A Dark Night In Ushaw Moor

 

Here’s a story for you.  

On a Saturday morning back in February of 2024, my neighbour, Billy, told me he had seen someone mooching about the back lane, trying garage doors and cars, so I checked my car to find it had been unlocked and my guitar amp and bag of pedals with assorted gubbins had been removed from the boot.

I usually parked the car with the boot right up against the garage where it couldn’t be opened but had left it in a different spot that night, never thinking about the stuff stashed inside.  

I reported it to the police and started seeing all these Facebook posts of other stories of similar things happening all over the village that night, along with camera footage.  They were using some kind of electronic relay device which can create a link between your car and key fob if the two are close enough which can unlock your car as easily as with the key.

That Saturday night, there had been a load of police sirens late on, about midnight, and Sunday morning there was a police car stationed outside the pizza shop.  The shopfront was now heavily decorated with police tape and the glass door smashed in.   The scene was still the same by Monday morning. 

It turned out there was a break-in, a stabbing and a hostage situation, the perpetrators arrested and some poor guy in hospital.  Once forensics had been in, my neighbour down the road got the job of clearing the flat - house clearing being one of his many sidelines, and low and behold, among the blood splatters and everything else, he finds my Marshall amplifier and a big bag of guitar pedals stashed behind a couch, which are now in my possession.  

It would be reasonable to question the integrity of a police forensic investigation not finding them first, but I was more than happy with the outcome.  The only thing that was missing was a battered old M&Ms tin, probably because it had some loose change in it, about 3 quid at the most. 

They likely had little idea they were in possession of around £1600 worth of gear and even less idea how to sell it.  A pair of absolute idiots on an all-night thieving rampage in their own village, taking all the stolen gear back to their own flat, then get wasted out of their nappers the next night and coerce someone back to their flat, tie up and torture the poor guy for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

They are now well on their way to lengthy jail time – not their first offences by far as it had transpired, and I shall never leave anything in my car again.  Life lessons; ignore them at your peril.

Banana

When she saw me, the wee girl ran over with her drawing book and crayons.  She lived next door to a friend I was visiting and knew I would always be up for drawing pictures with her.

“Can we draw a picture?”  She asked with big, imploring eyes.

“Of course we can.”    We sat down on the warm grass of the front garden where she carefully opened her new box of Crayola crayons.  Their bright waxy colour glowed in the sun and a fresh, white page of her drawing book was turned.

“What shall we draw?” I asked.

“A man,” she answered with no hesitation. “You draw him, and then we’ll colour him in.”

I picked up a black crayon and lightly drew the outlines. 

“I’ll give him a jumper, trousers, boots and he can have a big hat on his head,” I suggested.

Once the outlines were drawn, I asked, “Why don’t we start with his jumper – what colour do you reckon?”

She picked up a red crayon and said, “Tomato.”   Then with absolute concentration, she carefully coloured the jumper in the finest tomato.

After complimenting her colouring prowess I suggested the boots might be next.  

Upon careful consideration of the colours available, she picked up the brown crayon and declared, “Chocolate!”

So, chocolate colour boots it was.  Once finished she then announced that the trousers would have to be sky.  This clearly meant blue, like jeans, and before long, our man’s blue trousers were complete.

By this time, I was totally invested in her inventive use of colour names, and to prove I was with the programme, I picked up the yellow crayon and confidently suggested, “maybe his hat could be banana?”

She gave me a rather perplexed look.  “That’s not banana, that’s yellow.”

A Beautiful Hour In Sibiu

A Beautiful Hour In Sibiu

In 1998 I was on a trip to Romania as a street performer with Neighbourhood Watch Stilts International and as always, I had some drawing and painting materials to make the most of any spare moments captured from the chaos of travelling street theatre. We were in the beautiful city of Sibiu in Transylvania for four or five days, at a time when food there was sparse and alcohol was ridiculously cheap; Romania was still an extremely poor country nine years after their revolution put a violent stop to the horrific regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu's communist party. Away from the post-war cold, brutalist housing blocks remained the beautiful old centre of the city with its once grand buildings and ornate churches; the area we were lucky to be staying and performing in.

I managed to find an hour for myself on a warm sunny evening and sat with my paints and drawing pad in a doorway opposite The Lutheran Cathedral of Saint Mary - one of Romania's famous gothic style churches.  There was heavenly choral singing coming from inside the church and the peace was only broken by a very pretty and rather flustered young lady on a bicycle rattling towards me. She dismounted and breathlessly asked if I was going to be there for the next hour, and would I watch her bicycle as she was late for choir practice and of course, I said yes as she ran across the road.

