Salut! North

Angels of the North (1)

Ann, Barbara, Anthea, Dorothy, Christine, Rosemary, Margaret, Trish, Irene, Belinda. And the dark-haired beauty at the Redworth bus stop.

This is not a Salut! North version of that harmlessly silly song about having "a little bit of Monica in my life/a little bit of Erica by my side......". It is just the list of girls who occupied places of varying affection in my heart when I was single.

Even if you add a couple of missing names, it is not a particularly long list by the standards of today or, for that matter, the not quite so liberated 1960s. It becomes shorter still if you filter out one or two that scarcely qualify for inclusion as girlfriends.

My friend Len had much greater success. We'd prowl the rec path on spring and summer evenings, giving the eye to - and hoping to get it back from - any pretty girls that came our way. Actually, it was Len doing most giving of the eye. With perfectly good reason, he would tell me that when it came to chatting up, I had neither boldness nor finesse.

One day soon......

.......I intend to find time to write and post some more memories. The pressure of work is building, I am no longer wifeless in Abu Dhabi and everything must wait its turn.

In the meantime, feel free to let me know what you think of the new design - appropriately, if rather grandly, called Vicksburg Desert.

Programmed to fail

Life, for most of us, is a messy mixture of success, failure and downright ordinariness.

There is no special desire on my part to dwell on the middle bit of that list; it is just that when I think of my young days in the North East, the failures stand out rather more prominently than the humdrum, and much more so that success.

That introduction could have led into any one of several topics. Schooldays, despite what has already appeared at Salut! North, could be explored further. So could the process by which I came to realise I was unlikely, after all, to play for Sunderland. What about those feeble early attempts to attract girlfriends?

All in good time. For now, let me tell the sad rags-to-rags story of the North Eastern Programme Club.

Maybe these Scottish programmes would have sold
Picture: Lutrus