Rathbone's Ramblin'

[rathbone]

One of Mrs. R.’s passions is contemporary dance. When we first got together she would drag me off to this theatre and that theatre to watch people leaping about. If I’m honest, while I didn’t mind it, I wasn’t overly engaged either. A lot of the time I sat there wondering if the music really was intended to drown out the clatters and thumps from the stage. It was all a bit fusty, all leotards, leg warmers and sub-standard Nureyev impersonators.

Michael Clark put an end to all that.

He’ll be fifty next month and started dancing at the age of 3. He left Aberdeen when he was only 13 to join the Royal Ballet School. Quite quickly he was getting into trouble for wearing ‘inappropriate clothing’. By his final year he was on the verge of being expelled for sniffing glue. He turned down a place with the Royal Ballet Company and joined Ballet Rambert at 17.

At 20 he became the choreographer in residence at the Riverside and at 22 he left Rambert and formed his own company. He was soon trying to fuse his choreography with the other influences in his life. He started forming pieces around Stravinsky, the Sex Pistols, Wire and The Fall. And then he met Leigh Bowery and everything got really weird. A series of great works followed, culminating in I Am Curious Orange. By 26 he was a heroin addict and the work began to go a bit wobbly.

Someone once described his technique as ‘choreography between the cracks’, which I think is a really good description. In some respects he’s like a joiner trying to fashion something from the junctions between music and movement, dance and space.

After Leigh Bowery died Clark fell into deep depression and stopped dancing for years. In 2006 he started dancing again. Some of the critics were positively vitriolic.

Last year there was a piece in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern featuring untrained members of the public who had volunteered to dance. There were people of all ages, body shapes and ability, all dancing along to music by Jarvis Cocker. Right in the middle was Clark himself.

[Rabigyin]

Ah, but there's one hell of a difference between a skilled cabinet maker and a "joiner" whose usual method of fixing something is the Glasgow Screwdriver! For the uninitiated, a Glasgow Screwdriver is a 4lb club hammer!

[rathbone]

I stand corrected.

In some ways he was like a skilled cabinetmaker.

[rathbone]

URBAN MYTH 3

There was this skilled cabinet maker from Glasgow who was an intrepid hang-glider. One weekend he decided to take off from the top of Arthur’s Seat. Unfortunately he had not banked on the Edinburgh weather. As he was drifting from thermal to thermal he was suddenly caught by a thunder cloud over Duddingston and whisked away in a freak updraft. He was ejected from the cloud at such a height that he entered the jet stream. Of course, he immediately suffocated at that altitude and his body was frozen solid. He passes over Edinburgh every sixty-four minutes, is regularly tracked by NASA on their radar systems and can be seen on clear night using a pair of good binoculars.

[rathbone]

We were having the annual wardrobe clear-out this weekend and I was surprised by how little denim I now own. There was a time when half of what I wore was denim. Now I’m down to two pairs of jeans. I wonder if it’s a subconscious propriety thing. Something about the way we see older people: that it’s not cool to flash your bus pass if you are wearing distressed jeans and a cut off denim jacket over your Mastadon t-shirt. Or is there another reason why I’m usually in check shirt and beige chinos these days (albeit with the occasional hoody over the top?

Even the shops that specialised in denim seem to have disappeared along with the fetish of selvedge colour. If selvedge is something you have never noticed before, you can date Levis by the colour of the stitching. In the 1950s and the early 60s they used yellow thread. From the mid 60s through the 70s it was red and from the 80s is was orange. To some fanatics these minor details mattered. I have some friends who will no longer admit that they once wouldn’t have been seen dead in orange selvedge jeans.

Then there were the other sought after artifacts. The Stormrider jackets with the corduroy collars and blanket lining. Those early Levi jeans with the extra rivets. The smaller pockets on the yellow selvedge jackets. Then there were all those, frankly artificial, finishes which the market was flooded with: Stonewashed, snow-washed, bleached, marbled, stretched to dyed. All of that malarkey culminated in the cult of the distressed. People were actually paying for rips and holes.

[rathbone]

Back in 1987 I made a big error of judgement. During the Festival there was an exhibition called Vigorous Imagination which featured work by Steven Campbell, Stephen Conroy, Peter Howson, Ken Currie and Adrian Wiszniewski. Collectively they began to be called The Glasgow Pups.

Most of the work was for sale, though not much was in my price range. There was a box with loose pieces in it. Rummaging through the ‘works on paper’, there was an etching by Wiszniewski which I could afford. The trouble was I much preferred Howson’s work to Wiszniewski’s. I hummed and hawed, put it back and had another turn round the exhibition, hummed and hawed again and left for something else at the festival.

For the rest of the afternoon my mind was more on the etching than it was on the performance I was at. The same that night. The following day I went back to the gallery, but it had gone. There was nothing left that I could afford.

Ever since I’ve had this idealised image of this small work by Wiszniewski in my mind. I’m sure that what is lodged in my memory probably bears little relationship to the actual etching, wherever it may now be, but what is in my mind has grown more wonderful over the years.

The reason it has come back to the surface is because I’ve done it again. In a gallery in Harpenden I came across a Hockney etching for £600. It was one of the series illustrating the Cavafy poems, but it was unsigned. I hummed and hawed. Went out for a coffee. Came back. Hummed and hawed again. I was balancing Mrs. R.’s likely reaction to me spending that much with the sensation of owning a Hockney. A bit of googling indicated that the signed edition had been limited to 75 copies, which change hands for around £3,000. £600 was a reasonable price for the unsigned copies, of which there are 500.

The following day I went back and, inevitably, it had gone.

[rathbone]

Some times there are pieces of music which just stop you dead in your tracks. Yesterday I was walking along minding my own business when the shuffle on my i-pod pushed a piece of music into my ear which had just that effect. “It’s Grim Up North” by The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu. It’s a deadpan catalogue of northern towns, recited by Bill Drummond over a techno track of tweaks, blasts and pummels, which suddenly blossoms into a glorious version of Blake’s Jerusalem.

It made me think of all those wonderful KLF and JAMMs tracks which were immediately deleted by Drummond and Cauty when they split up and how I would like to get my hands back on some of them now.

Of the JAMMs output none is probably more obscure than the Anthem Peace In The House album from 1994 which was dedicated to football and had such great tracks as ‘All The Way To Wembley’, ‘Huddersfield Town FC’ and ‘The Now Sound Of The Future Kirklees Stadium’. Stupidly I never bought it at the time and have only been able to track down a couple of tracks on the internet. ‘Huddersfield Town FC’ starts off with an air raid siren and then has a child reciting the names of the players of the Huddersfield Town squad over some excellent weirdness which mashes up ‘It’s Grim Up North’ with some brash brass.

