Author: kevinrevell

Blogging that is in imminent danger of disappearing into its own middle aged, middle class, middle England hole...

These Testing Times…

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Good evening and welcome from Emu Towers, where we are just completing week five of a five week exercise in patience and stress management.
Yes, it’s that time of year again, where we knuckle down to exams, and this year we’ve managed a three card trick with #1 having to get approval for year 2 at Uni, #2 worrying himself into a stupor over second year of A levels, and #3 dragging himself through the Gove-inspired wanderlust that is the GCSE programme.
And it’s with #3 that most of my time has been spent, testing both our patience pretty much to the limits. Several months ago, the cheery ‘goodmorningFelix’ was replaced with ‘getoffthatbloodyscreenanddosomerevisionFelix’, and, as of this Friday, thankfully, we’ll be able to get back to a more cordial relationship.
But, as a result, I find my knowledge of GCSE type subjects at something of an all time high. Which has made me scratch my head a little bit at the way we teach, and test, our kids in this country.
Part of this head scratching is because I’ve ended up relearning stuff that I haven’t needed to know since…well, since I was 16. And, although that seems quite a long time ago in Felix-years, it isn’t really, it’s just that there’s quite a lot changed about how we go about learning stuff
I’ve bored you before in this blog on the delights of growing up in the sticks in the 1970s, and I’ve never really thought until now about how the process of learning was so different. Our family had a particular challenge here which is worth a slight diversion; my Dad had, in an effort to improve himself, and those around him, subscribed to an encyclopaedia, built in weekly parts, and filed away in a bookcase, absolutely ideal for all those homework and revision tasks.
This might seem a bit odd now, but this was at a time when sets of encyclopaedias would cost hundreds of pounds and often came with their own hire purchase schemes. So to build up from A for Aardvark, on an affordable weekly basis, probably seemed like an excellent idea. Unfortunately, around L for Lima, my Dad either lost interest or failed to keep up his payments. Or possibly the build-your-own-encyclopaedia company went bust. Anyway, as a result, we had a full set of binders in our house, but they were only really useful if you were looking up something in the range A-L. Consequently, our homework could be a bit hit and miss – Ancient Greece was no problem at all, but the Roman Empire was something of a mystery.
 (btw I do still harbour a light fantasy that one day I’ll be asked to join a quiz team where my limited general knowledge is matched, weirdly, with two people with fabulous recall on subjects M-S and T-Z. We could go on to conquer the quiz world and then to all manner of general knowledge related scrapes and japes, the whole thing will get made into a screenplay, we make our fortune, but it all ends up really badly because we find we have literally nothing in common to talk about…)
But anyway, all of the above meant that the stuff we learnt, had to be taught, and pretty much memorised, at school, in order to go into exams. And that’s the bit that I can’t understand not changing, because, should one of my kids want to know about Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, or oxbow lakes, or who played on Jack White’s last album…well, they look it up on Google. And, about 99% of the time, because this whole internet information thing is nicely self governing, they get it right. So they don’t really need to know facts that much anymore, they just need to know how to find them.
And, given that they’ll be doing an even more advanced look up through even more brilliantly interlinked technology in the future, shouldn’t we be teaching them  how to interpret data and manage it? Instead, we still seem to be fixated on remembering the stuff that, in Felix’s case, he might not need again until he’s tutoring/barely tolerating my sixteen year old grandson. That, incidentally, is one of the most disturbing thoughts I’ve had for some time, for a number of reasons, but you get my gist.
I do understand that part of exams are around how bright our kids at learning stuff. So not everything has to have a direct practicality. But we all know that being bright has a bit more to it than memory tricks and techniques that you could easily drag off the net. And it would be really good if we could tie in the subjects to stuff that was really immediately useful. If you look at the syllabus for GCSE maths, for example, (and pay attention at the back, Gove), the fundamental problem to me is that it hasn’t moved on in twenty years. So, we’re still looking at techniques around calculus and trigonometry in favour of understanding how money works, or how to understand, interpret and present meaningful data, which, IMHO, are going to be much more useful as tools for the future.
Anyway, no more GCSE horrors until (an increasingly nervous)#4 steps up to the plate in 2018. So, if you need to know the hypotenuse length of your bizarrely shaped patio plan, or how long your bath will fill up if water flows in at 2 litres/min and out at 20% of that due to a bizarre leak normally only found in maths exams, ask now! It’s only a short matter of time before I forget again.

Everything but the (geek/obsessive) Girl

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When I was ten, I thought my brother was God

He’d lie in bed and turn out the light with a fishing rod

I learned the names of all his football teams

And I still remembered them when I was nineteen

Well, to the best of my knowledge my brother never owned, and doesn’t own, a fishing rod. If he had or did then I’d see this as an excellent opportunity to disown him; I’ve always set a lot of store by the maxim of ‘Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but give him a fishing rod and he’ll turn into a solitary twit who enjoys sitting in tents staring aimlessly into the distance while his guy-ropes trip up unsuspecting runners from the towpath’. Although mentioning gormless staring does allow me to flag today’s ‘word of the day’, an occasional series where I’ll travel from bathroom-reading direct to blog-writing, to bring you a word that you’re challenged to use in everyday conversation. Today’s word is ‘gongoozler’, a person who enjoys aimlessly watching activity on the canals of the United Kingdom. According to Wikipedia, it may have arisen from words in the Lincolnshire dialect : gawn and gooze, both meaning to stare or gape, which makes more sense. I’ve never met anyone gape-free from that neck of the woods.

But I digress. It was the song lyrics that got me started. I really like these lines from Everything But The Girl’s wonderful ‘Oxford Street’ as they take me back to a pretty innocent time which I remember really fondly, and which, these days,  I constantly struggle to articulate to my kids.