I got back to my painting and a while later a young boy carrying a huge carrier bag of clothes walked up to me. His English was excellent and I soon learned he was only eleven years old. He wanted to know what I was doing so I showed him what I was painting and he asked if he could sit and watch.  I gave him a sheet of my paper and told him to draw a picture using my pencils; he happily set to it, saying it would make a good present for his mother.  He sat down and we got to talking.  

Even though he grew up in poverty, and poverty in Romania at that time was real, brutal and everywhere, he had such a happy outlook on life and a wisdom beyond his years.  I learned he went to school Monday to Friday, on evenings he helped his mother do other people's laundry, hence the bag of washing he had with him, and on weekends he laboured on building sites with his grandfather and uncles. He never knew his own father who died during the revolution.  To me, his life story was tragic; to him it was just matter of fact. He was most excited about the World Cup which was on at the time in France, and Romania and Scotland were both in.  He said with great confidence, "Romania are going to win."  

"No chance," I said, "Scotland will win."  He was adamant, however, that Romania were certain to win and he happily explained his logic.  "You know how Brazil are the best football team?  Because they're really poor. Well Romania is even poorer than Brazil."

I had to admit, I had no come-back for that one and felt rather humbled. He'd finished his drawing, said he'd best get home and off he went, laundry in one hand, drawing in the other. I got back to my painting.  

Soon the etherial choir singing stopped and the pretty girl came back for her bicycle. She too was curious about my painting which she politely admired and we got talking for a bit.  She found it exciting that I was one of the stilt walkers in the huge, brightly coloured bird costumes which had not gone unnoticed in the town centre.  She wrote her name and address on a piece of paper and asked me to send her a postcard from my next location on my travels, which, of course, I did.  And that was my beautiful hour in Sibiu.

A good lesson.

When I was a wee boy, probably around eight years old, I asked my dad to help me with my homework.  I was to draw a picture of a cow and I wasn't very good at drawing cows (I suppose we must've been doing a project on farming or dairy produce.)  My dad took the pencil and paper and quickly drew an outline of a cow with the idea that I should finish it off.  I noticed right away the cow was missing an udder, so with great enthusiasm, I quickly scribbled in an eight year old boy's idea of what a cow's udder looked like.  My dad smiled, shook his head,
    "Whit's that? A bunch o' bananas?  That's no whit it looks like."

We needed a picture of a cow.  I found one in a nursery rhyme book - it was jumping over the moon.  My dad took a fresh sheet of paper and the pencil and began the drawing lesson.  He showed me how to look at the outline of a shape, told me about proportions, how to compare the length of the leg to the width of the body, the angle of the neck to the back,  how to hold the pencil very lightly and draw over and over again till I got the lines right, and not to be afraid of making a mistake.  He taught me that most important lesson of all - that drawing was all about looking, looking harder than you ever looked before.  The result was, for the first ever, I'd drawn something that looked like the thing I was drawing; for an eight year old, that was terribly exciting.  It was like I'd been given a key that unlocked one of the great mysteries of life.

That was a very important lesson for me, not only because all these years later, I still remember it, but because it was the start of a journey.  That drawing lesson made me best in my class at art, and that felt good; I'd not been best at anything before.  That in turn, led to me being the best in my year at art when I went to secondary school, where I got into the habit carrying a sketch book everywhere, and every morning on the school bus, other pupils wanted to see what I'd drawn, and my ego didn't mind the attention.   By the time I was seventeen and getting ready to leave school to go to art school, I was selling drawings and paintings of local views and saved up a tidy college fund.  Art school opened up a whole new world of possibilities which in turn led me to many new experiences and adventures.

My dad died last week after a period of illness and I came to realise that when you lose your dad (or anyone close) they leave stuff behind.  You know, the usual things - and I'm being general here - signet ring, wrist watch, fishing rods, books, tools and in my case, some snazzy shirts and a dazzling array of geraniums.  All lovely and sentimental stuff to hang onto, but these are not so important.  The things that matter are not the material things, but the memories of the times you shared, and the inspiration they've given you to look at the world in your own unique way;  that's the real inheritance which you will carry with you always.  I'm very grateful for that.

In memory of James Prott McGinn.  1937 - 2013

My Dad

My dad is ill.  Fit, strong and healthy all his days then in the weeks leading up to his 76th birthday, he lands himself in hospital with pneumonia, suspected pulmonary fibrosis and possibly cancer.  (Maybe the 35 years in a coal mine are catching up) They can’t confirm the latter two until the pneumonia is dealt with but something is showing up on these CT scans, making it a worrying time for us all.  He’s now home by his fireside on a cocktail of steroids and antibiotics, trying to build his strength back up; he’s lost a frightening amount of weight.

