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Leither articles:

Issue 80 Pen Portraits from the Port: Macaroni revelations and a review of Midget Gems

When you start a new relationship, one of the exciting parts/death knells is finding out about your prospective other-half’s likes and dislikes. A sneaky study of their music collection while they’re at the toilet is always good, as it rifling through their handbag and diary if they’re away for a long time. If you can, it’s useful to hire a private detective to produce a dossier on them too, with phone hacking essential. It is sometimes the only way to find out if that new partner ever bought a Toploader record.

Nothing, though, is fool proof. Recently, Mrs Portraits went wildly berserk when I mentioned that I’d never had macaroni cheese. ‘What?! WHAT?! But…but you’ve never told me this. I didn’t know. This is…Oh my God. No. No, that’s just impossible. It’s…it’s mental.’ A detailed and expensive poll showed that this was, in fact, a matter of geography: we Englanders knew nothing of the dish other than its name, and sometimes not even that, while you Caledonian culinaires loved the stuff. You, incidentally, were right – it is rather tremendous, subsequent tests have shown.

How, though, do you account for Mrs Portraits’ recent revelation [drum roll]: she’s never seen ‘Dad’s Army’. I’m out.

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I’ve lost my glasses. I know because I can’t wee shat I’m typing. I left them on a train and hope the man who pushes the buffet trolley offers them a brew from time to time. The trauma necessitated a trip to the opticians for an eye test. Yet again, I think I failed it. It’s the pressure I can’t stand.

The optician batters away at me, question after question. ‘Lens one, or two?’ ‘The red, or the green?’ ‘With, or without?’ Ten minutes in and I am ready to confess to anything. Outside the interrogation suite, I try on various frames and can’t quite believe how nonchalant I’m being about moving on to a new pair of spectacles. I’ve hardly grieved for the old pair. I run out of the shop. Out of the shop and straight into a lamppost.

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FOOD REVIEW EXTRA

In my youth, there were a number of gastric certainties. Fish and chips came on a Friday, curry was something that happened to other people and lots of us climbed mountains for a packet of Tudor. And then there were Midget Gems. Proper Midget Gems. Not the limp-wristed softies supermarkets produced, but Lion’s Midget Gems. Only that badge made them official. All others were imposters that tasted, variously, of mouldy flannels, neglected turf, rotten beeswax, sour gravel, septic cats, decayed gnomes, fetid whelk, putrid traffic cone and parsley. Proper Midget Gems were edible only from paper bags, preferably twirled over with a flourish by the shop keeper. Then one day, the Brobdingnags of Maynards colonised little Lion, and nothing has been the same since. Gone are the liquorice black sweets, and in are mass-produced Gems that are a distant cousin of their former selves.

Thankfully the original Lion factory in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, does still churn out bespoke originals. Finding them, though, is a very difficult and serious matter indeed. I’d heard whispers of a purveyor in Portobello, so I had my driver, who chargers a flat fare of £1.30, transport me there. So it was that in a green-fronted emporium on Bath Street, I found a little jar of euphoria.

First, a note on the shop. What a place. There was barely turning space for an averagely-sized motorised scooter, so packed were its inches with confectionery delights. Sweets young and old, English and Scottish, hard and soft, fizzy and chewy, big and small, black and white, red and yellow, green and brown, blue and orange, Torvil and Dean mingled and sparkled. From behind the counter, an older gentlemen served with precision and vim.

Reluctantly leaving this toothsome Valhalla behind, I strolled to the beach and opened my paper bag. What unbridled joy. Midget Gems as perfectly flavoursome as tangible rainbows, each colour original and uninhibited by modernity. The texture, too, was straight from the manual: neither too soft nor hard, they perched wonderfully on the consistency fence. Eating a quarter was as close as one can come to time travel without having to sit in a car with the irksome Christopher Lloyd. Heaven is…a small paper bag.

Rating: 10/10

Damage: 87p

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Issue 79: Pen Portraits from the Port: Waiting for the man and British Tapas food review

It’s a tightrope. The email states that the person will call around to fix your phone line between 8am and 12pm. By 9am, there’s no sign, so you risk making some toast. An hour later, bolstered by the success of your risky breakfast, you commit to a toilet visit, and not a toilet visit of the ‘number one’ kind. Giddy as you sit on the pan uninterrupted by the doorbell, you rebelliously look across to the shower and think ‘Could I? COULD I?!’ Do you play safe, or do you go for it? Your decision says so much about the type of person you are. I’m a risk taker, a gambler, an explosion of spontaneity, so I went for it.

The act itself wasn’t the mistake; getting away with it was. I began to feel like I could get away with anything. At 10.50am I baked banana bread. At 11.10, I started my family tree. Twenty minutes later, I’d mowed the lawn and brokered furtive peace talks in Israel/Palestine, and that without the use of a landline. It was all too much. Too many plates to spin. The bread was burning and in the Gaza Strip things were getting testy. By the time the phone bloke turned up at 11.55 I’d passed out on my newly-cut lawn. I still haven’t got the phone fixed.

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To pass the time, I enjoy behaving as if starring in a reality TV programme. Last month, I divided my spare time between an underfunded youth centre and the warehouse premises of a local charity that helps re-house homeless people. I hired a camera crew to follow me around and made up a cover story, telling them I was making a documentary about volunteers. Each day, I’d let my accent slip into ‘posh’, wear Gucci shoes or turn up to work in a limo. The looks when they found out I wasn’t a Secret Millionaire? Priceless.

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The phone-hacking scandal has left me outraged and befuddled: I mean, who are these people that leave voicemail messages containing anything remotely useful or interesting? Until now, I thought that all left messages consisted of the words ‘Hi, it’s me. Just wondering what you were fancying for your tea. Give me a call back when you get this. Bye.’ Apparently, though, there exists a class of people who take the words ‘Please leave a message after the tone’ to mean ‘Please reveal confidential information at length after the tone’.

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Food Review Extra

Summer’s lease lasted long enough to grant many a meeting between food and open air. Al fresco dining: a marriage as fine as chariot and horse or Ant and Dec. Eating under God’s sun is a chance to embrace all the world’s food and a chance to mix the countries – a samosa here, a hot dog there.

Mrs Portraits and I have been enjoying British Tapas (or, as those with less culinary erudition refer to them, ‘crisps’) for the best part of a decade. Early on, we devoured the work of Walkers of Leicestershire, before a long affair with the Golden Wonder stable.

Aside from a brief maize flirtation five or so years ago – Monster Munch were doing some wonderful things back then – we’ve continually stuck with potato-based British Tapas. Both of us feel that our country does them best; foreign trips, with their miles of aisles of paprika ‘Lay’s’ and cheesy ‘Cheetos’ have only reaffirmed this.

Exoticism, then, comes from stepping off the British mainland and embracing Taytos of Tandragee. The County Armagh producer (tagline: ‘`Bout ye’) is a giant on the island of Ireland, and upholds a cult following here. Lounging between disused fag packets on Leith Links, we both tried two flavours each.

For my part, the salt and vinegar (in a blue packet, as they should be) hit the spot marked ‘satisfying’, their tangy bark placated by a smooth bite. Beef and onion avoided the usual pitfall of tasting like Oxo-sautéed curtains, emitting notes of satisfyingly chewy pub steak baguettes instead. Mrs Portraits lingered long on the spring onion before offering ‘It’s so hard to get them right, but I think Tayto have done it. Can we go home now please?’ On the roast chicken she added, ‘Yeah, fine. When are you going to take me for an actual meal?’

Far better than a mixed bag, then.

Score: 8/10

Damage: the right side of £1.97

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Issue 78: Pen Portraits from the Port: A review of the Ikea Cafe

Food review extra

Sometimes in the quest for gastronomic perfection, one has to venture outside one’s comfort zone. This can mean sampling foods the diner previously thought unpalatable – think veal or twice boiled baby chaffinch – or journeying to faraway shores – el Bulli in Catalonia or The Coffee Shop in Erinsborough.

Fully subscribing to this sense of culinary adventurism, Mrs Portraits and I found ourselves travelling westwards in a maroon charabanc of classic vintage. The number 47 bus chugged and chuckled its way up hill and down dale, a romantic sleigh caked in errant diesel flak. Sadly and all too soon, we reached our dining destination, her slinky blue corrugated roof and giant golden lettering resembling the sun setting sleepily on a continental sky.