I’m assuming that everyone reading this has a copy of ‘The White Room’ album. The holy grail for KLF and JAMMs fans is the unreleased ‘ The Black Room’. The first track on ‘The Black Album’ was meant to be ‘It’s Grim Up North’. Much of the rest of the album was intended to be a version of 3a.m. Eternal with Drummond and Cauty screaming the lyrics over a backing track provided by Extreme Noise Terror. The resulting piece was considered so extreme that the BBC refused to broadcast it. Like a lot of ‘lost’ albums, much of ‘The Black Room’ has been released on bootlegs over the years. In all, a little over twenty minutes worth of music is out there if you’re prepared to track it down. None of it reaches the pinnacle of ‘It’s Grim Up North.’

[rathbone]

In some ways I’m sad to see Ken Livingstone bowing out of London politics. It’s easy to forget what a force he was. At the height of his powers the only way that Margaret Thatcher could get rid of him was to abolish the Council that he led and, as soon as that Council was reinstated the electorate immediately re-elected him mayor.

While Boris Johnson depends on buffoonery to keep his profile up, Ken Livingstone has always gone for radical cheek.

He almost made it again this time, despite all of the hoo-hah about how much tax he was paying. The whole of the last London elections was reduced by the tabloids to a debate about Ken and Boris’ tax arrangements. The campaign never became a focus or comparison of policy Any hopes Livingstone had that he would win on the basis of detailed costings and help for the poorest were soon dented by revelations about his tax arrangements. For Livingstone once again, a painful truth was exposed: enemies gained, stances adopted, conflict pursued over a lifetime of political activism combined to bring him down.

Some of the media coverage was really underhand. The London Today t.v. programme revealed that Livingstone has fathered five children by three different women. As well as two young children by his partner, he has two adult children by one woman and a boy with another. "I don't think anybody in this city is shocked about what consenting adults do," he said. "I guess I'm just very fertile. When I was younger I liked to put it about a bit, no one cares now do they?"

The real shock to Ken came when London Today TV reporter, Katy Kay revealed the results of a recent DNA profile. All candidates for the position of London Mayor have to register on the national DNA database, ironically legislation which Mr. Livingstone himself introduced. The results revealed that Boris Johnson is in fact Ken Livingstone's love-child. Boris Johnson himself was unavailable for comment but later released a statement saying "I have known for some time that Ken Livingstone is my biological father, there have always been clues; my interest in politics for example, my love for amphibians and my desire to bed every hot young filly I come into contact with.” 

In his most recent interview Ken was asked if politics was anything like newt conservation. He answered "Yes, but the world of politics I now frequent is full of lizards who aren't as friendly as the lovely newts I knew in the 70s, and they're a lot slimier too.”

[rathbone]

URBAN MYTH 4

A man on his first visit to Portobello decided to visit Fort Kinnaird. He was warned by his friends not to attempt to walk back, but despite their warnings he decided to try it anyway. With a bit of difficulty he made it to Milton Road and then made the mistake of crossing the deserted waste of Portobello Park.

Around the golf clubhouse a skinny kid rushed up, bumped into him and dashed away. Fearing the worst the man checked his pocket and discovered his wallet was missing. He immediately gave chase, caught up with the ned in Milton road and grabbed him roughly by the collar. “All right, hand over the wallet,” he demanded. The little nyaff did as he was told.

The man was feeling pretty pleased with himself when he got back to his friends in West Brighton Crescent, but was more than puzzled when his friends told him he had left his wallet on the kitchen table.

[rathbone]

Interesting to see that the American presidential campaign has brought the moral majority creeping out its cave for another fling. Obama pitched for the gay vote, so the dinosaur rises.

It’s been a little while since it stirred in quite this way. Killing people who ran abortion clinics, if I remember correctly.

The Moral Majority (with capital Ms) was founded by Jerry Falwell in 1979 to act as an umbrella organisation for the american religious right. It started as a pressure group which sought to impose its views on teenage pregnancy, abortion, divorce, pornography and the need for daily prayers in school.

It was quickly embraced by the Republican party and it has been argued that it was the moral majority vote which led to Ronald Reagan being elected to the presidency, which is presumably why it is now back on the scene. Romney needs all the votes he can get.

After Reagan’s second term Jerry Falwell announced that the religious right was solidly in place and that religious conservatives in America were now in for the duration. That wasn’t strictly true (thank God), but their pernicious influence has pervaded american politics ever since.

The whole thing took a knock when t.v. preacher Jim Bakker’s affair with his secretary was revealed amidst much scandal and handwringing. But there are still estimated to be fifty million americans who consider themselves to be born again fundamentalist Christians who have a direct line to God and speak on his behalf.

Campaigns by the moral majority keep popping up on a regular basis, usually accompanied by placards saying “ XXXX you are going to Hell” or “God Hates XXXX”.

Probably the most bizarre has been their campaign against the Batman films and comics on the basis that Batman’s sixty years of sex free crime fighting with only young Robin by his side condones homosexuality.

[rathbone]

Recently I caught a photograph of Mick Jagger which really made him look like an old man. As a rapidly aging teenager myself, I know the angst which arrives when it starts taking the skin on the back of your hand five minutes to get back into place after you’ve pinched it.

The elder Rathbonette expressed surprise at the age of Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys when she was reading his obituaries. It’s as if these people aren’t allowed to grow up. In some ways, I suppose, we treat them a bit like Dorian Grey’s portrait in the attic. Rock stars fulfill our fantasies for us. They represent that part of us which wants to give free rein to all of our most childish feelings and not give a damn. Consequently we have invested a bit of our youth in them, so how dare they get older.

It’s a trap that the groups themselves fall into, with the result that they either don’t go away or else keep coming back. Take the Grateful Dead. Even death couldn’t stop that lot from carrying on. It paid off. They kept on playing right through their own revival and ended up with the biggest seller of their career with the ‘In The Dark’ album, which was bought in millions by kids who hadn’t even been born when the band started out.

Aerosmith seem to go on forever. David Johanssen of the New York Dolls just gets better and better. There are two versions of Yes currently touring. Despite the grim reaper having literally cut their numbers in half, The Who keep pounding away. At one time they would have been called rock dinosaurs, but no-one seems to use that term any more.

