Pumping petrol

On the road from Glastonbury to Taunton, it was a filling station in that old sense of the term. It was not a garage, for that would have suggested the possibility of mechanical repairs, instead it was three pumps with a small shack set back from the forecourt. It sold petrol, diesel and oil, nothing else. There was a counter inside the shack on which rested a temperamental cash register. There were no facilities, no toilets, even the air line worked only intermittently.

Unattractive, lacking in investment. The poor condition of the place was not assisted by an owner who would come into the shack and take notes from the till in order to go horse racing. The tanks must have been leaking, or perhaps water was deliberately added to the fuel, for more than once customers returned to complain about having to take their car to the garage, only to find there had been water in the petrol. There was no canopy, the pumps stood in the open, operating them on wet and windy days was a miserable experience. It would always be in the pouring rain that one of them would refuse to reset to zero, no matter how forcefully the lever was pulled down, the metal digits would obstinately decline to move.

The pay was poor, sixty pence per hour, a figure that was around the lowest an employer might pay in 1978 and still hope to have someone working for him. I worked there from 1 pm to 8 pm on a Saturday and from 8 am to 1 pm on a Sunday for £7.20.

The man who worked the remaining hours of the week was paid at the same rate, but he was a novelist, who was just waiting for a publisher. A draft of one of his novels lay in a drawer in the shack, it began with a scene involving red-coated huntsmen, it did not seem very exciting, but what would a seventeen year old student know about such things?

There were few other buildings in sight and no-one else to whom to talk. A transistor radio provided the only diversion and, while it would have been possible to take a book to read, the radio was always sufficient. The favourite times were the hour before closing on Saturday and the first two hours on Sunday when customers were few and there was nothing to do other than just sit and listen to the radio.

Is it possible now to be seventeen and to find hours of contentment in something so simple?

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A fair week

In Somerset, it is the season of fairs: Bridgwater, the greatest of them all, will take place next week.

Our local fair was at Long Sutton.  It was a funfair small enough to fit onto the village green, but it was big enough to cause excitement to a six year old boy. There was not much to it: dodgems, a roundabout, swingboats; stalls selling toffee apples and candy floss; and maybe a few other things. Standing outside the Devonshire Arms on the green in Long Sutton now and you realize how small it must have been.

Going to Bridgwater Fair was the highlight of an uneventful year. Bridgwater was the big day out. Dating from medieval times, it takes place at St Matthew’s Field.

Was there always mud? I certainly remember going in Wellington boots. The street approaching the field was lined with ‘cheapjacks’ intent on parting people from their money. The offers were too good to be true, but everyone knew they were, that was part of the entertainment, watching to see who might be taken in.

As the field was approached there was a gateway through which the countless thousands of feet passed. The ground would have been well churned up by the Saturday evening, the closing night of the fair.

Stalls and other stuff were OK for grown ups, it was the funfair that was the magnet for a small boy clutching a half-crown. Looking back now I’m sure it was gaudy and garish and completely unsophisticated, but to a child who lived in village of 300 people and who went to a two classroom school that had just forty pupils, this was the most amazing place. This made Long Sutton look like a sideshow.

The rides were often frightening, more for watching than trying. There were constant wonders to discover as we pushed through the throngs. I remember tents that were forbidden to small boys, but perhaps my imagination invented them. In my memory, there were at least a boxing ring and another involving the charms of some lady. Did they exist or are they the later interpolations of a mind fed on stories of travelling shows and circuses? Was there a Wall of Death or is it something misremembered?

If a small boy went to Bridgwater next week, would there be the same magic now? Where would a child cluthching the equivalent of a half-crown find such a world of excitement and delight?

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A cat among the ministers

Apparently, Larry the cat at Number Ten Downing Street is the only permanent resident. It was a story that prompted speculation by the presenter of the radio programme as to how long cats lived. Sadly, for those with an affection for felines, the lifespan is probably all too short.

If Larry had been around for a human life expectancy, I might have met him on a visit to his neighbourhood five decades ago.

Being taken to London on a school visit in 1975 brought an unexpected  direct encounter with members of the government.

Having visited the House of Commons, where our host had been the genial Ray Mawby, then Tory MP for Totnes, we arrived in Downing Street as a meeting was ending at Number Ten.

The opportunity for autograph hunting was too good to miss.

Taking a postcard of the House of Commons from a bag of souvenirs and borrowing a biro from our teacher, the first target was Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary. ‘Mr Jenkins, can I have your autograph?’

‘Oh, all right, but quickly before a crowd gathers’.

‘Who was that man?’ asked an onlooker as I turned back.

‘The Home Secretary’.

‘Oh’.

Jenkins was followed by Education Secretary, Fred Mulley, and then an even better target.