Tired of the ethnic dietary canon on our doorstep, we had decided to go Swedish and try out a little place called ‘The Ikea Café’. Once we’d surmounted the logistical obstacle of having to enter via the attached shop’s exit (the café’s owners recently branched out into flatpack furniture), we joined a queue bristling with stressed-looking couples. This hiatus gave us chance to appraise the menu, trendily displayed on a dayglo headboard; paper menus are just so not Stockholm or Gothenburg.

What we read was an innovative departure from tired Scandinavian fare, Swedish food only pecked on the cheek by the inclusion of meatballs rather than embraced. Mrs Portraits opted for the calzone (‘a squelchy riot of satisfaction and regret’), your paunchy narrator a hot dog dressed in a jaune paste, which brought to mind soccer moms on a hot summer’s day (never a bad thing). We shared chipped potatoes in the French style, which were triumphantly salty and reminded us of an incident in Marseille I shan’t go into here. Liquid sustenance came via a boutique vessel of carbonated citrus fruit, which sadly veered towards the higher regions of gaseousness. Overall, though, the Ikea Café is piping hot proof that travel can broaden the mind without broadening the bank balance.

Score: 8/10

Damage: under £4.94

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Issue 77: Pen Portraits from the Port: Cultural Quarter and a review of Greggs

The latest Filmhouse programme appears. As happens every month, I pick it up and scruffily circle several films that I’ll never go and see.

Arthouse cinema programmes are constructed entirely for this exercise: the circler can feel intellectual validation for attempting to engage with high culture before going to see Cloudy With a Chance of Meatbaws at Vue instead.

Then on page 13, a shock. An act of marketing larceny has been committed. ‘We are the Cultural Quarter’ explains a vaguely turquoise advert, ‘Filmhouse, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Traverse Theatre, Usher Hall’. But, Your Honour, let me quote from a Pen Portrait published in August 2010. The author is describing a bohemian strip that begins dans le Kirkgate and sweeps up through Duke Street to the elegant lower reaches of Lochend Road:

With a Pets & Things (what things?), three bus stops complete with Tracker and the brand new Marksman quiz night, it is every inch the Cultural Quarter.

Further, Your Honour, said author has since repeatedly championed this, original, Cultural Quarter in his column. Indeed, he feels the CQ (again, his) has lately been improved by the addition of Ramsden’s pawnbrokers (‘We buy gold’).

So no, you are not the Cultural Quarter (how can anywhere with a flesh café named ‘Bottoms Up’ be so?), because we bloody well are.

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Currently running on television sets is an advert for Bridgestone car tyres. In it, a couple are taking their newly-born baby, Sarah Jane, home from hospital. Dad shelters Sarah Jane from the rain and carries her to the car.

‘3.4kg’ floats a graphic over the bairn, as if statistics might make her more appealing. ‘Her mother’s nose’, it continues, ‘[and] her father’s temper’, somewhat darkly (and let’s hope Dad has never taken his temper near Mum’s nose). At the wheel, cantankerous Papa’s eyes gape with fear: he is about to hit a rogue HGV, possibly errant from Five’s bewilderingly entertaining Eddie Stobart series.

Dad slams on the breaks, managing just in time to avoid disaster. ‘Still sleeping now’ says the baby ticker tape. After pausing while we realise it doesn’t mean ‘sleep’ in the morose, funereal sense, we see the family embraced in a roadside relief huddle.

Cue voiceover: ‘We make tyres that help you stop shorter in the wet.’ Thus, the message seems to be: buy our product or the baby gets it, and I long for the day when more adverts are based on this threatening ethos. In the meantime, I wish Sarah Jane and father well in their parent-toddler anger management classes.

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Food review extra

Edinburgh Marathon time. Trundling up to take part was Matt, a friend from Manchester, along with his supportive entourage: partner Helen and former cellmate Paddy. As his nominated dietician ahead of Sunday’s slow dash, I took my responsibilities seriously.

On Saturday I treated us all to lunch from a little place in Tollcross, the district sandwiched between controversy’s The Cultural Quarter and nice-but-dim Bruntsfield.

The azure frame of Greggs deli et patisserie is familiar to foodies across the land, but the artisan chain has, in recent years, shed its snobbish image to embrace customers of all social hues. Gone are the days of Kensington realm knights sauntering in for a foam basin of tomato soup or squire ladies popping by for a week’s supply of sausage and bean melts to take back to Hampshire.

The aristocracy have been rumbled; Greggs is now a democracy where one is as likely to discuss Cornish pasties with Big Issue vendors as chicken and stuffing lattices with A-List celebrities (a London-based friend recalls a particularly illuminating debate over Yum Yum icing with Todd Carty in the Pimlico shop).

As my visitors had not experienced dining a la Greggs before, I ordered the pastry smorgasbord: four sausage rolls (fairly priced at £2.20 for the lot), two steak bakes and a cheese and onion pasty. We ate al fresco from achingly retro papier bags, which I noticed Helen carefully folding for subsequent, kudos-earning re-use in the hipster joints of Canal Street. Matt and Helen were pleased with the steak bakes (‘It’s all about the carbs and the gristle’ – Matt), though Paddy was ultimately disappointed with the sausage rolls (‘immediately rewarding but, much like when excitedly scoffing fish and chips, they left an aftertaste of greasy nausea and moral anxiety’).

A mixed bag, then; perhaps Greggs is moving a little too quickly from its gourmet roots in the rush to be all things to all people.

Damage: under a fiver

Score: 6/10

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Issue 76: Pen Portraits from the Port: Sauna gossip and a review of chips

I do like to hang around the swimming baths in an afternoon. No hang on, that didn’t sound right. It sounded awful and possibly incriminating. I do like to hang around the swimming baths of an afternoon.

See? SEE? You thought I meant that it was bad because it made me sound like a pervert, but I was actually making a grammatical point. Now who’s the filthy-minded one?

The point stands, though: Leith Victoria Swimming Centre, to employ its Sunday name, can be a mightily entertaining place in which to loiter. It is, afterall, one of only a few places left where men in their seventies can go to stand around in what are essentially waterproof pants and chat about cigarette prices while Aswad blare from the water aerobics stereo.

Even the Pool Programme Timetable leaves me intrigued. On Wednesday nights, a part of the pool is reserved for, simply, ‘Masters’. Of what, though? Swimming? Degrees? The Universe? Then when Saturday comes, 4pm offers ‘Open All Hours (girls only)’ in which, presumably, Nurse Gladys swims about in the nude while Arkwright and Granville peer sneakily over the edges of the poolside changing room doors.

When I’m feeling particularly flush or the heating at Portrait Heights is broken, I pay 75p for extras, in this case a wristband granting access to the sauna. The sauna is the golf course of the swimming pool, the place where the movers and shakers go to move and shake, sometimes with frightening consequences if a flabby person shakes and you don’t move.

Here, men of an uncertain age eye one another to check whether the sweaty, mostly-naked bloke in front of them looks like he could be easily engaged in conversation. I seem to have perfected a terrified and terrifying look somewhere between that of Susan Boyle entering the stage for the first time on Britain’s Got Talent and Susan Boyle entering a sauna at Leith Victoria Swimming Centre. As such, no one has ever tried to engage me in conversation, save for the time a man asked me to sing ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ for him as “ma Jeannie loved that yin.”

Despite my best efforts, pulling this face does not stop me from hearing. In recent months I’ve learnt how poor Fat Colin’s gout is back and why global warming is “jist another ‘Millennium Bug’ scare”. Further, I’ve mistakenly encountered racism so casual that it is wearing jeans and a jacket and whistling ‘Smoke Weed Everyday’.

Sometimes the greatest treat can be walking into a discussion already in stunted flow. Recently, I found three men trying to remember something. “Whit’s that phrase they use? You ken, that phrase,” said one. “Aw, that, er, that one aboot the bucket?” replied another. “Aye, ‘slopping oot’, that’s it,” said the third. “Nawwww,” injected the first, “human rights, that’s the one”.

Adding ‘confused’ to my portfolio of looks, I shrugged, sat back and pretended to be French.

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Food review extra

Hark, for there is a new addition to the Cultural Quarter (see Portraits passim if you really want to. I wouldn’t, and I was there when the horrible little letters fell onto the keyboard in the first place). The Dragon King Chinese opened on the site of the old Lochend Road chippy in late winter, and I went along with Mrs Portraits just before midnight on a recent Friday.

Service was excellent: prompt, polite and with an enlightening conversation about the Year of the Rabbit thrown in. Typical Cultural Quarter, really. We went for Large Chips, at £1.50 pitched 20p dearer than New Wang’s on Great Junction Street. Salt, vinegar and packaging were free, though, a testament to the kindness of the Chinese people.