My brother and sister and me grew up in the country, where there was, in the 1970’s, absolutely nothing to do. We’d go and play in the woods for hours, returning occasionally for meals, or go out on bikes or played football, and if it was wet, we stayed inside and…well I’m not really sure what we did, really. We will have read books, I’m sure, but I can’t believe we did that all day. And we didn’t have a television. I don’t remember that being a big problem at the time, but it seems hard for my kids to understand. Last time I counted, there were three TV’s and nine computers in our house, which came out at about three per person, which, realistically, feels a bit excessive.

‘How many screens can you look at at any one time?’, I challenged #3 quite recently.

‘More than the number of your bikes you can ride at once’, came the irritatingly measured reply.

Most of our parenting ritual these days involves extricating kids from staring at the blue light, switching machines off, retrieving them from rooms at bedtimes, and generally telling the boys to ‘get off the bloody screen’.  So it’s quite hard for them to imagine a time when all that wasn’t available, or as #3 helpfully pointed out the other day, ‘when Dad lived in black and white’.

But we seemed to muddle through.  My Dad finally broke the duck some time around 1975, by buying a 10” portable black and white TV, which the five of us would crowd around to watch the football, a film, or (slightly bizarrely), the snooker.

So, me and my brother typically had other forms of entertainment, and chief amongst a pretty short list was the Freewheel catalogue. If you were a cyclist in the 1970’s and you didn’t have ready access to a bike shop, then the Freewheel catalogue was your bible and your bike shop all rolled into one. Every year, a new copy would appear on the shelves in WH Smith, and the regular poring over the pages became a pretty big ritual for me and my brother.

Inside, to a cyclist, were all manner of delights, from specific and exotic components through to the impossibly unaffordable Campagnolo group sets, and, at the back, where the really wonderful page layouts were, the  frames and the full bikes.  Freewheel only sold two types of bike; Mercian, still renowned as fabulous bespoke frame-makers, and a now-defunct brand of cycles from a company called Revell.

When you’re fourteen, and you’re really quite keen on cycling, and you turn the pages of a magazine, and it falls open at a picture of a beautiful touring bike, and then you notice that, quite literally, It’s Got Your Name On It, well, it’s kind of hard to explain just how astonishingly excited you feel. There are a number of post-pubescent analogies that I could use at this point, but, if nothing else, the Emu’s mission statement is to keep things above the waist, so let’s just go for very very excited indeed.

So, one day, I figured, I would own my very own Revell touring bike. Unfortunately, by the time I got old enough and financially stable enough to do such a thing, Revell touring bikes were a thing of the past. And then a couple of years ago, I found one on eBay, bought it, and put it in my garage, in the knowledge that one day it would get restored to its former glory. And, with a respray courtesy of the wonderful people at Mastercote in Norwich, the application of replica decals from H Lloyd cycles and some rather tedious sourcing of lots of parts, it is finally back to something approaching that glory. And just looking at it makes me go all dewy eyed and wishing I’d kept those old catalogues:

Image

I forgot to mention that the frame is too small for me, but it’s just the right size for Mrs E, and should be just about right for our brief tour of the Highlands in July. And, as it happens, the final nut has just gone onto the bike today, just in time for Mrs E’s birthday tomorrow.

Unfortunately Mrs E has got wind of the timing of this and made it clear that the bike doesn’t count as a valid birthday present. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, she reasons, the rebuild has given me all the pleasure, often at times when I might have been slightly more use as co-shouter at children, or providing meals/neck-rubs/handyman services etc. Secondly, and she’s mentioned once or twice, she’s not altogether happy about relying on my mechanical skills to keep her travelling (and stopping) when she wants to. And thirdly, she doesn’t quite share my adolescent geek-ness where bikes are concerned. Last month, while travelling down to France, we were about eight hours into the journey, with her driving, and, with the kids asleep in the back, and she told me she was tired.

‘Just talk to me’, she said, ‘Tell me something interesting to keep me awake’.

So I told her about the importance of gear ratios and the relative merits of compact and triple gearings, the tensioning function of the rear jockey wheel mechanism, and how to minimise chain stretch.

Before I knew it, we’d pulled off the road into a layby.

I’m really sorry’, she said, and almost immediately went into a deep sleep.

I don’t think I’ve ever really bored my wife, or anyone else, into an absolute unconscious state before; I’m looking on the bright side in that if I need to get a bit of peace and quiet I can always resume the discussion, but I guess my point is that we’re not exactly as one in our passion for bicycles.

Finally, and this is not to say that she’s ungrateful in any way, but there are strict parameters around birthday presents, as opposed to the other gifts that liberally shower upon her during the year. These include a) no second-hand items and b) preferably nothing that has been made by a member of the family or c) purchased at a craft fair.

That’s fine. Her main present this year is a fishing rod.

Happy Birthday, dear x

 

Bringing up baby

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Some years ago, me and Mrs E came under a certain amount of pressure around the kitchen table, particularly from numbers 1 & 2, to get a pet. After a number of months of resistance, we finally agreed that we could increase the headcount in the family with a hamster, an ideal pet that doesn’t actually do very much, is almost entirely nocturnal, and enjoys biting humans. So we trawled off to the pet shop, and the boys, after being encouraged away from the snakes and spiders, selected their new best friend. (The NBF, by the way, maintained the BF element for about 5 minutes after arrival, which might have been predicted, and ‘Brains’ maintained a hermit like existence for his entire life, doing what hamsters do, which, from my experience, is as little as possible.)

