Spelling B(astard)

"Bloody Shameful", screeched The Sun on Monday 9 November. Mindful of the fact it was Remembrance Week, and even they couldn’t think of anything left to say about Jedward, it was time to spin the profound grief of Jacqui Janes into a cynical exercise of laughing contemptuously at a man whom – while important enough to be running the country – cannot see/write properly. Over three sorry days, we saw Political Editor and product of Marlborough College Tom Newton Dunn, not to mention Justine Smith (whose name is too workaday to google), stretch this minor gaffe (understandably difficult for Mrs Janes, irrelevant to just about anyone else in the world) beyond credulity. The unfortunate implication throughout has been that, had Brown written a letter that began “Sorry you’ve lost your son but shit happens” but attended that calligraphy class at night school and spelt everything right, all would have been just dandy.

Buried in amongst the paper’s obligatory humbug was Janes’ acknowledgement that it wasn’t Brown’s condolences that were in doubt, merely that she thought he couldn’t spell the word ‘condolences’. In truth, if we’re looking at handwriting skills, I’ve seen much, much worse, and from people with two functioning peepers to boot. But my favourite bit of all occurred in Tuesday’s Sun. (Here, in fact: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/campaigns/our_boys/2720283/Prime-Minister-Gordon-Brown-couldnt-even-get-our-name-right.html) Even though the cretinous Newton Dunn has just slated Brown repeating himself with the adjacent signings off “my sincere condolences”/”yours sincerely” (with the sort of venom that suggests Brown has just shot several children at point blank range), in a neighbouring column we find graphologist Elaine Quigley offering her remarkable analysis. “Having to write to strangers on such a difficult and tragic subject is obviously incredibly difficult for him”. Bzz. Repetition of ‘difficult’. Ha ha. Are you blind, Elaine?

Yes, writing a personal, private letter to strangers is not only difficult but difficult. Could most of us claim to be able to write a letter expressing deepest sympathy without being at least slightly concerned about hitting the right tone, and about trying to emphathise with its receiver? He’s not having a conversation here, where one knows almost straight away whether engagement between the two parties has been made. I think, on balance, Brown – whatever you think of him otherwise – managed to do this, and if he doesn’t win points for penmanship, he certainly doesn’t lose them for humanity. The paper, on the other hand, loses many points simply for being so, so cheap.

Yet now we’ve reached Armistice Day, Jacqui Janes is prepared to draw a line under it all. This is curious, for her anger to have subsided so suddenly, so quickly. Can this be true? If I was her, I’d still be fuming, not just at the PM for spelling mistakes, but at the way that my distress would have been so comprehensively mined for political gain by a quasi-racist newspaper. Because of course, this isn’t about handwriting, or even about Remembrance Day. There’s an election heading our way, and with Murdoch ordering his empire to back Cameron, Brown will do no right in their eyes from now on. Expect further stories on how he broke wind in a Westminster lift, didn’t wash his hands sufficiently AND MAY HAVE SPREAD SWINE FLU, and either didn’t vote in the X-Factor final (snooty sod in ivory tower) or did vote in the X-Factor final (shouldn’t he be running the fucking country?).

Still, it’s nice to see a tabloid newspaper rail against insufficient apologies when members of the public without powerful legal representation are publicly wronged. Can we now expect to see sincere front-page apologies when newspapers print indefensible horseshit about such individuals, as opposed to miniscule, evasive faux-sorries shrouded bottom right on page 38, probably in the cracks of George & Lynne’s buns? We can? Fantastic!!!