By the time our food reached the plate it had retained its heat to a pleasing extent. There were a couple of issues with rogue overcooked potato scraps, but I’ll put this down to the timing of our visit. Mrs Portraits transferred much of her main onto buttered bread before adding a Houses of Parliament jus, while I experimented with Daddy’s Tomato Sauce, a recent addition to our larder following a successful promotional stint in Lidl for the much-maligned, controversial brand.

We washed down our meal  with tins of the excellent 2011 Diet Irn Bru (60p). The Barrs really are doing some special things over at Cumbernauld this year; I suggest you stock up and invite friends over.

Overall, an excellent experience. I’ve a feeling the Year of the Rabbit could be a good one for the Dragon King.

Score: 9/10.

Damage: £2.70

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Issue 75: Pen Portraits from the Port: A nauseous commuter hamlet and Lassie the Cat

Southwards to Yorkshire, where a pile of journals required my attention. Mother Pen Portraits had gathered them over the three months since my last visit, and each edition now required sarcastic analysis.

The Copmanthorpe Village Newsletter is, sadly, not widely available. Luckily, my Mum still lives in the nauseous commuter hamlet of Copmanthorpe, my home for 16 formative years, and so an arsenal of newsletters can be easily amassed.

Before the kettle had boiled, I was excitedly reading Reverend Geoffrey Mumford’s hard-hitting editorial, ‘A Word from the Vicarage!’ It was the exclamation mark that conned my eyes in Mumford’s direction, plus the promise of a single word summing up the local church’s perspective or mood. What would the word be? ‘God’? ‘Love’? ‘Twatsticks’?

His column’s title was, though, a lie. He lied to me, ladies and gentlemen, me and all the other innocent parishioners: there were at least 250 words from the vicarage. Distraught, I powered on to page five and found that Copmanthorpe Women’s Institute remained intact, a beacon of trust in a time of flux. I do hope their ‘Hearing Dogs for the Deaf’ lecture went according to plan.

Page seven’s Carnival round-up bought the not entirely unconnected sentences ‘We are further burdened this year by the requirements of the York Event Safety Advisory Group’ and ‘Most of you will be aware of the accident at last year’s carnival when a teenager was thrown from the Cliffhanger.’

It was all getting far too heavy, so I ploughed on to the peerless ‘Used Postage Stamps for Charity and Stamp News’ and then more recent newsletters. In March, Les Wilcox, building contractor, advertised his credentials as a ‘Specialist in disabled adaptations’, which sounded vaguely threatening (“You pay cash in hand, love, and I’ll do you a knee-capping for £75”).

Then in April, Reverend Penny Worth (no, really) managed to get from an account of the revolutions in Egypt and Libya to some bearded fella ‘giving himself on a cross’, and all within the space of 150 words. Reverends are amazing like this: give them any subject and in seconds they can tell you how it relates to the bible. “Well in many ways, Hamilton Academical’s relegation plight is symbolic of the Sermon on the Mount, and the Discourse on judgmentalism specifically.”

This edition of the Newsletter needed bringing back down to earth, and what better way to achieve that than with a piece about the local playing fields (I really should write links for The One Show. Seriously. I need a job. Anything will do. Anything). The unintentionally hilarious Recreation Centre News is best read in a cutesy Alan Bennett voice:

‘The Recreation Centre has gone on a spending spree and bought a mower and a strimmer…One of our volunteers has clearly been over-enthusiastic while using the Ransome triple mower. When Kevin Heels serviced it last month, he found that the bar which carries the left hand cutter unit had been dramatically bent. Someone had clearly hit a tree, or something similar, and Kevin has had to take it away to straighten.’

The replacement of the strimmer, meanwhile, was necessitated when in late 2010:

‘…it seized up. Trevor Buckle suspects that someone may have used it with ordinary petrol, rather than 2 stroke mixture. The cylinder was so badly scored that it was beyond repair. Guy Dillon-Kelly has very kindly used his influence at Elcock’s to get us a very good deal on a stihl strimmer’.

The author of Recreation Centre News is a genius at effortlessly ramming up his word count with forensic and irrelevant minutiae. I learnt from the best.

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To escape the misery of Copmanthorpian existence, I often pretend my visits are television formats. There’s one that is basically the opposite of My Name is Earl, where I wish to go around righting all the wrongs done to me during my teens. For instance, I’d walk into Fred the Baker’s and extract a written statement from Fred agreeing that I did not steal a packet of Space Raiders in 1993.

In another, and this is not exclusive to Copmanthorpe so do try it at home, I enjoy pretending my Mum’s cat is a humdrum domestic version of popular television character Lassie the dog. This entails looking at the cat, listening and then exclaiming such things as ‘What’s that, Lassie? My toast is burning? Run into the kitchen before the fire alarm goes off?’

This is the kind of creativity that may one day earn me my dream gig: a column in the Village Newsletter.

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Issue 74: Pen Portraits from the Port: Visually impaired raindrops and unspeakable Ginsters violence on the Harthill tarmac

‘Let the train take the strain’ it said on some advert or other, possibly for a rail company. I refused. I didn’t like the cut of the train’s jib. I let the bus take the fuss. Better jib. Good jib. The right kind of jib. Jib so good it almost stopped sounding like an odd word the more times you said it. Jib jib jib. Jib. Jib. Jib jib.

I was travelling to Glasgow, the pearl of Strathclyde. I like Glasgow a lot. I like the awesome, ambitious scale of George Square and the fact that the taxis are cheaper. I like it that after 100 or more visits I still can’t quite find my way around. The centre is supposed to work on some kind of grid system, like New York. In fact, the grid was plotted on the back of a Belgian waffle by a visually impaired raindrop.

Like repeated sex with an imaginary friend, the Citylink bus to Glasgow can be a lonely affair. This is especially true if you travel in the middle of the day, as I did, when none of your fellow passengers really has a purpose or they wouldn’t be travelling to Glasgow on a bus on a Tuesday afternoon.

The mid-afternoon coach is bound only by mutually-shared pet hates. Should any passenger recline their seat, use the over-flowing portaloo or eat anything hot and ethnic it can, to quoth comedy’s Danny Dyer, get pwoper naahsty. It’s a tightrope, a maelstrom of simmering bad habits. One false move on an unopened Ginsters can so easily spill over into unspeakable violence on the Harthill tarmac.

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That night, I was put-up in a ridiculously swanky hotel where even the bedbugs had room service. Within a minute of my entrance earlier in the afternoon, three people had called me ‘Sir’, which I took to be sarcastic.

One of the name-callers then picked up my bags (admittedly, ‘bags’ is a bit strong: one consisted of an M&S carrier containing some opened Percy Pigs), while another showed me to my room. It was suitably ridiculous. Across wall after wall switches, ports and possibly portals stared back at me. Cushions were everywhere. Cushions on the chez long and the bed. Cushions on the sofa. Cushions on cushions. Cushions on cushions on cushions.

I pointed the remote control around the room and something which I took to be a window sprung into life. Next came the sound, gushing from speakers in the ceiling. Doctors blared out from four corners and I collapsed, frightened. Thankfully, a cushion broke my fall. As the programme’s plot ebbed and did its best to flow, I began to believe I was part of some twisted torture routine. Make any man that comfortable, and you can break him.

I crawled to the minibar and ran my fingers down the price list in search of the word ‘complimentary’. Bottled water fitted the gratis bill. Phew. Plunging my hand through things that cost money I reached for its glassy sheath and pulled it free. Fumbling it open I leaned against the wall and splashed springwater over my face. Everything was going to be fine.

‘You alright, Sir?’, said the porter, still awaiting his tip.

Oh come on. Come on. Is this thing on?

________

After Mrs Portraits had arrived, we laughed at how she’d never seen me cowering and sobbing underneath a mountain of cushions quite that high before, and proceeded to amble along the fine streets of No Mean City.

Turning the stereotype register up to 11, the rain fell in table legs and a drunken man of 80 or so offered me a fight. We ran for the Glasgow Film Theatre. What a place. Wooden panels coughing heavily and oh so glad of the smoking ban. Signs in typefaces that demand respect.

In the auditorium, some audience members had taken our chosen film’s title, The Big Sleep, a little too literally and snoozed deeply.

The film crackled into life. Humphrey Bogart’s trousers were up to his nipples and his one-liners stupendous. Staring far too intently at Lauren Bacall I experienced a weird sense of comfort that my Granddads had probably done the same when they arrived back from the war.

