Nothing But A Lyptechare

I had a strange dream last night. In the dream I was attending some kind of public occasion and I became aware that the chap sitting at the next table was about to make a short speech about me. I half recognised the chap concerned, I had known him slightly about twenty-five years ago when. for a while, we taught the same course. But I had not met him for over quarter of a century and I had no idea why he was about to deliver a speech about me. For some reason I had a copy of the speech and at that point the dream "slipped" (in the way dreams do) and I was going to have to deliver the speech, written by my old acquaintance about me, myself. In quickly reading through it I was initially more concerned with presentation rather than meaning - does this say something very deep about me - and I was anxious to check to make sure there were no words which I might find difficult to pronounce. Near the end I found reference to the word "lyptechare". Searching for context I re-read the short sentence which said "In short, he is nothing but a lyptechare". My focus of attention now shifted from how the word might be pronounced to what it might mean. What was I being accused of by this one-time friend of mine? I immediately sought out a dictionary and looked the word up. When I eventually found the page it was on, Amy jumped on the bed and woke me up.

It was such a powerful dream that I immediately found some paper and wrote the word down. The dream may have been gone for ever but at least I could still investigate the message. What was being said about my character and personality? What critique of my life was contained in that short sentence? I grabbed the dictionary and quickly thumbed through it looking for "lyptechare". Nothing. Perhaps I had wrongly transcribed it. I tried various different spellings .... liptechar, lyptochare, etc. Nothing. I Googled it to see if it might be a foreign word or phrase. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

I am therefore caught in this dreadful dilemma. I know what I am. I know how history will judge me. The one thing you can say about Alan Burnett is that he was nothing but a lyptechare. But what does it mean?

French Me A Fry

I was walking the dog the other morning and listening to Diana Krall singing "Peel Me A Grape". It had been a long time since I had heard the song and I suddenly remembered how spectacularly good the lyrics were. If you are not familiar with the song, here is a snippet :

Pop me a cork, french me a fry

Crack me a nut, bring a bowl full of bon-bons

Chill me some wine, keep standing by

Just entertain me, champagne me

Show me you love me, kid glove me

Best way to cheer me, cashmere me

I'm getting hungry, peel me grape.

I had a feeling that I knew who had written the song just by the feel of the lyrics : the sheer joy of the word-play and the slightly odd-ball direction the song comes from, but as soon as I got home I double-checked. And yes, it is the work of the truly great Dave Frishberg. Frishberg also wrote another of my favourite songs - "My Attorney Bernie" (Blosson Dearie does a splendid version of it) and he also penned the equally brilliant "Quality Time". If you have never discovered his work, check it out.

Flying Monochrome Cycles

There is something about the starkness and the strange idiosyncrasy of the cycle sign that appeals to me in this shot. And it really was as grey and grey as the image suggests. It is just down the road in the Business Park. Where the cycle lane goes to I have no idea.

Still Sober After All These Months

It is now over six months since I embarked on my lonely odyssey to visit, record - and of course, drink at - as many traditional British pubs as I could still find. Conscious of the fact that in an age of smoking bans and cheap supermarket booze, pubs were vanishing faster than Gordon Brown's supporters, I was determined to get around as many as possible before the only choices left were plastic play-pubs and snotty gastro-pubs. Six months on, it is time for an interim report.

The project has changed name and changed objective a good few times during its short lifetime. It started as the "100 P Challenge" (100 pints in 100 different pubs). Soon it morphed into the "100 Px2 Challenge" (100 different pints of beer in 100 different pubs). Then I decided to focus the odyssey on my own county of Yorkshire and it became Great Yorkshire Pubs. Then I got lazy and lost my evangelical fervour. I stopped going out, drank very little, became introspective and grew my toe nails. Sad.

So yesterday I decided to relaunch the project. I dusted down the blog site and set out to blog another Great Yorkshire Pub. I found myself in Bradford so I visited a bar called "Brass". You can get an idea of the place from the photograph above. To find out what I made of it, visit the Great Yorkshire Pubs blogsite.

