Eurovision in Blaydon, with Katie Boyled Eggs

Nobody quite knows when the first Uncle Johnny's Easter Egg Painting Competition took place, but it must have nearly ten years ago, because it was when my little cousins Joe and Jamie were barely out of nappies.  At first it was just a matter of the two tots inexpertly colouring in hard-boiled eggs with felt-tip pens, but after a year or so the grown-ups started joining in too, just to make things interesting (although, of course, the children still had to win the chocolate prizes that were up for grabs).  As the years have gone on, the kids have retained their interest in this annual ritual- while the grown-ups (made up of Joe and Jamie's parents, my mam and dad, and whichever other family members happened to have convened at my mam's house over the Easter weekend) have begun to take the competition more seriously, producing ever more elaborately designed eggs, featuring the use of cotton wool, matchboxes, paper-clips, and all manner of other decorative accoutrements designed to catch the eye of my dad, or to give him his official Easter title, Chief Judge Uncle Johnny.  Indeed, it is nowadays arguable whether the event, nominally billed as an entertainment for young boys, really owes its continuing existence to an unspoken but seething set of inter-sibling and cross-generational rivalries on the part of their elders, who really ought to know a little bit better.

So, while the origins of the contest may be lost in the mists of time, there is no doubting the war-like seriousness with which it is waged.  This Easter Monday the quality of the entries laid out on my mam's coffee table is particularly impressive- there is a lifelike Humpty Dumpty atop a wall, a butterfly done up in glorious attire reminiscent of a Rio street carnival, and a bright red helicopter, complete with matchsticks for rotorblades.  Above them, pasted to the window, a new innovation: digital photographs of overseas eggs submitted for consideration via the wonder of email by my sister and her husband.  Abby has created a studious-looking, moustachioed figure against a backdrop of miniature bookshelves, entitled 'Trotsky in Eggzile', while John's impressionistic, hazily-striped 'New York Classic' egg asks for less literal interpretation, and comes accompanied with a full-page 'Artists Statement' warning us that 'The piece looks simple, feels simple, smells simple.  Don't be fooled; it really is simple'.    

As I survey this impressive competition, my lingering hopes for my own egg ('Rainy Easter'- a clumsily felt-tipped drawing of a man holding a giant umbrella under cotton-wool clouds and orange glitter lightning-strokes) begin to dwindle.  I console myself with the thought of the leading role I am due to play in the staging of the event, which is to be scored this year following the model of the Eurovision Song Contest, with the contestants divided into juries, me mam playing Katie Boyle, and me taking the part of Terry Wogan, accompanied by  a scoreboard I have designed allowing for the votes of each jury to be displayed and counted up. 

As the juries retire to consider which entries are to be awarded their precious points (un point for their third-best egg rising to trois points for the best, with additional nominations for categores such as 'The Easteriest Egg') it becomes clear that, just like in the real Eurovision, an amount of skullduggery and inter-familial machination is taking place that the diplomatic skills of 17 Terry Wogans would struggle to contain.  Sighing at this proof positive of my family's essentially duplicitous nature (but staying on the look-out for the opportunity to negotiate a handy 'deux points' for Rainy Day from any likely-looking candidates), I fill in the scoresheet for me and Charlotte's Manchester jury, just as the signal is given for conferring to stop, and scoring to begin.

It soon becomes apparent that, in the absence of any equivalent of the cabal of Latvian nations existing to place a stranglehold on honours, any underhand manoeuvres on the part of entrants young and old have served simply to cancel each other out, leading to a close but fair race between the better-executed eggs on display.  Not that this is making the Terry Wogan role any easier- I am needing to call upon untapped reserves of tact in addition to adding up the numbers, and need to bring urgently forward the award of 'Easteriest Egg' to young Jamie in order to avert a mid-contest tantrum.  Meanwhile, I have determined to pay no heed to the darkening faces of several of the grown-ups whose eggs are failing to garner the hoped-for crop of votes.