Anyway, we had a fairly memorable exchange with the shop assistant, who gave us a light/medium grilling on the importance of being prepared in the art and science of hamster rearing. Would we, for example, like to read up on the subject, just to make sure that we were completely ready to manage a new pet in the house? Perhaps we could take away a £6.99 book and check the safety features in our home, then return when we were absolutely certain we could cope with the upheaval.

I remember this meeting quite clearly, partly because Mrs E, who doesn’t raise her voice in public terribly often, raised her voice in public.

“Look”, she said, and I remember, all around us, people began to do just that.

“I’ve raised four children without a manual, I think I can manage a hamster”.

And so she could.

I mention the story of Brains (RIP) entering our lives in this way because we’ve just welcomed in a small puppy which has taken over our lives far more forcibly than the hamster, or indeed, any of the children ever did.

Just to give you some context here, I work away most weeks, returning on a Thursday evening to help with the telling off duties, so I end up speaking on the phone to my wife a couple of times a day. And for the last three weeks, almost every phone call between the two of us has focused on bringing up the new baby.

“Whatever did we talk about before we had Luna?”, Mrs E said at the end of a call last week, as I imagined the children looking longingly at their mother, desperately keen to tell me about achievements at school, new girlfriends, enthusiasms for improving readings, exercise routines and what they wanted to do when they grow up. (As if.)

In truth, having children has just about prepared us for the challenges of bringing up Luna, and so here’s a bit of a brain dump on how:

We are, for example, the only people who have ever owned a dog, just as in our own self-centred ways we were the only people to have ever had children, and thereby we reserved the right to bring every conversation around to how beautiful they were, whether they were eating/pooing in the right direction, what they’d learnt to do, and so on. Twenty years on, I can just about face talking about how boring we must have been to those around us, and only really justify it in that I’ve seen every other new parent I’ve met since behave in exactly the same way.

We’re ‘socialising’ the puppy in the same way as we took the kids to the park, and we look at her in that sort of benevolent angst that all the other dog owners do. Isn’t it great, we think, when they’re playing nicely together. But if your puppy starts getting above itself, we’ll take ours away before you can say obsessivemiddleclassttwit.

And, in the same way as we spent hours poring over the early learning centre catalogue to get yet another worthy toy, we’ve filled Luna’s living space (which started off as a bed in the corner of the kitchen and has now spread to pretty much the whole of the house), with dog toys, balls, chews and goodness knows what else. And, just like the children, she dutifully ignores all the toys and contents herself with a cardboard box. Most of the children have grown out of chewing table legs, but #4 still gives it a go now and again, and it’s quite sweet to see them side by side, munching on bits of furniture.

Already, Mrs E has trained her to have a better sense of personal hygiene than #3, although to be fair that’s not too high a hurdle to jump. Luna does catch you out though – when you’re home from a run, for example, she greets you by licking you as a makeshift salt lick – delightful at first, but a bit off putting when you realise she’s just had same tongue inserted in her own bum, and before that it was licking bird crap up off the pavement.

There’s a fundamental difference though, in the whole bringing up puppies and children thing. When our kids were born, obviously we loved them to bits, but their faces all looked like something between Winston Churchill and The Hood from Thunderbirds.

the hood winston

 

 

 

 

So, looking down into the pram, you might be forgiven for the odd shuddering recoil.

Thankfully they’ve all grown out of this look, although #3 does give a passable ‘Never Surrender’ look in a certain light – God knows what he’d be like with a big cigar and a homburg. In contrast, showing someone a picture of Luna always gets the same reaction. Altogether now…aaaah:

 

Image

Jocky Wilson . . . What an athlete!*

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Some of the best conversations I have these days seem to be when I’m in a taxi. Not the ‘you’ll never guess who I just had in the back of my cab, guv’ conversations, but the ones you get when you’ve got 15 minutes to kill, which I reckon is about all it takes these days to put the world to rights, eke out your frustrations with the government, or share your excitement about small dogs. Or, as was the case last week, discuss the wonders of the professional darts circuit.

So, I’m in this taxi at some ungodly hour and we’re talking about this and that, and out of nowhere, the driver says:
‘I was in Wigan all last week’
Well, that’s not a line I’m going to leave hanging around like a dropped handkerchief, so I asked what he was doing there. And it transpired that he’d not only been battling against 360 other hopefuls to get a licence to play professional darts, but he’d come 21st, with only 20 qualifying. Which must have been pretty gutting.
‘That must’ve been pretty gutting’, I said, always keeping one step behind the narrative.
And gutting is about what it was, by all accounts, as there’s money to be made on the circuit, but you need a licence to take part, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it.

And I don’t have a massive interest in darts, but naturally enough I started to ask about the culture around the sport, and, predictably enough, the drinking. Time was when Jocky Wilson, Eric Bristow et al would be lining up the lagers on the TV, but that doesn’t seem to happen these days. So, I asked, had darts cleaned up its act?
Far from it, I learnt, it’s just that the drinking goes on in the dressing room, and, by all accounts, quite enthusiastically.  Surely it must affect your accuracy of throwing, I suggested, but apparently it’s a balance between being completely off your tree and not allowing to your hand to shake, which is the thing that must be avoided at all costs.

All of which makes me quite enthusiastic to catch a bit more darts action, if I can be reasonably sure that the people throwing quite sharp implements might be doing so while reasonably trollied.

Fast forward to a reasonably unpleasant run last weekend, only really lightened by the wonderful Danny Baker podcast, in which the equally wonderful javelin superstar Fatima Whitbread was interviewed. Like many other people about my age, shape and size, I find myself nicely in tune with Mr Baker, and he asked the question that I would definitely ask FW, in the unlikely event that I found myself in a lift with her:

‘Are you any good at darts?’