EDIT: Funnily enough, The Sun has the advantage of being able to go back and change their gaffes. Whoops, this blog was too quick to capture it though:

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/11/11/the-sun-shows-how-easy-it-is-to-get-a-name-wrong/

"Oh, An Elevatoroperator'saperson in Your Neighborhood"

I consistently claim - often quite forcibly - that advertising has no effect on me whatsoever. That I can't remember the product, that I am not prodded towards any brand when I go shopping. I am not influenced. And yet, my very favourite television series in my earliest years was nakedly intent on adopting the techniques of advertising, and applying them to the alphabet, numbers and various other educational concepts, through repetition, jingles, catchy songs and humorous skits. Hence that announcement at the end of each episode which began: “Sesame Street has been brought to you today by…”

Made from day one by the Children’s Television Workshop, Sesame Street was first broadcast in the United States on Monday 10 November 1969 on the commercial-free PBS (Public Broadcasting System). Created by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisset, Vice-President of the Carnegie Corporation (one of the series’ many sponsors), its initial budget was $8 million, and 130 daily shows were made in its first year. An extremely fast-paced collision of studio activity, live action documentaries, brief animations and sketches and songs involving adults, children and puppets, its target audience in America was said to be the 3 to 6-year-old viewer who had not yet begun regular schooling.

The show’s production team were not slow to look at international sales. In January 1970, executive producer David D. Connell travelled to the UK to try and look into the possibilities of co-production, or at the very least to see if the BBC would broadcast the shows. The Corporation had started to sell its own pre-school success - Play School - around the world. However, its head of children’s broadcasting at the time, Monica Sims, rejected Sesame Street. While admiring of many of its aims, she believed that its approach was too ‘authoritarian’, obsessed with rewarding right answers. More than this, she worried that the programme-makers’ intention to ‘change children’s behaviour’ in learning was ‘dangerous’. It should also be noted that the BBC’s education and children’s departments considered themselves completely separate at the time; when another CTW series, The Electric Company - a series aimed at 10- to 16-year-olds to improve reading skills (Morgan Freeman was one of its cast members) – was bought by the BBC in 1974, it became firmly locked in a schools TV slot.

The Independent Television Authority (ITA) expressed more interest in importing Sesame Street than the BBC, but remained cautious. Could an American series, 60 minutes long, with many inbuilt cultural and linguistic differences, be used as an educational tool for British children? After a half-hour extract was presented at a Society for Film and Television Arts meeting in London in November 1970, tentative, experimental transmissions were organised in a handful of ITV regions. On Monday 29 March 1971, at 1.45 in the afternoon (just as Watch with Mother was ending over on BBC1), HTV became the first region in Britain to broadcast Sesame Street. Selected episodes were shown daily for a fortnight.

HTV was my ITV region. I was ten months old at the time, and by October 1971, HTV was running Sesame Street in a regular Saturday morning slot (as did London Weekend, Grampian in the North of Scotland, and a few months later, Granada and Ulster). Gradually, most but crucially not all ITV regions followed suit. Ironically, Midlands company ATV – who would co-produce the internationally successful Muppet Show from 1976 – was one of the last to show Sesame Street.

I can’t really remember my earliest years, and there’s no point asking older relatives about it as their memory is far worse than mine, but I am almost certain that Sesame Street – shown every single Saturday in my living room from 1971 until 1976 - fired my curiosity, and enhanced my reading ability and counting skills before I started nursery school (1973) and then school itself a year later. I can even remember being corrected by a favourite teacher that the last letter of the alphabet was in fact pronounced ‘Zed’. Not ‘Zee’. I was mystified. I think that may have been my only Americanism – I wasn’t saying ‘sidewalk’ or ‘elevator’ or even ‘jelly’ instead of ‘jam’, but my unspoken defence at the time amounted to, "What British programmes teach the alphabet?" Clearly, in this country, it wasn’t (isn’t?) a job for television to do. That was (is?) for schools, and parents.

Sesame Street had a hugely controversial beginning in the UK (and US for that matter, where the standard of quality kids TV was generally regarded as deplorable). Barry Norman, writing for The Times in 1971, sniffed that children could already glean all they needed from existing BBC fare like Blue Peter and Play School, aside from “a little verbal wit”. Chris Dunkley, in the same paper, wondered why a homegrown children’s department could not produce something comparable at a fraction of the cost. But even as the ITA was deciding how and when to broadcast Sesame Street, so ITV companies’ children’s departments were considering how to devise their own equivalents, on comparatively modest budgets. What, after all, was Thames Television’s Rainbow (which began in 1972), if it wasn’t a stripped down Sesame Street? Studio-based banter with colourful puppets, songs, stories, those 'Lines and Shapes' animations made by Cosgrove-Hall...

