A Somerset Lad

I was never a person for Union Jack bunting. When I lived in Northern Ireland, it marked out an area as Loyalist and always had associations with the tensions of the marching season. In England, Union Jack bunting seems to be an altogether more benign phenomenon. It doesn’t really seem to symbolise anything other than an attempt to celebrate an occasion.

There was a box of bunting in my classroom, left by my predecessor, a history teacher who had made much of the centenary of Armistice Day in 2018. After school on Thursday, I thought it might be a way to mark the anniversary of VE Day, so gathered it up and brought it home. There was lots of it. I hung it along the front of the house, upstairs and downstairs and it seemed to make the place more jolly.

Taking it down this evening, I stood unpicking a knot. “What sort of knot is that?” Dad would have asked.

He would have been right. He always shook his head at badly tied knots. I never attempted anything more complicated than a reef knot, and even it sometimes ended up as a granny knot. Dad tied hitches and bowlines and numerous other knots I could not have named.

If skills and gifts are hereditary, then it is my youngest sister, who can do everything from installing storage heaters to the most intricate handicraft, who inherited all of Dad’s dexterity.

There was nothing to which he would not put his hand. Derek, a neighbour on our road, recalls Dad as the person who could be called on to fix the washing machine when it was broken.

Dad was always there to answer problems. Once, when the car would not start, I phoned him from the west coast of France. We went through a number of checks, before he said bluntly, “your battery is flat.” A kind French neighbour drove me to a garage and we bought a new battery, the kind neighbour ensuring the garage was not paid a franc more than was due.

Dad would have enjoyed VE Day, not the official observances, such as they were, but the opportunity to revisit his memories of the time. He would have recalled the events of the day and the mood of the time and the pure joy that would have filled the heart of an eight year old boy.

Dad was eighty-three and eighty-three year old people die, so it is silly to wish that he might still be able to criticise badly tied knots.

I’ll tell you what, there’s a lot more on television now than there was in the 1970s, and there’s still nothing on.

Searching through the television schedules, there’s a sense of what a Saturday evening felt like in teenage years. The search through the television schedule in the newspaper in those times did not take very long. A single tabloid page of the Daily Mail was split into three columns. The left-hand column listed BBC 1 programmes, the right-hand column listed those on ITV. In the middle column there would be the picks of the day, below which appeared the BBC 2 lineup. Watching television was all there was to do.

Even in the years at sixth form college, weekends were devoid of excitement. The college discos and birthday parties of friends were always on a Thursday. Perhaps the venues were cheaper, perhaps the DJs were cheaper. Who else wanted to go out until 1 am and get up at the usual time the next morning when Friday and Saturday nights awaited when there would be no need to care how late you stayed up?

No matter how bad television now may seem, it offers an extraordinary range of choices. In the 1970s, Saturday evening television was from a time when BBC programmes might attract tens of millions of viewers. There was The Generation Game, and Parkinson and Match of the Day.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine why so many watched The Generation Game, even Bruce Forsyth, the ever cheerful presenter must have felt frequent cringe moments. But when there were only three television channels, only one television in the house, and there was nothing else to do, Bruce Forsyth was watched.

Late on Saturday night, there would be the Hammer House of Horror or Westerns where the bad guys would commit some heinous crime and would be tracked down and shot by the good guys (Valdez is Coming remains my favourite Western and vengeance film of all time).There was something unsatisfactory in the films where the bad guys did not get shot at the end.

Even in a time of lockdown, the choices available to teenagers are vastly greater in number than they were in the 1970s. Even if the electronic programme guide on the television offers nothing whatsoever that you might want to watch, the options offered by smartphones, tablets, laptops and games consoles are immeasurable. Social media provides a degree of connection unimaginable five decades ago.

For those living their lives in a virtual world, for those whose reality is online, lockdown may seem hardly noticeable.

For someone who grew up with Bruce Forsyth, the chance to go out now would be welcome.

The filing system in my grandparents’ farmhouse seemed to be two drawers in the kitchen sideboard. A diverse range of paperwork seemed to be stored in them, from the brown card tags that were fastened to the milk churns each morning, identifying the source of the milk, to accounts from feed suppliers, the vet, and the miscellaneous other businesses upon whom the farm depended.

Amongst the paperwork there was always the easily identifiable copy of Old Moore’s Almanack. Neither of my grandparents would have given a moment’s thought to most of the Almanack’s  content which seemed to be a collection of charlatanism and quackery. My grandfather was a rationalist, a firm believer that this life was one’s lot and that one should make the best of it. My grandmother was a woman of faith, but was very clear sceptical about anything that did not accord with her hard-headed view of the world. So why, when every penny was carefully counted, did she buy a copy of the Almanack every year?

Among the silliness of the astrology and predictions for the year, there were things that were measurable, scientific and universally true. The Almanack was my grandmother’s source for the sunrise and sunset times for every day of the year as well as phases of the moon. In a deeply rural community, the availability of light, whether solar or lunar, was important to the tasks of the farming year. A clear full moon on a summer’s night would offer enough light to continue the work of the day. Undeniable realities of everyday life were expressed in very precise times and dates.

It seems unlikely now that anyone would buy a book to know at what time the sun would rise or set on a particular day of the year. Such information is no longer critical, and if it is sought, then it can be found in an instant by checking online. No longer do most calendars include details of whether the moon is new, at first or last quarters, or full. The decline in the need for such information has been part of a disengagement from the physical universe.

It is hard to imagine that those whose lives depended on the light would have comprehended the world wide web and the instant availability of information. Looking up at the moon this evening, it looked almost full. Taking out my phone, I discovered the full moon is not until Thursday morning. My Nan would have know without checking.