Sometimes it’s the younger bands who bring the dinosaurs back on to the stage. You can make a strong argument that it was the Beastie Boys blatant plagiarisms of Led Zeppelin which brought Plant and Page out of retirement.

The Industry’s response was to create AOR adult oriented rock. That was twenty years ago. What had been intended to target a cd buying baby boom generation is now downloading to their MP3 children. Roll on the Lady Gaga revival.

[rathbone]

Had to buy a new stanley knife at the weekend as my old one finally fell to bits.

Looked at as a piece of design, Stanley knives are well nigh perfect. Two simple cast pieces and one tooled slider all held together by a single screw. The user can adjust how far the blade extends from the handle. When the blade becomes dull, it can be quickly reversed or switched for a new one. Spare or used blades are stored in the hollow handle and can be accessed by removing the screw and opening the handle.

There was a time when stanley knives were the weapon of choice. They took the violence out of hurting and maiming because they were so efficient the deed was over so quickly. Five inches long, one inch wide with a two inch retractable blade that you could claim was intended for use on your shag pile. Britain never had so many carpet fitters.

Just googling Stanley Knife this morning brought up the following:

In Adelaide, Australia, a man armed with a stanley knife robbed a bakery. He threatened staff and fled with an undisclosed amount of cash. He was described as caucasian, about 168cm tall with short black hair and wearing green shorts and a dark t-shirt.

A 13 year old boy has been charged with possession of a stanley knife at a Barnet school. He was arrested after the school alerted the police that he had the knife hidden in his sock. He was released on bail.

In Inverness a teenager who was caught carrying a stanley knife was ordered to carry out 100 hour unpaid community service and had a curfew slapped on him as an alternative to a custodial sentence. His defence solicitor said the lad had been working as an apprentice bricklayer but after being laid off work had too much time on his hands and had fallen into bad ways largely because of "boredom".

A man appeared in court in Aix-En-Provence after he cut off his love rival’s penis with a stanley knife. According to the defendant, Blaise Fragione, 38, his rival came to his home and declared “I’m with your wife. If you’re not happy with that, it’s tough”. He said he then knocked out the man with a punch, removed his trousers, cut off his penis and threw it in the toilet. “Everything that I had refused to believe came to the surface and I just lost it”.

Please note that this knife is not for sale to people under the age of 18. By placing an order for this product, you declare that you are 18 years of age or older.

[rathbone]

I had a phone call from Archie Foley the other night. He’s currently working on a book about Portobello during the First World War and wants to use some of the research material that I gathered for the piece I posted here on the Local History thread.

His request threw up something which is a real problem on the internet. What Archie was after was citations. On this site I didn’t list citations for the items I was posting because to do so would have been tedious for the reader, but it is different if you are producing a definitive work such as the one Archie is working on.

I went back to my notes and started calling up the various websites which I had consulted in order to give him the url citations, only to find that some of them had disappeared since I took the information from them.

Unlike ‘traditional’ research material, on-line content can be frustratingly ephemeral. Sites come and go. I’m sure a number of readers here have tried to call up Duddingston Arcade recently only to get the message: ‘Sorry, the website duddingstonbooks.com cannot be found.’ Then there are sites which do come up but won’t let you log in, sites that just hang or, worst of all, sites which have just disappeared off the face of the ether leaving no trace behind.

Fortunately for Archie and I, most of the stuff he needs for citation came from the Scotsman Archive, which is currently down for maintenance and they have the courtesy to tell you that.

I’m not so lucky with the book I’m working on at the moment. This is a history of the Edinburgh music scene from 1951 to 2011. It’s on its penultimate draft and I’ve reached the stage where I am going through it pulling together all of the citations, only to discover that huge swathes of sites which I consulted have ‘disappeared’. (Incidentally I always like to get objective criticism of my stuff in draft before I stick it out in public, so if you’d like to help by reading the work in progress, let me know.)

At first I thought it was mostly a case of groups which had split up and taken down their own websites, or their MySpace and Facebook pages, but it goes further than that. One of the many culs-de-sac that I got sidetracked by during my researches, was exploring the career of my namesake who used to be the bass player in Dean Ford and The Gaylords forty years ago. There was a really good website covering the band. Now it has completely gone. That can’t be because the band split up! And it’s not the only site which has vanished in this way.

Sometimes sites vanish because the host has packed up. (I run an on-line fanzine called Bimbo which is hosted by Mobile-Me. Mobile-Me ceases to operate in July and I’m currently looking for a new host.)

I’ve been doing this sort of stuff for long enough to know that a lot of the time the information hasn’t actually vanished, it’s just hiding somewhere else on the web. Google and other search engines regularly clean out old addresses and update them with the current state of the web. Often the url has merely changed (there are many reasons for this), and with a search for the item in Google using the exact title in quotation marks you can normally find the item. A lot of missing information has found its way on to the Internet Archive at archive.org. (something that most people don’t even know exists.) Since 1996 they have been archiving the web. They have over 85 billion pages stored. The only problem is that you need to know the original url of the site you are looking for. If you do have that, and they have archived that site, they will call it up for you. If you don’t have it, you’re stuffed.

Disappearing websites is something that the internet community have not addressed. Given that most of our global knowledge base is now digital, if websites continue to disappear, perhaps exacerbated by the current economic climate that is killing off the companies that run host servers, our collective memory disappears too. There is a strong possibility that historians of the future will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century and we will all have to go back to books in libraries.

[rathbone]

I see that the closure of the Bongo club has made the national press, and under the absurd headline ‘The heart of British rock music is under threat.’

Hardly. It also describes the Bongo as an ‘iconic’ venue. Again, hardly.

In comparison with most Edinburgh clubs Bongo has had a good run since it started up in 1996. It has been at Moray House since 2003 and the University has now decided to terminate the lease in August because they want the premises for their own use as a resource centre for community education students. Now, I know there is some argument as to when the lease should have been ended, but this sort of thing is run of the mill.

The same sort of thing happened with both The Roxy and The Forest in 2010 after the Edinburgh University Settlement charity collapsed. Arguably those closures were more damaging to the Edinburgh arts scene than the demise of the Bongo will be.

It is true that there has been a gradual erosion of venues in Edinburgh over the last decade. It probably started when Wilkie House lost its licence back in 2001 following police concerns about drug use. Then the great Cowgate fire in 2002 took out La Belle Angele and with it Manga. The Venue went shortly afterwards to the dreaded propeerty developers. The University Settlement bankruptcy took out The GRV as well as The Forest and The Roxy.