Mind, at least their combat was over by then: I’d still to get the bus back.

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Issue 73: Pen Portraits from the Port: Time and Wurds-worth

An advert comes on for i, ‘the new concise quality newspaper’. The TV commercial is full of busy, dynamic people with the caveat that they all have enough time to pose on an escalator or while driving a black cab for an advert. One woman, beset and befuddled by a meep-meep flu-voice redolent of a 1980s Tunes advert or Ed Miliband, sits on a bench with drizzle caking the air about her. In front of her is a lunchbox and a child’s scooter. She’s eating outside on a winter’s day. She’s not busy, she’s unstable.

The people this is aimed at are the kind of faux-hectics who are constantly stopping throughout their day to fingerspittle into Spacebook or MyFace just how otherwise engaged they are. They are the man who keeps putting his tie backwards over his shoulder to appear windswept and frazzled, and the office woman in an unkind blouse who bangs the photocopy lid to make people see that she’s far too busy for menial tasks. In the advert, one of them is even Dom Joly, who hasn’t been busy since 1997.

The idea of i (the idea) is that it is a curtailed paper for those who just don’t have time to read full-length articles, in the same way that trousers are curtailed urinals for tramps who don’t have time to get to the McDonald’s toilets. It’s aimed to sit nicely, or shuffle agitatedly, in a world where every second counts. But in a country where people still have the time to watch The One Show, that halfwit nightly study in where it all went wrong for humanity, or pretend to care about tennis, is anyone really that busy?

In a canteen recently I read a laminated sign that implored workers to pay using an in-house credit card system rather than cash. ‘A cash transaction takes 20 seconds, with a card it’s only 5’, it read, ‘Save time, use a card’.

Let’s just have a think about that. In what way would those stolen, cherished 15 seconds make a difference to your day? That’s 1 minute and 15 seconds per work canteen week. Five minutes a month. With holidays and Monday sickies, it’s less than an hour a year. An hour, the time it takes to drive to Glenrothes or instead die having stuck a potato in your exhaust pipe.

I worry (no, I do, I really do) about where all this unnecessary time-saving will lead. Capitalism has cottoned on to the fact that people like to be told they are busy and offered fake sympathy through slogans or images of actors running sweatily for a bus. Food is advertised not for its quality, but for how quickly it can rotate from corpse-frozen to putrid-melty-hot.

If everything continues in this manner, there will be a generation of people who’ve saved so much time that by the age of 48 they’ve got nothing left to do. It’ll be like when a meeting is unexpectedly called-off at work, only that feeling will last until death.

The revolution begins here: next time you see a person behind you in the street feigning a rush, slow down, straddle the pavement and dawdle hellishly. If you have a broadsheet newspaper on you to stretch out, then all the better. It might not change much, but it’ll be bloody funny.

Issue 72: Pen Portraits from the Port: Swearers and Middle-class slumber

A friend of mine (this one is real) went to visit the parents of a pal. With her, she took a further friend. The two had just been at a Hibs match. ‘How was the game?’, asked the pal’s Mum. Without pause, my friend’s friend replied: ‘f***ing pish’.

When the two were alone again, my chum enquired: ‘What the hell were you doing there? She’s about 90. You’ve never met her and the first word you say’s a swearword’. ‘Well,’ replied her companion, ‘I thought she was A Swearer’.

In his head, it seems there are two types of people in this world: Swearers and Non-swearers. Joining him and scar-heided fictional footballer Gordon Ramsay in the first group, you have those who believe that all sentences are improved by a garnishing of expletives. To them, everything is game for blaspheming, so that Martin Luther King Junior’s most famous speech would’ve been far better if he’d stood up and gone: ‘I have a dream that one day this frigging nation will rise the s**t up and live out the true meaning of its creed’.

Of course, there is truth in this: anything the great Doctor said would’ve been improved by the use of northern English words like ‘frigging’. If only he’d thought of this, King Junior wouldn’t have become the forgotten and marginalised fringe character he is today; truly, he was the Bobby Davro of the equal rights movement.

Another Swearer was my Granddad, a Yorkshire-Irishman brimming with the confusing sense of morose bonhomie such genetics breed. When marrying into the family, my Dad was immediately impressed by his new father-in-law’s cussing, later defining it as ‘creative swearing of the best kind’. Dad’s favourite remains the occasion on which an exasperated Granddad bore down on a quarrelsome housefly and seethed: ‘Come ‘ere, yer blue-arsed flamer’.

That second group (remember, from a few words back), the Non-swearers, would certainly not have welcomed Granddad into their pious cabal, but it’s amusing to imagine the tame language with which they’d have told him to go away, and equally his untamed response.

Advantages of being a Non-swearer include performing better at job interviews than Swearers and not offending the elderly, always good unless the elder in question is Margaret Thatcher or the novelist Katie Price. In addition, Non-swearers don’t suffer the sense of alienation an ‘Email not sent due to explicit content’ brings.

Whose side are you on? It’s a bloody minefield.

________

For the past month, more often than not I’ve fallen asleep listening to the Ashes and reading the diaries of former Labour MP Chris Mullin (to use some words up, un-dear reader, you can have two jokes here: ‘he doesn’t seem to mind’ and ‘which is a particular worry as I’m an overnight long distance lorry driver’. Neither work, but that’s 42 words used – now who’s the idiot?).

Other than inviting Delia Smith around to make you a coco laced with free-range port, this is about the most middle-class way to reach slumber. It also leads to lucid dreams of former Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Nick Brown bowling at Michael Hussey or Diane Abbott dropping an easy catch at slip, but that’s a different matter, as my psychoanalyst keeps reminding me.

Laying there, understanding between four and seven per cent of the words babbled and jargoned by the commentators, a nagging feeling gripped me in its arms: having never played cricket on any discernible level apart from twatting an apple core with a pogo stick, how do I know that this isn’t the game for me? How do I know I’m not in possession of an incredible, raw, world-beating talent?

Before long, this feeling extended to everything in the universe, ever (it was a long night): politics; metaphysics; javelin; making cup cakes; medicine (medicine, for Pete’s sake – I might have within my hidden talents a cure for cancer or the common cold or that thing when you knock your elbow on the table and it goes all fuzzy). You name it, I fretted that it could be my leashed talent, my untapped gift to mankind.

Now though, the cricket’s over and I’ve finished the diaries. I can get back to listening to Tony Livesey’s 5Live phone-ins about bin collections. I can start reading Mrs Pen Portrait’s Heat magazines again. Happy New Year.

________

Issue 71: Pen Portraits from the Port: Boycotts and Toby Jug Cameron

Home to York, where I grew up (well, older). There, the Minster stood grandly as places that cost £8 to enter should. At the ancient marketplace, men called Ste sold multipacks of pegs to women called Denise and the fishmonger told people to cheer up as it might never happen. I walked through the Farmers’ Market, picking up a burly offal-faced dairy specialist named Colin for £107.50 as I passed, pressed on via Whipmawhopmagate (take that, spellchecker you halfwit!) and settled for a pint in The Blue Bell.

The Blue Bell is a pub of magnificence. In room one, men that have known eachother since Roman times sip and fail to speak. Their faces are so rigorously Yorkshire that if you look hard enough in their wrinkles you can see tiny Geoffrey Boycotts pushing Wensleydale cheese downhill in a steel bathtub. In room two, baffled tourists, sent there by their Rough Guides, wonder if you really do have to order your poison through a hatch. Of course you do. This is Yorkshire. Full frontal service is frowned upon.

I settled by the front bar and tried to look like my choice of real ale was informed by wisdom and not the shiny picture of a dragon on the handpump. Accompanying the pint with Scampi Fries beside an open fire that threatened to melt one side of my face, all was well in the world. Then a man wearing a cravat walked in.

Behind a thin beard, I could pick out a chap in his early 50s. His tweed jacket smelt slightly of fetid dog, his conversation of dormant fascism. ‘Yes,’ he would say to anyone who wasn’t listening, ‘I’ve just been to a civilised country where they actually let you smoke in bars.’ Wearily going through the motions like a cruise ship comedian 32 years into the same routine, the barwoman was the unlucky person obliged to reply. ‘Oh yeah? Where was that then?’ ‘Belgium. That’s a proper country. None of this PC nonsense.’ Because, of course, it’s Politically Correct not to want lung cancer via passive smoking, I didn’t say; the Scampi Fries were all gone and it was time to get Colin the farmer home.