And, it transpires, she is, and had appeared as a special guest on ‘Bullseye’ where she scored a triple twenty in the final. And it took three people to remove the dart from the board afterwards, boom boom.

Anyway, this kind of got me to thinking that the stars are aligning fairly beautifully if we could but take a few brave steps towards a new kind of sport. Here’s my thinking:

1. Lets face it, the common interest in track and field these days is largely track, and possibly a bit of jumping now and again
2. Which leaves a marketing challenge for the throwers
3. Darts seems to have something of an unfair monopoly on the idea of playing sport while three sheets to the wind
4. The Commonwealth games are heading this year to Glasgow, a city where you’d hope would enjoy a nice regular overlap of sporting endeavour and serious drinking.

You’re probably one step ahead of me here already, but what if we introduced javelin, shot, discus and hammer events which combined throwing expertise with light alcoholic poisoning? I’d be more than happy to stump up the entrance fee to see whether accuracy was improved with half a dozen vodkas down the hatch….and I’d probably not mind particularly if it wasn’t.

For added entertainment we could simply replace the volunteer judges with an ever rotating string of national pariahs. The heats could feature Lib-dem politicians who abstained in the student grant vote, the semi finals could have a selection of News International journalists, and for the grand final, what better set of judges/targets than your favourite misogynistic TV and radio personalities from the late 1970s?  And if they proved a bit nippy on their feet, we could have all the throws at once, or introduce blindfolds, or both.

Well, it’s just an idea, and it might need a bit of shaping on the marketing front, but I’m offering it to all bidders here and now, and I can’t help feeling that now that it’s out in the open, that without it our athletics viewing this summer will be disappointingly tedious and sober.

*Just one of the quotable quotes from the fabulous Sid Waddell. Others include:

“He may practice 12 hours a day, but he’s not shy of the burger van!”

“Darts players are probably a lot fitter than most footballers in overall body strength.”

“Steve Beaton – The Adonis of darts, what poise, what elegance – a true roman gladiator with plenty of hair wax.”

“The atmosphere is so tense, if Elvis walked in ,with a portion of chips….. you could hear the vinegar sizzle on them”

“Cliff Lazarenko’s jumping up and down like a gorilla saying “give me back my banana!”

“Bristow reasons . . . Bristow quickens … Aaah, Bristow.”

“It’s just like taking a sausage from a boy in a wheelchair.”

“That was like throwing three pickled onions into a thimble!”

“He’s about as predictable as a wasp on speed”

“It’s like trying to pin down a kangaroo on a trampoline”

“That’s the greatest comeback since Lazarus.”

“Under that heart of stone beat muscles of pure flint.”

“There hasn’t been this much excitement since the Romans fed the Christians to the Lions.”

“John Lowe is striding out like Alexander the Great conquering the Persians”

“Keith Deller’s not just an underdog, he’s an underpuppy!”

“When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer….Bristow’s only 27.”

“If we’d had Phil Taylor at Hastings against the Normans, they’d have gone home.”

“He’s like D’Artagnan at the scissor factory.”

“I can only sum that up in one word – world-class darts”

“They’re showing Shakespeare’s Othello over on BBC1 but if you want real drama tonight, get down here to Jollies, Stoke-on-Trent”

“Tell Mrs Dellar not to bother putting the chips on, because Keith won’t be home for his tea tonight”

“That’s quality with a capital K.”

“If you had to throw a knife at your wife in a circus, you’d want to throw it like that.”

“Circus Tavern packed — even a garter snake smothered in Vaseline couldn’t slide in here.”

and of course:

“There’s only one word for that – magic darts!”

I’ll be your dog

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Well, following the Emu’s previous blog on The Big Decision On Becoming Dog-Owners, we’ve finally agreed the way forward. As a result, we made the all important call to the breeder a couple of weeks ago, and had a discussion that I suspect we’d find more familiar had we ever tried to wedge one of our kids into Eton. It appears that when you decide to buy a dog from a respectable  breeder, the interview kind of goes in the opposite direction to the one you’d expect, and it’s really up to you to pass the interview on whether you’re really qualified to own a dog. I’m not sure that we had the equivalent of this qualification when we first contemplated bringing kids into our world, but that may say something about the society we live in. Anyway, we passed the audition about whether we’d be fit to take on a puppy, and, given that there was a national waiting list and two large litters, we were duly allocated ‘bitch number 7’ and given a 90 minute viewing appointment in February, at which we will be paired with the ‘right’ puppy.

At which point, there was a suitable amount of what Hank Williams might have called ‘a’whooping and a’hollering’. I don’t think I’d realised just how much everyone else in the family actually wanted this puppy, and the sight of four people jumping up and down like they were on individual trampolines will stay with me for some time. And might be referred back to when the dog needs walking at six in the morning when it’s teeing it down with rain.

And that’s when the real challenge of naming the dog started coming in. At our allotted time in February, we’ve received instructions that we need to provide a small snap collar that is marked with the puppy’s name. This means that we not only need to have sorted a name by then that won’t sound ridiculous to the breeder, but also will a) mean something and b) be acceptable as something that can be called out in public and at the vet’s. For example, where we live, if we name a dog Elsie or Ruby and call it in the park, there’s a fair chance that we’ll be mobbed by ten year old girls in floral dresses and T-bar sandals.

And the meaning thing is a big deal as well. My absolute favourite ever name that we’ve come up with (thanks to our chums N&N) is Brilleaux, after the wonderful, wonderful Lee Brilleaux, who I mentioned here earlier and who really deserves some sort of recognition in the Emu home. I carefully worked out a hustings and lobbying plan for this name, and canvassed all members of the family to get them to vote in the right direction, but was eventually worn down by the counter-lobby (which I suspect may have been led by my wife, who has been heard in the past to say that ‘All Doctor Feelgood songs sound the same’). The counter-lobby finally won, with a text from #1, stating firmly that Brilleaux was ‘only suitable for a ‘boy dog”.

