Nobbut Laiking, by Ross Brewster
Just thinking last Saturday night as I crept off to bed at the sort of time when, as a young blood, I would have been going out. My mates, much as it irks me, have got it right. Football and death, my principal topics of conversation these days.
Not quite at the point yet where I put my teeth in a jar, set the Teasmade for 7-30am and utter a faithless little prayer that I will wake up in this world and not the next.
My Saturday night thrill is listening to the Paul Gambaccini music quiz on Radio 4 and enjoying the cheap satisfaction of getting a Mozart question right.
Kathy Burke’s programme about Growing Old on TV last week had some sprightly veterans on show including a wrinkled 85-year-old woman who claims to be a fashion model for senior clothes.
What does Kathy Burke know about being old? She is only 58, though if she persists in smoking heavily she may never reach the delights of old age.
I no longer qualify as sprightly. I’m not keen on these bright eyed pensioners who claim life begins at 70. Arthritis yes. But life?
Once the football results are in, and I have expended the last of my energy celebrating a Carlisle win, it’s time for a pre-bed kip. I never seem to see all the goals or, if it’s rugger, the tries. I lost count of how many France were running in against England at Twickers and probably missed a couple during my nap.
If I am all football and death then, seriously, so many good people have been lost since Covid came among us three years ago that it’s difficult not to think that way.
Kathy Burke said the enemy of older people is loneliness and she’s spot on there. The longer you live, the fewer friends you have left. Even long life is a poisoned chalice.
My journalistic pal, who writes a daily blog and is around my vintage, started off with a football theme, but admits he is increasingly becoming the editor of an obituary column.
He began with around a dozen devotees and now has thousands following his wanderings and he says people are tending to use it as a clearing house for the deceased. He has an astonishing number of friends and associates, but even that number is thinning out rapidly.
A radio institution
I have recently been reading a book about the history of Sports Report, the long-running radio programme that has featured some of the great figures in sports broadcasting.
Right back to the silky Irish tones of Eamonn Andrews and the likes of ex-Welsh rugby international Cliff Morgan who turned sport into poetry and the poetry of language into sport. How I loved that programme as a youngster.
It not only filled my soul with a love of football, but the joy of words used with such glorious precision.
If there is a heaven, then I hope it’s Sports Report.
That colossal waste of money, HS2, now appears not to be going further than Birmingham and not even reaching London, but stopping somewhere about 25 miles to the west.
The cost has already gone up from £32 million to over £100 million. They can’t even get it to Crewe so it’s going to be of no use to the north. What with regular weekend buses on the west coast line, my railway enthusiast pal tells me it’s usually cattle class on the journey across the country from Manchester to York.
I don’t see much levelling up. Think of what that money could have done for the infrastructure of the north. They’d have been better running the existing railways well and opening up a few of the lines Beeching cut rather than this vanity project for London and the south.
Lovely bit of squirrel
Vladimir Putin’s propagandist told Russian TV viewers that we Brits are so impoverished by Brexit and the war in Ukraine that we’re eating squirrels now our food supplies have run out.
Actually Lord Inglewood and Jamie Oliver suggested putting greys on the menu a few years ago and his Lordship once told fellow peers in a Parliamentary speech that they made a tasty meal stewed in Madeira and served with partridge wings en papillote. Also delicious fried or boiled for the dogs.
He said if we hunted down and ate the greys it would leave more room for the reds to spread. I don’t think when he said reds he meant the Ruskies.
Banks for nothing
Keswick’s last remaining bank closes in a matter of days. They won’t even allow us to retain the cash dispensing machine which is a valuable town centre asset where tourists abound. All our other banks ran out on us long since.
A recent survey showed one in five bank customers travel at least an hour to get to their nearest branch.
Strange thing about banks. They spend big money on advertising to tell us how cuddly and caring they are. How committed they are to our local communities. They’ve got a funny concept of customer care, I’ll say that.