It is always sad to see venues closing but, frankly it’s not the end of the world. Like everything else venues come and go. It’s a cyclical thing, usually linked to the economy. Overheads go up while punters have less to spend. Result, greater competition and fewer venues. I could produce a ‘where are they now’ list of Edinburgh music venues as long as your arm. None of them led to the end of music in Edinburgh far less threatening the future of British rock music.

[rathbone]

I’m having a book clearout and finally decided to ditch the Baudrillards.

Jean Baudrillard was a writer who had ‘cult’ scribbled all over him. Pick up any text and the words ‘implosion’, ‘signification’, semiotics’, ‘simulation’ etc. spill out on to your eyeballs. At least his books were easier to read than those of Derrida.

The problem I had with them was probably the piecemeal way in which his work initially came out. Complete texts were hard to come by, with extracts cannibalised for anthologies, so you had to more or less piece them together from a number of different sources. Even when The System Of Objects and The Consumer Society were published in their totality there seemed to be problems with the translations.

It appeared that, in his view, we were constantly searching for a sense of meaning that kept us in a fruitless search for total knowledge which led to a kind of delusion.He argued that a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality. I could empathise with that. Just consider these daily dollops of trivia which I deludedly think might be of interest to others.

He was wonderfully pessimistic: “The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in. Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin.”

So what, ultimately, did I glean from what he was saying and did it actually amount to anything? On the latter point yes and no. On the former: Capitalism will not be defeated by its contradictions so long as it can keep making a media spectacle out of them. Society will become dominated by media spectacle and that will not be undermined by scandal so long as it is used as a vehicle to make people consume. The consumer economy will not be subverted by irony so long as it can make a fashion out of it and if you think you can escape the judgement of fashion, forget it.

Look back over the current News International debacle and see how true that is.

[Sceptic]

Personally, Rathbone, I would put the demise of Sandy Bell's as Sandy Bell's above that.
There cannot be a folk singer of that era who had not performed there.
There again, how many pubs have a character of their own now?
Even the Diggers is not what it used to be.

[rathbone]

Sceptic, I would agree about Sandy Bell's. In fact the point I was making is that I'd put most things above the closure of the Bongo.


I was standing in the queue in MacDonalds yesterday waiting for my double sausage and egg MacMuffin meal when I thought: Bovine Spongiform Encephalitus. What happened to it?

This was the disease which was supposed to be devastating us all by now, but doesn’t appear to have arrived...... yet.

The first case of BSE was recorded in April 1985. Some scientists claimed it originated as scrapie, a disease of the brain found in sheep. It was caused by a virus which lead to madness and death. The virus was particularly hardy and could not be destroyed by heat. Any infected sheep were destroyed, minced up and used in cattle feed. That led to the virus being transferred into cows, with the same deadly effects. The cows were slaughtered, minced up and turned into beefburgers...........

Over 180,000 cattle were slaughtered at the heights of the scare in 1989, but it was estimated that, because of the long incubation period, as many as 482,000 infected animals could have entered the food chain, which meant that potentially millions of humans could have been infected. The human version was christened Variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease, or vCJD for short. was anticipated that there would be thousands of human cases by now.

In fact, to date, there have been 176 recorded cases of human mad cow disease in this country and around 100 in the rest of the world. All cases of vCJD are co-ordinated through the National CJD Surveillance Unit which is based in Edinburgh.

The problem with vCJD is that there is still no diagnosis. The incubation period can be up to eight years and it is only when symptoms start appearing that people can be suspected of having it and only postmortem diagnosis of the brain can determine for certain whether the person had it or not. Consequently scientists still predict that we may all be vulnerable.

Happy eating.

[rathbone]

Fifty nine years ago this morning my mum got me out of bed really early because we were going to my Auntie Margaret’s at Gilmerton to watch the Queen. That meant getting the tram up to Princes Street and the the bus to Gilmerton from the bus station in St. Andrew’s Square.

I was dressed in my best clothes, with my white coat with the brown collar, even though it was June. My great Auntie Mag was coming with us, but Nana wasn’t because she was helping out at a party at the Alexanders.

We were going to Auntie Margaret’s because Uncle Davie had bought a television set. I didn’t know what a television set was. Mum and Auntie Mag were very excited by the television. When we got to their house in Moredun Park Gardens, the television set turned out to be a disappointment. It was just a big brown box, a bit like a record player, with a small grey square at the top.

Auntie Margaret had been up half the night making sandwiches and baking cakes and Uncle Davie and my cousins were busy taking the kitchen table out into the street. Everybody seemed to be taking their kitchen tables out into the street. Then Uncle Davie and the boys started taking all of the furniture out of the front room, except for the television set.

I was more interested in what was happening outside, with all these flags being strung up on the lampposts and all the food being laid out on the tables.

But I was herded back inside at about ten o’clock. Lots of people packed into the front room and then Uncle Davie switched on the television and the little grey square started to show pictures. I was told that this was the Queen’s coronation. It meant nothing to me, but everybody else seemed fascinated. It went on and on and on so my cousin Robbie and Iwent to play in the garden. My mum brought us back in because ‘this was important’. All I can remember of what was on the screen was the golden coach.

What was more important was getting to the cakes and sandwiches afterwards. We were all given a special Coronation mug for our lemonade. That mug used to have pride of place in my Nana’s kitchen in Bath Street until Frisky, the cat, accidentally knocked it over and it smashed in the sink. For christmas Auntie Margaret gave me a model kit of the golden coach.

[rathbone]

For some reason I was always given my pocket money on a Sunday morning after coming back from Sunday School. It was 3d (just over 1p). Some times it came a threepenny bit, which was a chunky brass hexagonal shape, a bit like a yellow 20p. There were also silver threepennies which looked like the current 5p, but they were exclusively reserved for choking unsuspecting pudding eaters at Christmas. I preferred it when I got my pocket money in the form of six halfpennies. It seemed like a lot more.

Usually those six halfpennies ended up in the till of Molly Hood’s sweet shop in Bath Street. It was a magic place with all of these big jars of all types of sweets towering over your head all the way up to the ceiling.

Sweets were still rationed and so I had to ask my mum for my ration book before I could buy them. I can’t remember her ever not giving me it, but I presume that she did use it as a way of limiting my consumption. It was a little square book with a beige cover. Inside were coupons which had to be exchanged for the sweets. You could only exchange a fixed number of coupons every week.