We also have a slight problem with other ‘meaning’ names, and my not-so-subtle attempts at calling a dog after my heroes have met similar obstacles. And as a result, Tegla (Loroupe), Grete (Weitz), (Alf) Tupper and Tuppy (Glossop) have been received with a certain amount of sniffiness by the committee.

Fortunately, I work in an industry that prides itself on knowing one end of a data based decision from another. And, if there’s one thing that I’ve learnt from a career in careful  observation of management actions, setting strategic direction and addressing important opportunities for process improvements (and so on), it’s that by turning very important data into attractive red, amber and green colours, you can make the whole exercise of making decisions far easier. So, taking our shortlist of potential names, and taking all feedback into consideration, we arrived at the following table (pls note #2 might not have been taking the exercise entirely seriously):

number 7

Oh, I forgot to also mention that I’ve also learnt from  observing management actions, setting strategic direction and addressing important opportunities for process improvements (and so on), that this is also an excellent way to hide behind the reality of actually having to do anything. And because it’s unlikely that our breeder is actually going to allow us to call our new member of the family ‘Bitch Number 7’, and because the really valid name (Brilleaux) has been outlawed, we’ll do whatever any responsible business leader will do, and make a decision by completely ignoring the management information and going with our gut instinct.

Which is what we’ve done.

 

 

Norfolk. And Good.

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My parents married in 1957, and they honeymooned in the southwest of England. This event, monumental though it was of course at the time, was rather overshadowed by the launch of the Russian Sputnik satellite into space.  And this was causing some consternation amongst the folk that my parents bumped into as they picnicked their way across the countryside.
‘It’ll change the weather’, the locals said, as they laid into another pint of scrumpy.

And, not so very long after, that reaction seems ridiculous. You could argue that the thousands of satellites that we have whizzing about us now do many, many things, but they don’t, as far as we know, change the weather.

And I was reminded of this story as I wandered in yet another sleep deprived daze, into Norwich station at stupid o’clock this morning. On the floor in the main concourse is a plaque, and it commemorates the electrification of the line from London to Norwich in (wait for it….) 1987.

I was lucky enough to be living in Norwich in 1987, and I remember the furore around this event (the electrification, rather than the putting of a rather pointless stone in the middle of the floor of the station. Although it does remind of a fabulous story about Prince Philip, when he visited the recently restored HMS Victory. His guide pointed out a plaque on the floor, and solemnly said that it marked the spot where Nelson fell. ‘Not surprised’ said our favourite royal, ‘nearly tripped over the bloody thing myself’).  The reaction was not that far away from that experienced by my parents all those years ago: Why would we ever want to get to London any quicker…or at all ? And what would people from London want to come here for, anyway? By the way, some peoples view on answers would be a) we still don’t know and b) to buy up pretty much every single property in North Norfolk so they can wear hunter boots at the weekend.

Then I spy a copy of the Eastern Daily Press, which has a headline of ‘Premier League’. People in Norfolk are drawn to headlines like this, as a reminder that we do still (currently) have a football team in the top flight. These things are very important, but, as I say, we need to remind ourselves to keep in touch with our own reality. Anyway, this article is not about football, it’s about the investment committed by HM government into the East Anglian road infrastructure. Catching up on this online, I was also delighted to read the second lead story as well (Dereham Deputy Mayor’s Recycling Shock), which gives a pretty good insight as to the range of topics that the press hounds of the EDP have to cover.  So, apparently, our PM is visiting Norfolk today (at last, a valid reason for me to be in London!) and keen to tell people about the biggest infrastructural investment in the country. Well, outside London and the southeast, it transpires, but at least that means that Norfolk can be nicely patronised while still sticking two fingers up to anyone living north of Watford.

Here’s the quote: Mr Cameron said: “Why does this all matter so much? Well put simply, the jobs of the future depend on infrastructure fit for the future. It is the foundation stone on which businesses can grow, compete and create jobs – jobs that provide financial security for families here in Norfolk and across the country.”

But I’m not sure I totally agree. I’m a long way from being a Luddite, but putting money into something that allows people to waste slightly less time travelling between two places feels a bit last year to me. Remember all that great stuff a few years back about the global village, where everybody was going to be able to telecommute, and think global and act local? Well, looks to me like we’ve lost sight of that a bit, amidst an enthusiasm for squeezing out as many fossil fuels as possible out of the planet to maintain our obsession with being in lots of different places, often for fairly negligible reasons. Surely the infrastructure we ought to be investing in is the one that allows us to have less relatively pointless journeys? By the way, as far as this blog is concerned, the great irony is that putting yet more cars on the road will of course, really change the weather…

The beauty of living in Norfolk is precisely because its hard to get to, and as a result, it hasn’t necessarily moved in the same direction or at the same pace, as much of the rest of the country. It might be lacking in a bit of drama as far as the landscape goes (although I remember mentioning this a few years ago and getting the response ‘Hills? What do we want with them? They’ll only get in the way of the view’), but its still largely of its own making. And most people respect it for that, and  for not being just another commoditised settlement.

Of course, theres a down side to living here as well, being a hard place to get to means that its also a hard place to get out of, a bit like Royston Vasey (Welcome to Royston Vasey – You’ll Never Leave) for those of you who remember the League of Gentlemen. So it can be a bit insular, and someone once told me that it was the ‘graveyard of ambition’, but (trust me on this,) I’ve met far less ambitious people in my wanderings around the country than those I knock up against in this fine city.

