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

Writing's on the wall for Wills

BACK home I’m a constitutional monarchist, born and bred. But if I were Australian I’d be a Republican.
Monarchy, an outdated, undemocratic institution, is acceptable only on grounds of nostalgia and tradition and to provide a refuge of last resort should parliament fall to tyranny. But the very idea of swearing allegiance to the King or Queen of a country half a world away is illogical and indefensible.
Nonetheless, Australians remain unswervingly patriotic to their ‘Queen of Australia’: the last referendum, in 1999, returned a 72 per cent vote against republicanism and few Aussies, even the republicans amongst them, would countenance any constitutional change while the current Queen is on the throne.
But two fascinating events have coincided with our month-long trip Down Under. First, and by any means foremost, a brief, informal trip to New Zealand and Australia by Prince William has rather overwhelmed the public in Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne.
Second, even before William’s arrival a sizeable opinion poll showed 56 per cent support for the notion that the young man the media has - quite incorrectly - dubbed “Prince of New Zealand” and “Australia’s prince” should be the next King of Australia.
In other words “Tough luck, dad“, on two counts: Charles is not popular here, because of the Diana divorce and subsequent tragedy. And the ascendancy of Prince William to pin-up boy Down Under owes more to his mother than to his royal right of succession.
What Australia wants is a Di-nasty. “You’re as lovely as your mother,” sobbed one middle-aged Melbourne mum as he gave her a peck on the cheek during an unprecedented royal walkabout. It was the same in the predominantly poor, aboriginal suburb of Redfern in Sydney. William wowed them.
To understand how extraordinarily his brief, supposedly private visit has turned into a major state occasion overwhelming even coverage of the Haiti earthquake and the Australian Open tennis championship you have to understand that an awkward relationship exists between Australia and its monarch in the same way as it endures a love-hate affair with we Poms.
There is undoubtedly real regard for Her Majesty who, in 1954, was the first British monarch to set foot on this distant shore. Similarly, the memory of Diana is revered and the torch Aussies carried for her has passed to her eldest son.
Little wonder the media has begun to murmur about the possibility that William might be invited to become Australia’s Governor-General, representing his grandmother and giving the Antipodes something even America would envy: its own Royal Family. Another one in the eye for his father, of course, who coveted the same role thirty years ago until Labour Prime Minister Bob Hawke put a stop to his ambition.
William isn’t home and dry yet, though. Not by any means. The current Labour PM, Kevin Rudd also has strong views on a continued constitutional monarch. “There’s a place for the British monarchy,” he muttered recently, “and that’s in Britain.” And amid all the hoo-hah on TV screens and front pages one Melbourne paper stamped its front page: “Warning: not a single Prince William story in this paper!”
But the writing is beginning to appear on the wall. And it would indeed be ironic if the scion of a flawed and tragic union were to claim a crown his father was denied.

IN my endless quest for suitable bottles to fill The Byreman’s almost constantly emptied wine cellar I have come up with a couple of labels in this land of oaky whites and mellow reds that put even his current favourites, Fat Bastard and Flying Pig, in the shade.
First of all I came across a delightful cabernet sauvignon by the name of ‘Ten Miles By Tractor’, which would seem designed to give the bibulous old Byreman and his farmer buddies a good night out sometime soon.
And if that doesn’t put him out to grass a couple of scoops of ‘Old Blue Cow’ should do the trick.
Hic!
First published in The Journal, Newcastle on January 22, 2010

Half a world away it's raining in Paradise

DON’T laugh, but it’s raining in Sydney. I travel 12,000 miles to the other end of the earth to escape the snow and am greeted Down Under by thick cloud, steady drizzle and airport workers in anoraks.
Oh look, I DID ask you not to laugh . . .
Anyway, Aussie rain is different. It’s the kind of precipitation those bare-bellied lasses would laugh at on a Saturday neet oot in the Bigg Market. It comes down like thick steam and lowers the temperature gauge to a hardly unbearable 23C.
Frankly, up with that I can happily put. Especially when I recall how the Good Lady and I fled the snowbound Borders a day early to evade the threatened second blizzard the London Met Office was predicting.
Actually, it wasn’t the Met Office warning so much as the Byreman that had us running scared: he and Lady B arrived home tanned and fit from Adelaide’s sun-baked plains three days before Gemma and I were due to fly in the opposite direction.
Naturally, having paid to fly in the posh part of an Emirates jumbo, Byreman and spouse were chauffeur-driven home from Newcastle Airport in fine style . . . until within fifty yards of their front door they were forced to abandon the limo and lug their Louis Vuittons through four feet of drifted snow.
The Byreman viewed my prospects equally bleakly: “Berwick to London should be okay,” said Milfield’s Michael Fish, “and once you get off the ground, London to Sydney will be a doddle.
“No, it’s Crookham to Berwick where you’ll come unstuck. I’d better take you.”
Cattle class it may have been but with the Byreman’s chauffeur service and a special plea to Virgin Atlantic to find me some extra leg space beside the emergency exit my holiday is off to a solid start.
Now if it would just stop raining . . .oh, PLEASE don’t laugh!