Having healthy parents lasting happily into their seventies is a blessing not everyone gets to enjoy and one I am ever more grateful for.  No matter how you consider the possibilities, nothing prepares you for the sudden realisation that they are not invincible;  that they, and in fact, all of us are fragile and only here for a fleeting time in the grand scale of things.  We shall all one day return to the dust from whence we came to be scattered and forgotten.

Back in 1989 when my grandfather (on my father’s side) was falling into that slow, insidious failing health of old age, both mentally and physically, I remember going with my dad to visit him in hospital.  We walked into the ward and there on the first bed on the right hand side of a big old Victorian room, he was lying perfectly still, mouth open, face sunken and eyes half shut and for one horrible instant we both thought we were looking at a corpse.  What has stuck with me all those years wasn’t how my papa was but that look on my dad’s face, a frozen moment, quickly dispelled when my papa woke up.  I’ll never forget that, and I was reminded of it when I went up to Scotland last week to see my dad in hospital.  My once fit-as-a-butcher’s-dog dad shuffled through, skeletal, breathless and vulnerable and at once I knew what that look on his face all these years ago truly meant; when someone close to you is facing their own mortality, it’s also your own mortality that stares back at you.

He’s always been a good dad, and at the age of seventy six, he can still teach this forty five year old boy a valuable lesson or two.

Code42

I seem to be getting bombarded with spam comments on my blog.  Rather than publish, I save and edit them into equally pointless and slightly surreal poetry.  I'm calling this exciting new genre "Spamoetry".


Code42

Faced with the Aspect
of shutting depressed near
Topper in multiply
 SOS! On-line backup, does a Bully job Here

Just cloud prices
services that volition.
See good storage of valuable
Digital occupation

In Online stand-in; this road very considerably.
If you desire something
unproblematic in? This industry and just like.
Parity! Ordered series but cloud unloosen

Records.
if you are occupation;
possessor
software program adaptation.

On servers hosted by some ship's company
will welfare from fund your files?
or do a lot of work on compresses, encrypts,
and transfers the data expansile?

1.2 is of the fate 500,
credit fourth dimension-consume
Another benefit is
that you get the be very irksome.

From home investment.
its identify.
Percentage and deal
all their substance in the cloud
and from nomadic devices.

To precisely cloud.
Online backup,
just now cloud,
not to unloose.
Reviews table service and
typically collects,
but hey, dig that iCloud.

Stick Your Spoon In And Have A Taste.

Last year, on holiday in Northern France with Fiona and our good friends Keith and Kate, as always I had sketchbooks and notebooks to record, sketch and doodle as is my want.  It became clear that a trip to France described as a mere chronological list of events seemed to say little of what should be better expressed as a menu; as a travel-log of our ponderous journey of gastronomic ecstasy.  Food, after all, is what France is really all about.

The various purveyors of breads, cakes, pastries, fish, meat, cheese, vegetables and fruit pull you in by the nostrils, seduced by aroma and left helpless and salivating.  Displays of flavour and colour whisper sweet nothings to star-struck taste buds and induce lustful pangs of hunger.

Le Touquet; elegant seaside town on an endless stretch of beach between Calais and The Somme.  Stick your spoon in and have a taste.
“It has to be fish,” I’m thinking.  We were having Soupe de Poisson for lunch while I ponder on dinner.  It’s my turn to cook.  Like a painter staring at a blank canvas and too many colours to choose from, where do I begin?

Soupe de Oignon.  I’ve made this before and it’s a simple recipe.  Lots of onions chopped and sautéed in butter with a generous scattering of black pepper and salt to taste.  Add water and simmer for ages.  It really is that easy.

So first on the shopping list is onions and black peppercorns.  That powdered dry black pepper is rubbish.  It blows around like stale household dust and is an insult to the flavoursome peppercorn.  Also with Soupe de Oignon is bread and cheese.  In France, bread is easy and always good.  No Mother’s Pride white sliced here.  I admire the way good food in France is considered an act of patriotism; we Brits should learn from them in that respect.

I’ll need olive oil and of course Haricot Vert - is anything more French than that?  I enter the vegetable shop like a wide eyed child in a sweet factory.  First, the Haricot Vert,
“Une kilo dimi,” and the pretty dark haired girl is smiling at my heroic and slightly rubbish attempt at speaking her native tongue but I am undaunted in my quest.  New potatoes and beans were all I came in for, but soon I was smelling handfuls of radishes and eyeing up the big flamboyant green lettuces.  The tomatoes and courgette were too good to resist and suddenly ratatouille was added to the menu.  I chose the biggest green pepper in the shop which carried that strong fruity scent which a quality pepper should have, and a fist sized bunch of wet parsley - always good with fish, and some small round shallots.