In Molly Hood’s shop there were lots of sweets which were four for a penny and she would let you have a selection .... pick ‘n’ mix before its time. For my 3d I could get a mixture of
blackjacks, fruit salads, dolly mixtures and sherbet lemons. Alternatively I could have a Barrat’s sherbet fountain with a stick of licorice in it and a gob stopper. Or there was the possibility of a penny whopper (which was long, brown and chewy .... I shudder to think what was in it) and a packet of kp nuts.

If I wanted to blow the whole 3d on one thing there were Rollos and, a little later in the 50s, Spangles. There used to be an advert for Spangles which showed an artist in smock and beret painting two men in kilts walking a scotty dog over the slogan “Jocks love spangles, docs love spangles, even still life artists in smocks love spangles.” Nobody at the time thought that was surreal.

If you had a pal, you could club together and really splash out on a Mars bar which cost fourpence. The only trouble with that, though, was cutting it up into equal slices. Unless it was really cold and the knife was really sharp, the chocolate tended to crumble and endless arguments about who got the bigger portion were sure to arise.

[rathbone]

I suppose Auntie Mag got dressed in her best for the Coronation as well, but in my memory I can only see her in her pinny. She never seemed to take it off. Most mornings it was accompanied by a head scarf tied round her head like a turban.

Aunty Mag was my Nana’s sister and they ran a theatrical boarding house at 43 Bath Street. All sorts of strange types used to pass through there. To a kid it seemed very exotic.

Because most of the rooms were used by ‘the guests’, our lives were lived in the kitchen. I used to sleep on the couch which was in an alcove behind the kitchen table. My abiding memory of staying at my Nana’s is lying on the couch in the morning listening to the sound of the clock ticking.

As was almost uniform in the 50s, Monday was washing day. This was a ritual. All of the bed linen was stripped off the beds, sorted into sheets, blankets, bolsters and pillow cases. They were then put into a pram and Nana and I would push it up to the High Street and then along to the steamie in Adelphi Grove. I used to love the steamie. Back in Bath Street Auntie Mag would be washing the more delicate things in the big galvanised tub, making efficacious use of a dolly blue bag and a poss stick to get them gleaming and the washboard to remove the stubborn stains. Then it was running them through the mangle. I used to get to turn the handle. I used to love the mangle as well.

At night I would have to climb up on the work top next to the big Belfast sink in the kitchen to get washed. That was alright during the summer, but in winter there was an icy blast from the window up your back. I didn’t love the Belfast sink.

[rathbone]

There weren’t any supermarkets in those days and most people didn’t have cars, fridges or microwaves. If you lived in Portobello, like us, that wasn’t a problem. There were shops all along the High Street and down Bath Street.You could get anything. There were fishmongers, butchers, green grocers, bakers and dairies. Rudge’s general grocer on the corner of Bath Street and Straiton Place was particularly good.

Then there were the deliveries to your front door. These came on horse and cart. The coal men came every week. As a child I just took them for granted, but when you consider the effort it must have taken to carry bags of coal up to the top landings of the tenements, they really had a hard job.

The Rag and Bone men would also come around once a week. You could tell it was them because they would ring a bell. I wasn’t allowed to go out when the rag and bone men were in the street because they were ‘tinks’ and not to be associated with.

Then there were the skoosh carts, the lemonade man with his deliveries of lemonade and the magical american cream soda. There was the time when the lemonade cart overturned at the junction of High Street and Brighton Place, shedding its crates of bottle, and there was glass and lemonade everywhere. Maybe something had spooked the horse or it had caught it’s foot in the tramlines.

An off-shoot of the horse and cart trade was the manure. As late as the 50s we were still familiar with piles of dung in the street and the smell of horses in the air. People usually went out with a bucket and spade and scooped it up for their gardens.

Finally, for real door to door service there was the Kleen-e-ze man who would sell you a brush for every occasion. What a job that must have been. I’ve never worked out how many brushes you would have to sell to make a living, but it must have been huge.

[rathbone]

URBAN MYTH 5

Driving home to Porty after a night out with the lads, John was aware that he was well over the limit. Suddenly he realized that the car behind him was flashing him and, on closer scrutiny, realized it was a police car. They pulled him over and he reconciled himself to the fact that he would lose his licence.

However, as he got out of his car to talk to the police there was an almighty crash on the other side of the road as two cars rammed into each other. Both John and the police rushed over to help. “Wait over there,” said one of the policemen,”we’ll deal with you in a minute.”

John wandered back over the road. With the bravado peculiar to the very drunk, he decided to seize the opportunity and make a run for it. He jumped in the car and sped home. When he arrived home he told his wife that if the police called to say that he had been at home all night.

The police did, in fact, arrive at the house early the next morning while he was in the shower, still trying to sober up. His wife told the pre-prepared story. “Oh really”, said the policemen when she had finished. “In that case, can you explain what our police car is doing parked on your drive?”

[rathbone]

Disasters come and go. The hall radiator has sprung a leak and soaked the carpet. When Mrs. R. pointed it out my response was “Well, it’s hardly Chernobyl, is it.”, which went down well.

Every year there are disasters and it made me wonder why some of them stick in the consciousness and others don’t. Most people can still remember Chernobyl and most will probably be able to remember the Japanese Tsunami in twenty years time, but the Indian Ocean Tsunami already seems to be slipping away and the Pakistan floods hardly register at all.

On a practical level the effects of Chernobyl are still being felt. Radiation levels in Wales are still elevated and while the sheep may no longer be glowing in the dark, they are walking around with something toxic floating around in the grass they eat.

Unlike the tsunamis and floods, Chernobyl was entirely down to human error and was subject to human cover-up. While the explosion occurred in the early hours of the morning of 26 April 1986, the Soviet Government chose not to say anything. It was only when the Swedish authorities detected a huge plume of radiation passing over Scandanavia two days later that suspicions were raised and by the end of the week, when the whole of Europe was now covered by radioactive fallout, the Russians were forced to admit that there had been an accident in which two people had died immediately and a further twenty eight over the following couple of days.

Italy, West Germany and Greece were the countries most heavily contaminated by the radiation, though readings in Britain were also high. When the issue was raised in the House of Commons Margaret Thatcher denied that there was any problem. In fact the British Government adopted the same position as the Soviets, not warning its citizens about the radioactive fallout and taking no action until the last possible minute.