LIKE Lot’s wife, I made one mistake at the Heathrow departure gate, sneaking a last look at my emails before being condemned to 22 hours of cramped captivity in the semi-darkness of a Sydney-bound jet.
There it was: an unrefuseable call to action from David Lockie, chairman of my local parish council. Apparently an application has been made to Northumberland County Council to build a 17,500 square foot supermarket in Wooler, with parking for 130 cars.
Aware of potential controversy, the county council was canvassing as many views as possible throughout Glendale. Could my little Tillside email newsletter The Clarion (120 subscribers and rising) help spread the word?
No editor can refuse a call to action such as that!
With the departure gate deadline looming, my pounding fingers dispatched the hot news back up to Godzone country before I raced through the airbridge to my seat.
Mission just possible!


A SPOT of turbulence we ran into over the Bay of Bengal had me recalling that great flying story about the nervous young woman passenger who completely ‘lost it’ when the aircraft hit really rough turbulence and its wing was struck by lightning.
Running to the front of the plane she screamed: “If I'm going to die, I want my last minutes on earth to be memorable!
“Is there anyone on this plane who can make a girl feel like a woman?"
For a moment, there was a shocked silence. Then a man from Newcastle - handsome, tall and well built with dark brown hair and hazel eyes - stood up at the rear of the plane.
Slowly, he started to walk up the aisle, unbuttoning his shirt as he went, one button at a time. Then he removed the shirt. Muscles rippled across his chest.
Awestruck, no one said a word. The woman gasped. Finally, her he-man spoke.
"Iron this, will you? Then get us a beer, pet."
Moral: only a Geordie can make a lass feel like a REAL woman.
First published in The Journal, Newcastle on January 15th, 2010

The Showbiz Agent from Heil . . .

A SLIPPY Christmas and a Scary New Year . . . that‘s what we’re having up here in the place tourist brochures call ‘Britain’s ‘secret kingdom’ but which we know better as The Land Northumberland County Council Forgot.
Didn’t take long, did it, for the suffering to start once Britain’s worst borough council handed over north Northumberland to what seems destined to be the UK’s most useless unitary authority?
Over the whole festive season I saw but ONE gritter on the main Cornhill-Wooler road, and an empty one at that; the yellow bins I checked were empty; there wasn’t grit to be had for love nor money. Only teeth got gritted where I live!
John the Joiner and I bought the last six available bags at Jewson’s and were told: “No more supplies ‘til after New Year.” Berwick Christmas Farmer’s Market was a dismally attended affair thanks to the car park that became an ice rink.
I understand the argument that excuses an absence of snowploughs and teams of gritters: it would be hugely uneconomical to invest millions in equipment that might only be used for a handful of days each year.
But grit? Or rock salt? A little manpower? Where were THEY when the weather closed in?
It certainly makes the deal that County Durham Primary Care Trust struck with its county council – to grit 35 miles of bus routes over the next two winters in exchange for £1million – a far-sighted bargain in terms of reduced accidents to car drivers and the elderly and, therefore, reduced costs to the NHS.
If we can’t expect our council to send the gritters around every village up this way – paying, don’t forget, just as much council tax as the cosseted burghers of Morpeth and Alnwick – what about creating ‘grit dumps’ when bad weather is forecast? Why not pay local builders and farmers with the machinery available to subdivide the grit around the locality, where householders could fill a pail and make their own pavements safe?
And perish the thought that some of our 2.5million unemployed might be expected to earn – indeed, might welcome – a bonus on their dole money when a national or regional emergency requires it.

I’VE been keeping one eye on the weather forecast and the other on the exchange rate for Australian dollars. Why? Well, to celebrate 35 years of married life the Bankses are taking a trip Down Under later this month.
It’s not the 24-hour flight that worries me – it’s what comes before.
Since the day six years ago when the notorious Shoe Bomber was arrested security checks have required that every air passenger remove his or her shoes.
What are they going to want us to remove now the Underpants Bomber has been exposed?

MY Daughter the Actress and her actor partner share a dyslexic agent called Daisy who once, appropriately, spelled her own name ‘Dozy’.
The other day, the man who would father my grandchildren was directed to attend an audition for a TV ad for Nationwide in which, Daisy told him, he was to play “a Germanic housebuyer”.
Now Alistair takes his acting very seriously and likes to ‘climb into’ the role, so he cut and dyed his hair blond, adopted a military bearing and stomped around the set clicking his heels and demanding “Wo ist die haus, Herr Estate Agent?”
The audition was over almost before it began. Mystified, the Hunnishly handsome young actor checked the film company’s requirement.
Not ‘Germanic’ at all . . . it was for a GENERIC housebuyer!

ONE thing puzzles me about the fall-out from Tory frontbencher David Willetts’ concern that marriage is becoming a ‘middle-class only’ institution: the accompanying statistic stated that marriage was at its peak in 1972 when 480,285 people said “I do”.
How could it have been an odd number? Did some sexy little threesome sneak in there? I think we should be told.
First published in The Journal, Newcastle, January 1 2010