the widest sense of the word – antisocial.
One cannot copyright history, which is what news becomes almost before it reaches the breakfast table; even literary and musical masterpieces eventually pass into the public domain.
If the public’s right to access library-stored information cuts across the Murdochs’ quite reasonable determination to charge for their newsgathering investment then the answer must be some form of statute of limitations.
Let News charge for today’s Times and twelve months of archive access. After that, log on to the Library.

First published (well, MOST of it) in the Press Gazette, June 2010

Why don't toffs 'get' public transport?

PUBLIC transport has been a battleground for politicians since Boadicea drove a cart and horses through the Romans.
Berwick’s MP, Sir Alan Beith, is currently pursuing Northumberland’s transport department to find out why our local taxpayer-subsidised bus company increased fares and cut timetables a month ago without any local consultation or even notification (we only became aware of the changes when buses failed to appear!).
Down south, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone has launched a campaign to regain the mayoralty of London from Boris ‘The Blonde Bombshell’ Johnson, citing bus fares as The Big Issue (up thirty per cent since Boris took the wheel, though still a damn sight cheaper than Northumberland’s).
Both should be wary, though: climbing on the bus bandwagon has stalled many a promising political career.
Legend has it that Thatcher Cabinet Minister Nicholas Ridley’s attempts to get matey during a visit to a Newcastle bus garage ended in failure when he asked the drivers if they took their buses home at the end of a shift.
Similarly, in 1923 the Conservative Party had to choose between Lord Curzon and Stanley Baldwin and a colleague advised the noble lord to “get closer to the people by taking a ride on a London omnibus“. The intrepid Curzon, former viceroy of India, fluffed the mission.
When asked by the conductor, "Where to, guv?", he replied: "42 Berkeley Square, please".


WHO’D be a journalist? You’re damned if you do and dumb if you don’t.
Last week, to spare a child’s grief by reporting the death by drowning of her pet hamster, I carefully changed the names of all involved - hamster, child and her mother - just in case the little girl was upset to discover her furry friend had met its end by falling into the toilet bowl.
The Press Complaints Commission might be impressed by my gentlemanly journalism, but I need not have bothered. Wee Emily, our egg collector, saw through the subterfuge straight away and is now touring Tillside asking how anyone can trust anything a journalist writes when he can’t even get a hamster’s name right!


THE henhoose is all a-flutter, like High Noon when the midday train is due to arrive. And cowering in his coop is Rocky the Cowardly Rooster.
Rocky has been a poor replacement for our agri-business’s original team leader: where the late Jock the Cock bossed and bullied hen and human alike -- he never gave up an egg to Wee Emily without a fight -- Rocky was henpecked from Day One. And now that word is round the hen run that a cockerel thief is stalking the village he’s barely visible.
Two fighting cocks have already fallen victim to the menace that haunts Ford village: John at the Lodge and Roy the Gardener have both seen their ‘hen-forcers’ snatched in moonlit raids, never again to call the faithful to their nest boxes with a cacophony of dawn choruses.
It’s unlikely to be a fox. After all, why take on the fighting cock when not a single hen has been harmed?
So Rocky is quaking in his corn bin at the thought that he might be the Cockerel Catcher‘s next victim. Watch this space . . .


MY toughest assignment since being boss at the Daily Mirror? The job I’m doing this month, editing BOG News, a quarterly magazine distributed to members of Borders Organic Gardeners.
I’m guesting in the hot seat while the newsletter’s esteemed editor, Robert Latham, is away and it‘s a hard row to hoe: planting parsnips replaces Page Three girls, tips on composting instead of kiss-and-tell tales . . . I am out of my depth.
One old tabloid habit dies hard, however: the pun. An article on potato growing across the Channel is introduced under the headline ‘Jacques Tattie’s French Collection’!
I don’t think BOG will ask me back . . .

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, June 4 2009

Why hamsters need toilet training

SNUGGLES (not her real name) is, or, rather, WAS a hamster, as I discovered from her obituary on the internet social site Facebook.
My friend Alison (again, tediously, not her real name for reasons which will shortly become clear) had written: “Snuggles escaped again last night, but sadly one adventure too many: I've just found her floating in the downstairs toilet. Have hidden her in the shed as Charlotte has friends coming for tea tonight before Cubs. . .trauma!”
What is it with furry creatures and water? When my children were small a neighbour found them and some friends playing happily in her kitchen while what looked like a rat crouched in a corner beside the dishwasher.
Quick as a flash, Ruth scooped up her dustpan, felled the creature with one blow and raced down the hall to the bathroom where she deposited the flattened corpse in the toilet and flushed it away.
Minutes later a second neighbour appeared at her door with a weeping child in tow.
“Ruth!” she screeched, beseechingly. “Tell me you haven’t done what Simon says you’ve done to his pet gerbil!”
Anyway, back to Facebook, which is where I seem to get all my bad news these days. Having shed a tear for Snuggles I then find a former News of the World editor friend of mine – whom I haven’t been able to contact since she disappeared a month ago, SUPPOSEDLY to write chapter six of our joint newspaper novel – sharing grubby jokes online with the Sun’s ex-Royal reporter!
Frankly, it feels like infidelity.


THE Outlaw is back in the village so I’ve left home and moved in with her while the missus is away.
It’s not as bad as it sounds: the Outlaw is Gemma’s mother, who’s just spent a month in .hospital having her broken hip pinned and has been allowed home while Gemma is in Provence following the Andy Goldsworthy sculpture trail (she said if I mentioned Goldsworthy ‘cultural types’ would understand).
They’re a pair of one-offs, the Outlaw and ’Er Indoors, if that isn’t too much of a contradiction. “While you’re here you can set up my new computer,” growled the Outlaw.
Yes, at 94 and (only temporarily) slowed by a healing hip she’s bought a whizzy new computer set-up to keep in touch with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren across the world.
Truly, a woman batting towards her first century and a whizz-kid a heart!


WERE you surprised that Sarah Ferguson was recorded asking for half a million quid in exchange for an introduction to her ex-husband, the Duke of York? I can’t say I was.
That’s the way people in public life behave nowadays. It’s only six weeks since three Labour Cabinet Ministers were taped by Channel Four as they negotiated fees for introductions and lobbying services. Would that have been for what they knew or for WHO they knew?
Ken Clarke wasn’t long out of government in 1998 when he gratefully accepted the deputy chairmanship of British American Tobacco, a company accused of using dubious strategies to promote its products in Third World countries.
Would that have been because he was a QC and a celebrated cigar smoker? Or because he knew the right flesh to press?
And Tony Blair? Don’t get me started on Britain’s newest multi-millionaire. He’s not content with his peacekeeping role in the Middle East, his seven-figure consultancy salary from the Wall Street bank JP Morgan Chase and his £400,000 an hour speeches on the international lecture circuit.
Now he is to lend his expertise and his ‘global relationships’ to Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valle technology company. For love or for money? “Not pro bono,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
And we’re worried about Fergie?