Really, though, my most primal, instinctive thank you to Sesame Street does not really concern its schooling techniques. I remain affectionate to it – even though I’ve not seen it properly for many years now, and some of the Muppet additions later on (I’m thinking of you, Elmo) annoy the hell out of me even in passing – because it was almost certainly the first thing I ever saw on television that regularly made me laugh uproariously. I think Barry Norman underestimated this aspect of the series, and bearing in mind that most kids TV humour in the early 70s hardly nudged itself beyond the lolly stick gags of Crackerjack, there was something about the vaudeville, tele-literate nature of Sesame Street’s comedy – much of it, I concede, aimed at parents/guardians – that thoroughly appealed to me. It says a lot that the laughter still came thick and fast just now when I watched this, and this, and in fact this.

To finish: a careless thought: Was Oscar the Grouch’s voice deliberately based on that of Barry McGuire’s (check out the chorus)? And a wish: I want a full-length version of this, which used to accompany the post-credits rollcall of sponsors for the programme. Nile Rodgers (later of Chic) was in the Sesame Street house band in the show’s early days, and I’d love to think he’s playing on this.

Primrose Hill... Statten Island... Chalk Farm... Massif Central... Gospel Oak... Sao Paulo...Boston Manor... Costa Rica...

For me, few things are usually as ephemeral, as transient, and to be honest as meritless as a remix of something old. Just about passable and tolerable in a club, when half the time you're not really absorbing who things are by (not even I do that in that setting, and that's saying something), but all too often it's hard not to regard these sorts of remixes as short-term marketing gimmicks dreamt up by record companies who want to fill the free space on a forthcoming greatest hits package. And the treatment in many cases is simply to trowel on a crass slab of tinny hardhouse.

Not, thankfully, in this case, though. On sale as a limited edition, Foxbase Beta is Richard X's remix of the entirety of Saint Etienne's first-ever LP, Foxbase Alpha. The original album arrived in the shops on the 14th of October 1991 as a terrific stew of three-minute pop songs, indie sensibilities, dub and dancefloor culture, plus an eclectic plethora of lo-fi samples from radio, TV and celluloid. It only reached 34 in the album charts, and the only top 40 hit it spawned was the group's landmark cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" (first issued as their debut single in May 1990 and with Faith Over Reason vocalist Moira Lambert singing lead). But it remains one of the most colourful and innovative long-players of its time, as much of an adventure as the more commercially successful De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising or Primal Scream's Screamadelica.

Foxbase Beta is both radical in form and content, and respectful of its parent album's own groundbreaking nature. Most remixes of Saint Etienne's work - and there have been some first-rate ones down the years, many of them collected on 1996's Casino Classics - have tended to throw the song in the bin and start again, but Richard X's love of the pop song has perhaps dictated that he wants to retain the heart of the originals. An excellent and enjoyable accompanying audio commentary that adorns a bonus disc - in which remixer meets artists (namely Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs) - reveals how X tried his darnedest to mirror the original running time of the LP in the reworked version.

The commentary also reveals which songs started life under the working titles "House", "Goth", "Vibes" and "Militaria", the two reasons why track 3 is so-called, as well as tantalising us with who could have provided a cameo appearance on "London Belongs to Me", and climaxing with the voice of a bona-fide 80s pop star (well, two-hit 80s pop star anyway). Listening to the real-time discussion of the album and its remix, plenty of mysteries are solved, but a handful are deliberately left tangled, and a couple are not even addressed. What, for instance, is the significance of "June the fourth, 1989" in "Girl VII"? Is it related to the massacre by the Chinese army in Tiannenmen Square which took place on that date? Or is there a more personal reason why it gets a mention?

