Flats (nearly) for sale!

Ah the bliss of being woken by a dog-kiss! Even if horribly early. My mother had many "rules", one was no dogs upstairs. But then there came a time I was home alone with the dog of the time - yes, a labrador. Instead of a quiet howl/whine from downstairs (I always seemed to end up sleeping over the kitchen where the dog slept) at sunrise to be reminded he was there and it was morning now, a patter, patter, patter and gentle lick to be told the sun was up... and if I must sleep longer, move over, he was going to lie beside me.

Many years later, now married to Jane, I accidentally got my own back (as regards animal early awakenings) on one of the cats draped around the bed.. one (I hadn't realised) was on the side by me when I suddenly felt like curling up, half asleep, and too late I realised it had been there but I'd hurled it onto the floor. It looked most surprised, I was normally so gentle!

Ah well! Animal memories apart, thought I should show the recently-completed neat front of our development house, gate and wall and gravel "driveway" in place... with, yes, our car parked on it, poster for Jane's book A Proper Family Christmas showing in the back window. (She spent this afternoon reading some of her canal ghost short-stories, soon to be published by Oxpens, to author Colin Dexter, who loved them.)

So, the front looks good, nothing else to do on my lists...

And this shows one of the gardens at the back - there's one per flat. Nothing to do there, either, except move a large bag with a bit of topsoil in it that looks ugly and except that the grass grows all too quickly and Jane worries that the flowers may start dying away before the insides of the flats are ready for a public eye. Well, valuer and prospective purchasers.

But inside is coming along like a ... I was going to say "house on fire", but that might be tempting the fates, even if it is insured. (Come to think, I must tell the insurers it IS now two flats...)...

This morning the downstairs lights went on (the mains sockets already "on")... even if I did suddenly realise too late (for today) I hadn't done the shaving light over the basin in the bathroom thereby leaving a floating now-live cable in mid air... and a lot of the final painting started. We have still got to build the kitchen and lay floor finishes and arrange some carpets and I've only done half the tiling in that bathroom... upstairs needs a bit more but nothing drastic... can't see it should take more than 2 - 3 weeks.

Oh, and when I turned on the lights (downstairs) the outside lantern didn't go on but the hall light did for the wrong switch... and I could have sworn I'd labelled the wires so carefully... shucks. All corrected, didn't take long. Mind you, I always find that if there's only a choice of two it is incredibly easy to reverse them - it's exactly like the intensely embarassing moments one has said "yes" when you meant "no" or vice-versa. Can't believe the number of people I've met say they've had the same effect - I mean, about saying "yes" instead of "no" ... where the annoying thing is that in conversation you can get totally trapped with no opportunity to say "I said the wrong one!"... that sounds too crazy... and it can take such ages to explain you'd actually meant "no" (or "yes") but accidentally said the wrong one.

I know I'm not alone in this. Apart from embarassing memories, just the other day when we took friend and neighbour Caroline to the hospital for a medical test (results A1 OK, thank goodness) she raised the theme herself. It seems to be a common failing and, in fact, why, for example, people let salespeople talk them into signing on for things they didn't possibly want.

But lets not get into that. I've still not checked where my huge Don Quixote book is - it might even be valuable for all I know - that sort-of-related second-husband of that great aunt made a lot of money from the manufacture of enamelling of baths and kitchen cupboard tops and collected expensive things, I was told. Must admit I loved the collection of clocks - and uncle Harold (step uncle Harold) had to adjust most of them to chime the last half hour on the pull of a string for another relative who had gone blind.. well, almost. I only met her very young and I remember I was rather shocked to discover she wasn't totally blind so I'd been mislead by all-knowing adults yet again...

Alan says he gets angry for being older. I find I get invaded by reminiscences I know nobody really wants to hear about, but they so spin around in my head it's therapy for me to simply concentrate (when I can) on specific good events. Like getting my wiring right.

