Salut! North

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

Growing up

Salut! North is growing up.

Sixteen items posted.....it is what you have seen it become and there is much, much more to say. Each time I pour out one set of reminiscences, I know two things will happen.

First? My sister, Sandra, will write in (or to me) from Middlesbrough - where, unforgivably for any Durham lass, she has reinvented herself as a Boro fan - to correct my memory. Well perhaps that was harsh, since in truth she knows not the first thing about football and can therefore just about be excused for not supporting Sunderland (and probably thinks, in any case, that Boro still play at Ayresome Park).

The other thing that happens? Some other memory from childhood, youth and early adulthood streams back into mind. So this site has a long way to go. You will hear - inshallah (I am, after all, in inshallah country) - about girlfriends, elocution lessons, play, fights, jobs and much more besides. That list may well change, grow longer or get shorter.

But please remember - Irene from the Netherlands included, before I say "Irene, goodnight, Irene" - that I am helping to launch a new newspaper, an unbelievable project on more than one level in the age we live in. It is a huge challenge and a huge job; I do not have time to do that job AND write as often as I would like on my various websites.

My wife joins me (finally) in Abu Dhabi this weekend; she deserves some time too, and not only because she has packed a rolling pin to bring as hand baggage.

Friday - tomorrow - is the start of the weekend here and I may well have something to add then. You will find more in due course, if only you can bear to be patient and keep coming back. Salut!

Wet chips and Wate-on

No bones were broken. I was left grazed and dusty, not bleeding. There was, unfortunately, no cause to stay off school and counselling hadn't even been invented.

But it was still a middlingly unpleasant experience, being pounced on in the dark, pushed and jostled by two or three other boys and left feeling sorry for myself on the ground as they ran off laughing.

My crime, aged all of 11, was to be caught in possession of grammar school uniform while carrying a briefcase that even a bunch of louts could see was probably on its way to or from a piano lesson.

If only they'd known how bad a grammar school pupil I was, how hard I was applying myself to the sort of under-achievement that could have only one outcome, explusion, they might have spared me. But no, at that moment on the path that leads down from the King Willie to the railway tunnel top in Shildon, I was a "grammar school snob" and that was reason enough for their half-hearted assault.

The singer and the song; death by strangulation

Del Shannon has a lot to answer for. No, I am not talking about the hurt pride of the Shildon workingmen's club steward who didn't want to let him in without membership cards. This is more altogether more serious.

If anyone in the world was responsible for making me believe I might be able to sing, it was Del.

You can at least admire my ambition. There were so many singers of the age whose hits I could have chosen and whose voices would have been a lot easier to copy, giving me a sporting chance of stringing together a few notes and staying in tune. But who did I have to decide I would try to mimmick? None other than the master of falsetto.

No wonder poor Paul Younghusband talks of never properly recovering from the ordeal of living next door when, years after my attempts to become a Del Shannon soundalike, I took to practising folk songs. "My poor ears," Paul reports in his response to my item on the club trip, "were never the same."

Of kindness and gaiety at Christmas

In Britain, Sir Elton John, George Michael and even the likeable Coronation Street character Sean benefit from the tolerant attitude towards homosexuality that has prevailed for several years. In France, no one bats an eyelid that the mayor of Paris and top male designers at the fashion shows are gay.

Back in the 1960s, though, the only political correctness was that men who fancied men were queers, bent, poofs (though I think the word we used then was actually puffs). It didn't matter that surveys occasionally estimated one British male in five to be homosexual or, indeed, that some of our Continental neighbours considered this statistic on the low side.

I shall call him Ernie, not his real name but borrowed from the only other man to make advances to me.