________

As baby-faced Toby Jug David Cameron hones in on society’s most vulnerable, I’ve been wondering just how far he can go. Each week, there’s a fresh policy to terrorise a new group weaker than the last. Realistically, this can only go on until he levies a stealth tax on pigeons for relying on the food crumbs of hard-working families. There is every chance this is all actually a reality TV show where ‘the government’ push things as far as they possibly can. Expect the impoverished blind to burn their sticks for warmth, the disabled to smelt their wheelchairs to sell for scrap and the obese to sell parts of their flubber for cat food before it gets any better. Then, and only then, can Davina McCall reveal the truth in an altogether shouty manner.

________

Given their strike the other week, it’s comforting to imagine what a picket line of Scottish referees would look like. Firstly, they’d all be in garish full kit, occasionally stopping to jokingly book one another for knocking over the stack of foam tea cups. Officials would be scrawling tiny slogans into their books, causing cars to drive dangerously close as they strained to read the words ‘Honk if you support our claim to not get shouted at in the face by Neil Lennon as defined by the Human Rights Act 1998’. Around a barrel of fire, others would stand rubbing their hands together and occasionally blowing for imaginary free-kicks or sending bypassing pram-pushing mothers to the stands.

________

As the deadline for this humble rag lapsed before the recent snow deluge, I can’t really write about it. I can’t write about how, despite nauseatingly in-depth coverage, the world’s media missed the real story: that of my working from home routine being disturbed by the snow-bound presence of Mrs Pen Portraits. I can’t write how she singularly failed to realise that I have my newspaper and banana break at 10.30am and scattered her real-job detritus all over my regular resting perch. Nor can I mention how much her failure to see the genius of Homes Under the Hammer perturbed me. As for the madness of having lunch at 12pm? Bring on the melting, I’d say if I could.

 ________

Issue 70: Pen Portraits from the Port: Buses and Ikea Flea Circuses

At last, I belong here! It all happened on a recent Monday afternoon, as important events tend to (Bob Geldof being unhappy; weekend hangovers starting to kick in; Ben Fogle’s Escape in Time on BBC2). As the number 49 bus lumbered around the corner, I noticed something remarkable about it: it was a double-decker. Never in all my 49-catching had this occurred. This in itself did not mean I now belonged to Edinburgh; it was the fact I had noticed and cared enough, even, to text Mrs Pen Portraits the words ‘Seen. It. All. Now’ (she presumed I’d caught the bloke that lives opposite drying himself in front of the bedroom window again, but that’s by the by). Once you start to care about LRT, well that’s when this city has got you underneath its confusingly contoured skin.

On arrival here seven years ago, I was immediately transfixed by how much locals knew about bus routes. Ask anyone how best to get to, say, Silverknowes and it’d be ‘37 this’, ‘16 that’ and ‘why?’ Places didn’t have directions or geographical locations, just bus numbers, so that when I asked where the Mining Museum was ‘you get a 29’ came the answer, or when I enquired as to what Crammond was like people would reply: ‘a nightmare to get to.’

After a while, I became convinced that this particularly Edinburgh version of The Knowledge was no fluke: it was, in fact, being taught in schools. All across Midlothian, children as young as eight were being instructed in how to get best use of a Day Saver and in the nuances of the strange non-queue queue system that seems to somehow work at bus stops here. By 11, pupils were being dropped blindly somewhere across town and told to make their way back to class using no more than two buses. By 16, if any child had not been on all routes (including the lesser-spotted 21) they would be exiled to Dalkeith.

_______

In most living rooms they sit there, ignored, old and left behind. I talk not of Grandmothers at Christmas, but of the humble landline. The mobile phone has enjoyed an emphatic victory over it among an entire generation. Very few people under 30 even give their home number out any more. Indeed, landlines only ever get used for chats with Mums like a version of the Downing Street to White House emergency hotline only with more talk of Ethel next door’s bunions. In our house, when it rings we glance at one another with the kind of horrified look formerly reserved for midnight chapping of the door by police officers or my weird cousin Kenny. I still remember our childhood numbers, mind: everyone from our borstal does.

________

Seamlessly picking up the phone theme: lately I’ve been getting exasperated with people moaning about call centre queues, options and outsourcing. I need some kind of system whereby I can give them buttons to select should they wish to proceed. Press 1 if your diatribe is about muzak, press 2 if it’s about the cost of the call and press 3 if you’re masquerading slightly racist views with a pretend point about commonsense and will soon say, ‘I mean, I’d be the same with a broad Geordie, honest’.

________

Disconcerting scenes round our way: the postman’s only gone and taken a three-week holiday. I’ve had number 16’s mail twice, and Cathy up the road found Paula’s free Gillette Venus sample in with hers. People are livid, taking to the streets in their slippers to shake their heads and furtively leaning to pick-up red rubber bands as if extracting single hairs from a murder scene. The poor stand-in has no chance among curtains twitching like Ikea flea circuses and dogs sensing new whistling, red-shirted meat. The whole neighbourhood is in chaos. Tough times indeed but we’ll pull through.

________

There’s only one way to avoid the creep of mild Seasonal Affective Disorder, and that’s turning the clocks forward when they’re supposed to go back. No-one really understands the whole thing anyway, and twice a year most of us have to use our landlines to ask our Mums which one it is. Just think how early you’ll be for everything. I think. No, is that right? Because if it was dark at 7 it’ll now be…oh I don’t know anything anymore.

________

Issue 69: Pen Portraits from the Port: Poundland and phoning Sophie Webster

What does Asda stand for? Associated Dairies. What does Tesco stand for? Low prices and everyday value. Ay? AY? Oh, you people. Last month, said retail colossus brought its Clubcard points and half-price Tony Blair bibles to the Cultural Quarter (see editions of this piffle passim. I’ve always wanted to use the word ‘passim’. Now I can look myself in the eye. Using a mirror, obviously). Risking the ire of Mr Lidl, I bimbled down on opening day in search of free things and to find out if every little really does help.

That, anyway, was the plan – I hadn’t reckoned upon half of Midlothian doing the same. Never had I seen the likes: old boys crammed to price-up John West tinned salmon; grannies rubbed their hands suspiciously across 45p Tesco Value foil; and a fat girl in a Flintstones t-shirt picked up some fluffy red slippers with all the warped reverence of Cinderella’s shoe-fetish prince. Where had all these people come from? Where had they shopped before?

I could only conclude that I was in the presence of a travelling Tesco Army, distributed by the coach fleet load to attend store openings across Britain. As I became stuck in-between two trolleys by the soya milk, my paranoia worsened: were these even real people? I mean, that bloke over there angrily complaining about them running out of chicken breasts, does any human really care that much about poultry, Bernards Matthews and Clifton aside? And that woman there, who somehow knows where the Tracker bars are; who on earth knows where the Tracker bars are, I ask you? The Tesco Army, that’s who.

_______

While Tesco brought its brutal consumerism to the CQ, Poundland gently slotted in like a kindly impoverished Auntie at a wedding reception. On its own opening day, an actress from Emmerdale turned up to cut the ribbon and bark at anyone adding the suffix ‘Farm’ to her programme’s title, mysteriously lost in 1989. Once I’d got over the fun of repeatedly picking up items and asking staff members ‘How much is this?’, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience; how can the spectacle of a potential shoplifter protesting ‘why would I bother stealing from here, everything’s only a quid?’ be anything but enjoyable? My favourite eavesdrop, though, came from the woman who approached a shop assistant hanging up skeleton costumes and witch hats and remarked: ‘Is that the Christmas stuff up already, hen? Jings, it gets earlier every year.’

________

When the leaves crunch underfoot, a trademark Autumn can make you glad to be alive. The artist Kyffin Williams wrote ‘There is poetry in the dying of the year and mystery as well,’ which perfectly sums up that feeling (When the leaves squelch that’s a different matter, but scraping your feet across grass and removing the rest with an ice lolly stick should do the trick.)

Autumn means time for sitting on benches, a particularly underrated pursuit. Thoughts are gathered on benches, and tempers calmed there. Whole communities live their days upon on them, and some their nights. First snogs, business chats, lunches all occur on benches, though only if you wait there long enough. Most benches have plaques dedicated to the dead and buried on that, their favourite spot. I hope one day to find one that says ‘Big Davy sat here and got pished every day. Aye, he loved a bevvy in the park, right enough.’

________

Non-lowbrow television watchers look away now. This gobbet contains scenes of a soap nature.