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, May 28 2009

My tactical voting teach-in

TWO weeks on and they’re still infected with election fever down at the Red Lion.
“Never mind yon bus timetables you wrote about last week, Banksy,” thundered the good Farmer Morebottle. “There are issues of state still requiring answers.”
Well, you know me: ever prepared to selflessly give of my time and great wisdom I hunkered down with a pint and a bowl of peanuts and took questions from the floor at Young Farmers’ Night. This is how it went:
Old Bob: “Who’s representing ME in the Coalition Cabinet? Two thirds of them went to Oxford or Cambridge, only four are women and none of them is working to a manifesto any of us voted for.”
Me: “Well said, Bob; the Cabinet is indeed unrepresentative educationally and by gender. At the same time, half the population must be, by definition, of below average intelligence; let’s just hope the Cabinet is non-representative in THAT aspect, too.”
It is, in fact, extremely unlikely that Bob, my domino partner, would have been persuaded to cease exercising his drinking arm for long enough to exercise his civic duty. But I digress . . .
The Byreman (who has been gloating ever since the Fat Cats’ and Foxhunters’ Alliance won office): “Boris Johnson says the Coalition is like a cross between a bulldog and a Chihuahua. Do you agree?”
Me: “No. I see it more as a marriage of pit bull and muzzle.”
At this The Byreman exploded and headed off to fetch a four wood from golf bag to “teach me a lesson”.
“Don’t worry,” cooed Billy the Kid, soothingly. “I play golf with him every Friday and I’ve yet to see that four wood connect with anything.”
Nevertheless, the kerfuffle brought our General Election inquest to a premature end with important questions left unanswered. Such as: How will the Liberal Democrats of Thirsk and Malton vote next Thursday in an election that was delayed by the death of the UKIP candidate?
It’s a safe Tory seat where a Labour man ran second in 2005. A fortnight ago tactical voting brought about a national coalition government, but two weeks is a long time in politics and protest votes are all the rage.
Supporters of both ruling parties who disapprove of the unholy alliance – and there are many – might well vote Labour ‘just to show ’em’.
Then true blue Conservatives and diehard Lib Dems could really stand united . . . behind the red rosette!

THE High Court decision to grant BA an injunction to stop the latest air crews’ strike on a technicality offers just the precedent we need for a re-run of the General Election: not every voter was correctly registered, some people had more than one vote and hundreds – maybe thousands – were prevented from voting.
Or do General Elections not have to be held to the same high standards as union strike ballots?

I STOPPED a man on a train from bellowing into his mobile phone the other day by pretending I thought he was talking to me.
“Absolutely!” I muttered, when I could take no more of it. “I couldn’t agree more.”
His eyes narrowed. He glared at me and lowered his voice. But only a little.
“You’re SO right!” I cried, nodding vigorously in his direction and giving him the thumbs-up.” It did the trick: he scowled, mumbled a little Anglo-Saxon into his mobile phone and hung up.
The fightback against noisy mobile users gathered pace this week when the new Prime Minister announced that mobiles and Blackberrys must be switched off in Cabinet.
Why stop there? We’re quite used to wifi hotspots as the only places where wireless broadband works . . . why not jam mobile phone signals in restaurants and public buildings and instead construct pavement buildings, painted red with windows for safety and providing perfect mobile telephone reception for all networks?
Then we could call them . . . phone boxes!

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, May 21 2010

Keeping the bus-tards honest...

YES, I know it’s only a couple of days since the new PM (Poor Man) accepted the poisoned chalice but I’d like to be the first to protest . . . And yes, I DO know that Cleggy and Campo have hardly had a chance to get their feet under the table at Number Ten. Nonetheless, I’d like to register the First of the Summer Whines.
After all, it is occurring on their watch. And Mrs Banks and I blame Cameron’s Big Society.
Something terribly sneaky, you see, has happened to our village bus. They’ve put up the fares. They’ve cancelled a couple of runs. They’ve retimed the rest.Without asking – or even telling – a solitary soul!
Word first got out about the altered timetable when a lady from Branxton told ’Er Up In Arms how she’d waited for a bus that “never came”. Actually, it did – but (uselessly) twenty minutes after its long-advertised time.
The parish council knew nothing about the change. Neither did our post office, which has always been the designated stop in Crookham.So Mrs B boarded the next bus to Berwick to find out for herself.
Sure enough, times had changed, one trip had been abandoned altogether and the fares had gone up. And all of this had happened three weeks earlier.Nothing advertised in The Journal or the Berwick Advertiser. Nothing even in that waste of space, money and manpower the county council mischievously calls ‘Northumberland News’.
The timetable confusion is extraordinary:
VISIT the bus company’s website and you will find a timetable dating back to September 2006.
CALL at Berwick’s Tourist Information Office and you’ll be given a ‘slimmed down’ schedule which omits any reference to Branxton, Crookham, Duddo, Felkington or Shoresdean. It tells you where the bus starts and finishes its trip but gives no indication of which route it follows.
My check call to the operators, Glen Valley Tours, confirmed the changes. Confusion still clouded the question of cost: the receptionist quoted £2.80 as the new single fare (“It’s gone up 20p or 30p, I’m not sure which”) but she was unable to remember the new return fare.
“If you ask for a return on the bus you might get a discount but it won’t be much.”
The bus driver told us different: £2.60 single and £4.80 return is what HE charges.
So here’s why I’m getting steamed up: the 267, like other scheduled services in Northumberland, is subsidised by the taxpayer through Northumberland County Council. The service is not cheap, especially compared with heavily subsidised big city services like London and Manchester.
Londoners pay just £1.20 per bus trip to travel anywhere in the capital, with a daily £3.90 cap on bus costs. Under-18s pay just 60p per trip with a £1.95 cap.
Less advantaged north Northumbrians – with far fewer transport alternatives than their big city counterparts – struggle to meet comparatively colossal bus fares. With the minimum wage set at £5.80 per hour (or £3.57 for under-18s) daily travel can represent a hefty percentage of earnings.
It’s not so much a Big Society we need, Campo, as a joined-up one.
In the meantime don’t bother asking the bus company for a timetable, get one from the bus driver. And pay the fare HE asks rather than the price Glen Valley suggests!

WHEN fat cats telephone hoping to part you from your hard-earned, how do they KNOW who they’re talking to?
“Is Mrs Banks at home?” the Man from Barclays asked. “No,” I replied. “Can I help? I’m her husband.”
“Afraid not,” said the banker. “Is her brother available? [the siblings handle my elderly mother-in-law’s affairs]”.
I thought quickly. “Yes he is…hang on.” Pause. Change of voice. “Hello?”
“Ah, Mr Newton . . . I just wanted to go over a few things . . .”
Ridiculous, this security charade. Isn’t it?

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, May 14 2010

Dopey decides General Election!