Swollen But Not Much Stirred

I managed to get down the hill into Brighouse yesterday. The TV news programmes were still doing the "alarm and disaster" thing with stories about people being evacuated from their homes, but it must have been a different Brighouse they were talking about. There was a bit of mud in one of the car parks but that was about it. The river was swollen but well below its retaining banks. It was all a bit disappointing and reminded me a little of Young Albert who was taken to Blackpool by his parents :

"They didn't think much to the ocean;

The waves, they was fiddlin' and small ;

There was no wrecks... nobody drownded';

Fact, nothing to laugh at, at all.

So, after walking around for a bit and taking a few photographs, I took my stick with its horse's head handle and went looking for a zoo.

Panoramio

Often whilst Google Earth browsing (there should be a better verb available for this activity, growsing or something like that) I have been impressed by the embedded photographs available via the Panoramio layer. If you are not familiar with Google Earth (shame on you), this layer gives you access to fairly high quality images which are "rooted" to the actual locations via the Google Earth maps. Thus, as you wander down a country lane in County Kerry, you can click on one of the little blue spots and see a splendid image of the Iveragh Peninsula - or some such joy. Obviously there was some review and selection procedure at work : the images are quality images and there is not the usual selection of headless mothers and cute dogs one normally associates with on-line photo albums.

So in need of a distraction to keep me from filling-in my tax self-assessment form, I went in search of Panoramio. It is now part of the Google Empire, but the site was established by two young Spanish software engineers who wanted to develop a means by which you could file and display images from a geographical perspective. It has now become hugely popular and the system can be used to both store your images and display them to the public via Google Earth. Once you have an account - in the best Google traditions, free to set up - you can store any photographs and - if you so choose - submit them for inclusion as Google Earth Panoramio images.

So I have my account - you can access it via this LINK - and I have a few images already there. We will have to wait and see whether they pass the Google Earth selection process.

Flowers In The Rain

Colours, shapes, movement : flowers in the crematorium grounds lashed by wind and rain.

The Yorkshire Floods And A River Of Snot

A streaming, energy-sapping, spirit-crushing cold has kept me largely indoors for the last 48 hours where I have occupied myself by watching BBC News 24. Two stories dominated the news - the crashing stock market and the flooded streets. The streets in question were in West Yorkshire, indeed they were within a mile or two of where I sat. But I live on the top of a hill and all I could do was to sit up here and watch the water flow away. By mid-afternoon, the television was saying that children were being rescued in Brighouse and houses were being evacuated. The newshound in me dragged me out of my sick-bed and, camera in hand, I set out for Brighouse. But a few hundred yards down the road I began to realise the impossibility of the task : traffic was stacked up as roads were grid-locked. I turned the car and headed home for bed. So no photographs, no first hand reports, no tales of wading through flooded streets. Just a very red nose and a river of snot.

American Billionaire To Take Control of the NHS (Hopefully)

When real-estate mogul Sam Zell became Chief Executive of the American media conglomerate Tribune Co. at the end of last year many anxious employees and curious onlookers wondered what changes would befall the company that controls such newspapers as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. After all, the blunt-speaking, jeans and cowboy boot wearing billionaire had little or no experience of the newspaper industry and some feared a combination of Murdoch-type editorial control and blatant asset-stripping. But curiously enough, it does not seem to have worked out that way.

One of the first actions of the new regime has been to publish a new Employee Handbook which sets out corporate core values and workplace rules. During a previous life, I would spend long and painful hours ploughing through such documents within the NHS. As Human Resources departments became more powerful such policies would expand in both coverage and complexity like a field of blooming jellyfish. It is therefore with outright joy that I read about the new employee handbook in an article in yesterday's Washington Post.

You can get an idea from the section marked Company Rules which runs as follows:

"Rule 1 : Use your best judgement.

