So it’s a toss up. Do I write about how I have recently become a new man, or at least an old man with new possessions, or do I write about the recent woeful state of my blogging psyche?
Tough call.
Rather behind schedule I skulk back into the blog arena, with the slight tan that denotes an English holiday and the shorter hair of one who baulks at London snip prices.
So we covered all sorts of parts of the country and came home a week ago. Since then there has been a palpable sense of tension and blog paralysis because my in-laws’ fiftieth wedding anniversary was looming. It has now safely passed as of this Saturday and more normal thought processes have re-established themselves.
Holiday highlights include:
- having mediaeval weapons demonstrated for us in Nottingham. Also entering The Tales of Robin Hood experience with a gaggle of Japanese tourists and speculating what on earth they made of the whole thing. What with the dodgy overacting and uniquely incomprehensible sound system I came out profoundly disoriented, and I wasn’t oriental to start with.
- having my hair cut in north Cumbria in six minutes for a fiver. And it wasn’t bad. The complete lack of house music throughout seemed to have no adverse effects.
- visiting Flodden Field, an unremarkable piece of rolling agricultural land in north Northumberland where in Sept 1513 about 9,000 Scots were slaughtered in less than two hours. And they’d only come over to borrow a wee cup of sugar.
- climbing Thorpe Cloud, a peak in Staffordshire of about 1,000 feet. Impressive till I mention that we started from the car park at about 700 feet. Still, there were some tricky cowpats to negotiate and weedy children to encourage. I had a whole lecture planned for the summit after about five minutes climbing, all to do with striving and how nothing easy was worth doing or maybe it was how nothing worth doing was easy, but when we actually got to the top my oxygen debt was such that I couldn’t remember what I was going to say and wouldn’t have had the breath to deliver it even if I had.
- hearing again the Cumbrian accents so familiar from my youth but brought to the wider world only as a faint echo in the vowels of Melvyn Bragg. The sounds of this speech are difficult to render in 2 dimensions but if the demand is there I will attempt it. It is still a fairly well kept secret and until the world salutes its first truly Cumbrian Prime Minister, cartoon hero, sports commentator or rap star it will remain so. To date the nearest celebrity thus blessed has been Eric Robson on Gardener’s Question Time or the legendary Derek Batey on Border Television’s only contribution to world culture, the long running gameshow “Mr and Mrs”, a compulsory first step on the road to divorce that made Sale of the Century look like S level Physics.
And in the end it was almost three weeks without TV. The lack only hurt during the Third Test as England closed in on the West Indies’ total on the last day. I’m sorry, but without an Arlott in sight Radio Three’s Test Match Special has become a tedious description of serial bowling, bogged down in prosaic inessentials and woefully short on analysis. Henry Blofeld may think describing buses and birds is entertaining but I don’t. I would only recommission the programme if the phrase “comes in to bowl” is completely banned. Of course he comes in to bowl. If we’re going that route then why not remind us that the sky is still up there and the ground is still down there. Both of those elements sre integral to each delivery as well. I have spoken.