SO, at last it’s over. Can Toon and Country lay claim to having been scrupulously fair throughout all the bigot-bashing, name-calling, head-in-hands horrors and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-their-mouths moments? I think so.
As you read this I will be settling into my headphones onstage at the University of Chester preparing to take part in day-long BBC Radio Five coverage of the General Election fallout, whereto I have been summoned to provide a taste of North-east opinion on the outcome.
Frankly, loosening the fairness leash a little will come as a welcome relief. The past five weeks have been very trying.
My domino form at the Red Lion wasn’t helped by the eternal sniping from the Byreman and those bibulous old Tory farmers he hangs out with. Calling every drawn game “a hung parliament” hardly smoothed things over, either.
And my earning power was frequently reduced when the BBC, agonising over compliance with its Charter, would cancel planned studio debates because some redneck journalist of the Right had pulled out, thus destroying the careful political ’balance’ demanded by the party spin doctors armed with stopwatches.
Naturally, The Journal and its editor have been entirely, nit-pickingly fair in their approach to election coverage and I pay homage to the spirit of decency blah-blah-blah…( as you can see from the above, dear reader, my annual contract negotiation is underway).
Anyway, as I was saying, the Great Pow-wow is over, at least until we grow to hate the next lot and demand they, too, face the guillotine. I hope you’re happy this morning. I can almost certainly promise you that I’m not.
So to cheer us all up, I was going to unveil my favourite, least-politically correct election joke. But even that has been stymied.
“I think NOT, Banksy,” said The Powers That Be when I submitted my column for perusal. “Britain might still be counting the votes if the result is as tight as everyone thinks it will be.
“This so-called joke,” said t’Editor, painfully puncturing my week’s work by metaphorically consigning it to the spike, “is hardly presented in the spirit of fairness, honesty and decency.”
So I argued. I pleaded. And finally (contract negotiations being at a ticklish point), I capitulated and rewrote my political joke “snowy white“, naming no names, in the spirit of fairness (and in exchange for an extra five quid on my fee). Here goes...
Hi-ho! Hi-ho! The Seven Dwarfs left for work early each morning, leaving Snow White at home to do her housework. As lunchtime approached, she would prepare their food and carry it to the mine.
One day as she arrived at the pithead with lunch she saw that there had been a terrible cave-in. Tearful, fearing the worst, Snow White began calling out, hoping against hope that the dwarfs had somehow survived.
“Hello? Hello!” she shouted. “Can anyone hear me? Hello!”
For a long time there was no answer but just as she was giving up hope Snow White heard a faint voice from deep within the mine, singing: “Vote for Change!”
Snow White fell to her knees, sobbing and praying.
“Oh, thank you, Lord!” she wept. “At least Dopey is still alive!”
By the way, if you think that’s still a bit one-sided try the bolshie old Byreman’s definition of the word ‘bigot’: Brown Is Gone On Thursday!

POLITICAL correctness now stretches to food where kids are concerned: sell-by dates consign cases of yoghurt to the kitchen bin, day-old bread can’t even be used for toast, cheese with a rind is “off”, they insist.
Only the poverty brought on by leaving home adjusted my pair’s commonsense acceptance of the Real World, but I wonder what even they would make of the remedy for mouldy jam that I found in Marguerite Patten’s 1968 Every Day Cookbook the other day?
“Remove the mould from the jam, tip the remainder into a pan and boil hard…use VERY quickly!”

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, May 7, 2010

Shirley's show must go on...

THE show, as the old saw has it, must go on. Come hell, high water or hot volcanic ash a duty, once undertaken, must be completed.
Sez who? Well, my Daughter the Actress for one: dedicated to her art, she once gamely dragged a theatrical surgical boot upstage and down throughout a Tennessee Williams play, ignoring the torn knee ligaments her dedication brought on early in Act Two.
Fans of Queen, Pink Floyd and Three Dog Night understand the maxim, too; it booms out of their soundboxes through the eponymous singles those bands respectively produced.
Carrying on regardless may be courageous but it’s not always comforting. At the high point of one cultural expedition to the Hackney Empire to hear the Moldovan State Opera play La Boheme (a contest La Boheme won hands-down) ’Er Indoors and I suffered agonies for the lead tenor who missed his top notes and coughed over the lower range throughout the first act.
”I so sorry,” he pleaded, after stepping bravely through the curtain at the interval. “Haff sroat veddy bad, much hurt.” The politely sympathetic ovation that followed dried to a slow, horrified handclap when he added: “But neffer fear, I carry on!”
I find myself in a similar dilemma. For two months I have eagerly anticipated interviewing Baroness Williams of Crosby (Shirley, as was) tonight at the Queen’s Hall, Hexham, as part of the town’s book festival.
Last Sunday I was laid low by a chest infection, a hacking, hurtful cough bad enough to cause me to miss my dominoes at the Red Lion. On Monday I visited the doctor then took to my bed, popping antibiotics and sucking on a lung-clearing inhaler.
My contact with humankind has been limited: I bumped into the Byreman at the chemist’s shop in Coldstream and he directed me out into the street “where we can talk in the fresh air and not surrounded by your bloody germs.“ What a friend!
My old agricultural pal Ronald ‘Demon’ Barber didn’t even notice my spluttering discomfort when we met as I travelled home via the Cornhill shop,
“Cereal prices are on the floor,” he growled. “Thank God for the EU money.”
Doubtless he’ll still be voting Conservative next Thursday, however!
Anyway, on the eve of my theatre date with the noble lady - and despite a second visit to the surgery for a change of medication - I’m still wheezing like a steam engine and scaring the local sheep with my bark.
So here’s my dilemma: we have a full house turning up tonight (so much so that Mrs B and her old school friend Mary Clegg will have to perch on chairs backstage), it’s too late to brief an understudy and I’m determined not to let anyone down, particularly Baroness Williams.
Besides, ‘Shirl the Pearl’, as we tabloid types used to label her, has a fascinating life story to tell.
The woman many believed would be Britain’s first woman prime minister abandoned the security of the Labour Cabinet to join the Gang of Four in setting up the Social Democrats, forerunners of today’s Lib-Dems. Easy to see that 29 years later - and one week from tonight - she might finally witness the breaking of the political mould.
But there‘s so much more to Shirley: for instance, did you KNOW she once worked as a waitress in Whitley Bay? Or that the one-time tomboy’s ambition to become an MP was, at 20 years of age, acerbically dismissed by Lady Astor with the words: “Not with THAT hair!”
So say a silent prayer that my tonsils hold out and that my coughing fits don’t drown out Baroness Williams and drive her audience to distraction. For this is one show that MUST go on.
Who, after all, could let a little thing like a chest cold cost him his front row view of history?
First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, April 30, 2010

Last orders! Chatham House rules, OK?

I LUNCHED this week with a Conservative Shadow Minister and six national newspaper editors; privileged company for this tabloid has-been to keep with Britain two weeks away from its most unpredictable General Election result since 1945.
Unfortunately, as I flipped open my red-backed Creamline notebook, laid out three newly-sharpened HB pencils and checked the batteries in my mini-recorder, our host intoned words that spell dismay for any journalist keen to hit the headlines: “Chatham House Rule, gentlemen.”
I should explain two things: first, pressure of work had forced cancellations from Britain's two female editors, leaving our political guest of honour to cope 'only' with the testosterone-hyped editors of The Times, Financial Times, Independent on Sunday, Observer, Daily Mail and the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs.
Second, for those not in the know, a meeting held under the Chatham House Rule allows participants to use information received while revealing neither the speaker's identity nor affiliation. While in no way legally binding, it is a moral code (governing the behaviour of the least moral members of society, the media).
In other words, I COULD tell you everything that was said, and by whom, but if I did so I would have to kill you.
So let me tell you first what was NOT discussed as the nearly great and the not so good picked over their fish-and-white-wine lunch beside the Thames: policy, either pertaining to a future Tory government or to its attitude toward the media, did not get a look-in. Neither did volcanic ash, our empty skies and the million Brits pleading (with the 'nanny state' they claim to despise) to repatriate them on warships from the Costas.
All we talked about was Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.
About how Clegg “could not win” last night's second TV debate with Brown and Cameron “because expectations after his stunning first performance were now too high” and that his opponents would be gunning for him.
And, briefly, about the deleterious effect that a powerful showing by the Lib-Dem leader would have on Rupert Murdoch's massive influence on the government of this country, given that his powerful editors have always laughed off the need for a relationship with the third, “inconsequential” political party.
Bearing in mind the off-the-record restrictions imposed by Chatham House, a rule originated in June 1927 at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, I think I may at least tell you that the Tories are as mystified by Clegg's appeal to the ordinary voter as the Vatican is towards the outrage over the church's child abuse scandal: They Just Don't Get It.
Alas, all too soon the lunch broke up: the editors of the Times and the FT fled first, followed by our Shadow Minister breaking away to knock on doors in Godalming and, lastly, by the drift of Sunday editors off to stoke the fires of next weekend's one-day wonders.
Tabloid editors of my ilk, I reflected sadly, were made of sterner stuff: no Sun or Mirror editor would dream of leaving the table until glasses stood dry and all hope of replenishment had passed.
And as for Chatham House Rules . . . pah!