Lately, I’ve been trying to help Kevin Webster find his daughter Sophie on Coronation Street. Pausing the telly and writing down the number from her ‘Missing’ poster (07760 900 763, in case you want to try), I called to say I’d seen her in Sheffield, shacked up with that Sian lass. However, all that greeted me was a woman doing a passable impression of Moira Stewart ostensibly unaffected by the inhaling of helium. ‘The number you have dialled has not been recognised,’ she said, ‘please check and try again.’ And do you know what? She only bloody hung up. No wonder they can’t find Sophie.

________

Issue 68: Pen Portraits from the Port: Jabba the Hutt carrots and fascist hairdressers

August was a momentous month in our garden. After much deliberating and high-level conferencing, we finally pulled a carrot out of the ground. This was not just any carrot; it was a shrivelled, pathetic carrot resembling one of Jabba the Hutt’s thumbs. Having stared at it for a while, we then washed said carrot, barbecued it and applied some Reggae Reggae sauce, which took much of the foul taste away. Next to be uprooted was a courgette, the only survivor in its family after a savage ransacking by the kid next door’s Finding Nemo football. On the palate, this performed a little better than the carrot, and we only fed 80 to 85% of it to the neighbour’s dog. On reflection, gardening has failed to resemble popular documentary series The Good Life.

________

On three Saturdays through the same month, accompanied by a supreme Spanish guitarist I read stories from that book wot I wrote, Homage to Caledonia, as part of the Fringe. All three shows sold out, with many of the audience members only slightly related to me. This was generally a good experience until the final week when one lady went to sleep on the front row and the man next to her erupted in a coughing fit of sarcastic proportions. I’ll not be inviting my parents next year.

________

Talking of fringes, one of the pains of my existence is the haircut. Every few weeks I’ll go along to some bonce rug reduction unit or other and remember just how rubbish I am at banal conversation. This is not to say I deal only in the sparkling, far from it (I own five books about trains for a kick-off), but I really am poor at chit chat. Put me alongside the most prattling of taxi drivers and within minutes he’ll be whipping off his seatbelt at the traffic lights and running for the hills.

At the hairdresser’s, I’ll try to fit in by pretending to enjoy an old issue of Esquire magazine. Then, there’s the nervous acceptance of a cup of tea, trying to slurp it while describing that you want your hair styled the same way as last time despite never having been there before, followed by the alarming feeling that the barber is about to say something vaguely fascist. It always reminds me of an old schoolmaster I’ve just made up. When asked ‘how would you like your hair cut today, sir?’ he’d emphatically reply ‘in silence.’

________

Picture the scene. In the beginning, there was only a few of them. Then in time they multiplied at the rate of screen-faced Von Trapps on a desert island. iPhones. i-bloody-Phones. Small ‘i,’ large ‘P,’ and ruining the very thing they were born to facilitate – conversation – for three years now.

Look up in any café and there you will see their pie-eyed users pushing away. In the street, hark at the way those users walk with one arm outstretched checking Facebook, slaloming into one another like zombies sponsored by Apple. They’ve got ‘Apps’ for telling you when the number 49 is due and Apps for ruining Likely Lads-style football score avoidance. They are information vats that delete the possibility of surprise and ruin the traditional pub quiz. Like Mrs Doyle and her teasmaid, I like the misery of knowing nothing and of using age-old timepiece and timetable technology to catch a bus. I’ll be sticking with my Alcatel, thanks, an anti-iPhone that chuckles and says ‘Are you taking the piss, mate?’ when you mistakenly press the redundant camera button.

________

Issue 67: Pen Portraits from the Port: Working from home and the Haribo dentist

When I tell people I work from home, they react in one of two ways: ridicule or awe. The concept is either preposterous and can result only in Jeremy Kyle and first name terms with the postman, or it inspires a level of unquestioning admiration reserved usually for firemen and Stephen Fry.

To the first bunch, humans are unable to labour without carrot and stick, or at least if they have a carrot and stick it’ll be turned into a sculpture in pursuit of work avoidance. To the second, domestic toilers are paragons of self-discipline – industrious Stakhanovites dressed in opus dei baw-ticklers for good measure. The convenient truth lays somewhere in-between.

There are many theories about how best to work from home, very often written by office-based journalists who have never suffered the daily agony of taking in the rest of the street’s Amazon deliveries. Regular breaks, dressing smartly and going for a walk round the block ‘to work’ every morning are recommended (the latter falls down when you get in and mistakenly think you have been at work all day, open a can of lager and find it’s 8.45am. That’s what I told my wife, anyhow).

The message seems to be ‘make home like an office,’ an edict I am closely following. First off, every Monday morning I’ll call a meeting with myself about the week ahead. As I walk into the kitchen, I’ll say in a thoroughly irritating voice, possibly my own, ‘oh hello. Someone had a bit of a rough weekend!’ and banter with the kettle about how Ian from accounting got off with the new girl.

At some point in the week, there’ll be a surprise fire drill: I know, because I do the alarm noise. Single-filing downstairs, I’ll assemble in the forecourt at the front of the building (the flagstone by the wheelie bin) and reprimand myself for thinking ‘Christ, I hope it’s a real fire.’

It’s outside too that I perform another of my office functions. With no watercooler to congregate near, chats over the fence with my neighbours are invaluable sources of business intelligence, if you count who isn’t sleeping with whom and which local takeaway has rats as intelligence, which I do.

Morale is very important to our organisation, with teambuilding exercises toe-curlingly frequent. Mood facilitation games include trying to balance a pencil in between my lip and filtrum and roll it into my mouth, throwing a teabag into a mug from across the room and running my finger along surfaces and tutting at the dust as I pass.

Really, it’s a wonder there’s time left to watch any telly at all.

_______

The recent opening of The Parlour (a pub, it’s a pub, ok?) on Duke Street just confirms that area as Leith’s hippest. With a Pets & Things (what things?), three bus stops complete with Tracker and the brand new Marksman quiz night, it is every inch the Cultural Quarter.

The Parlour has nothing to do with a former Arsenal midfielder and is a little bit ace; with a popcorn machine and separate section on the menu for Monster Munch, how could it be anything else? Aside from an atmosphere that couldn’t be any more amiable if it kissed you on the lips, wiped dirt from your face with its hanky and gave you 50p, by stripping the old Golf pub back to its knickers and deep-cleaning them, they’ve revealed the building’s inner-gargoyle; now, you can look up and enjoy being eyeballed by an ornate Victorian carving. I’m not sure which one out of Ying and Yang is the good one, but if it’s Ying, and Yang isn’t just suffering from a bad press profile, then the Parlour is Duke’s Ying to the new Tesco’s Yang. Got that?

It was in that Parlour that a dentist friend from back home in Yorkshire revealed her love of Haribo Tangfastic. This is no mere dalliance with the wormy sweet made to make your mouth cringe, but full-blown, twice-a-day addiction. What she expected was shock and tut; what she got was accord and nod. I am just the same, only with a wider range that lurches from chocolate limes right across the scale to Midget Gems. This conversation was therapy for us both. We agreed that society would be easier on us if we came out as alcoholics or drug abusers than adult sweet fiends, and that green wine gums were vastly underrated. It was the kind of erudite discourse that made a 1970s Open University maths documentary look like….. Typical of the Cultural Quarter, really.

________

Links to a few more Leither pieces:

Issue 65: Pen Portraits from the Port: John Cormack

Issue 64: Pen Portraits from the Port: William Wedgewood Benn

Issue 63: Pen Portraits from the Port: Eduardo Paolozzi

Issue 62: Pen Portraits from the Port: John Gladstone

Issue 61: Pen Portraits from the Port: John Hunter

Issue 60: Pen Portraits from the Port: Robert Jameson

Issue 59: Pen Portraits from the Port: Clarice Shaw

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Old Fanzine Scribblings

There will be a selection of 2002-2008 pieces when I can find them, but until then you’ll just have to wait for my controversial views on the 12-minute loan spell of John Eustace. Here are a few articles from my last two years of sporadic Fly Me to the Moon contributing. Note spectacularly wrong predictions from pre-season 2009/10 and optimism about Gordon Strachan. Foolish.

v. Crystal Palace, 6.11.10

Tales from the Script

Last Saturday was the equivalent of those awful mornings where your Mum would wake you for school as you dreamt of a chance sauna-based meeting with Agent Scully (just me then? Oh.) A beautiful thing that would’ve had you smiling for the rest of the week was interrupted, stopped in mid-flow by hideous, bumpy reality. It was not supposed to happen.