In fact milk was contaminated by iodine-131 and slaughtered sheep were found to contain high levels of caesium. It took the Government until 20 June before they decided to do anything about that. Even then they announced that the necessary bans on the consumption of milk and lamb would only last three weeks. Meanwhile gallons of contaminated milk and tonnes of meat had found their way into the food chain. In actual fact the bans had to stay in place for almost two years before the levels of iodine and caesium dropped back to acceptable levels.

Now, quarter of a century later, the long term effects of the radiation from Chernobyl is still not calculable. Because of the continuing disinformation from the Soviet government it is impossible to say how many cancers were caused in Russia. Estimates are 500,000. In Europe it is easier to calculate and there the figure is around 25,000.

Given the response of the British Government to Chernobyl and to various events since, I wouldn’t rely on them to respond any better to any future event. Me, I’ve just ‘phoned the plumber.

[rathbone]

I was doing my regular stint of voluntary work in the YMCA and listening in to two young lads sharing their tribulations in the coffee bar when one of them came out with the remark that the problem with the Tories is that they have a policy of no jobs for the yobs. Doesn’t that just sum it up.

You can peel away the weasel words and skewed semiotics, but underneath it all there is still that assumption that if you are not working then it’s your own fault. While Cameron & Co. carefully try to avoid direct comparison with the Thatcher administration, you just know that someone (probably Oliver Letwin) is just itching to say that it is time to get on your bike and pedal off to some entrepreneurial fantasy job of your own making.

Wasn’t that called ‘The Enterprise Culture’ the last time round? Now it’s called ‘The Dragons Den’.

The assumption is that there are all these cheap ‘starter’ units all over the country just waiting to accommodate everything from pizza delivery services to mobile children’s entertainers. Round our way, if we are not careful, car valeting will become the nation’s biggest growth industry.

All of this is Mickey Mouse business, of course. Most of these enterprises are providing non-essential services to people who can’t afford to buy them. An economy can’t run on balloon shops, kissograms and nappy services alone.

George Osborne may hail this surreal approach as ‘growth’ when in reality it points to a complete failure to provide the employment opportunities that remain the Government’s responsibility.

[rathbone]

I’ve mentioned before that I am somewhat thin on top. In fact I now only need to go to the barber’s quarterly for a quick spray and polish.

Our local barber is a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and I was sitting waiting my turn and flipping through the Watchtower when this young guy came in and asked if they did hair extensions. The barber shook his head and suggested that he tried the ladies hairdresser in the arcade.

When it was my turn in the chair, rather than chat about the state of the premier league or where I was going on my holidays, I asked him about the hair extensions. It seems as if there is a little fad at the moment for young lads with braids. It is not something that either of us have seen mentioned in the press and assumed that it might be a local things. These kids are all about fourteen.

Inevitably, once I had been alerted to it I began to notice it everywhere. It was a bit like the fad a year or so back for young lads to go around wearing rosary beads. Once you spotted one you saw them everywhere.

According to the barber, though, they may be storing up problems for the future.
Permanent hair extensions must be attached tightly near the base of the boy’s own hair where they are woven tightly into the natural hair. It is this way in which the extensions are attached which causes later problems in the form of unexpected bald patches. Although some hair loss is perfectly normal (the average person typically loses up to 100 individual strands of hair every day), hair pulled by the extensions can cause significant ongoing problems. The person’s own hair is pulled taut by the weight of the extensions and the binding method which places great strain on the hair follicle in the scalp. When this strain is applied all day, every day for weeks or months at a time, the follicle can be become deformed, stretching into a oval shape, and preventing future growth.

So maybe in a few years time I will have company on the spray and polish bench.

[rathbone]

Bingeing on Jim Jarmusch. ‘Strangers in Paradise’, ‘Down By Law’ and ‘Mystery Train’ all in one go. Not bad going by anyone’s standards.

What is it about Jarmusch’s films? They’re cool, deliberately so. They are nonsense, deliberately so. I’ve seen one critic describe them as cinematic jazz. That’s probably deliberate as well.
Almost everything Jim Jarmusch does is deliberate and he is a great source of inspirational quotes. Try:

“Don’t let the fuckers get ya. They can either help you, or not help you, but they can’t stop you. Carry a gun if necessary.”

“The production is there to serve the film. The film is not there to serve the production.
Filmmakers who don’t understand this should be hung from their ankles and asked why the sky appears to be upside down.”
“Treat all collaborators as equals and with respect. A production assistant who is holding back traffic so the crew can get a shot is no less important than the actors in the scene, the director of photography, the production designer or the director. Hierarchy is for those whose egos are inflated or out of control.”

The biggest contribution Jim Jarmusch has made to my life, however, is the following quote he gave to Moviemaker in 2004:

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from those that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.”

You wouldn’t believe how much I’ve stolen from Jim Jamusch over the years.

[rathbone]

I notice that Lynx Attract is the official partner for the panda mating season at Edinburgh Zoo. I've heard that the Lynx Effect is kicking in.

Aren’t the adverts for Lynx Deodorant something else?

Take the ‘Unleash The Man Leather’ one. That was where all of these naked cave men accidentally discover a can of Lynx Instinct in a rock. One of them sprays himself with it and is instantly transformed into a leather clad hero with sabre tooth accessories who can ride around on the back of wooly mammoths picking up nubile cave girls.

Or the Dark Temptation one where the guy sprays it on and turns to chocolate, only to have women stealing bits off him and eating them, to their obvious satisfaction.

Or the Inca boom shakalaka one which ends up with Jennifer Aniston ironing the guy’s shirt for him after he has wowed her by sticking chips up his nose.

Or the Lynx Effect one where the guy is being double crossed by the Mafia, but a quick spray under the armpits brings all the sicilian girls running to his rescue.

Then there was the Lynx Jet mile high club with all of the scantily clad air hostesses crawling over the passengers to get to the guy who was using Lynx.

And who could forget the whole series of Lynx Rise adverts with their wake up calls: The guy who slips into the kitchen to see the woman leaning over the sink and slaps her on the bum, only to hear the voice behind him saying “I see you’ve met my mum”. The guy who sheepishly tells the girl in bodice and whip that when she said role play he thought she meant board games. The guy cooking a fry up when the girl says wasn’t last night wonderful, especially when she found out he was a vegetarian too........Wake up and stay alert with new Lynx Rise.

And remember, premature perspiration can be controlled with Lynx Dry antiperspirants.

I hope those pandas realise what they’ve let themselves in for.