Rule 2 : See Rule 1
That's it. That is the one hard and fast rule. Unless a serious mistake was made when you were hired, you have pretty good judgement"

Other gems include the following:

"Employee Manual

4.1 : Working at Tribune means accepting a creative, quirky, intelligent, odd, humorous, diverse, opinionated and sometimes annoying atmosphere
4.2 : Working at Tribune means accepting that sometimes you might hear a word that you, personally, might not use. You might experience an attitude that you don't share. You might hear a joke that you might not consider funny. That is because a loose, fun, nonlinear atmosphere is important to the creative process.
4.3 : This should be understood, should not be a surprise and is not considered harassment".

In an introduction to the Handbook, Zell writes that it is "a reminder not to take ourselves too seriously and to have fun". I have only one thing to say to Mr Zell and it is this : "when you've finished sorting out Tribune Co. do you fancy coming over to the UK to take charge of the NHS?"

Edie And Mother

I remember saying some time ago, in relation to old picture postcards, that it was often the message on the back which was more interesting - and more instructive - than the picture on the front. Sometimes the same is true of old family photographs.

If anyone has ever undertaken the task of sorting, digitising and cataloguing family photographs (and if you haven't done it yet, you should do it now before it is too late), they will know the importance of those scribbled words on the back of a photograph : they are worth their weight in printing ink (if you have recently bought a new ink cartridge for your printer you will appreciate the scale of this claim). If you are the type of person who adds witty subtitles to your everyday snaps - power to your elbow. In a hundred years time someone will no doubt give thanks for your scrawling. The worry is, of course, that as fewer and fewer digital images are actually printed off, there is no canvass for such historical doodlers to perform on.

Anyway, the little photograph reproduced here was small, tatty, scratched and bent. Such imperfections can easily be overcome with the help of Photoshop. The real treasure, however, was the description on the reverse :

"10/8/47 : Edie and Mother. She wanted to get dressed up but we told her it didn't matter for snaps"

The Edie will be Isobel's mother Edith. The mother will be her mother-in-law, Sarah Shaw. The reporter, no doubt, will be Isobel's father Raymond. Small-scale social history at its best.

Discovering An Acquisitive Yardstick

When I was young I had a dream. We all had them - those recurring day-dreams which somehow composed a picture of perfect happiness. Into such a picture would be transposed all those things we longed for : school-free days, summer weather, friends who wanted to be in your gang ... that kind of thing. For me, the two central images would always be a cart and a dog.

I had always longed for a dog with a degree of longing only those who knew the true meaning of impossibility could experience. To my parents, dogs were smelly, flea-ridden, an encumbrance, a pest, an expense and something people living on Oaklands Avenue just did not have. To me a dog would be a perfect companion, loyal and loving. In the clash of these perspectives I knew I could never win. But I could dream.

A "cart" was something that was vary popular amongst my friends in the 1950s. Invariably home-made, such carts consisted of a central wooden spine to which were attached four old pram wheels. A wider board would be attached to the rear of the central spine for the driver to sit on - or during more sporting occasions - lie flat on. Carts were self-propelled, exciting, adventurous, fun and offered a form of childhood transport that could take you to strange lands such as Shibden, Hipperholme and Shelf. To my parents carts were dangerous, silly, dirty and something people living in Oaklands Avenue just did not have. Once again, in the battle of perspectives, it was no contest. Once again I could dream.

Eventually the dream subsided, to be replaced by other, more complex, teenage dreams. But the degree of longing I invested in that childhood picture has remained with me throughout my life as a kind of acquisitive yardstick. Yes, a flat screen telly would be nice - I tell myself as I walk around Dixons - but do I want one as much as I wanted a dog and a cart.

All this came back to me yesterday as I took my dog Amy a walk in the January rain. We turned a corner and there, in front of me was an old broken cart. The wheels were spreadeagled and the wooden spine was broken. But still it sent a thrill down my old spine. I wanted to patch it up, fix the wheels, oil the axles, hitch Amy up to the front and fly home. Send the flat-screen back, trade in the digital camera, pawn the new computer. The boy had his dog and his cart at last.