IN a small bar over a cleansing ale after lunch, one of the media men reflecting on what he saw as “the greed” of the Scottish Assembly in its demands on the British taxpayer, illustrated his remarks with this story:
A Scotswoman was walking along the beach with her small son when a tsunami plucked the boy from her grasp and sucked him out to sea.
“O Lord,” wailed the wee wifey, “Bring back oor Hamish safely and I'll be grateful tae God for ever mair!”
Instantly, another huge wave crashed ashore returning her son almost into her arms. He was saved, but she wasn't pleased.
“Here, youse!” she cried. “He was wearing a new hat!”

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne on April 23, 2010

Hey, Dave! Save wonga with Debt-ol wipedown

IF David Cameron REALLY wants to wipe billions of wasted wonga off the nation’s books he might well kickstart his efficiency drive by giving the nation’s zimmer frames a wipedown with Dettol.
I’m serious! My pal Patsy’s mum-in-law had a fall recently, spent a couple of days in hospital (where together they watched a government information film encouraging recycling) and was then discharged with a smart, new zimmer to aid recovery.
A fortnight later, fully recovered, she tried to return the walking frame she no longer needed to the Essex hospital from which it was provided. “Nothing doing,” said the local NHS Trust. “It’s a matter of ’elf and safety, madam.”
Zimmer frames harbour unseen germs, they explained. “Never heard of bleach?” fumed Patsy’s mum. “Or Dettol and a J-cloth?” Still no takers.
So she tried recycling the zimmer via the local Red Cross.
“Sorry, love, but we’ve got a warehouse stuffed full of the wretched things,” said a volunteer, not unsympathetically. It’s a nationwide problem, apparently: Dorset’s Primary Care Trust, for example, finds it cheaper for patients to keep the equipment rather than collecting, cleaning and re-using it. “It also minimises the risk of cross-infection” said a spokesman.
So if you, too, are having trouble finding a use for that redundant granny-walker here’s Five Things You Could Do with an Unwanted Zimmer:
1. Grow runner beans up it.
2. Cover with cling film to make a mini-greenhouse.
3. Add wheels and turn it into a golf trolley.
4. Make a tent for your cat.
5. Use as a baby swing.
On second thoughts, Health and Safety wouldn’t be happy about the baby swing idea . . . metal fatigue, you know.

IF you’ve ever wondered how firm a grasp the average punter has on subjects such as geography, climatology and global warming then this wee tale that has drifted back from Australia should leave you shaking your sorry head.
Robbie the Lawnmower Salesman from Spittal was visiting an old Geordie mate Down Under last summer and they were lying on the beach talking about old times when Eck says to Robbie: “Here, back home it’ll be Kelso Show this weekend.”
“Aye,” says Robbie, stretching out under Sydney’s still-warm winter sun, “And haven’t they got a grand day for it!”

IT has been a trying week up here in Godzone: we didn’t realise The Byreman’s chest infection was as bad until he missed TWO drinking nights at the Red Lion as well as Ladies’ Day at Kelso, a racing event normally etched into his heart as deeply as his own dear wife’s birthday.
Then a steward’s inquiry had to be called into the latest Grand National sweepstake coup by the landlord’s infant son AJ, a precocious toddler with the suspicious knack of winning everything he enters (indeed, we’re thinking of saddling him up to ride Lucinda Russell’s best mount in next year’s National!).
Finally, a brace of banking traumas for ’Er In Debt: first, our internet bank account was mysteriously frozen as we tried to draw funds with which to open new ISAs. Then the bank – having demanded proofs of identity as a means of unlocking our funds – refused to accept that their account holders “David and Gemma Banks” were the same people as the council rates bill’s rather more formal “A.D. and M.G. Banks”.
If it happens to you, by the way, don’t bother calling the automated customer service number with your mother’s maiden name, first school, place of birth and so on; ’Er Enraged did that and the robotic voice at the other end merely wilfully misunderstood her human dialect and demanded that she “try to find another way of describing the problem”!
I remember the days when I could go into the bank, blow a kiss to the girl on the till and blag a cup of tea from the manager, but that was way back when . . . oh, don’t get me started on zimmer frames again!

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, April 16, 2010

Don't let the 'democrats' kill off democracy

DEMOCRACY is in danger. Don’t just take my word for it: Justice Secretary Jack Straw says the same, and so does Tory shadow minister Caroline Spelman. So, too, do the men and women of a House of Commons all-party Select Committee.
The difference is that they have just started saying it. Whereas YOU read it here first. Last November, to be precise.
The wee headcount that Prime Minister Gordon McGrumpy has called for next month pales into insignificance alongside the fallout from these words I wrote before Christmas:
“I pay council tax to have my rubbish removed, potholes paved over, 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!”
Trinity Mirror, the publishing company that owns, among other properties, The Journal, has recently taken up cudgels against council freesheets but let’s get something straight: I hold no particular brief for a company that is big enough and rich enough to fight its own battles.
What DOES concern me is the threat to freedom of speech if our political controllers also take control of the means of communication and muzzle criticism.
Jack Straw said this week: “I am on the side of the papers, not the councils. Local papers are of fundamental importance to the workings of our democracy.” Caroline Spelman, Conservative shadow local government secretary, said newspapers “risk being driven out of business”.
Ironically, this month’s Northumberland mealy-mouthpiece (it contains not a single objective criticism, only praise and propaganda for the council’s plans) fell onto my doormat (and, expensively, onto 144,000 other doormats county-wide) at precisely the same time as a Culture Media and Sport Select Committee report tore such phoney propaganda sheets to shreds..
The Office of Fair Trading has been asked to investigate the damage such publications have on democracy, foisting as they do a ratepayer-subsidised alternative to independent and frequently critical local newspapers which are struggling to survive the global recession.
Indeed, not content with foisting its one-eyed spin-sheet on the populace, Northumberland’s newspaper nonentity is now touting for advertising.
Without revenue, local newspapers perish. And without local newspapers, so does democracy . . .

TALKING of democracy, the political jokes have already begun. Here’s my current Number One:
Gordon Brown dies during an official visit to Israel. The undertaker tells British Embassy staff: “You can have him shipped home in state for £5 million or you can bury him here in the Holy Land for just £500.”
Without hesitation the ambassador elects to have the PM shipped home, whatever the cost to the nation. “But why?” asks the undertaker. “It would be wonderful for him to be buried here and you could use the £5million to help settle the national debt or pay for the Olympics.”
“Yes,” said the ambassador, “But two thousand years ago another man died and was buried here, and three days later he rose from the dead.
“We just can't take the risk!”