[rathbone]

URBAN MYTH 6

A resident of Moira Terrace was taking out her rubbish and was horrified to see her dog standing outside the door with a dead rabbit in its jaws. ‘Gracious’, she thought.

She was doubly concerned when she recognised the rabbit as exactly the same breed as the one that her neighbours had bought for their kids to look after.

Carefully taking the rabbit from the dog, she cleaned it up, giving it a good wash and a blow dry to make it look as though nothing had happened. Knowing that her neighbours were out, she sneaked in to their garden and, inevitably, the rabbit hutch was empty and its door was open.
With great care she arranged the rabbit in a life-like pose and closed the hutch door, hoping that her neighbours would think that it died of natural causes.

She was just starting on the tea when there was a scream from next door. Going out into the garden, she found her neighbour in an obvious state of shock. “Last night the rabbit died and so we buried him at the bottom of the garden”, the neighbour gasped, “But now he’s sitting up in his cage, with his fur all fluffed up.”

[rathbone]

Our local bike shop is closing own - overheads too high, custom too low. Adrian who runs it blames the quality of the bikes. They are now just too well made. He gets hardly any back for repair and they just last and last so fewer people are replacing them.

I suppose the boom in mountain bikes is also over. I’m using the term mountain bike loosely. What I actually mean is the trend towards bikes for riders who don’t want to be seen as ‘cyclists’. There was always something a little over the top in seeing tractor tread monsters being ridden through the city streets instead of across the Grampians, where their extravagant features at least had some practical application. A triumph of image over need, summed up in the contention that my Ridgeback was better than your Muddy Fox.

History has it that mountain bikes developed out of the old clunkers that we used to ride because some guy from California moved to Spokane and found that his big tire, one speed bike with coaster brakes did not work so well. The hills in Washington State were steeper and he had to walk up them. He became frustrated and the idea of fitting the old one speed with a ten speed drive train came quickly, but left just as quickly, as he would have had have no way to stop. Coaster brakes and derailleurs do not mix and no wide caliper brakes existed. Then he found out that a company in Japan sold a ten speed bike with a Shimano disk brake.

The brake was cable operated, had replaceable pads, and although very heavy by today's standards, stopped quickly and smoothly even in wet conditions. He ordered and purchased the brake from Spokane's Wheel Sport bike shop and rebuilt the wheel with the original 2.25 inch rim from the one speed bike and the Shimano brake hub that included threads for a ten speed freewheel on one side and special threads for the brake disk on the other side. He finished up by installing double chain rings, the derailleurs, and the cables. The lowest gear, a 39 tooth small chain ring and a 34 tooth freewheel, was an "alpine" gear in those days (29.8 gear inches). Now he was free to ride in snow, climb hills, and soon to discovered the joys of dirt roads in the mountains. The mountain bike was born. bike provided "road hugging weight" like the big cars of the fifties. It had the feel of the old cruiser bikes, but with the new gears didn't bog down on the slightest It’s those gears which make all the difference. It iss always good fun driving behind cycle couriers in London watching them furiously turning the pedals of their mountain bikes as they fail to find the right gear.

There is something amusing about the fact that the vast majority of mountain bikes never go anywhere near a mountain and all that effort to get up the hills around Spokane turned into a fashion statement. Ponder that the next time you are whizzing along Fishwive’s Causeway.

[rathbone]

I suppose rucksacks as we know them came along with mountain bikes. We currently have five between the two of us. Mrs. R. takes two to work with her every morning, one on her back and one carried by its straps. Just looking out the window just now, the kids next door are off to school with fluorescent pink ones on their backs. Walk down any street and you’ll see small ones, massive ones, leather ones and canvas ones, ones with logos on, ones shaped like animals and ones that are just plain ridiculous. Or rather you won’t see them because the things are now ubiquitous and we take them totally for granted. It can be argued that they are the most popular accessory ever, yet twenty years ago they were simply something that you used if you were going camping or on a biking holiday.

I used to have a Wright and Teague rubber lined one which went to some exotic places and had some hair-raising adventures. The latter mostly took place on buses in Nepal. If you get off the main routes between Katmandu and Pokhara things are basically single lane dirt tracks. Passing an oncoming truck requires careful manoeuvering, particularly on hairpin bends where there's a drop on one side, a deep ditch the other and not an inch of road surface to spare.  Larger vehicles have to advance slowly towards each other as each driver gauges just how much width is available to him. At the same time cars opportunistically, cheekily, squeak through the narrowest of gaps between the two while ‘negotiations’ are going on.  More than once our bus leaned precipitously over the edge as we jerkily eased past.  We saw one casualty – a car about to be hauled up from about 300 ft below.  Probably it had gone off the road some while before as there was no sign of either driver or passengers.  Fortunately our small bus could fit underneath the arm of the crane.  Just.

The scares were usually worth it to get the rucksack to the next monastery. If we were lucky we would catch the tail end of a procession around the monastery with the monks chanting, banging drums and blowing long trumpets.  Two of them blowing helmet conchs at each corner in turn. Inside we would be plunged into a cornucopia of colour. Vivid murals covered the walls (some with alarming cracks), vibrant designs painted on doors, window shutters, pillars and ceilings, richly coloured silk hangings, golden statues, silver bowls filled with rice and bank-notes, a seven-tiered wooden model of Guru Rimpoche’s heavenly abode, complete with rainbows, angels, buddhas, bodhisattvas, incredible in its detail.

The old Wright and Teague perished in the rift valley of Kenya (quite literally. The rubber lining finally crumbled into dust). It’s only when you have to carry your stuff around in plastic bags that you realise how much you can pack into a rucksack. Which is why Mrs. R. has two.

[rathbone]

Following the piece I did about Martin Millar I decided to read Tank Girl again. A comic character with an armoury of tanks, bazookas and foul language, she was a shero who had a solution for every eventuality.

Like so much good stuff, Tank Girl first started out as a comic strip in a fanzine. This was Atomtan, which Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin produced in Worthing in the mid 1980s. It was picked up by the magazine Deadline, where it ran until 1995. Poster and t-shirts began to be produced with Tank Girl on the front and she quickly became a role model for liberated young women in Thatcher’s Britain, prone to random acts of violence, nose picking, flatulence and more than occasional drunkenness. She was picked up by the lesbian community, who started having Tank Girl nights at various clubs across the country. Not bad for a character who had a sexual relationship with a mutant kangaroo called Booga. In 1996 she became pregnant (though whether to Booga or not was never made clear).

Penguin books picked up the strips and began publishing them as graphic novels. Soon there were Tank Girl clubs in Spain, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia and the USA.