Richard X's first achievement is to strengthen the oddities so that "Wilson" now has an endearing keyboard motif, and the closing "Dilworth's Theme" is extended way beyond its original 33 seconds into the proper singalong it always deserved to be. As for the opening "This is Radio Etienne", which in original form was little more than a lift of a recording from football coverage on French radio, has now been doctored to establish a mood of 1990, what with a curtailed Radio 1 jingle and conversation with a fictional cab driver. X was given full access to the master tapes too, so that we get alternative footage from the decimalisation disc and episode of Countdown that feature in, respectively, "Wilson" and "Stoned to Say the Least". With a lot of the original's reverb sucked out of the mix, you can hear some of the lyrics better too. I'm not sure I'd ever deciphered the second verse of "Nothing Can Stop Us" before now.

As audiences at the group's occasional gigs this year can testify - where they have performed the LP in its entirety in a similar style - the bolder reworkings are often the most effective. The brittle and lolloping "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" has been jettisoned in favour of a tougher stomping rhythm, "She's the One" sounds thrillingly contemporary, and as we near the album's end, there are powerful treatments of both "London Belongs to Me" and the extraordinary and chilling "Like the Swallow". All in all, a superb revamp, and if it doesn't quite hit the heights of the original incarnation, it's more than worth investigating.

Why Jan Moir Just Doesn't Get It

"Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention. Stephen, as I pointed out in the article was a charming and sweet man who entertained millions.

"However, the point of my column-which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read - was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all. Yes, anyone can die at anytime of anything. However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately's death - out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger - did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition.

"The entire matter of his sudden death seemed to have been handled with undue haste when lessons could have been learned. On this subject, one very important point. When I wrote that 'he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine', I was referring to the drugs and the casual invitation extended to a stranger. Not to the fact of his homosexuality. In writing that 'it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships' I was suggesting that civil partnerships - the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting - have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

"In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones."

--------------
"Mischievous in the extreme". Well, leaving aside the shameless back-pedalling - indeed, is there anything about the Moir act that isn't shameless? - I think we really have reached a nadir in cynical journalism. Because to assume that hundreds of complaints published on the Mail website, many from those who profess to being loyal Mail readers who have never posted about anything before, represents a "heavily orchestrated internet campaign" means that while she is just about bright enough to know what will make people complain (she's a columnist with a FABULOUS education but who knows fuck all), she isn't sufficiently clever to understand why they're complaining.

The reason you're hated on a day like today, Jan, is that you assume a readership, even a Daily Mail readership, is so spiteful that they'll cheer on any kind of salacious, wrong-headed gossip about a celebrity whose corpse has barely cooled. Interestingly, they haven't. And we've been here before. In 1986-87, Kelvin Mackenzie at The Sun tried very hard - extremely hard - to bring down Elton John's career, from badly-researched and WRONG tittle tattle about rent boys to suggesting that his guard dogs had had their larynxes removed. Not only was it a costly mistake - Elton sued to the tune of a million quid and in December 1988 the paper had to print a front-page apology into the bargain - but it backfired because the readership didn't believe in the gossip to begin with.

Newspaper readers, particularly tabloid ones, could perhaps be insensitive and unthinking, but usually only because they don't carry round a story in their heads all day. They chuckle for a few moments at the mental health of a celebrity or pass judgement on how evil a criminal might be, but they don't necessarily have an agenda. And they don't take kindly when a much-loved celebrity like Stephen Gately, who really didn't cause anyone much harm whatsoever while alive, is given a sniggering anti-tribute which no heterosexual man would have received in quite the same way. You don't have to be a Boyzone fan, or a gay man or a Guardian reader to find Jan Moir's column reprehensible old shit. But in order to see the angry response that's circulated over the last 24 hours as "a heavily orchestrated internet campaign", someone like Moir would have to have reasoned that the British public is every bit as cynical and cold as she quite clearly is. What today's events have proven - and this is quite heartening in the end - is that sometimes the public isn't idiotic and has a sense of decency that journalists can underestimate at their peril.

In the end, Moir can bluster about being misunderstood, but no. Actually, quite a lot of us understood extremely fucking well what she was trying to do: trivialise the death of someone into ignorant copy, before going on to talk about scones and The Nolans' onstage costumes in exactly the same gushing bitchy syntax. She may think she's Dorothy Parker. She's nowhere near Dorothy Squires. There's no insight there, not even impassioned hatred, but something far worse: careless, icy indifference.