THEY were at it hammer and tongs the moment the news broke: Steve the ex-bobby was sniping at Klondike Barry, Robbie the lawnmower man from Spittal started laying off bets around the bar while the Byreman wanted the Red Lion renamed using a neutral colour “to prevent trouble”.
“But surely,” I pleaded, “We can agree to differ until the general election campaign is over?”
“Who the hell cares about the election?” said Iain the landlord. “It’s Sunderland and Newcastle together in the Premiership WE’RE arguing about!”

BY the way, I KNEW technology had finally won the Man v. Machine contest when my brother Richard called me after the clocks went forward to see if his digital watch had made the adjustment unaided.
I had to go and check the microwave to find out!

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, April 9, 2010

The day I got that sinking feeling . . .

ARE you sitting comfortably? Then you’re much better off than I am, friends.
I’m starting to get a persecution complex. It started this week when the Red Lion threw out all its old chairs and installed sturdy new ones. The landlord looked embarrassed. “They have to take a lot of stress,” Iain mumbled, nodding in my direction.
Then I made a pre-theatre dinner booking at the quaint, antiques-cum-restaurant business Café Curio in Berwick – where having dined like a millionaire you can behave like one and purchase anything that takes your fancy, from furniture to cutlery and paintings to plates – and was warned by my fellow diner Gilly the Radical: “Watch where you sit: the chairs are a bit delicate!”
Then, to cap it all, my man in Western Australian emailed me from Perth with the distressing news that a past transgression of mine had been exposed in the national press.
Graham Jones of Perth, who gets his Journal second-hand from an old pal in Morpeth, emailed to say that, writing in the latest issue of the Weekend Australian on the beneficial effects of strong coffee, a former Aussie colleague snitched: “I remember one Friday when editor Frank Devine and his deputy, David Banks, went off to lunch and returned for afternoon conference twenty minutes late, red of face and carrying huge tumblers of strong black coffee.
“They walked airily into the conference room and sat down. Now Banksy is not a thin man; think of any big man you know and multiply him by five. Slowly, as the editor conducted his conference, the deputy’s chair buckled beneath him until there was nothing to be seen save for Banksy’s eyes peering over the table top.
“Frank paid no attention whatsoever. He might as well have never before met his colleague. . .”
I then received two emails from contemporary colleagues deriding me for returning from lunch only twenty minutes late (until I pointed out that we left the office at noon and conference was held daily at 5pm!).
To make matters worse, as I sit here writing this column and contemplating yet ANOTHER diet, I notice that the leg on my study chair is getting wobbly…

THERE is one national newspaper I love beyond all others, partly because it has the decency to correct its mistakes publicly but mainly because of the wonderful eccentricity of those errors. This week provided a classic:
“In a recent interview with the Irish singer Gavin Friday we included this quote: ‘And those hip-hop guys, they all have about 10 managers and 10 assistants, all with black berets.’
“On reflection, our writer realised that he had misheard and what he should have written was: ‘And those hip-hop guys, they all have about 10 managers and 10 assistants, all with BlackBerrys."
Not even we journalists could make THAT up, could we?

OF LATE we’ve been doing a lot of hobnobbing with the gentry, the good lady and I, and they raise funds rather more grandly than we do with our coffee morning raffles at Crookham Village Hall.
As a result, we’re awash with the sort of gifts one bids for at charity auctions like the grand affair we attended at George and Jane Farr’s Pallinsburn House in aid of the Tillside Cricket Juniors’ summer tour.
Auctioneer Sandy Jeffries was merciless: as a result, Mrs Banks is lined up for A Hawk and a Walk (a day’s hawking with an instructor/falconer) while I am looking forward to a one-day woodturning course and a tour of Berwick Town Hall with the mayor.
Sadly, I missed out on a day-long horse riding lesson, following the audience’s cruel reaction to my bid.
“How big’s the horse?” they yelled in unison!

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, April 2, 2010

Ex-journalists make great copy . . .

CONTRARY to the opinion you might well have formed upon reading this ill-informed scribble of mine every Friday in The Journal, I am still very much a journalist.
While my days are now spread between the simple delights of garden, village hall and occasional WI speaking engagements I retain just enough cognitive experience of my life’s craft to be able to recognise a good yarn when I hear it and, what’s more important, to take down a surreptitious note (it was once suggested I could peel an orange in my pocket).
So when my broadcaster and TV celebrity pal Nick Ferrari – he’s the chubby chap on Titchmarsh – nudged me during the speeches at the British Press Awards this week and asked “What are you drawing?” I smugly reminded the one-time newspaperman that the scrawl on my menu was, in fact, Pitman’s shorthand.
Furthermore, I was recording some rather good words spoken by two other one-time newspapermen who have swapped their old roles for the lure of celebrity: John Humphrys, once of the Penarth Times, and Boris Johnson, sacked Times trainee and later a writer for the Wolverhampton Express and Star.
Mr Humphrys first: the TV presenter and bête noir of the political heavies who fall foul of him on Radio 4’s Today programme, confessed that he prefers presenting TV’s Mastermind these days “because it’s so much nicer questioning people who WANT to give you an answer!”
Mr Johnson, now rather better known as Mayor of London with half an eye on Number 10, was in the sort of sparkling form that required the full extent of what was once my 120 words per minute note-taking ability. Chastened, he said, by the Scoop of the Year – the MPs’ expenses scandal, exposed by the Daily Telegraph – the mop-headed Churchillian figure thundered:
"I appear before you tonight with the trembling hesitation of some Japanese general emerging from a bunker after Nagasaki. On behalf of all British politicians I have come to convey our unconditional surrender.”
Suggesting (tongue firmly in cheek) that democracy might be better served by an influx of journalists into Parliament, ‘hizzoner’ boomed: "You have won. You have bugged our phones. You have abolished our second home allowances. You have confiscated our porn videos and made it unacceptable for us to charge the taxpayer for pruning our wisteria.
“We can not go on like this. I come to propose, as a gesture of submission, that we change places . . . I urge all of you to put your expenses online: every dinner, every bunch of flowers. And to satisfy the wholly legitimate desire of the British people to know how much Jeremy Paxman is paid, a fact I failed to discover despite asking him 14 times, most of which was cut out by the BBC.”
You’ve never seen a sea-change like it. As ever, all agreed, Boris had now Gone Too Far. Hacks’ heads that had nodded in vigorous agreement, slowed to a halt when they realised they’d been had.
“Huh!” grunted Ferrari in my ear. “Same old Boris, well over the top.” Then, spotting the menu filled with my squiggles, added: “Pitman’s, is it?”
I nodded.
“Hmmm . . . we younger reporters were all taught Teeline.”
They may be EX-newspapermen but they’re ALL still a slippery lot.

ONE ex-newspaperman who refused to be blinded by the bright lights of Hollywood, I was reminded at the Awards ceremony, was the playwright Sir Tom Stoppard (ex-Western Daily Press) who initially rejected Steven Spielberg’s plea that he adapt Empire of the Sun for the big screen.
“Sorry, I’m busy doing a play for the BBC,” Stoppard told him.
“The BBC? But that’s just television,” said the great director.
“Ah, but you don’t understand,” replied Stoppard, indulgently. “This is for BBC RADIO . . .”