Theme Thursday - Kiss (From A Big Wet Nose)

Each morning I am awakened with a kiss. I would like to be able to say that it is from my good lady wife, but regretfully that is not the case. She awakens me with an elbow in my side and a mumbled request for a cup of tea. The kiss comes courtesy of Amy. And before you start getting silly ideas, Amy is a seven year old soft-coated wheaten terrier and probably the most adorable dog in the world. She sleeps at the bottom of our bed and she tends to wake up when Isobel aims the tea-demanding elbow in the direction of my slumbering form. My wife is Alpha Dog in our household and Amy sees herself as Beta Dog. She takes it upon herself to reinforce my wife's early morning wake-up call by endless wet kisses and annoyingly wagging tails. After a short period of time you realise that the kisses are just as bad as the sharp elbow to the ribs and so off you go to make tea.

One of my favourite singer-songwriters, the late Jake Thackray, used to have a song about his dog called Ulysses. It contained the following lovely verse :

When I stumble home at night I'm jaded and stale

And so I try to take a little repose

I don't want waking up with a happy tail

I don't want a kiss from a big wet nose.

The song tells of how the poor owner is driven to suicide because his dog gives him too much love. Hopefully that will not happen to me. I could only find one clip of the Thackray song : who knows where the images come from and why they were used with the music. But ignore the images. Close your eyes and listen to the words. .

An Alphabet Of Pauperization : Illness, Heredity And Drink

I was on my way somewhere when I got distracted by the big book yesterday. The book - the one illustrated at the top of yesterday's post - is one of the early 19th century minute books of the Ionian Bank Limited. Most of the early minute books have been digitised and are available in an on-line archive held by the London School of Economics. I was merely browsing through the collection when I got side-tracked and started wittering on about big books. Where I was actually heading for was another of the LSE's on-line digital archives : the archives of the great Victorian philanthropist and social reformer Charles Booth. If you have never visited the Charles Booth Archives do take a visit. It is a place I return to again and again : it is the kind of place you need to go to when you feel sorry for yourself or when you imagine times are hard.

The particular collection I would refer you to is the Stepney Union Casebooks - a series of six notebooks which contain detailed case histories of the inmates of Bromley and Stepney workhouses and of people who received outdoor relief from the union in the late nineteenth century. You can stop at any page and read the reports ... and weep. I have included a reproduction of just one of the hundreds of cases - the case of Frederick Andrews. Frederick was 52 and worked as a carpenter until rheumatic gout meant he could no longer work. It appears that he sold his tools to pay for treatment and later he applies to the Poor Law Guardians for a grant to buy new tools so he can work again, but the Receiving Officer (RO) discovered that he was "living with a woman that had taken to drink". No tools, no work, rheumatism returns and Frederick is going to just one place - Bromley Workhouse,

On the inside cover of the Case Books the Officer - in this case a Mr J Jones - records the abbreviations that are used throughout the book. In effect it is an alphabet of pauperization, a lexicon of misery. The list says so much about our Victorian ancestors and how they viewed poverty. Whether it was through drink (D), Immorality (J), Recklessness (R) or Laziness (L), pauperization would get you in the end. And if you managed to avoid all of these there was always Misfortune ("Ye Gods") (Y) which could dispatch you to the Poor House. Poor Frederick Andrews was classified as I, H and D : he was the victim of illness, heredity and drink. What became of him I do not know but it can be safely said that few people left the workhouse to go on to a life of luxury and plenty.

Last night my good friend Tim and I were having a discussion - admittedly a discussion which was fueled by home-made cocktails and beer (D) - about post-modernism. Was progress now an illusion? Perhaps ... that is until you return to read the Stepney Union Casebooks.

One You Could Press A Rose In

I've always wanted a big book. There is something about a big book : it invites big thoughts, it encourages big projects, it promises to leave a big impression for those who follow on. I have often seen big books in the dusty windows of side-streeted stationery shops. Minute books, ledgers, anything-but-commonplace books. I am seized by an almost physical desire to go in and buy one even though I would have nothing to put in it. Such books can't be filled with shopping lists, to-do lists and half-remembered Internet passwords. The book I carry around with me is tiny, it fits in my back pocket. It is convenient, it is handy, it is a canvass wide enough to encompass my modest life. But I wish I had a big book. Leather bound, marbled end-paged. One you could press a rose in.

