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
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