I've already given her Daily Mail email address on here - though (why not?) here it is again: jan.moir@dailymail.co.uk But you might also want to give a piece of your mind to the editor of the Mail's Femail section, who would have greenlit the article. It is Andrew Morrod, who was appointed to that position in February 2008. His email address is andrew.morrod@dailymail.co.uk

If A Columnist Writes Something Offensive, Ignorant And Stupid (As They Often Do), Don't Write A Comment On A Board They Will Never Read

Email them instead.

The Sun: firstname.surname@the-sun.co.uk
Daily Star: firstname.surname@dailystar.co.uk
The Independent: firstnameinitial.surname@independent.co.uk
The Guardian: firstname.surname@guardian.co.uk
The Telegraph: firstname.surname@telegraph.co.uk
The Times: firstname.surname@thetimes.co.uk
The Mirror: firstname.surname@mirror.co.uk
News of the World: firstname.surname@notw.co.uk
Express: firstname.surname@express.co.uk
Daily Mail: jan.moir@dailymail.co.uk

Convenience Food

October means only one thing. OK, it doesn't just mean one thing, as there's the Horse of the Year Show, the Booker Prize, the clocks going back, Halloween, the deadline for sending your tax returns by post, and the bank holiday to coincide with celebrating the birth of Hazell Dean. But really, Octobers exist to remind us that the Christmas decor is about to suffocate every shop's innards within a matter of a few weeks, and that what heralds the pre-Yuletide build-up even more than greatest hits albums or the emergence of live DVDs from people who've been on Mock the Week is a lot of cheap, gaudy additions to the humour sections of bookshops. Stocking fillers. Books to dip into. Toilet books.

If there's something that constitutes a toilet book, it's a tome that isn't really linear. Try starting Anna Karenina at page 271 and next switch to page 80 and it won't really work, but no matter what page you stop at in Is It Me Or Is Everything Just Shit?, chances are that your reaction and appreciation of the text will be exactly the same.

I was going to invent a sarcastic spoof title for an Is It Me...?-type book but then reasoned that, like the names of thrash metal bands, or of porn films, it is impossible to parody the titles of toilet books. The genuine articles cannot be beaten. And so, it is with great pleasure that I welcome on to the shelves of bookstores everywhere a piece of work that aims to make sense of the convoluted history of the much-disrespected toilet book - namely the terrfically entertaining and informative Closet Reading by Phil Norman, which is subtitled "500 Years of Humour on the Loo". Over 250 pages, he traces the story of how we got from The Decameron to Crap Towns, an itinerary with many breathers along the way: conpendiums of riddles, bawdy stories, periodicals, mock-ups of Radio Times listings, and - fittingly - the borrowings of daubings from lavatory walls (the latter courtesy of Nigel Rees's many volumes of graffiti in the 1980s). Clowns called Roger, farmhands in 1595 called 'John-a-Nokes', the innate feeling that a book by the game and prolific Gyles Brandreth is never far away, regardless of the subject under discussion.

I'd dearly like to know how Norman amassed all the ingredients for Closet Reading for this well-researched journey. Either he was bought a skipful of pulp each December throughout his childhood (and adulthood?), or he has set out with grim thoroughness to test that reported claim that 'The British Library is bound by law to keep a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom'. Or has he, on the other hand, not logged out of eBay since March 2002?

We've all bought or been bought many titles celebrated or at least eyed suspiciously in Closet Reading - even if we haven't gone as far as to actually share our living space with What a Week! with Bruno Brookes or Angela Rippon's West Country. Admittedly, my own personal collection of toilet books ranges from nearly all the Not the Nine O'Clock News ones, The Goodies Book of Criminal Records, The Peter Powell Book of Pop, and seven annual volumes of The Rock Yearbook (Virgin Books, throughout the 80s, usually containing at least one ponderous phoned-in rant from Tony Parsons), to a free copy of Viz's Crap Joke Book (from when I bought a tape deck from Richer Sounds in 1992), Paul Manning's How to Be a Wally, and - given to me at the age of EIGHT by friends of my parents - Ronnie Barker's Sauce. I met these people again at a family gathering a few weeks ago, and despite being roaringly drunk and therefore far more likely than usual to ask weird questions, never thought to enquire, "Now, did you ever open that Ronnie Barker book before giving it to me, seeing as it was almost literally page after page of black and white archived photographs of naked women?" And in case you're wondering: no, a song from Barbara Dickson did not turn up for the centrefold.