Moaning Monday : Intriguing Suede

I know I have moaned about this before, but what the hell : a good moan is like the food in a cow's stomach, it should be regurgitated and enjoyed on several occasions. Having established that principle let me say that one thing that is guaranteed to get me frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog is the stupid and pretentious names builders choose for their new housing developments. It is almost as though there is a competition taking place to come up with the most trivial, asinine, ostentatious label they can find for their new duplexes, studio flats or urban spaces. Within ten miles of where I live there has recently appeared such gems as Echo Central, Nexus, Heritage, Suede, Quattro and Intrigue. What kind of person could possibly want to live in such a development? What kind of fool can imagine that what might appear trendy to a dunderhead now will not appear plain idiotic a few years down the line?

Time was when street names told you something. At the bottom of our street is Bradford Road. It is called Bradford Road because if you walk down it you will get to Bradford. Other streets were given logical names based upon specific factors. Chapel Street was the street upon which there was a chapel, River Street ran close to the river, and Towngate was at the entrance to a town. Not far from us there are three short streets. The first has about twelve brick terraced houses and it is called Brick Terrace. The second has twelve houses faced in rather nice red tiles and it is called Tile Terrace. The third street has a mixture of the two and is called Brick And Tile Terrace. You can see the logic in that. You don't need to spend a long time trying to work out what on earth it means. The names tell you something about the houses, not about the people who happen to live in them. But what does Quattro tell you? Other than the fact that anyone living there is likely to be a prat.

The rot set in - as with so many things - in Victorian times. The Victorians were apt to name streets after "great people" or famous battles. The local phone book is stuffed with Gladstone Streets and Balaclava Terraces. It is a trend which, thankfully, seems to have gone out of fashion and therefore we have been spared the likes of Blair Boulevard, Thatcher Mews, Goose Green Glen, or Kuwait Drive. The 20th century brought a trend towards aspirational names. If you were building a row of bleak terraced houses in grimy Heckmondwike you would give them a name like Ambleside Close or Windsor Drive. I live in a 1930s house on Dorchester Road. If you walk down Dorchester Road you will get to Dorchester. The problem is it will take you a couple of weeks and you will pass through Huddersfield, Sheffield, Nottingham, Coventry, Birmingham, Reading, Slough, and Southampton first. But at least you could see a purpose for such aspirational monikers, you could argue that they might brighten the lives of people who would otherwise live on Bog Green Street or Water Closet Crescent.

But what is the point of naming somewhere Intrigue or Nexus? Other than to drive me mad and start me off moaning all over again.

Looking For Leaks In My Head

It was raining when we set out for the Friday Night Pub Quiz last night so I took one of my hats with me. I have a large collection of hats not because I am eccentric .... On reflection, let me rephrase that. I have a large collection of hats not just because I am eccentric, but because I always fear that if my cochlear implant gets wet I might short or spark or something. So off I went wearing my large brown trilby : a hat with a brim wide enough to keep a small garden-party dry. When I got settled with my pint (for those who care about such things it was a pint of Sam Smith's Sovereign) in our usual cozy corner I had cause to examine my hat only to discover a slight dusting of fine sawdust on the inside! Was something leaking? What other explanation could there be? The last time I did any joinering was in woodwork classes some half a century ago.

In my search for an explanation of this strange phenomenon I remembered a story I had been told many years ago. It concerned a group of friends who worked in a city office. This was way back in the 1960s and one of the friends still came to work each day in a bowler hat. His friends thought this was slightly pretentious behaviour for the swinging sixties and decided to teach him a lesson. They clubbed together and bought two new bowler hats, each one exactly the same as that worn by the friend, except one was a size smaller and one was a size bigger. One day whilst the poor chap was out of the office, they substituted the smaller hat for the one he had arrived in that morning. At the end of the day they watched carefully as he put on the hat, seemed to pause a moment, and with some effort pull it down onto the crown of his head.

