crinklybee

Hit the North: Eggs, Chips, and Complimentary Yorkshire Puddings

Easter Saturday, and me and Frankie head North on the early morning train.  We are off to visit the Geordie side of his family tree.  Here are the edited highlights.

1.  The Easter Egg decorating competition

As readers of long-standing will recall, this annual event was initially planned as a one off to entertain tiny cousins, but has grown into an institution comparable in size, scope, and potential to cause bitter internecine resentment only to the Eurovision Song Contest itself.  As well as entering an egg (usually very badly and hastily decorated) I play the part of Terry Wogan (or, as older readers may prefer, Katie Boyle).  I also add the scores up of the various juries (well OK, of the various cousins, sisters, brother-in-laws and aunties), which is the most complicated job of all as it involves (don't ask why) the application of a weighting system meaning the scores of certain contestants need to be divided by six, then multiplied by five, in order to arrive at the final figure.  Usually I am in need of a stiff drink by the close of proceedings.

This year I had high hopes for my entry 'Scoot to Commute', which was an egg wearing a crash helmet and riding a 50cc Vespa fashioned from a desk sellotape dispenser.  I thought the last-minute touch of adding a tiny 'L' plate to the back would be the kind of thing that would catch the judges' eyes and garner me an all-important extra half-dozen points or so.  No such luck- I trailed in in second-to-last place, just ahead of one of Frankie's several entries, which as far as I could see amounted to an egg scribbled upon, in what I can only describe as a juvenile manner, with several colours of felt-tip pen.  The boy will have to do better if he is to compete with the elite entrants, which this year included (courtesy of one Gosforth household) the entire cast of the Wizard of Ozz.  My Auntie Viv's reproduction of Dorothy walked away with the top prize of a giant Cadbury's chocolate egg filled with Smarties. The defeated contestants had to console themselves with medium sized confectionary, and thinly veiled accusations of Balkanesque collusion between voting allies.  We'll all be back next year.

2 Cullercoats

Cullercoats is the poor relation of Newcastle's three main coastal resorts.  It doesn't have cute antiques markets and upmarket tearooms like Tynemouth, or stips of amusement arcades and crazy golf like Whitley Bay.  In fact it doesn't have very much at all, just a chip shop, which on Bank Holiday Monday had a queue of Geordie scallies, most of them clutching packets of Regal Kingsize and six-packs of Fosters, stretching almost back to the Metro station.  Once we'd finished queuing there was just time for me and Frankie to bury two of his large cousins (the ones who used to be tiny when the Easter egg thing started) up to their heads in sand before we all had to run back to the station because me and Frankie had to get back to Manchester. 

3 Stoke City away

As an exile I've grown used to watching Newcastle games in the company of fans of the other team.  Usually this passes off without incident, although there was the time when a giant Levenshulme skinhead took exception to some innocuous comment I may have made about Roy Keane being a 'dirty cheating bastard' and threatened to 'batter' me (and I don't think he was proposing a trip to Cullercoats for fish and chips).  There was also the time, just the other week, when I risked the wrath of a bar full of dandily-dressed Zimbabwean Arsenal fans by some over-exuberant celebration of an equaliser.  So it was a rare treat to take in the Saturday teatime fixture at Stoke in a bar full of black-and-whites.  It was a cricket club bar, though, and a very slight bit on the posh side, so I did receive a couple of askance glances when after twenty-five seconds I yelled something like 'Haway Ameobi man where's your fucking first touch' at the top of my voice.  After that I concentrated on becoming a picture of restraint, and by half-time the barman had clearly concluded I presented no immediate danger to the social fabric of the borough of Gateshead because he offered me one of his tray full of complimentary Yorkshire puddings.  This gesture seemed to signal the succesful passing of some kind of test, and by the end I had been accepted into polite cricket club society to the extent that my views on the unsuitability of Damien Duff as an emergency left-back were given a respectful hearing.  I'll be back, and not just for the Yorkshire puddings.

There were other highlights too such as a visit to an allotment site in Jesmond that is slowly being colonised by my entire extended family and a sighting of one of the blokes who write the Viz comic running for a Metro train.  But I haven't got time to tell you about those as I am writing this in Chorlton library and the time-clicker at the bottom of the screen says I've only got 10 minutes left.  Next time out, something slightly less hurried, maybe...