If you like the sound of all this and you don’t live in Norfolk, then do look us up some time. Let us know when you’re on your way, wear comfortable clothes and make sure you get some food in for the journey. It takes bloody ages, which is, of course, just the way we like it.

Train, train, sixteen coaches long….

~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment
Our tale this week begins at 0450 this morning, my designated waking time for Tuesdays, as the day starts in a warm and comfortable bed in Norwich, and gets me to a desk in Newcastle a few hours later, full of the sort of vim and vigour that you might expect of a fellow with a heavily interrupted sleep pattern.
 
And our journey takes us, initially, from Norwich to Peterborough, courtesy of the comedy train line that calls itself Greater Anglia. It is a little known fact (by which I mean that it’s a complete fabrication), that Abraham Mazlo first had his bright ideas on hierarchy of needs while travelling on the 0550 from Norwich to Newcastle. Idly sketching to pass the time, he drew a triangle, and put at the base of it all the things that were missing from his journey –  lighting, heating, tea, power sockets, wifi, 3G, working toilets, something to look out of the window at, and so on, and before he knew it he had the bottom of his picture filled in. 
 
Sort these things out, figured Abe, and we’ll be able to talk about things like the human condition and purposefulness of thought, without too much worry at all.  
 
Anyway, accompanying me on this journey this morning was my eldest son’s bicycle, which he’d kindly asked me to take up to him in Newcastle that morning. So I’d pedalled it furiously down to the station at 0530, cutting quite a dash in a bizarre combination of cycling and work clothing, and popped it onto the train and locked it into position before you could say ‘first come first served’. Which is, verbatim, the Greater Anglia process for carrying bicycles on trains.  
 
All was good, and I settled down for the light combination of early morning emails and occasional naps that the journey allows, and awoke a few minutes before we pulled into the station at Peterborough.   And that’s when the problems started. Did I mention that I’d locked the bike to the train? Yes, but I hadn’t mentioned that I’d done it with a lock I’d liberated from the garage late the night before. Funny, I thought, as I put it in my bag, that one of the kids would just put a perfectly good (albeit cheap) lock in a drawer and not use it. Unfortunately, now was the time I found out that it was not a perfectly good lock. Although I knew the combination, it jammed. It was still jammed when the train doors opened. It was still jammed when one of my fellow travellers kept the door open to stop the train leaving, and it was still jammed when a member of the Peterborough station staff, almost apoplectic with rage, told all parties that the train must, must, must, leave on time. And the door was shut. Ten seconds later the bike was unlocked, and I found myself en route to Liverpool Lime street.   
 
And it is at this point, dear reader*, that when I expected my day to be heading for something of a decline, that things started getting better. 
 
This is what happened:  
 
I asked the conductor of the train for some help. She helped me. She told me to get off at the next stop (Grantham) and get a train to Newark. She printed from her ticket machine a revised journey from Grantham to Newark to Newcastle. I asked her if I’d be charged, and she said probably not, but wrote on the back of the ticket a message for future conductors. I have the ticket in front of me now, and I’m afraid I can’t actually read any of the words, which is a drawback. I have this problem generally with people with bad writing – my wife’s writing is appalling and I do have to second guess any cards she sends me – I tend to read them as ‘you’re the only thing that matters to me and I would like you to shower kisses on my upturned and eager face’ but for all I know, they may actually say ‘please see below for details of my solicitor, I’m having the house and you can keep that ridiculous car’. Similarly, this ticket may well say ‘this man is clearly deranged and doesn’t deserve to be in charge of a bicycle lock, never mind a bicycle’, but I like to think that it’s more like ‘please give safe and unpunished passage to this bloke who’s had a bit of bad luck and the world will be a better place’.  
 
Then I get off in Grantham. (Never thought I’d write those words down…) at which point the train waits for a good 5 minutes as it has got in early, thanks to its speedy departure from Peterborough. A man in a uniform calls across the tracks, and asks me if I’ve got a reservation for my bike. What I say is ‘no, I’ve missed my connection’. What I think is ‘gawp help us, what I really need now is a bloody jobsworth getting in my face’. He asks me to bring my bike across the footbridge, and I lug it over, expecting the worst. The worst doesn’t happen, he just explains that I need to pop into the ticket office and get bike reservations. This is very easy to do, I come out and he tells me that he’ll phone all my stations and make sure that the guard’s van is opened. That’s why they need reservations, on this train line, as otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get your bike on and off the train.  
 
And a man turns up next to me for the Newark train, and he unlocks the guard’s van, lets me get my bike on, and I hop into my carriage, which, this not being a Greater Anglia train is heated, lit, with a power supply, and before I get my coat off there’s a nice bloke asking me if I’d like a cup of tea. Which I do.    
 
And the conductor comes by and I steel myself for another difficult discussion about penalty fares, I start explaining myself, and she says ‘oh, that’s alright sir, you’re the one with the bike. Don’t worry, we’ll look after you’.  I’m not expecting to hear that level of reassurance and comfort again until I finally make it into a care home. Actually, I need to rethink that – given that my children are likely to have a pretty key part in the choice of where I spend my soup dribbling years, and given that I’ve tried to impress on them that every part of their leisure time should be spent in spartan pursuit of healthy improvement or quality of reading (advice that they’ve largely ignored), it’s pretty likely that they’ll get their own back by choosing something less comfortable as a fitting retaliation. So perhaps I’ll never hear that soft assurance again, which would be a shame.  
 
I bowl into Newcastle only 45 minutes after my original target, which was pretty good going. #1 was there to meet me.  
“Have you got a lock?”, I ask him 
“Yes, I bought a cheap one yesterday”, he said, showing me a TK Maxx bag.  
His turn next then.    
 