The next day they substituted the smaller hat for his normal one and thought they detected a slight look of relief when he came to put it on that evening. The next day they introduced the larger hat and were rewarded by a concerned look on the face of their friend which, of course, was slightly hidden by a low-slung hat. Over the following days they substituted the hats at will and by the end of the week the chap was a nervous wreck, fully believing that he had a dreadful disease that was causing his head to alternately swell and contract. They were all prepared to continue the treatment the next week but their friend never turned up for week : he was on sick leave suffering from "nervous exhaustion".

As I examined the inner lining of my hat and brushed off the small dusting of sawdust I looked around at my friends. Was Dave watching a little too carefully? Did Graham exchange a carefully disguised grin with Jimmy? I am still not sure, but from now on I will keep a careful watch of my head and my friends ... looking for leaks.

Me And My Family On Tenterhooks

For some years now there has been an old photograph curled up in a tight roll sat in the bottom of the box where I keep family photographs. The last time I rolled it open was several years ago. It is in a perilous state, cracked, dried and brittle. I know that I will be able to open it just a few more times before it disintegrates into shards of bromide paper, and then it will be lost for ever. I need to scan it, to preserve it, but I know that the very act of scanning it will destroy the original for ever. For ages I have been trying to work up the courage to make a start on the process, and this morning I took a deep breath, stretched it out and started the scanning and restoration process. The print was on tenterhooks - and so was I.

This is the first scan. You can see that it is already in a poor state. The restoration process should keep me occupied most of the day. But what you can see already is my fathers' family in 1917. Let me introduce them. From the left you have my Auntie Annie, my grandfather Enoch, my grandmother Harriet, my Uncle John, my father dressed in his sailor suit, and finally my Auntie Miriam. As you can see both my grandfather and my Uncle John were in uniform : this is 1917 at the height of the Great War. If you look very carefully you can detect a slightly different background at the part of the photograph where my grandfather was standing. This was because he wasn't actually there when the photograph was taken : he will have been far off in Flanders digging tunnels. It was a standard procedure to "burn" in images of absent soldiers in order to produce family groups even though, in reality, the family has been split open by the war.

Six members of the family, frozen in time in 1917. Over the next six Fridays I will try and tell the stories of each one of them : to unfreeze the image and let it move forward. We will start next Friday with Auntie Annie.

Theme Thursday - Buttons

My mother had a button tin. It was an old toffee tin and it was kept in one of the cupboards in the kitchen. Although the original contents of the tin must have been exciting and inviting to me as a child, it is the eventual contents that remain in my memory. In those days clothes were repaired. In those days buttons were re-sewn on shirts, trousers and jackets : time and time again. In those days clothes were never dispatched to the rag-bin without having all their buttons carefully taken off and lodged in the button tin. The button tin was as much a store of memories as it was a store of tiny pieces of plastic, metal and bone. To riffle through the button tin on a wet afternoon was to revisit times long-gone.

Now, we do not have a button tin. Like most of our generation we are materially wasteful. When buttons fall off shirts, the shirts are cast into a dark place at the back of the wardrobe. When old clothes eventually make it into the waste bin or the clothes bank they do so with almost their full complement of buttons. But, funnily enough, I still have a tin of button memories. It's a virtual tin, to be sure, and the buttons are not the type that my mother saved. But the memories are just as real.

I remember my father had a concertina. He would play it at family parties. It was never a long recital as he only knew two tunes : Moonlight and Roses and Silent Night. He would call the instrument his "button box". As I write this I can remember the feel of the buttons beneath my fingers as I tried to coax a tune from the thing. There was a wonderful simplicity about it : you pressed the button, a valve was opened and a note would emerge.

If I jump forward a good few years I can recall more buttons. The buttons on my first transistor radio. Big buttons, chunky buttons. Buttons that were pleasing to press. Buttons that would take you from the comfort of the Medium Wave, to the mysteries of the Short Wave or the exotic realms of the Long Wave. Buttons that had the power to take you to Luxembourg, Hilversum and Kalumborg.

