Doing the same things again and again

Posted on 16th June 2021 by Ian

It being Wednesday, I phoned my mother at seven o’clock, went to Sainsbury’s for the weekly shopping, and then made my lunch for tomorrow. Lunch is always similar, a round of mature Cheddar and Branston Pickle sandwiches, three tomatoes, a Tunnock’s caramel wafer and an apple. Once lunch is complete, the box is put into my school bag and the bag is put into the boot of my car. I then put two Weetabix in a bowl and a Yorkshire Gold teabag into a mug for breakfast. Then I set out my clothes for tomorrow, a shirt to match the jacket and trousers, a tie to match the shirt, shoes to match the clothes. Should any of these routines be neglected, I would become discombobulated for the day.

The value I place on the repetition of daily routines always recalls John Mortimer’s 1980s novel Paradise Postponed. The novel tells the story of the rise of a working-class politician. Reading it while still in my twenties, I remember that the routineness of the life described made me smile, but its value has become clear in latter years.

Leslie Titmuss, the rising star describes his home life:

“I went to the village school,” he told them. “Then I got a scholarship to Hartscombe Grammar. Weekends I used to go out on my bike and help people with their gardens. I grew up to understand the value of money because it took my father five years to save up for our first second-hand Ford Prefect. Every night he finishes his tea and says to my mother, “Very tasty, dear. That was very tasty.” He always says the same thing. He falls asleep in front of the fire at exactly half past nine and at ten-thirty he wakes up with a start and says, “I’ll lock up, dear. Time for Bedfordshire!” Always the same. Every night. Just as he got up to go to work at exactly the same time every morning for forty years.

“Could any person in real life be as predictable as George Titmuss?” I thought. Surely, real life could not be so routine?

The very routineness of life, the repetition of the same things and the same words has about it a reassuring quality. Perhaps being a creature of habit is boring; alternatively, perhaps it is about being secure, about being content with life with its gentle rhythms and familiar patterns.

For centuries, people lived lives entirely governed by the rhythm of the agricultural year and no-one thought less of them for it. Perhaps the gentle, dull and inoffensive George Titmuss understood life much better than I imagined.

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The end of study and beginning of reading

Posted on 15th June 2021 by Ian

English, Economics and History, the examinations for my three A Level subjects began on Monday, 4th June 1979 and ended eleven days later on Friday, 15th June 1979.

In ordinary times, such an occasion would now be marked by a rowdy party or even a group visit to a Spanish resort (I have read of groups of eighteen year olds heading to Ibiza to celebrate the end of their secondary education). In 1979, no such options were available to students of limited means living deep within rural England.

The passing of our days at Strode College in Street was marked in an altogether more subdued way. A small group of us spent the evening playing skittles and drinking ale at the King William Inn in the village of Catcott. The evening ended in an even more traditional manner than in which it had been passed, we sat on stools at a wooden table and ate a supper of crusty bread, Stilton cheese and pickled onions.

The next day, Saturday, 16th June, entirely unaware of the existence of something called “Bloomsday,” I went with my parents to the library in Bridgwater. I had gone with the deliberate intention of borrowing books that were considered to be “important.”  Perhaps I imagined that by reading I could become someone whom people considered to be “serious.” Among the books I brought home that day were James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, the latter being a nine hundred page narrative of the day of Leopold Bloom in Dublin on 16th June 1904.

Discussing the books at a friend’s house that evening, my friend’s father thought it distinctly odd.  He was emphatic in expressing his belief that it seemed very strange that any red blooded male should be reading Joyce. More than forty years later, his logic still seems unfathomable.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was read with great effort, it was very different from the adventure novels that had been my usual choice. Part of the reason for the slow progress through the pages of dense prose was that I had begun my summer job, labouring at Kelway’s Nursery, on Monday, 18th June. Starting at 7.45 am each day and working in the fields until 5 pm, I was exhausted at the end of each day.  Having had enough of Joyce, Ulysses was abandoned after forty pages and not picked up again until 2003.

There seems a clarity in those moments of trying to become a serious reader, as if I could reach out a hand and pick up one of those books.

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Disappearing green baize

Posted on 14th June 2021 by Ian

“Pool and snooker table maintenance,” announced the strapline on the side of the white van. Times being what they are, it is hard to imagine that the driver is finding much work.

Snooker tables used to be commonplace. “Billiard tables,” they were called when I was young. Snooker halls, working men’s clubs, games rooms in big houses and student facilities, pubs, even youth clubs, the green baize was something approached with seriousness, and treated with care.

Snooker halls were places filled with a concentrated silence, the kiss of the white ball against a red or a colour, a puff on a cigarette, a sip from a pint of beer, an occasional word of congratulation to an opponent. Muzak and constant background television noise were still things of the future.

While played with just three balls, billiards seemed a more difficult and a more complicated game. Playing it only once, with a friend at his university’s snooker room, it seemed a game without hiding places, a game where the failings of a bad player like myself were quickly exposed.