 
 
 
*evening dear. Don’t forget to put the bins out.

Keeping the woof from the door

~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

So, what to worry about this week as I speed my way homewards, courtesy of the fine people on Greater Anglia railways?

A quick poll of my fellow travellers suggest the following key and topical issues that justify the most scrutinous of debates :

– how valid is Romanian/Albanian immigration?

–  how are we going to cope when these waves get even higher in Wales and the South? Or, even worse, the East?

– can we really be living in a country that’s just endured the Mark Duggan verdict?

– is wearing a donkey jacket valid for a 51 year old bloke who works in financial services?

All great topics for debate (although the last one might be a bit of a stretch. Honest, I’ve been looking for a replacement for about 20 years).

So naturally we’ll steer well clear of all of them and talk about whether or not the family Emu ought to get a dog.

This has been an ongoing debate around the kitchen table for about three years, so, as the other Mrs E* said to me the other day, we’ve had something of a cooling off period.

In the red corner stands the pro camp, consisting of all of the kids, and the hearts of myself and the primary Mrs E**. In this camp we have :

– an enthusiasm for another member of the family that will always be pleased to see us (a key factor when also rearing teenagers)

– lots of commitment to healthy walks at least twice a day

– the perception that we’ll always have a companion for running and to keep us from being alone

– every dog owner we know saying they’d never be without one

– the fact that we seem irresistibly drawn to the impossibly handsome Vizsla dogs – friendly, fond of running, and apparently, self cleaning. A bit like our oven. The self cleaning bit, I mean.

In the blue corner, are the agin camp, which contains solely of the heads of me and primary Mrs E, and we talk about:

– the waning enthusiasm of any of our kids to commit to anything

– pretty much any dog owner that I’ve come across as a runner

– the horror of picking up dog poo

– the slight concern that we might be replacing jr Emu #1 with a dog. That in itself is not a problem, but we’re concerned that by the time the fourth one leaves home we might have a bit of a pack

– the frightening thought that we’ll have to get an estate car. And that it might well be a Volvo

– the ties that bind whenever we need to do something spontaneous

– the sheer bloody cost

The last couple of these are particularly interesting. The idea of doing anything spontaneous, ever again, disappeared from view in the summer of 1993, when #1 decided to take over our every waking thought. By the time #4 leaves us to our own devices/house, I fear we’ll be past the ability to do anything spontaneous anyway.

And the sheer bloody cost of these things (by which I mean dogs, not kids. Don’t get me started…)is astonishing. Honestly, they cost a fortune to run, and that’s after you’ve forked out the best part of a grand on getting one into your home in the first place. Yes, I found this fairly hard to believe as well, but have a look at ‘pets4homes’*** next time you’re passing.

So you’d think the case for the defence was pretty solid, no? Well, no. Sometimes you need to go with your heart, and that’s almost certainly where we’ll go. As with most key decisions in our household, the clincher will end up on the most innocuous decision, and the current one is around ‘naming the dog’ which has kept us occupied at most mealtimes and long car journeys for about three weeks solid. As soon as we have the right name, the logic goes, we’ll know that we need to get a dog.

And #2 has played a trump card here, with an absolute stroke of genius. We know we need to get a dog, he says, because then we can call it ‘Reservoir’.

Watch this space, and if you happen across any Viszla puppies with a low hip score, docile parents and, ideally, coming in at less than a month’s rent, let me know.

* Nothing to worry about dear, honest
** Doreen, please do let me know if this gets confusing
*** I think the domain name ‘petsforgullibletwits’ was taken

In the shadow of a brilliant light

~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

Most people I know have fairly meaningful pictures on their phone home screens, of loved ones or loved things. I do too, and someone asked me the other day what it was. The picture’s at the top of this blog.

For those of you under the age of thirty or over the age of sixty, you might not recognise the face that is Lee Brilleaux. If you’re between those ages, and claim to have any sort of knowledge of contemporary music, and still don’t recognise him, then you need to listen up, particularly, if you recognise this picture:

cobain

Because it is the Emu’s task in hand today to convince you, gentle reader*, that Lee Brilleaux is more important to you, your life and the whole wide world of modern music than Kurt Cobain. A fairly random challenge, you might think, but one of the objections that I have against Mr Cobain, was that he inconsiderately killed himself the same week that Mr Brilleaux passed away. Not that either of them would know, but the reality is that when that happened, all we heard about was Cobain’s death, and Brilleaux’s was relegated to a footnote, if that.

Cobain’s death was April 5th, 1994, Brilleaux’s was a couple of days later, and I mention it now, because the sharp-minded amongst you will understand that we’re headed, like a very predictable train, towards the 20th anniversary. And if there’s one thing that our media industry likes a lot, it’s an anniversary. So, I’d predict that we’ll have lots and lots of 20th anniversary and hand-wringing retrospectives on Nirvana and the tragic life of Kurt Cobain, and I’ll not mind**, but in amongst there, I’d really like to see a bit of time spent on what Lee Brilleaux was all about.

I’ll admit to being slightly biased here. I was lucky enough to meet Lee a few times, and was in bands that supported Dr Feelgood a number of times on what looked like a fairly non-stop tour from the mid 70s through to the late 80s. Quite apart from the fact that he was charming, friendly and funny, he was also the best front man that a band could ever have. When he was on stage, you just could not take your eyes off of him, not because he was going to start turning cartwheels or wow us with some sort of genius quip, but because, well, his presence. Look at this clip from 1975 and you’ll see what I mean.