In Praise of The Lollipop Ladies Of The Westside

It's a quarter to eleven but I'm still wide awake as, in a repeat of what has happened on the previous four hundred and thirteen occasions when it has been my job to get Frankie to sleep, I've fallen for the sucker punch of 'just lying down next to him for half a minute, it'll be all right, I'll not even close my eyes'.  Like an alcoholic taking his first sip of the hard stuff, from this point onwards all is lost and it is only a matter of time before oblivion is breached.  A very short amount of time, usually.  Within a minute, I'm persuading myself that it's been a long day, and 'if I just close one of my eyes for the smallest few seconds it can't do any harm', and this very quickly progresses to 'you know what, just a two-minute dose here and I'll be fine- just five minutes, ten at the outside, who'll know the difference'.  Moments later cohesive thought gives way to a series of fragmentary, borderrline nonsensical short films featuring cameo roles for blokes I used to work with at the Gas Board, long-forgotten Newcastle United centre halves and the alumni of Wingrove Junior School, Fenham, circa 1975.  There follows a descent into bliss, which lasts for fully two and a half seconds, at which point I regain consciousness and realise in quick succession that:

1.. I am teetering so precariously on the edge of a toddler-size mattress that if I shift any part of my body backwards I'm going to fall to the floor, no doubt landing on one of Frankie's 'sound and picture' books and waking up the slumbering child with a blast of uptempo pirate music.

2... It is ten-past nine and I have missed the full first half of the England- Ukraine game and probably the start of the second

and

3.. that my impromptu siesta has left me feeling groggy, grouchy and, all things considered, just very sorry-for-myself.

A sorry state of affairs, I'm sure you will agree. And that is just what it is like for fifty weeks of the year.  The other two weeks- the ones during which the government takes it upon itself to do something infernal with the clocks- are like that, except worse.  I don't really know why but the fact of the clocks going forward an hour, or back an hour, or whatever the hell it was this week, seems to have the effect of disorienting me so completely that I become to all intents and purposes nocturnal.  Needless to say the semi-sleepless nights make the working days more or less a write-off, and it doesn't help that some of your timepieces have taken it upon themselves to change automatically, while the rest you have changed yourself but moved exactly half of them in the wrong direction, so during daylight it could feasibly be anything between eleven o'clock and teatime, and there's no point in asking anyone because they're all as confused as you are.  Yesterday it reached the point where only the sight of lollipop ladies populating the suburban junctions of the Westside made it apparent to me that I had completely missed lunchtime and it was actually very nearly time to go home.

So there you have it- the fabric of day-to-day life is unravelling at my feet, but not to worry, because it will all be all right again in a week.  In the meantime I was grateful for last night's Tai Chi class, which happens absolutely at seven o'clock every Tuesday night and will continue to do so no matter what harebrain schemes the government of Harold Wilson comes up with to appease Scottish hillfarmers from the 1960s.  I'm getting better at the Tai Chi now, or at least looking less likely to topple over and land on my nose during the tricky moves.  Last night I was hindered in some of these, however, by the gradual realisation that a surprising amount of them (at least when carried out in the rather ungainly fashion which I can manage) seem to be based on the signature moves of British TV stand-up comedians past and present.  In quick succession last night we had the Les Dawson 'Blankety Blank cheque book and pen' plant one foot and upraised palm forward , the Harry Enfield Scouser 'calm down calm down' parallel arm movement, and, last but not least, the Vic Reeves 'now who's this pretty young lady to my right?' knee bend and superfast thigh rub.  It's only a matter of time, I am sure, before we are invited to partake in the Eric-Morecambe 'I'll have a pint of what he's drinking' Wobbly-Glass-Drinking-Mime.  In fact, if it doesn't make its debut next week I might just introduce it myself as a sort of half-time interval to break up the ten-minute meditation at the end- I'm sure we'll all see the funny side and wonder what we ever did without it.  We're a right bunch of jokers, us modern-day Qi Jong practitioners.

And with such serene and unworldy thoughts I must leave you, as it is now a minute to midnight (or possibly a minute to eleven, or a minute to one in the morning, or ten past four next Thursday afternoon, who the hell knows?).  Next time out, the reaction from Crinklybee Towers on the sensational return of Shearer (which I mention here, clearly, to elevate this post into A Historical Record Of Our Times, and not just Some Meandering Nonsense About Lollipop Ladies And Les Dawson).  Until then, then...