With the voting all but complete, there are three eggs in the race- and in sensational scenes the votes of the New York jury (drawn at random, in the absence of the actual New Yorkers themselves, from the inside of a Cadbury's Easter Egg box) cannot produce an outright winner.  Amid pandemonium, the Solomon-like pronouncement of the tournament figurehead Judge Johnny Baker himself is called for- and a pall of blue smoke emerges from a Blaydon row of terraced railwaymans cottages while he considers the verdict in closed session with a half-pint glass of lager and a pork pie. 

After what seems like an eternity, his eminence re-emerges, to announce...... a draw, between the butterfly (me mam) and Trotsky (my sister).   Meanwhile in the categories, New York Classic has walked off with most humorous egg (in recognition, surely, of the perfectly realised highbrow pastiche of the 'Artists Statement'), while cousins Joe and Jamie garner awards for, respectively, most artistic and most Eastery egg.  And Rainy Day?  Oh, I thought you had forgotten.  My Lowryesque scene of a rainy Manchester afternoon (complete with cotton wool for clouds, which to my knowledge is a material the Salford master never extended himself to), trails in sixth, garnering a measly one point.  Awarded in sympathy.  By me mam. 

Reflecting that there is evidently still room for sentiment in the increasingly cut-throat world of Easter Egg decoration, I fold up my scoreboard and put it away for another year.  Judge Uncle Johnny packs up his cape (did I tell you he was wearing a cape?), and a pre-dawn phone call is put through to New York to advise the overseas contestants of their respective successes.  Back in Blaydon, as the afternoon draws to a close ,the bulk of the remaining eggs are being ripped open joyously by the young cousins, neither of whom, as far as can be ascertained, are in floods of tears.  The adults still seem to be talking to each other as well, all underhand vote-bartering forgiven and forgotten.  Taking in these happy scenes,  I breathe a sigh of relief, exchange glances with Katie Boyle, and send a secret prayer of thanks to the real Terry Wogan for all that he has unknowingly taught me over the many years of his Eurovision tenure.  That job of his, let me tell you, is not as easy as it looks. 

Comments

[The Artist formerly known as John]

Thanks for this -- almost makes me feel like I was there. You have no idea how anxiety-producing a thing it is to be separated by an ocean from the event itself while one's unseemly competitive juices are spilling in an unsightly fashion from one's eyes and ears, fists clenching and unclenching, teeth grinding, feet tapping hellacious rhythms from another era on the wooden floors of our times. Eeeee, we could scarcely sleep a wink.

The question that remains is this: how long can you keep dyed hardboiled eggs around on your kitchen table at room temperature before you run the real risk of some sort of unforgettable sulfuric disaster? I've given up on the idea of egg salad at this point -- I was raised in an age of refrigeration, something these eggs wouldn't know from the Bolshevik councils of the early 1900s, especially that Trotsky-looking one, who wasn't even boiled. A breach of etiquette and morals, in my opinion, incidentally, but clearly not a factor in the judge's decisions.

In any case, it seems a shame to throw them out while they're still so lovely, when no disasters have happened, yet surely disaster is the inevitable result of indefinite postponement. A classic dilemma of which comes first, the egg or the ...

[jonathan]

Now that's a tricky one. I think maybe the professionals in this field have some method of removing the perishable inside of the egg using a tiny pin-prick and, let's see now, a pipette. Yes, a pipette- attached to a patent device which looks like a bicycle pump except instead of blowing, it sucks. Once that has done its work, a hardening substance is applied to the frail shell- all this before any actual painting is embarked upon.

Which all sounds a little scientific and clinical to me. Far greater honour to be had in leaving your delicate creations to rot on the kitchen table for two weeks before succumbing to the temptation to convert Mr Trotsky and his hazily-striped friend into a Spanish omelette. With a bit of luck. this ill-considered venture will cause you to contract one of those virulent Victorian-sounding ailments that those of a delicate artistic sensibility are famously prone to, like botulism or syphilis. Just a mild case, mind- enough to cause you to fall into a swoon. You would then become the talk of the fashionable salons of Europe for a week before emerging in rude health and full of bon mots. It is an approach that worked wonders for Oscar Wilde, as far as I am given to understand.