Now watch it again (probably from about 1:40, and count the number of times he or Wilko actually blink. Perhaps we couldn’t take our eyes of Dr Feelgood because they wouldn’t take their eyes off us.

Incidentally, those of you not familiar with the story of Dr Feelgood will also not be aware of the legendary white suit, which apparently started most tours relatively new and ended up in this sort of a state, after being covered in beer, sweat and the sort of stains you get by trying to mend the exhaust on a transit van. Which, apparently, he did.

Anyway, as a front man, he had very few peers. And even if you were to argue that there’s lots of really good front men about, you’d still be missing the point of what LB was about.  If you listen to the Feelgood live album Stupidity, from 1976, you’ll start to understand a bit more. You also need to remember that, for most people, this was before punk, before new wave, before grunge, and at a time when people associated  energetic music with Leo Sayer or Cat Stevens, or the Osmonds.

That highly charged, rehashed blues that they were playing must have been absolutely awesome to witness. I’m pretty confident in saying that, because so many of the interviews of the punk and new wave bands from the mid-late 70s cite Dr Feelgood as a huge influence. Added to which, you’ve got Brilleaux loaning Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson £500 to start Stiff records. And for those of you who spent the late 1970’s living under a stone, Stiff was the anti-label that launched the careers of Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, The Damned, Lene Lovich, Wreckless Eric and many many more. And without that lot, I’d respectfully suggest that the fabulous music (as opposed to the crud) that followed wouldn’t have happened. Admittedly, without Lene Lovich we might have been spared the miniaturised aural car crash that we know these days as Bjork, and without Wreckless Eric we’d have blissfully missed Will Ferrell belting out The Whole Wide World  in ‘Stranger Than Fiction’. But pretty much anyone with an ounce of credibility in British music since could trace part of their songwriting and attitudinal roots to that legacy.

Finally, nothing against Mr Cobain, but this is rock and roll, right? And in my view, that’s about dancing and drinking and sex and drugs rather than thinking you’re the first person in the world ever to feel sorry for themselves. So Lee’s picture stays on my phone until April. And in the meantime, I’ll keep listening and loving it, and I very much hope you will too.

Until the next time, onetwothreefour!

* evening dear. I’ll be home in about an hour

** see what I avoided there?

It was twenty years ago today…

~ kevinrevell ~ 4 Comments

…and I’m sitting on the bottom stair in our old house, and I’m biting onto my knuckles, because, upstairs, our two week old baby boy is crying, and my wife has been taken into hospital with mastitis, septicaemia and God knows what else, and I’m scared witless, and I haven’t got a clue what to do.

Quite a levelling experience, altogether. Fortunately, we muddle through and after a couple of weeks, we’re back to a fragile three again, and we start enjoying the first of a number of small people that are to enter our lives over the next eight years.

So, he starts to respond differently after a couple of weeks, and we get past that point where you’re not sure if he’s smiling or not, and he’s got a face that melts your heart, and everything starts feeling pretty right with the world.

And he starts crawling and talking and walking and it all goes really fast and before you know it he’s holding his baby brother in his arms and tickling him, and they’re both giggling away, and that’s pretty good.
And he toddles off to nursery school and learns songs about crocodiles and parachutes and makes friends that last him right up to now, and all the time he’s getting this really great sense of humour, and he’s naughty without being horrible, and that’s all pretty good too.

And, before we know it, he’s at school, and cutting quite a dash in his grey shorts as he goes off for his first day, and he loves it to bits, and he really likes learning, and all that seems to fall into place. And he starts getting those crazes, and the one that really sticks it the guitar and he starts practising for hours, and he gets really good at it, and I couldn’t be more proud. And we go for hours with me running and him on his bike and he tells me all about the absolute ideal colour for a stratocaster, and I couldn’t be less interested in that as a specific subject, but it’s just great to hear him so excited, and eventually we go to a guitar shop with his birthday and Christmas money and buy an Epiphone Casino that’s almost as tall as he is, and he sits down to play it and, you know, he’s really quite good. So he plays in a few bands and loves it, then he starts playing drums and he’s pretty good at that as well, and we start sharing all those stories about Things That Happen At Gigs, and that’s all good too.

And he does pretty well at school, and takes a few chances, and makes a few mistakes, and goes through those rites of passage as he learns to drive, and (separately) learns to drink, and meets a girl, then stops meeting the girl, and all the time he’s handling it pretty well, and it’s great to have him around, and before you know it he’s the third adult in the relationship, and telling his parents to grow up when they argue, and you can’t help but laugh. And he runs his first half marathon, then runs his first marathon, and we get to see him cross the line, and because we’ve both run marathons we know what that’s like, and there are moments like that where you just want to freeze time because its really not going to get much better than this.

And he gets his place at University, and it’s his absolute first choice, so he’s chuffed to bits, and after a fabulous summer he packs everything he needs into the car and gets deposited into a little room that reminds me of a Cat B prison I once visited, but which he absolutely loves, and we go away from there thinking that actually, these things can sometimes work out quite well.

And then a couple of weeks later, we’ve just come off the phone to him, and we’re talking about him in the kitchen, and his younger brother puts ‘Wish You Were Here’ on the stereo, and there’s that line about ‘two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year’, and I just start crying.

And it’s not because I didn’t want him to grow up and it’s not because I selfishly want to have him around all the time. It’s because we won’t get to see the world through his eyes any more, because over the next few years, we’re going to feel like this a few more times, and because, well, you’re allowed to miss people when they’re not around, aren’t you?

Well, it was about twenty years ago that Mrs E’s mother gave her the fairly mature advice that she should enjoy every minute of being a parent, because you only ever borrow your kids. It’s only taken twenty fairly wonderful years to understand what she meant.