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
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