Jump forward again and I am sat at the wheel of my father-in-laws car. It was a Renault 10 and it had a "revolutionary" semi-automatic transmission which was based on a series of buttons. You could press the button marked "Forward" or the button marked "Backward" or the button marked "Park", leaving the automatic transmission system to sort the gears out. It sounded so easy but, at times, it would prove so difficult.

There was - and still is - a particular hill leading out of Elland called Upper Edge. The gradient must have been unknown in the native France of Renault cars. The car would start up the hill and decide it needed to change down to complete the accent. It would gather speed in the lower gear and decide to change up again. In changing up it would loose revs and decide to shift down again. If you were unlucky the car would remain almost stationary on the hill, continuously shifting from one semi-automatic gear to the next, like the army of the Grand Old Duke of York neither going up nor down. I would sit cursing the ingenuity of the system pressing button after button in the hope that something would happen.

It's been raining this morning and it's been fun sorting through my old button tin. If you want to know how the other participants in Theme Thursday have approached this week's theme you can find all the entries here.

A Fire At Atkinson's Mill

In my attempt to visit as many pubs as possible before they all close down, I today went to the Beaumont Arms in Kirkheaton. In my attempt to drink as many excellent pints of beer as possible before I die, I had a pint of Timothy Taylor Landlord. If you want to find out about the pub or the pint take a look at my Great Yorkshire Pubs blog. But if you want to cross the lane from the pub and step back nearly two hundred years, stay where you are.

In the churchyard opposite the pub there is a monument to "the dreadful fate of seventeen children who fell unhappy victims to a raging fire at Mr. Atkinson's Factory" in February 1818. The monument is a stark stone column pointing towards the grey sky.

One of the panels contains a poem telling of "a parent's anguish for a suffering child". Perhaps it caused a tear or two when it was first erected but the poem somehow left me cold and unmoved.

Another panel states "Near this place lie what remained of the bodies of seventeen children, a striking and awful instance of the uncertainty of life and the vanity of human attainments". Uncertainty of life! Vanity of human attainments! I want to scream out loud. I have read the story of the fire at Atkinson's Mill. The fire started when a boy accidentally ignited some cotton with a candle. The mill doors had been locked by the overseer had gone home to bed, locking the children inside to get on with their work. This story - the truth about what happened in the mill - has not been carved into the fine stone panels. This murder is as unrecorded now as it was on that dreadful night in 1818. Read the names of those eighteen children and then shed a tear.

Into The Void Part 6 : Escape

I can still remember the day of the Switch-On quite clearly and also the days that followed. Getting used to sounds again was a curious process. At first I was amazed by the sound of birds singing but then I became overwhelmed by the noise they made. Alexander discovered me sat in the garden a couple of days after Switch-On throwing pebbles at the apple tree in my attempt to scare the local bird population away. A few days later I had learned to partially "tune-out" the bird songs which was both a blessed relief for my sanity and, I am sure, an equally blessed relief for the birds. I became a regular visitor to my local car repair garage, taking my car back on at least two occasions during the first few weeks after Switch-On, convinced there was something seriously wrong with it. "What's the matter this time?" the car mechanic would ask in exasperation. "It's making the most awful noise", I would reply before been told patiently that that was the kind of noise all cars made.

Within a remarkably short period of time the "Minnie Mouse" effect began to fade and I no longer heard artificial mechanical voices but natural ones full of a host of different tones and rhythms. I became fascinated by accents : particularly the accents of people who I had met only after the deafness set in. When you are deaf you do give people "voices" but these tend to be devoid of the richness and variety of natural speech patterns and it was a delight to re-discover the many regional accents of Britain.

