Saturday 21 August 2010

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

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