[Trotsky]

As it so happens, we have recently developed an almost fanatical devotion to a smoulderingly consumptive-looking nihilist poet of just this sort, called Maiakovsky. Just like the case of Rainy Day Egg, his fine poems were increasingly pushed to one side by the Bolsheviks to whom he had contributed so much of his creative output. My illustrated History of Russia says, in French, "En 1930, etouffant dans une atmosphere devenue ultra-conformiste, il se suicidait." I'd suggest that you might take him as your spiritual guide as you move towards next year's easter egg contest, (which is already uppermost in my mind). As for me, I hope to stick around on the kitchen table for another couple of weeks, "peacefully if I may, by force if I must."

[John]

I was so boyled over by this tale of your egg-centric family that i had to scramble to put a comment on
straight away.
I wondered if Trotsky got an ice-pick for his troubles
or did he just get smashed over the head with a silver spoon.

[John Schoneboom]

Yes, well, I haven't even had time to read the new one yet, and I have no time for that now. On the other hand, Jonathan hasn't had much time to respond to these responses, perhaps because he's been afraid that somebody might come out and expose him for the easter egg scorecard keeping genius fraud that he is.

That's right. It's been "Jonathan is a genius" this and "Jonathan is a genius" that as far as I can tell for weeks now, all because of the convoluted system he developed allegedly to "score" the easter egg contest. It is clear however to anyone with a modicum of common sense -- the minimum standard qualification, I might add, to be a lighthouse keeper in New England -- that his much vaunted scorekeeping system is nothing more than a cheap attempt to cloud people's minds, and a good one at that if I may say so.

There are lots of boxes and x's and so forth on the scorecard, and it gradually becomes apparent that there is some kind of order to it all if you study it for a while, and you begin to make sense of the strange markings. The easter egg people have been combined into convenient logical geographically based groups and have cast votes for each of the eggs. In the case of the New York contingent, the votes were somehow randomly done in what I am sure was an extremely fair and balanced fashion. These votes are then tallied and winners in various categories are selected.

It's when you look at the actual results that the disorder behind the system begins to make itself felt:

Tied for first: Trotsky in Eggzile and Beautiful Butterfly, both with scores of 5.

Makes sense so far. Until investigative reporters uncover the fact that Sponge Bob Square Pants also received a score of 5, but received only 3rd place. Why?

New York Classic, most humorous? OK, it got one "h" for humorous -- but so did Clown About Town and Mr. Bump -- and Sponge Bob and Trotsky, for that matter. Granted, we can leave out Clown About Town. It only got one point, whereas NY Classic got 3. But Mr. Bump also got a 3 -- and went home prizeless. (Trotsky received a 5 and two S's for "special effects" so we can see why it didn't have to win most humorous as well.)

One that I can easily see is Tulip Egg with Bees as most Eastery -- it had about 14 E's and pretty much overwhelmed the field in that department.

I could go on, but I think the general public can see my drift by now. There's been some jiggery pokery involved. That's right, I said jiggery pokery.

So before we hand out the genius awards, let's say that this Jonathan Baker may be a genius, but it is in the art of jiggery pokery that he should receive the distinction, not in any sort of scientific map-making.

Thank you.

[Joe]

This has made me so happy. Although I'd argue that my felt tip artwork was in fact so fantastically advanced that not even the most accomplished of artists could comprehend its true depth. And there is no way you could dispute the fact that those eggs were the SPITTING IMAGE of Harry Potter.

[jonathan]

Welcome cousin Joe (now quite grown-up)! And I am so glad you have found this post of all posts- I think you get a record for commenting on a story you were part of fully nine years ago! That was quite a classic in the history of the Easter Egg competition, but as you will agree the jiggeripokery and behind the scenes Eurovision-esque machinations could belong to any year before or since! Long may it continue!