Attending theological college in the 1980s, the snooker table was an opportunity to escape from the lessons on Greek and philosophy and Biblical literature. An evening never seemed complete without at least a frame. Later, more serious academic minds, deemed the snooker table and the adjacent table tennis table to be superfluous to the requirements of those preparing for ordination and they were removed to make way for an additional seminar room.

Pool always seemed a less formal game, although the skill demanded to be a good player seemed to be just as great. Pool tables could be fitted into a smaller space, the games could be played more quickly, the capacity for income generation was greater.

Now, all three games seem to be in decline. In the 1980s, the snooker champions were household names, now the viewing figures for the championships are a fraction of what they were. With the decline in public popularity, perhaps there has been a corresponding disappearance of many snooker tables. It is a long time since I heard of anyone playing billiards, perhaps there are still gentlemen’s clubs where the gentle art is still practised. Even pool tables seem not to have the popularity they once enjoyed, are there still places where people put piles of coins on the side of the table to reserve the next game?

With lockdown and the decline of licensed premises, the van driver may need to find other uses for his vehicle.

 

 

 

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Sunday teatime

Posted on 13th June 2021 by Ian

Heinz Baked Beans on toasted Hovis bread spread with butter, topped with grated Cheddar cheese. It was a Sunday tea of contentment, a Sunday tea that might have been eaten at any time in the past fifty years.

Baked beans were once frowned upon (perhaps they still are), but it seems that they can now be counted as one of the five portions of vegetables that we are expected to eat during the course of the day. Had I known they were so healthy, Heinz might have received much more business over the intervening years.

Sunday teatime was always an odd time, it could be a feast or a famine.

A friend once told me of going to tea on a Sunday with a friend who was daughter of the local clergyman. It was the 1950s and the fare at the rectory was very frugal. The girls sat down at the table with the rector and his wife and two other daughters. There was bread and butter to eat and tea to drink. The only exception was the clergyman himself, who was served a boiled egg as he had to go out to take the evening service.

A scant amount of food on the table seemed a common experience among clergy families. Another friend told me of her mother keeping a careful account of the household expenditure in a book in the kitchen. Frequently, the letters “SPG” appeared in the columns. Years later, the friend asked her mother why they had been so generous to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel when there was so little to eat. Her mother was baffled and when reminded of the letters said that often she couldn’t remember where the shillings had gone so wrote SPG for, “something, probably grub.”

In our house, Sunday teatime tended to be a time for more rather than less. The “grazing” that now seems commonplace would never have been allowed, tea would have been eaten at the table. There would often be sandwiches made with the cold meat from the Sunday dinner. More often than not, it was chicken, but repetition never detracted from the flavour. Sunday was also the day when there might be cake at teatime. There were slabs of fruit cake, dense filled with dried fruits and cherries, sometimes with almonds on top. Such luxury could not have been afforded every day, but Sunday teatime was different.

 

 

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Sportsmen of the past

Posted on 12th June 2021 by Ian

“Uncle Dick and Uncle Andrew were very keen on sports.”

It must be some thirty years since my grand uncles died, but from what I remember they never seemed very like sportsmen. Our family are not athletic.  We are short and stocky, broad shouldered, solid, not the sort of people who tend to excel at sports.

“Keen on sports?”

“Yes. Once a fortnight Uncle Andrew would go up to Bristol and he and Uncle Dick would go to watch one of the Bristol teams.”

I remembered stories of them going to Eastville. “Rovers, Mum.”

“Yes, one of the Bristol teams.”

“Definitely Rovers, I don’t think they liked the other lot.”

“As well as football they both played darts and skittles.”

These seemed more the sort of sports that might be played by our family members. At five feet seven inches, I am among the taller members, but lack of height is no hindrance in engaging in the sporting activities at a local pub.

“And they went greyhound racing.”

“That would figure, there was a greyhound track as well as a football ground at Eastville.”

Sports in the days of Uncle Dick and Uncle Andrew had connotations different from that of those that require the clothing and equipment bought in high street stores. The sports that used to fill their leisure hours seem to belong a past very different from the events viewed on satellite television screens.

Greyhound racing ceased at Eastville in 1997. A plan to build a new greyhound stadium in Bristol never came to fruition. Uncle Dick and Uncle Andrew would have to travel to Swindon to go to the dogs now.

Darts is still played, but with the changes in many pubs, and the death of many more, it is disappearing. Younger people are more likely to stand and watch Premier League football than they are to stand at the oche. High scores recorded on the blackboards either side of boards seem decades old.

Skittle teams still play, but struggle to find members. The alleys have often been put to other uses, the space taken by the wooden lanes now devoted to providing extra area for restaurant seating. Two of the pubs with which Uncle Dick and Uncle Andrew would have been familiar have decided that diners are more profitable than skittles players.

Even the sort of football my uncles enjoyed is declining. Football has become a commercialised, franchised packaged product in which the profits are taken by a handful of large companies. Clubs like Bristol Rovers, which once enjoyed a large following, can never aspire to success against such competition.

Sports are not what they were.

 

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