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, March 26, 2010

If this is culture, I'm with Goering

JUST like Hitler’s fat buddy Hermann Goering, when I hear the word “culture” I reach for my revolver. Not so Mrs Banks, however.
For her the word “culture” is like the pop of a starting pistol: telephone call to Sue the Luddite seeking a cultural companion, call to the Theatre Royal reserving tickets for Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, internet hunt for return train tickets to Newcastle . . . and that’s where Catch 22 leaves her up the Swanee. There ARE no return trains to Berwick after 9.48pm and the ballet doesn’t finish until 10.
Deep breath; “We’ll drive,” she announces, being the grumpy Green that she is. “We can still park and ride from the Regent Centre.”
No, they can’t: park and ride finishes at 7pm.
Deep gloom descends. Nothing for it but the car all the way to Newcastle and back and park in the Eldon Square car park, leaving a carbon footprint as deep as the Eccles pit at Backworth.
Which is what they do . . . until they reach Eldon Square and find that the car park closes at, yes, ten o’clock. So twenty minutes before closing time, Mrs Cinderella has to leave the stalls, her cultural companion and the suicidal swans to sprint back to Eldon Square and get her car out.
If that’s culture you can keep it, I tell ’Er In-A-Grump when she gets home.
She reaches for her revolver . . .


WHO says the Beeb isn’t dumbing down? The funeral of Michael Foot, one of the century’s great political figures, is attended by Prime Ministers and Labour leaders past and present yet BBC News fails to report the occasion.
Ah, but then of course they had to find time for two David Beckham reports, plus coverage of Kate Winslet's separation.


ANNIE’S phone was ringing. “Hello? This is Annie,” she said.
“That’s amazing!” boomed her mother’s voice from a room at the Berwick care home where she’s been recuperating for a few weeks. “I just changed the television channel and there YOU were!”
Poor Annie had to call the home and ask one of the nurses to go to her mother’s room and hang up the mobile phone.
Nothing new there, though: I still recall the embarrassment of being patiently told by my (then) teenage son that the ‘mobile’ I was shouting into was actually the TV remote and, besides, that wasn’t the phone ringing but the microwave timer going off.
It comes to us all . . .


I RESIGNED from the village hall committee this week. I cited the need for fresh blood and new ideas now that we have our thirty-year lease in place. Really, it was just me dodging the hard work and leaving (as usual!) the missus to soldier on alone as secretary.
When politicians quit they usually claim they are doing so “in order to spend more time with the family”, at which point the press has a field day uncovering The Other Woman and wringing the real story out of her while the wretched MP proclaims undying love for his cuckolded wife.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised, having left my wife alone on the committee (in order to spend LESS time with the family, I suppose), when the tongues began to wag followed by the surreptitious round-robin distributed by ‘a close friend’ which was headlined:
“NEWSFLASH! Hall Committee Member Resigns after Discovery in Love Nest with Secretary!”

QUOTE of the week: Baroness Deech, former head of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, explaining on Radio Four’s Today programme why donor anonymity should be reintroduced to persuade more men to donate sperm:
“At one point this year, Glasgow was down to one sperm donor.”
Step forward, Rab C. Nesbit!

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, March 19, 2010

Ignore Geldof's anger, don't stop giving

IT’S my own fault, really: a lifetime’s under-the-bedsheets habit began with Radio Luxembourg when I was a teenager back in the Sixties, graduating to Radio One then Radio Merseyside during the Beatles years.
Now that I’m in MY sixties the bedside radio’s ‘sleep’ button allows me ninety minutes of BBC World Service as I surrender to the arms of Morpheus (rather than those of ‘Er In Bed) and its alarm wakes me at 5.45am for moos and news: Farming Today, followed by the Today programme.
I may flirt with Radio Three and Classic FM when the world grows depressing from time to time, ; in-car dalliances range from ‘easy listening’ (i.e. more of the Beatles years) to Radio Newcastle or a bit of Borders. But, by and large, the BBC World Service is the bedrock upon which this old boy’s broadcast experience is founded.
Which is why I reacted with alarm to a World Service news report, deep in the small hours one day last week, that 95 per cent of the millions raised in Britain to feed starving Ethiopians after the 1985 famine might well have been redirected into the greedy pockets of fat middlemen, or used to buy weapons of war.
I wasn’t the only one to experience a sickening sensation: the claims by a first-class BBC reporter, Martin Plaut, and subsequently defended by well-known broadcaster Rageh Omar - both of whom spent years in Ethiopia - enraged the prickly Sir Bob ‘Band Aid’ Geldof, the sincerity of whose dedication to that nation’s plight can surely not be doubted.
My own, much more modest, interest in the allegations can be explained by the fact that ten years after Geldof’s incredible humanitarian effort I visited Tigray province in northern Ethiopia to ensure that funds raised by Daily Mirror readers had been used to supply the clinics, drugs and medical staff for which they were intended.
A former Mirror editor, I was by this time Mirror Group’s editorial director; if it is of any reassurance to Sir Bob I visited the ‘Mirror’ clinics, met the doctors and nurses and discussed and communicated back to London their needs for continued medical supplies.
My hosts, the charity Relief Society of Tigray (REST), satisfied me that they were doing wonderful work with the UK funds that were channelled through them; nonetheless, I was dimly aware of REST’s connections with the Tigray rebel army that had defeated Ethiopia’s Marxist former president, a despot called Mengistu who had used food and medical supplies as a weapon with which to control the people.
The BBC puts it rather more firmly, akin to the political relationship between, say, Sinn Fein and the IRA: “REST was,” says Omar, “undeniably the humanitarian wing of the rebel movement”.
The hard choice facing aid providers like Band Aid, Oxfam, Save the Children and even the Mirror was stark: either deal through REST and risk some of the money being illicitly (and, arguably, understandably) siphoned off to fight the dictator, or refuse and watch millions starve.
Has anything changed? Sadly, no: last night the World Service awakened me once more at 3am with a leaked UN security council report that half the food aid sent to feed hundreds of thousands of starving Somalians is being stolen by corrupt contractors, radical Islamic militants and local UN workers.
The Ethiopian allegations obviously worried my old colleagues at the Mirror as much as they did me; despite their confidence that all is still well, “not least because of your own eyewitness evidence that there were physical buildings and functioning clinics” they are continuing to make checks.
Bob Geldof’s anger at the World Service reports of chicanery and thieving - a classic case of shooting the messenger, if ever there was one - stems from his fear that we, the ground level donors who respond so generously to disaster appeals worldwide, will take fright, grow cynical and close our purses.
Please don’t.