Paragraph two – time for a cliché: Bristol City had not read the script. Or, in these days of austerity and picking on the weak, Boro had employed a cheap imposter of a screenwriter. He knew nothing of the background that should have shaped a happy ending: nothing of Mogga horsing a Mitre Delta 126-feet in the air by Dial-a-Duck dug-outs and chasing after it like a teenage shoplifter running from HMV security guards; nothing of Mogga scything a deserving tricky winger in the centre-circle before placing pleading arms around the referee’s elbows and charming his way out of a booking; nothing of Mogga charging into a melee, a fracas, a stooshie to drag his tempestuous young teammates away and kill provocateurs with one shattering laser stare; nothing of Mogga human cannon-balling to frighten the ball into the Ayresome net as if irritated by it; nothing of Mogga making the Holgate maelstrom hop and jive like elated idiots on the best drug known to man; nothing of Mogga’s floppy peroxide hair or his wedge in photos of Evening Gazette-sponsored days and 50p photos from Diane and Derek in the club shop; nothing of Mogga posters lining a thousand teenage Teesside walls, our popstar, our heartthrob with the giant heart; nothing of Mogga inspiring another thousand teenage Teessiders to become centre-halves, head the ball too much and make captain’s armbands from the school first aid bandage supply; nothing of Mogga standing for what seemed like whole Saturday teatimes to scrawl ‘Be Lucky’ in books, on programmes, on photos, on shirts, on scraps; of Mogga shaking hands and pledges of never washing again muttered on the cobbles by the Ayresome gates; of Mogga in Dickens and Heritage Hampers, amusingly quaint sponsors for a human tank; of Mogga being spotted in town, in real life, walking among us, shopping, eating, doing human things; of Mogga back from Ipswich and making the Riverside shake, a wave for each stand and then an annoyingly efficient performance for them – them, how can they understand?; of Mogga rumours and songs during every bad run over five years; of Mogga returning recurring dreams; of Mogga making them true; of Mogga in his press conference, all Bovril and Holgate and startlingly strong accent despite two decades of exile; of Mogga, someone who gets us.

A terrible screenwriter indeed.

v. Sheffield United, 7.08.09

Some friendly

 The average pre-season friendly (and sometimes they don’t even reach the lofty heights of ‘average’) leaves you far too much time to think.  There is usually a crowd silence so indifferent that to call it eerie would be an outrageous lie.  Supporters look baffled that they are actually there, as if a bored and out of work National Lottery ‘it’s you’ hand has scooped them off a beach and dumped them at Brunton Park or Roots Hall.  If these games were trailers for future films, you’d gladly boycott the cinema for the rest of your life.

My own flirtation with Boro’s seasonal preamble this year came by virtue of a visit to Dumbarton and the charmingly christened Strathclyde Homes Stadium.  The ground is named after Sherlock’s brother, a joke that works much better verbally.  In the gaps between arriving, half-time and full-time, also known as ‘the game’, these are the five things I learned:

1. The new kit looks an awful lot like a Coca-Cola vending machine.  I kept expecting a digital message to flash the words ‘Use Correct Change Only’ across Robert Huth’s forehead.  One of the consequences of this Boro swoosh is that all players appear to be wearing the captain’s armband.  I only realised this when I spotted Julio Arca; I can’t envisage the day when he’ll be skipper, unless Captain Birdseye pegs it.

2.  Gary O’Neil has turned a very strange colour.  It reminded me of the hue you get when you mix all the flavours of Iceland Neapolitan ice cream together in a bowl.  Colour aside, O’Neil is slowly turning into a Robbie Mustoe that can finish, which is not a bad thing.  The tabloids, though, claim he is homesick for Portsmouth, which is odd because he’s from south London.  I’m homesick for Caracas.

3.  No matter what the level, Julio Arca will inevitably pass to an onrushing opposition player forty yards from goal at least twice in every match.  Meanwhile, I will inevitably worry about his posture, which will cause him an awful lot of pain in later life, you mark my words.

4.  Jeremie Aliadière is a world class finisher when the flag is up.  It’s as if he can only score when he knows it is wrong, like a man able to have sex with anyone but his wife.  He seems to think the flag is used as in motor racing, a signal for him to begin.

5.  Mark Yeates will be a terrace hero and will get sent off two or three times this season.  The two are not entirely unconnected.  He has the manic look of a thirsty tramp going through a bin and the feet of Johnny Hendrie down the wing.  He looks like footballers used to look.  Already my favourite player.

v. WBA, 19.09.09

The view from the afternoon

After thirteen seasons in the same seat, Daniel Gray has decided to roam.  In a sporadic series that will have readers going ‘oh yeah, I forgot about that because the last part was so many months ago’, he takes us through the pros, cons and crackpots of areas north, south, east and west.

The seat

West Stand Upper, Block 79

Pre-match build-up

It was on the fourth day of waiting for the post that I realised a ticket wasn’t coming.  I now feel awful about setting the dog loose on the Postman.  The poor thing had to be destroyed afterwards, and he wasn’t long in the job.  You see, the ticket I’d purchased did not actually exist, explained the lady in the ticket office (the clue is not in the name).  It had been uploaded to my Boro Pride card, a virtual ticket.  Once I’d tutted to myself a bit and said ‘whatever next?’ and ‘I don’t like change’ a few times, I set about embracing this era of the new-fangled.

View

Delicious.  The kind of vantage point that enables genuine tactical insight, I thought.  “Aw come on O’Neil, tackle him yer fanny” came the tactically insightful comment from behind me.  Nonetheless I liked it, and so it seemed did apologetic arm raising’s Curtis Fleming, a few rows down.

Neighbours

To my left, a young mother and her daughter sat in quiet contemplation.  In these circumstances, I always feel like telling the child that it’s not too late to escape, that he or she isn’t beyond refusing to let Boro ruin the rest of their lives.  But then no one saved me from all this, so, applying the bitter logic a north-eastern disposition brings, they should suffer too.  Behind me, a man sat with portable radios clasped close to each ear, a refreshing if over the top reminder of the days when someone near you always had a wireless and thus scores from elsewhere to hand.  Next to him, a bloke with a suspicious tan took calls from his wife at ten minute intervals, each time telling her of his fictional progress home.  Incredibly, his wife failed to spot that he had passed Sainsbury’s for a second time.  You wonder why he had to cover up his attendance by lying to this extent.  At least in the absence of tickets there would be only virtual lipstick on his collar.

Concourse

Disconcertingly, there were no queues at halftime, and the person behind the counter did not refuse my Scottish money.  I perched by the window and looked across the muddy Middlehaven desert.  Aside from the repeated failure of regional regeneration policy, all was well in the world.

The verdict in a Smiths lyric for no apparent reason

I like it here can I stay?

 

v. Watford, 17.10.09

Obituary: Alex McCrae (1920-2009)

As a player, Alex McCrae, who has died aged 89, lived in the shadow of his strike partner Wilf Mannion.  It was, too, Mannion who lived on in the folk memory of Middlesbrough supporters.  Yet McCrae was a sublime footballer in his own right, and the last Boro player to score more than twenty goals in a top-flight season.

A miner by trade, McCrae joined Hearts, his local side, in 1941.  He continued to hack out a living underground, catching the bus into Edinburgh to train in the afternoons.  The left-footed McCrae’s prolific strike rate at Tynecastle turned heads in England, and he was transferred to Charlton Athletic in 1947.  Failing to settle in London, in October 1948 McCrae moved north to Middlesbrough for £10,000.  Amidst familiarly industrial surroundings, he found comfort and goals, as well as a deadly partnership with Mannion.

In the 1949-50 season, playing inside-left McCrae netted 14 goals in 36 starts, his pace and athleticism setting him apart.  The following year, the Scot scored 21 times across 32 games.  By the end of November alone, McCrae had plundered three hat-tricks as Boro’s lethal number 10.  He simply teemed with goals.

McCrae was to miss 10 games that season through injury, leaving Boro fans with a familiar feeling of what might have been; as it was, David Jack’s side finished a creditable 6^th in Division One.

By March 1953, McCrae had become stale at Ayresome Park, and returned to Scotland, and Falkirk, a team he later managed with no little success.  Yet perhaps with a nagging sense of unfinished business on Teesside, in November 1966 McCrae took a job as manager Stan Anderson’s Scotland scout.  He did not fail: among his many stellar recommendations was legendary goalkeeper Jim Platt.

Anderson’s decision to appoint McCrae was in all likelihood influenced by his standing in the north-east.  McCrae was renowned as an affable, selfless professional, and refused to writhe in agony following the desperate and meaty defensive challenges his tricky play so often provoked.