Jamie Hewlett stopped drawing Tank Girl in 1996, and moved on to Gorillaz. Alan Martin moved to Berwick on Tweed and continued to work on Tank Girl with a whole series of illustrators. She still hits the streets regularly.

[rathbone]

The Queen’s jubilee road show came trundling through our town yesterday.

The elder Rathbonette even took half a day off work to stand by the side of the road for two hours and managed to get a fuzzy photograph of an old woman in a blue hat sat in the back of a big car.

Over 2,000 children from all over the County were bussed in to meet the Queen. From Mrs. R.’s school little Elizabeth had been chosen to present a bouquet and Mary, the head teacher was to be presented to Her Majesty.

For weeks they have been practicing their curtsies and learning the etiquette. You do not speak to the Queen before she speaks to you. You address her as Ma’am. No shaking hands unless she extends hers first and if she does, no gripping, squeezing or pumping allowed. Eye contact should be no more than necessary and you should display a happy demeanor. Above all, you never turn your back on the Queen. Mary had all that down pat.

The Queen was arriving at the park, planting a tree to commemorate her visit, and then coming down the line of school children. She would stop and talk to Mary. Little Elizabeth would hand over her bouquet of flowers and then the Queen would go off to have lunch with the great and the good (the mayor and council to you and me).

As this was going to be a big day in the life of the kids, Mary decided to film the event on her ‘phone, so she set to, taking shots of the line of kids and then the arrival of the Queen’s car. Then she turned round to film the crowd.

When she turned back it was to see a little old woman in a blue hat filling up her viewfinder. Sheepishly she put down her ‘phone. The Queen was standing there smiling at her. “Um”, Mary said. “You were supposed to come to us after the tree planting”, she said. The Queen’s smile didn’t waver. “Ah,” she replied, “Wrong time.” And then she walked off to plant her tree.

Quarter of an hour later she was back. It was as if nothing had ever happened. Mary did her curtsey. The Queen held out her hand. Mary shook it. Little Elizabeth handed over her flowers which, in turn were handed over to the Lady in Waiting. And then the Queen was off again, moving down the line of cheering school kids.

Roll on the Olympic flame which trots through in a couple of weeks.

[rathbone]

Caught an interview the other day which referred to Nigel Benn. Now there was a great boxer who wasn’t a very good boxer. What he was was a boxer who talked a great fight.
He looked the part, heavily muscled for a middle-weight and flamboyant with it and kept himself hyped up to the hilt.

I suppose for me the bout with Michael Watson at Finsbury Park in 1989 summed up Benn. He entered the ring to a fanfare that would have done Zsa Zsa Gabor proud. Flounced around in front of the crowd showing off his physique and then proceeded to get pasted, finally being knocked out in the sixth.

He did recover after the fight and went on to win the WBO middleweight championship from Doug De Witt and the WBC Super Middleweight from Mauro Galvanos. He lost his WBO title to Chris Eubank in 1990 in a fight which was stopped in the ninth round and the rematch resulted in a draw on points.
In 1995 he beat Gerald McClellan, but had inflicted so much damage on McClellan during the fight that the other boxer collapsed after the bout, was rushed to hospital with brian damage and ended up blind, deaf and confined to a wheelchair. It was probably the most brutal fight I have ever watched.

The impact on Benn was traumatic. He fought a few more matches before throwing in the towel, becoming a born again christian and taking up a career as a DJ. Now he is a preacher and motivational coach for ex-squaddies.

[rathbone]

Julie Burchill seems to be growing old disgracefully, which is appropriate. I’ve often wondered if she actually is the miserable cow that she presents herself as, or if that is just a persona that she hides behind.

I can remember when she first started out on NME I looked forward to everything she wrote. It was opinionated, I didn’t always agree with it, but at least it was honest. Her work with Tony Parsons sparkled. ‘The Boy Looked At Johnny’ is still a great read. Then she and Parsons split up amid much bitter, even vitriolic dirty washing in public. She literally left Parsons holding the baby, their son Bobby and struck off on her own. As she said : "I don't care much for families. I adored my mum and dad, but to be honest I don't miss them much now they're dead." Still, her new column in The Face was almost as good as the NME stuff.

Unfortunately, it was too good. She was wooed by Rupert Murdoch and ended up on the Mail On Sunday. Her second marriage, to Cosmo Landesman, sealed her into that world. Her focus moved away from rock and on to shopping and fucking. She developed a well honed line in back stabbing. No-one was safe from her bile. It made her pots of loot and lots of enemies. Over the years there can’t have been much that Julie Burchill hasn’t said that she hated.

Then she decided that she was a lesbian, left Landesman, again holding the baby, their son Jack and started living with Charlotte Raven. When she met Charlotte Raven’s brother Daniel, she decided that she wasn’t a lesbian after all, left Charlotte and married him, the wrote the novel Sugar Rush about a lesbian couple.

One of the highlights for me was back in 1993 when she got into one of those ‘wars’ which journalists sometimes wage in their columns, this time with Camille Paglia which featured such ladylike exchanges as :”I'm not nice. I'm not as loud as you, but if push comes to shove I'm nastier. I'm ten years younger, two stone heavier, and I haven't had my nuts taken off by academia. Are you SO insecure that you can't get one critical review without throwing a temper tantrum ?”

Twenty years later she was still at it, tearing strips off Lilly Allen on twitter, which culminated with Lilly calling Julie “A self-loathing, ignorant and bitter old troll” and Julie coming back with “Lilly dear, I loathe you. And by the way, being called self loathing by you is like being called fat by Dawn French.” ..... a classic example of hitting two birds with one stone.

This, of course, is the woman who wrote :"Readers are invited to come and spit at me. I will, of course, welcome the attention. "

[rathbone]

URBAN MYTH 7
A woman was walking along Seafield Road when she was suddenly called by nature. Knowing that she would never make it past the Cat and Dog Home, she decided to try the Crematorium where she knew there was a toilet. Just as she was coming out again, she was accosted by an undertaker, who ushered her into the chapel. Embarrassed, she felt she had to comply. There was no-one else in attendance apart from her, the undertakers, the minister and one other man. It made her feel quite sad.

After the service, as she was making to leave, the other man stopped and asked if he could take her name and address, so she gave them. A week later she received a letter from a firm of solicitors to tell her that in his will, their client had left £150,000 to be divided between everyone who attended his funeral. As she had been the only attendee, she got the lot.