The most glorious re-discovery was undoubtedly music. When I had questioned people before the operation they had suggested that, if I were lucky, I might be able to follow music I had previously known. In such cases memory might fill in the gaps between the level of information the implant could handle : music was, after all, a very complex code of information. Within days I had started to experiment. With tremendous joy I discovered that I could follow - indeed I could enjoy - music, even music that was new to me. I went through a strange, accelerated learning process where - for the first time since my early teens - I became hooked on the latest pop songs that were doing the rounds. The simpler forms of such tunes were ideal to learn to cope with the more complicated structures of, what had always been my great love, jazz. Within a few weeks I felt able to test out my abilities by going to a live jazz gig at a local pub. I had not listened to live jazz since the Gerry Mulligan concert some fifteen years earlier. It was just a local band, nothing special. They played on the patio outside the pub. There were not that many people listening. Most people were talking or eating or reading the Sunday papers. But if you had looked carefully that day you would have seen a chap sat near the front crying his eyes out. Crying with joy at being reunited with music after so long an absence.

It is eleven years since Switch-On and several things have changed. Cochlear implants are no longer categorised as experimental and the funding problems I mentioned in my e-mails of the time have largely gone. The external parts of the implant system have improved in their design and size and the batteries, speech processor and transmitter are now so small they are hardly noticeable. But some things don't change. Every morning when I wake up I attach the implant and switch it on. I cough. And it is not until I hear that cough that I know things are alright. I know that for another day I will be able to hear.

Drive and electrics

As light relief from Ali's fabulous but (I find) still emotionally intense account of regaining his hearing....

(Which still thrills me as much as when I first heard it - hearing me for the first time he, of course, claimed he hadn't known Jane had married a Russian.... it was truly stunning following his implant to be able to simply sit and chat with him rather than have to grab pen and paper to thereby rather clumsily try to discuss anything remotely complex!)

MP (our development house) now - as in the photo - has a front "drive". Well, gravel parking for two cars, where the brick paving is on the left will soon (tomorrow) have a little front wall and a pedestrians' gate. And that's the front "garden" done. At the back, flowers are blooming and the lawns growing all-too fast. When we go along to paint and wire and build bathrooms and kitchens, we now park in style on "the gravel drive." It's seriously useful because the house is in a cul-de-sac and previously, parking in the road, we always had to go to the end to turn around - as Jane said "Now we'll never see the end of the road ever again."

Inside, downstairs, the mains sockets are now connected - as is the cooker supply (but the cooker itself - it's separate hob and oven, as are splashback and hood, sitting in boxes awaiting attention and constantly getting in the way - need built units to be fitted in.) The boiler awaits the gas man to commision it - water, radiators, bathroom, gas and electricity are ready and waiting but the kitchen sink needs... units to support it. If you foolishly wonder if the waiting pipes for the kitchen are OK and fiddle with the little valve, you get very wet. Just as if you wobble the valves waiting for the washing machine in the utility room trying to clean spilt the plaster off, it becomes a wet room without the tiles or drain. But it does settle the inevitable building dust a bit. Yes, I did that, of course.... I mean, knocked the valve merely intending to clean off plaster, forgetting the result would be a jet of high pressure water... - I've left the water pressure connected just in case time revealed any leaking joins. Actually modern push-fit plastic piping is rather like Ali's implant... very simply, it works. But I'm still constantly told cautionary tales it "won't really".

So, our development is all good stuff and at a guess we'll be ready for final inspections and setting up sale arrangements within about four weeks. This has been a long haul so it's a huge relief to see the end of the project in sight. Sadly, the fact is that we won't really be happy until we see money ching into our account to repay all the loans we had to arrange to cause all the good works.

Whether we end up with a profit is almost neither here nor there - that's all about the state of the housing market. It does seem likely that in fact we'll come out about even and there's even glimmerings we may do better. If it is evens, that's OK, that means an awful lot of money (after loans repaid) available for a next project. But definitely simpler. Or not. We have learnt so much from this project to do the SAME would not be anything like the same problem or cost.

I've debated my tail end comment forever. Ali's true story about his hearing is SO fabulous.. but I have my own story of debilitating illness where in 1979 something so fabulous happened I often want to tell the tale. Would anybody like to know?