Toilet books are oft-maligned and rarely given their due, so it's gratifying to see Norman pay sincere tribute to many of these titles. For instance, I'm still not sure if after all these years any book has made me laugh as loudly, as agonisedly, as Stephen Pile's The Book of Heroic Failures (1979) and its sequel The Return of Heroic Failures, with such entries as "The World's Worst Garage" (had three steps leading up to its entrance), or "The World's Most Useless Ornament" (the woman who owned it discovered it was a live bomb). Heroic Failures isn't mentioned in the same breath as Decline and Fall very often, and I'm certainly not suggesting it's better either, but what I cannot doubt is that few Christmas presents have given me such uncomplicated joy.

Norman's own prose, rich and evocative, demonstrates he's a gifted humorous writer himself. His summing up of Les Dawson's lecherous Cosmo Smallpiece is too inspired for me to toss away on a mere blog post - buy the book! - and I'd like to think that Dawson himself would have approved of his description. Juggling factual material and humour can be fraught with difficulty; it's easy to get bogged down with diligently researched information, or get carried away with witticisms and evaporate into pointless whimsy, but this author has a lightness of touch, a lively imagination and sticks to the point.

Will Closet Reading become a toilet book itself? Here's the irony. It's not a toilet book, not really. No pictures for starters, you have no choice but to read many words one after another with no other distractions, dammit. No chapter is terribly long, but it's less of a bog book than, say, Chris Evans's newly-published autobiography, which - diverting as it can be - rarely prods any chapter past five sides of paper. It has a thematic structure and is designed to be read from cover to cover. But then again, I suppose anything could be a toilet book, if you so desired. Maybe Clarissa, if pushed, although only if you were locked in.

Here's a second paradox. Even though I myself have been instrumental in writing a book that became a toilet read for an ex-school friend and his legendary musician flatmate (clue: rhymes with 'Latex Bin'), I don't read in the lav, nor have I ever done really. I have read in the bath, I would probably pack a book if I had to go hand-gliding, but I never think to read books on the toilet. I save that time for some kind of contemplation, even if it's simply to try and remember what I'm supposed to be doing after I wash and dry my hands and leave that room. Or maybe it's because I once houseshared with someone (I promise this is not me) who insisted on keeping lots of issues of FHM in the toilet and rather gave himself away by leaving them open at particular pages.

Closet Reading is gregarious, benevolent, filthy, charming, funny and intelligent. What's more it is the only way this Christmas - unless you can track down Michael Parkinson's 1973 offering Confession Album - of discovering just what is Patrick Moore's "greatest misery". Plus it reprints a Tarby line about a farting Goon that is so wilfully unamusing that it had the opposite effect and made me howl with mirth for a few minutes. Rescue it from the shelves and read it in any room, on any seat, that you wish. Merry October.

Major Dad

Meet my dad. This posting might be the first-ever reference to him on the worldwide web. Most of the rest of my family are googleable, even if it’s just in an incidental manner, but my dad never managed this “honour”. Exactly 15 years ago today, before the internet had become firmly established, he died at the age of only fifty-six. From time to time, during the dozen or so years I’ve had regular net access, I’ve idly entered his name into a search engine, and placed outside those all-important inverted commas words relating to his hometown, where he grew up, where he worked. Maybe someone he once knew has written about him, or mentioned him. One of the main reasons I signed up to Friends Reunited was to see if anyone at his secondary school mentioned him. No such luck. (By the way, does anyone else in the whole world still look at Friends Reunited? Or does everyone else in the world simply ask if anyone else in the world still looks at Friends Reunited?)