To the Poissonerie.  A fish shop in Le Touquet is an adventure in itself; and art gallery of the sea.  Fresh oysters piled high and apparently to be avoided if there is no ‘R’ in the month.  I had oysters and enjoyed them, but also seen the results of someone eating a bad one; it’s not pretty.  After much browsing I settled for some plump sea-bass fillets.  My challenge was to make a meal from local ingredients for four with a budget of 25 euros.  I was already way over my limit, but what the hell; you don’t go to France to skimp on the food.  You can do that at home any day of the week.

To get things going, the chef and his kitchen assistant (myself and Kate respectively) began with a glass of chilled Listel Rosé - a light fragrant wine full of the flavours of summertime - and started on the vegetables.  I chop a kilo of eye watering onions while Kate tops and tails the green beans.  I melt a generous dod of butter in the biggest pan in the kitchen and grind in lots and lots of black pepper.  A low heat melts the butter slowly so as not to burn and add the onions.  Just let them gently sauté away for ages.  When they’re soft and beginning to golden, add water, salt and leave to simmer away to their wee hearts’ content.  I’m sure there are many ways to make an onion soup, but this is how I’m doing it.

Now finished our glasses of rosé and feel a red would be too heavy at this juncture, and anyway, it hasn’t breathed yet; we decant two bottles of Leffe Blonde into tall and perfectly formed glasses.  With trusty beers in hand, Kate washes the vegetables while I chop garlic then big fat tomatoes - the shape and size of the biggest British supermarket ones, but with flavour, an impressive courgette and that mother of all green peppers.  We are now flowing like a well oiled machine.

The finely chopped garlic bubbling in the olive oil with green pepper, courgette and a few herbs, and the obligatory black pepper.  The ratatouille is under way and the kitchen is filling with delicious smells; the red wine breathes.  Fiona is drafted in for her salad dressing skills; she was taught the art of the classic French dressing under the strict supervision of her pen-friend’s mother many moons ago.  Olive oil, Dijon mustard, White wine vinegar and secrets I cannot divulge, for I am not party to.

Our Leffe Blondes are nearing the bottoms of their glasses so it seems only fitting we taste the white wine I got to accompany the fish course.  Crisp, dry, chilled to perfection with a fresh zesty citrus hint.  I take a shallow oven dish and butter the bottom.  I lay the sea-bass fillets out and throw a good glug of wine over them, along with whole garlic cloves, coarsely chopped parsley and shallots.  A few more lumps of butter here and there, black pepper and pinch of sea salt and into the pre-heated oven.  I slice the remains of the morning’s bread, sprinkle with Emmental cheese and they’re ready for the grill.  Another dod of butter melts in a pan, add plain four for a roux to make the sauce; the fish is almost ready so I pour some of the juices into the roux, add milk and more white wine (good job I got two bottles) and some of the Emmental.  Once ready, the sauce is poured over the fish and returned to the oven.

The table is set with cold sausage, little soft cheeses, peanuts and a bowl of radishes served as an aperitif with more chilled  rosé and dinner begins.  At the given time, the cheese toasted breads are placed in soup bowls and the Soupe de Oignon is ladled over with many “Hmmmmms” from my hungry diners. Success.

I quickly add a splash of red to the ratatouille which has simmered to just the right consistency.  We eat our soup to many “oohs” and “aaahs”  and I have to say I’m pleased with the result.  Sweet and light, an exercise in simplicity itself.  Just quality raw materials and that magic ingredient which in this case is lots of time to tease out all that great flavour.

There is one thing left for the main course; the Haricot Vert and again, time is the essence but in this case very little.  I plunge them into boiling water for three to four minutes to just blanch them and no more.  They are sweet, soft and mouth-watering.  A perfect accompaniment to the fish in their sauce, new potatoes and ratatouille.  White wine poured and main course is served and is met with resounding approval.

Next course is the bowl of elegantly dressed lettuce served with fresh bread and much mopping ensues.  What a meal.  And dessert?  An imposing lump of oozing mature Camembert, which has been allowed to breathe,  is presented at the table and  glasses are charged with the red wine.  The combination is sensual and rich - a knockout blow.  The cheese course is the part of a meal to linger on where wine and conversation flow at their best.  Our palettes have been led through the culinary rabbit hole and appetites thoroughly sated.  What could possibly follow this?

Well, as it happened, an few days earlier we were in Belgium, so naturally we had the finest chocolate in the world.   I put the coffee on.  Vive la France.