McCrae’s portrait now hangs in the Falkirk Hall of Fame.  As the accomplisher of a feat successive Boro forwards have failed to repeat, perhaps it is time his achievements in this town were recognised.  This inspired footballer should be extricated from Mannion’s shadow and recognised for what he was: a Boro legend.

v. Plymouth Argyle, 31.10.09

This Charming Man

Even if he deserved to go, and that is debateable, he didn’t deserve to go in that way.  Gareth Southgate’s sacking had an unfamiliar feeling of dirtiness about it; Boro just don’t act in that way.  Why midnight?  Why not the afternoon before or the morning after?  Somehow, the time of day makes it all the more grubby, a witch-hunt at witching hour.

Whatever Southgate’s failures (and yes, things changed for me too after Cardiff City), he simply deserved better.  In an age of footballing dilettantes, The Gate put heart and soul into this club, falling for us hook, line and sinker.  He plunged himself into community activities and knew that ‘Erimus’ was not a Brazilian midfielder.  Southgate simply understood Middlesbrough, town and club, and became fixated on leading it as skipper then gaffer.  Southgate was an advocate.  As a manager, perhaps it was this missionary zeal that meant at times, he simply tried too hard.

Mistakes were often made.  Indeed, his sacking might even be overdue.  But to terminate the marriage so abruptly is bereavement not divorce.  It is probably the kind of ruthlessness that separates successful businessmen from the rest of us, but I always saw Steve Gibson as a different kind of capitalist; not just a caring one, but one we could actually love.

Still, the fact remains that the decision to sack Southgate could be a good one.  Certainly, the one to bring in Gordon Strachan comes right out of Gibson’s cavernous top drawer.  The chairman has seldom let us down in the past, and while Southgate’s sacking is still smeared in a greasy veneer, this is a gem of an appointment.  Just remember, up the road a chairman was concurrently announcing his own masterplan to sell off the name of the stadium and keep his reviled control of the club.

v Scunthorpe United, 26.12.09

The view from the afternoon

After thirteen seasons in the same seat, Daniel Gray has decided to roam.  In a sporadic series that will have readers going ‘oh yeah, I forgot about that because the last part was so many months ago’, he takes us through the pros, cons and crackpots of areas north, south, east and west.

The seat

North Stand, Block 17.

Pre-match build-up

The omens were there when the fixture date and kick-off time were changed: Cardiff City, on a Sunday, at dinner time.  Still, omens are for superstitious people and, armed with the scientific fact that Boro were a bit rubbish at the minute, I knew we’d lose without resorting to such witchcraft.  I opted for the North Stand in the vain hope that I’d encounter atmosphere.  If I did, it was of the Russ Abbott rather than Joy Division standard, unless you consider booing David Wheater to be a good thing.

View

This was almost the exact same seat I sat in for the Steaua Bucharest game, so a little bit of me died when I saw Marcus Bent instead of Mark Viduka.  Still, we had the same steady, assured goalkeeper behind the sticks as on that night.  What could possibly go wrong?  It’s a strange view from here.  The pitch appears to slope, though that could’ve just been because the Boro midfield looked like they were perpetually running uphill.  It’s also interesting to look back on the West Stand after all my years there; to see a tartan blanket from 100 feet is always a thrill.

Neighbours

I had an Expert to my right.  Amazingly not employed in the professional game, he knew exactly when Boro should just “clear the bloody lines” (any time we had the ball in the last 90 yards), “cross it in early” (any time it’d just been crossed in early) or “get it in higher” (any time the aforementioned early cross had hit the first man).  In front of me, there was a bloke with a slightly out of proportion hatred for Michael Chopra.  I especially enjoyed the elongated heckle “oh f*ck off Chopra, you not-right-in-the-head tw*t”.  Mind, they’ve probably banned the word ‘mental’ now, haven’t they.  PC gone not-right-in-the-head it is.

Concourse

Oh the bounteous fare, the cakes and ale!  What variation!  It appeared that Newboulds had annexed a large part of the stand, and quite right.  A Parmo in a bun.  A lager and a pork pie.  Two women arguing violently about Justin Hoyte.  Worryingly or brilliantly, a steward asked me to let her into the queue at half-time, at which point she ordered six lagers and began swigging immediately.

The verdict in a Smiths lyric for the steward

v. Sheffield Wednesday, 10.04.10. With Paddy Dillon.

Political football

Oh those bloody militants.  If it’s not the Trotskyist trolley-dollies at British Airways having the gall to take industrial action then it’s the anarcho-syndicalist accountants at the tax office on the picket line.  Added now is the unlikely figure of James Beattie, who, it was revealed three weeks ago, recently instigated grievance procedures against his employer Stoke City.  The forward was unhappy about the role played by his manager Tony Pulis, a man who shits the words ‘well, it’s all that political correctness these days, isn’t it’, in an altercation following defeat at Arsenal.  Yet Beattie’s is not the first instance of trade union-won procedure and protocol being employed in football, as we’d now like to gently remind you.  Come, stand by this barrel of burning tar and rub your hands in frosty nostalgia.

1920s Work to Rule 

In a climate of militancy that was to culminate in Britain’s 1926 General Strike, the Boro squad of 1923/24 were at the revolutionary vanguard, and it’s not often you can say that about an organisation led by a man named Herbert Bamlett.  Appalled at the crass commercialisation of football (the tipping point came when the club shop started selling Gramophone recordings of the Ayresome Park crowd singing ‘you’re going home in a North Riding charabanc’), manager Bamlett encouraged a squad ‘Work to Rule’.  Free-kicks were no longer advanced ten yards from the causal offence, penalties were missed and dismissed as tools of reactionary bourgeois punishment, and Bamlett imposed on himself a moratorium on uttering stock management phrases such as ‘good feet for a big man’ and ‘low sense of gravity’ in post-match interviews.  At first, little harm seemed to come from the Work to Rule. Forward Andy Wilson netted five in an Ayresome rout of Nottingham Forest, and Newcastle were easily beaten by the Teesside righteous. Yet opposition scab labour eventually and emphatically did for Boro; Wilson scored again only once all season, and Bamlett’s men were relegated, bottom, with just 22 points. They had, in the words of contemporary political commentator and Marxist firebrand Clifford Pender-Urwin, “paid for their cowardly and Menshevik adherence to all-out strike action”.

Craig Hignett’s equal pay claim

When centre-parting’s Hignett accepted a pay cut just to stay at Boro in the summer of 1995 – a time when the average footballer’s wage was beginning to spiral – he cemented his status as the darling of the exploitative bourgeois class. Despite a consensus on the streets of Teesside that he’d been hard done by, there was just no telling the boy. The naivety of the young Hignett soon subsided, however, to be replaced by a fervent brand of trade union activism following radicalisation at the hands of Neil Maddison in 1997. The West Stand Upper cried trade union victimisation when boss Bryan Robson played hardball yet again by refusing to meet the popular Merseysider’s relatively measly wage demands towards the end of the 1997/98 promotion season. An incensed Hignett (serves him right for sitting on the front bench in church) set about familiarising himself with the intricacies of the Equal Pay Act 1970 and quickly lodged a claim on the grounds that he was worth at least as much money as a spherical Phil Stamp. Yer’ jokin’ aren’ yer? Hignett was swiftly sent on secondment to Aberdeen.

Malcolm Christie and the Accident at Work policy

Thanks to Malcolm Christie, the accidents book at Rockliffe Park between 2003 and 2007 read like the script of an episode of calamitous 1970s sitcom ‘Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em’. In one entry, a seemingly innocuous training ground challenge from double-thumbs-up’s Chris Riggott sent Malcolm’s left leg catapulting through the air, only to land on the back of an unmanned moped which rolled up a ramp into the back of a lorry and then splashed into a lake, to uproarious canned laughter from the rest of the lads looking on from the canteen. His right foot soon met the same fate. For someone who worked as a supermarket shelf-stacker before finding footballing fame, Christie was guilty of an astonishing lack of awareness of health and safety protocol. However, suitably embarrassed by his succession of broken somethings and shattered such-and-suches, he managed to bend his knees and keep his back straight for long enough to submit a batch of retrospective Accident at Work claims in the hope that he could find the employer to blame for at least one of them. Regrettably, each claim was doomed to failure when it materialised that the player had suffered no financial detriment whatsoever in the course of being limited to 29 starts in four and a half years at the club. Christie is now unemployed, possibly unemployable, and was last seen updating his Facebook status.

The General Strike of 2008/09