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, March 12, 2010

Farewell to Michael Foot, my hero

THIRTY years ago I lived a dozen doors away from a great and admirable man. A politician with a rare, perhaps unique, quality among his breed: lovability.
I was young and newly married, making my way at the Mirror; he was Michael Foot, wild and white-haired and apparently decrepit even in his mid-sixties and poised to take on the challenge of Labour leadership that would end in a terrible election defeat but which saved his party from disintegration.
My £25-a-week flat in Hampstead, then as now home to the capital’s assorted Lefties, writers, actors and intellectuals, bordered his beloved Heath and was probably the width of the Commons away from his rather grander detached house in Pilgrim’s Lane. He and his wife Jill lived a quiet and normal life, protected not so much by police but by the vigilant regard of their unobtrusive neighbours.
I often saw him walking on the Heath with Dizzy, the dog he named after his favourite (ironically Conservative) politician Disraeli and he invariably raised his stick to this tubby fellow journalist, as he did at everyone who hallooed a friendly greeting.
Now, at 96 – an age which looked decades beyond his reach when he was sixty-six – he is dead and I find myself both sad and grateful that I lived briefly alongside possibly the last great Edwardian ‘man of letters’, a politician both of his time and yet one who lived ahead of it.
The greatest orator of his day, Foot was a conundrum: a Socialist who, as Harold Wilson’s secretary of state for employment, restored many rights lost to unions in the 1971 Tory industrial relations act and yet a man who led a determined fight – right down to the vital Commons vote – against UK membership of the European Union.
As for living before his time . . . how else would you describe a man who fought his doomed 1983 election campaign on a manifesto – derided later as “the longest suicide note in history” – which today looks positively visionary as we fight our way out of recession: massive public spending funded by increased borrowing, greater state control of the City and its bonuses and a state takeover of banks which refused to cooperate in establishing a state investment bank.
Sadly, the great man – ever one to wear his feelings not in a fine sleeve but on it – will, instead, be better remembered for unapologetically wearing a posh donkey jacket to the Cenotaph.
Still, to be admired for one’s principles – even Lady Thatcher praised them – despite being oft misunderstood is no bad epitaph.

HARD on the heels of Northumberland’s Great Winter Gritting Scandal comes the county’s latest atrocity: the Great Hole-in-the-Road Rage!
Potholes are an unpleasant aftermath to a winter of hard frosts and savage snows such as we’ve just had (or are now having!) and the only way to make our roads safe is through constant vigilance and the rapid application of shovelfuls of tarmac.
So where are the road menders? I’ve seen holes close to a foot deep up here in north Northumberland. If we’re lucky, some passer-by plants a warning cone; I’ve even seen a sandbag filling one open-cast pit!
Reader Julie Smith of Cornhill on Tweed, driving a car full of children, had a fearful experience on the Berwick road outside East Ord one dark night recently when she drove unseeing into a pothole which blew BOTH nearside tyres and damaged both wheel rims.
A call to County Hall, Morpeth, elicited the following advice (designed, I suspect, to deter claimants): WRITE (no calls) to the Internal Audit and Risk Management Department enclosing (wait for it) exact location, date and time and a brief description of the incident, photos of the damage, copies of invoices paid, a copy of your MoT certificate and a record of your car’s mileage.
So go on, deluge the damned bureaucrats. Potholers of the world unite . . . you have nothing to lose but your claims!

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, March 5, 2010

Dear Headmaster, It's really NOT my fault . . .

I ONCE wrote a letter of such toe-curling obsequiousness that I still flush with embarrassment at the memory of it. I wrote, at my mother’s command, an apology to my headmaster.
Invited to his home to be fitted for a dress for my role in the boys’ grammar school production of Pirates of Penzance (and that‘s all I‘m saying on the subject), I clumsily knocked over and smashed a vase which had been their wedding gift.
His wife instantly forgave me. My headmaster, the following morning, was livid. Hence the letter of apology. It was an undertaking I vowed never to have to repeat and I never have . . . until this week.
Yes, another toe-curling apology. To ANOTHER headmaster. That disaster should strike twice in a lifetime is almost as unbelievable as the facts contained in my most recent mea culpa. Judge for yourself . . .
TO: Mr Bernard Trafford,
Royal Grammar School,
Newcastle upon Tyne
Dear Headmaster,
This letter is by way of an enormous apology/explanation for my non-arrival at your Governors’ Luncheon last Friday. Bear with me: it is 47 years since I had to supply such a long-winded series of excuses to a grammar school head.
First, let me assure you that I was ALMOST at your table, as per your directions: at one point Jesmond Parish Church flashed by just fifty feet BELOW the flyover on which I was travelling and then was gone, never to be seen again. But my misadventure began long before then…
My car’s satnav, loaded with your postcode, brought me as far as Gosforth before suddenly giving up the ghost, its arrow locked immovably onto a road island with the dying words: “In fifty metres enter roundabout and take the…”
So, no satnav; and soon, no petrol. I had left Crookham with a low tank but enough, I reasoned, to get me to the RGS. Once I became lost (is this not beginning to read like Hoffnung’s tale of the barrel of bricks on the building site?) a warning light flashed on, followed a few miles later by a written warning from my onboard computer, then, finally, by the ultimate alert for the terminally stupid (hence apparently illiterate) motorist: a Lowryesque stick illustration of a perspiring driver filling his petrol tank.
My priority at that point was to find a petrol pump. Mere survival had become marginally more important even than lunch. But that priority quickly changed when my body’s own ‘onboard computer’ began ringing alarm bells from the region of my bladder.
I was by now careening around north Newcastle. Wild-eyed, screaming at traffic lights, honking desperately at queues of cars in front of me, I ignored women with prams and pensioners waiting patiently at pedestrian crossings. I even overtook a police car in a thirty limit in my search for petrol and a pee.
At this point, I must confess sir, you and your governors and even lunch were far from my mind. At last I spotted a pub and, screeching to a halt in the car park, sprinted inside shouting “Large Scotch!” at the alarmed landlord as I dived straightway into the Gents where I unbuttoned with but a micro-second to spare.
By the time I had performed, scrubbed up, paid for my un-drunk Scotch (which with gratitude I donated to a still-bewildered landlord) I was 45 minutes late, certainly too late to appear at table.
I faced, therefore, an unenviable choice: explain my predicament to your secretary – which, given the personal nature of my story, did not seem an attractive option – or beat a dishonourably furtive retreat, pointing my car, its tank now full of petrol and my bladder evacuated to a comfortable level, homeward.
I have learned my lesson, headmaster. I beg your forgiveness. More than that, I offer you and yours lunch or dinner, at your convenience.
PS: I should rephrase the last bit . . . conveniences are in short supply, I’ve found.