As a child, I may have regarded Dad as some kind of prototype internet. He seemed to be a mine of information, most of it useful, and quite where he’d absorbed some of this from was always a bit of a mystery. Some of it came from school, where he gained four O-levels, but I think he was a bit of a closet swot. He never claimed to be an expert on anything – and something that maddened my mother consistently was his tendency to say “I think” after stating something that was very obviously a piece of factual information. He knew all the stuff I don’t know and always have to look up: how things worked, names of trees, birds, flowers, land features, history. While I found him a bit intimidating when I was very young (I think because he worked so selflessly hard to provide for us, he was either working or sleeping, when he could not be disturbed), we would come to bond over a love of physical comedy – one of the things I miss most of all is his cackling at Fawlty Towers or Tommy Cooper or Tom & Jerry – and, as any regular readers of this blog may already know, music.

He really did like music of all kinds, from Allegri to Motown, from Fairport to Stan Kenton. But you couldn’t tell what he’d suddenly fall in love with, or what he was cool towards. A working drummer for over 30 years, he was bound to take a dim view of synth-pop, given that it put his own profession under threat, but a spell in hospital in 1983 where he would be subjected over and over again to The Human League’s “Keep Feeling Fascination” led him from extreme irritation to... well, fascination. He became a fan apparently overnight, though he drew the line at “Being Boiled”. I never quite found out what changed his mind, but I know myself the number of my very favourite records which I have disliked on first hearing. Although he epitomised having a catholic musical taste, he was not above being a bit of a snob on times. My mother still recalls with shuddering pleasure Dad’s horrified reaction when a then family friend visited their house in the mid-60s, leafed through the LPs and enquired, “Got any Jim Reeves?”

Dad met Mum around 1952 on a Sunday school outing. He was about 13 or 14, and the resulting friendship would lead to courtship, and from 1963, a mostly extremely happy 31-year marriage. But his early life had been turmoil-filled. From the little I know – even when he was alive, we rarely saw his side of the family – he lost his mother to tuberculosis before he reached his second birthday. By then it was wartime, and he and his elder brother were evacuated to Carmarthenshire. After the war, their father married someone else and moved to the Midlands, whereupon his children were brought up by benevolent if slightly scary foster parents. His foster mum was still alive when I was small and if she had “mellowed”, I still found her more threatening than any teacher I had. (She still adored us all, though.)

And then she died, mere months after the sudden death of his brother while abroad. I never quite knew to what extent all this, or come to that the upheavals of his early life, affected him. Indeed, I never knew whether, overall, he was a happy man. He seemed stoic enough, someone who kept going, but I never really got the chance – at the risk of sounding like Mike & the Mechanics – to ask him about his life. What you’ve just read is most of what I know for sure.

But here are some other random thoughts about him: He had no ego. I don’t think he had a cruel cell in his body. He was a compact but strong man. He apparently told Mum he was at his happiest in work when he was a bus driver (during the 1960s). He was at his happiest off work either when he was walking our pet borzoi dog, or spending time with us, when he got the chance. He understood my bookishness and hatred for sport. Equally he related to my brother’s opposite nature. He loved his family, but he never seemed fazed by solitude. He would talk to animals. His snoring was, I regret to say, seismic, and even when we tape-recorded the row one night, he insisted that he was just snoring for effect and he knew we were taping him.

He loved us.

His last years weren’t easy ones either. At the end of the 80s, after 20 years as a fitter and turner at the docks, he was made redundant. He scratched around for temporary work, and the drumming duties continued for a time, but then he became seriously ill and had to stop. He grew more and more tired, and this quiet man who had always played LPs far louder than his children had became quieter still. The last time I was with him (I had left home by now, and lived fifty miles away), we watched a TV documentary about the history of variety presented by Paul Merton. I wish I could remember what we talked about afterwards. What I do remember, though, is that we talked.

The detail is, I guess/I hope, not important. Just remembering him is the main thing. And, 15 years on, I do just that every single day. To this sweetest of men.