From the Saint James’s Park end of the street came James Callaghan, the Foreign Secretary, with a foreign visitor. ‘Mr Callaghan, can I have your autograph?’

‘You would do much better to ask this man. He is the deputy prime minister of Egypt’.

Not wishing to be discourteous, I handed the visitor my postcard and pen. We walked down the street together, Callaghan asking about our school and our visit to London.

‘We’d better go in here’, he said, ‘the Prime Minister is waiting for us’.

On the steps of Number 10, Harold Wilson stood, smiling.

1975 was at the height of IRA terrorism, yet teenage boys were allowed to wander unchallenged around Downing Street; government ministers were people content to move around without a phalanx of security men.

Even four years later, visiting London as an eighteen year old, standing on the pavement opposite the door of Number 10 and shouting, ‘Power to the people,’ as Foreign Secretary Dr David Owen stepped from a limousine, brought no more than a contemptuous glance from a policeman.

Only a cat now would have the opportunity for such free movement among the holders of the great offices of state.

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Stupid television

Being someone whose knowledge of classical music is derived from clips played in episodes of Morse, from compact disc compilations given free with newspapers, and from television theme tunes, there are not many pieces of music that I recognize, but there are a few.

So even though the a piece of music had begun unannounced, I recognized it from the first couple of bars – it was the theme music from the ITV television series This Week.

This Week  was a current affairs programme that went out at peak viewing time in the days when television news was something to be taken seriously and wasn’t a broadcast version of a glossy “celebrity” magazine.  The theme tune, the intermezzo from Jean Sibelius’ Karelia Suite, seemed to be a statement that this was serious television, that the content of this programme was to be taken as seriously as the composition that introduced it.

Something got lost along the way.

ITV maintained that it was commercial pressures that meant that they could no longer find the resources or the viewing times for such programmes and seized the opportunity provided by lighter touch regulation to go for whatever might be popular, no matter how absurd or how demeaning the programmes might be. The television schedules came to be filled with dross, with whatever it was that the public demanded, and television came to be the fulfilment of the sort of programming foreseen in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It is now hard to imagine that ITV once produced such series as Brideshead Revisited.  Now, detective series are presented by ITV as “drama.”

Claiming that they must retain popular approval, the BBC chose to chase their commercial rivals to the bottom of the pond.  The BBC news becoming more and more domestic and more and more personality driven. The Six O’Clock News is now little more than a magazine with content tailored to a domestic market.

The downward spiral seems to be inexorable, if Big Brother was the bottom of the pond, then Love Island must have sunk into the mud.

It seems ironic that an entertainment series would have taken the name of the oppressive power in Nineteen Eighty-Four. While the series is about looking in on people, it reflects a fulfilment of the nightmare drawn by Orwell in which people’s lives are completely controlled.

There is a sense of decay, an end of civilization.  If snooping sensationalism and celebrity soundbites are what now pass as public discourse,  then something really has been lost.

 

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The dignified and the efficient

Once, I nearly bought his book.  A paperback edition, it was not unduly expensive. Flicking through the pages, though, it seemed very dry and very precise prose. It didn’t capture the imagination of a young undergraduate and was put back onto the shelf. His writing was probably more accessible than many of the titles sold by the academic bookshop, certainly much more so than the texts on philosophy, but Nineteenth Century writing on the English constitution seemed far removed from the reality of England in 1979.

Perhaps it was the title of the book, The English Constitution, that created problems in the mind. The very first lecture on political history had made the point that Britain had no written constitution. Rather than there being any written code, the governance of the country rested on a system of “common law and precedent.” There was no explanation of what such terms might mean, or perhaps it was a case of a lecture being a process of the lecturer’s words being written on the page of the student’s notebook without passing through the brain of the student on the way.

Walter Bagehot, writer of The English Constitution, was a Langport man who gained national fame as a journalist and essayist. Writing against the background of parliamentary reform, he sought to identify the principles underlying the governance of the nation. As editor of The Economist for seventeen years, he developed economic insights that proved relevant more than one hundred and forty years later, including “Bagehot’s dictum” that central banks should lend freely in times of financial crisis. It was a concept that found expression in the policy of quantitative easing adopted by central banks after the financial crash of 2008.

Bagehot’s text was significant in the education of the young Princess Elizabeth. Bagehot believed governance was exercised by “the efficient” and “the dignified,” he wrote:

No-one can approach to an understanding of English institutions unless he divides them into two classes. In such institutions there are two parts. First, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population, the dignified parts, if I may so call them; and, next, the efficient parts, those by which it, in fact, works and rules. Every institution must first win the loyalty and confidence of mankind and then employ that homage in the work of government.

The Crown plays the role of “the dignified,” the government is “the efficient” part.  Were Bagehot commenting today, he might have questioned if the government still fully merited the label of “the efficient.” What he would not have questioned is the dignity of the Crown.

 

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