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, February 19, 2010

Doing a Doris Stokes on the media

’TIS said that every year on the anniversary eve of Elvis Presley’s death Kelvin Calder MacKenzie would issue an identical standing order to one of his trembling ‘Features creatures’: “Get hold of Doris Stokes and offer her a couple of grand for an exclusive chat with The Pelvis.”
Handsomely remunerated, the famous medium would contact the rock icon on ‘the other side’ and help him compose an anniversary message for his grieving fans, all of them readers of Kelvin’s Sun. Naturally.
All went well until 1987, when Features Editor Wendy Henry had to break the worst possible news to her editor: “Sorry, Kelv, not this year . . . Doris has popped her clogs as well.”
Undaunted, crafty Kelvin fired back: “Okay, then, get Uri Geller or someone to contact Doris in the Hereafter so she can go and find Elvis and interview him.. .. after all, she’s still on our fucking books!”
Astrology has been an essential piece of newspaper and magazine content ever since the Sunday Express asked R.H.Naylor in 1930 to chart the future happiness (sic) of the newly born Princess Margaret. The article was well received but his reputation was made a few months later when he predicted serious trouble for the British aircraft industry on the very day the airship R-101 crashed in France.
From that day forward no editor’s output was complete without a horoscope. And no one used and abused his astrologers better than MacKenzie. He once sacked an out-of-favour stargazer with a letter which began: “As you are doubtless already aware . . .”
I’ve been down that path myself. When I amalgamated Sydney’s morning Daily Telegraph with the afternoon Daily Mirror I found that my Noah’s Ark of a newspaper had inherited TWO of everything, including astrologers. When one of the unfortunates rang from London to ask “Do I still have a job?” I remembered MacKenzie and delivered the only reply possible: “Well, if YOU don’t know I guess the answer is No!”
Why, you might well ask, am I rambling on like this, dear reader? Well, it’s that time of year in the newspaper calendar that brings it on.
Frankly, astrology plays no greater part in a newspaper than in the New Year editions. After the “FREE! King’s College Carol Concert CD!” and “A six-pack of Lager for £1” offers and before the “£1 ferry trip to Boulogne!” are launched in an attempt to haul back the legion of readers who deserted in droves over Christmas comes the glossy, 36-page insert: “Your Stars for 2010”.
So, I thought, if the Sun, Mirror and Star can do it why can’t your rather staid Press Gazette become the Mystic Mag, if only for one month? Particularly as the January deadline came so hard on the heels of the arrival of PG in the Banks household that I’ve hardly had time to read LAST month’s column.
[INSIDER GOSS: The printers, apparently, wanted early deadlines to get January out of the way so they could enjoy Christmas . . . haven’t they HEARD what happened at Wapping? Was that whole war in vain?]
Anyway, I’ve consulted the tealeaves and played with the Ouija board and here’s my 1-2-3 of forecasts for the year ahead:
ONE month behind a paywall . . . that’s about as long as the stars foretell for James and Rebekah’s plan to make the punters cough up for the Currant Bun, Thunderer, Screws etcetera. If the Evening Standard can make free pay, why can’t online?
TWO Fleet Street editors will conjugate more than verbs this year. Will this require their titles be joined in a civil partnership?
THREE major newspapers - one a national daily - will follow Lebedev’s lead at the Evening Standard and go free before next Christmas.
And if I don’t get the triple up then my name’s not Tipsy Rose Lee!

HER Majesty’s round robin to editors warning them off harassing or intruding upon the peace and tranquillity that her royal family was so keen to preserve at Sandringham this festive season may well have been a self-inflicted shot in the foot.
Until her royal crest dropped onto doorsteps at the Wharf, Wapping and Kensington, reporters were yawning their way through one of the most boring Buck House eras in recent years.
But the royal command was, if not a red rag to a bull then at least a timely reminder . . . there’s a royal wedding coming.!
Now that’s what I call an invitation, ma’am.

TALK at the Stuart Higgins PR pre-Christmas bash was heavily skewed towards the Murdoch empire’s preoccupation with paywalls - not unnatural, given that the party attracted the likes of News biggies Rebekah Wade and Clive Milner and that Higgy is a former Sun editor,
Of course, my paywall prediction (see above) was roundly pooh-poohed (at their peril); therefore, I divert you to examination of another pet News project: Sun broadcasting.
This consists of former columnist Jon Gaunt nattering away to as few as twenty listeners or as many as several hundred . The latter I can tell you, having myself made a few trial broadcasts for the go-ahead Journal in Newcastle upon Tyne, is impressive.
Exact listener/phone-in figures for the Sun’s expansive, expensive radio operation are difficult to come by but party tittle-tattle recounted issues which attracted a couple of hundred texts and emails from the Sun’s online following.
Certainly enough to attract a smart advertiser and definitely easier than putting up a paywall!
First published in Press Gazette, January 2010

Where've you been, Banksy?

WHERE were you last week, Banksy? I hear you asking (actually, to be honest, I don’t hear many of you asking; and the editor says he hasn’t been exactly flooded with calls from panicky readers demanding my immediate return).
But I do know my Uncle Davie in Duns worries when my weekly witterings fail to appear, so for his sake alone I thought I should explain myself: I was, dear reader, on a train crossing the Nullarbor Plain in Australia
An amazing place, the Nullarbor: 77,000 square miles of scorched, shrubless desert between Adelaide and Perth; hour upon hour of bleak countryside that looks like Farmer Morebottle’s tattie fields after he’s sprayed them to kill off the shaws. And nothing else.
Towns? The only brief stopping place 1,000 miles out from Adelaide was the ghost town of Cook (Elevation 0, Population 2), long since deserted by the navvies who laid the tracks for the Indian-Pacific 97 years ago and now looking like I imagine so many Northumbrian villages will look once the breathalyser has killed off the last of our pubs, the supermarkets have demolished the small shop trade and the Post Office has turned its last outpost into another wind farm.
And communications? No East Coast line, this: after leaving Adelaide not so much as a tweet from a mobile phone for three days (no bad thing, perhaps?) and the internet has not flung its web worldwide enough to be useable until our half-kilometre-long train finally lumbered into the sidings at Perth, days past my deadline.
So what was a workshy journalist to do for seventy-two work-free hours other than visit his favourite ‘inns’ . . . IN the dining car and INcommunicado!

IMPOSSIBLE to escape the North-east, even 12,000 miles from home.
First, driving from Sydney via Melbourne to Adelaide (and THAT’S no quick trip to the shops, let me tell you!) I was cut up at a traffic light in Lorne, Victoria by a 4x4 bearing the number plate ‘NUFC 2’, it’s back window smothered in ‘Toon Army’ stickers. One of you must know him/her and I expect an apology!
Then, on a beach hut further down the Great Ocean Road, I came across a plaque commemorating the feats of one “Alexander Weatherhead, born on Tweedside in 1809 and died here in 1901”.
This north-east Byreman of yesteryear is famed in south-east Australia as the cattle drover who successfully herded hs beasts “one flaming hot summer” from Nooroonga via Gundagai to Adelaide, cheating death thanks only to the survival skills of local aborigines and by drinking the blood of two of his cattle.
As I told the local café owner who lauded ‘the great Scotsman’, “They breed them tough on Tweedside - and there are TWO sides to the Tweed!”

NEWS that the Barmoor windfarm has been given the go-ahead reached me on my return to Sydney, thanks to The Journal’s (mercifully) still-free website.
My reaction is mixed: I am instinctively in favour of exploiting renewable alternatives to fossil fuels but sympathise with that minority of Turbin-aters who must pay the price in loss of amenity while the majority reaps the unburdened benefit.
I have friends on both sides of the argument (indeed, I have already demanded drinks for life from Klondike Barry, who stands to gain from the Barmoor ‘windrush‘) but it is ironic that I hear the news while travelling the breadth (if not the length) of this sun-drenched, windswept continent. For there is precious little sign of renewable energy sources Down Under.
Thousands of square miles of Nullarbor and barely a solar panel to be seen; thousands of miles of surf pounding the coastline and never a tidal barrage; bleak, windswept and uninhabited regions and only eight wind turbines spotted on our entire journey.
While the world worries about China’s rising consumption, the Third World’s deforestation and even little Northumbria’s unequal share of the renewables burden, who will point the finger at this ‘lucky, sunburnt country’ and ask Australia:
What are YOU doing to save the planet?
First published in The Journal, Newcastle on January 29, 2010