Pity the poor children’s entertainer coping with thirty little darlings at last Friday’s village Halloween party. Dressed in evil black, he was showing off his magic skills, pulling snakes and cats out of hats. One small child had other ideas.
Izzy, who had absolutely no intention of sitting politely in a circle, toddled to centre stage and began throwing streams of gobbledygook questions at the man. He was trying to saw a child in half – he must have thought he’d chosen the wrong one. There was no stopping my daughter.
“Make her sit down”, shouted all the 3 year olds, while parents tutted disapproval. Izzy, who’d come as a cat princess with ghost ears, turned, giggled at her audience, then went over to the magician’s bag and pulled out all his tricks, spilling their secrets onto the village hall floor. It brought the house down. Through tears of laughter, Jo apologised to the assembled parents. “What can you do, she’s half-American, and she wants to get into the Hallowe’en spirit”. She pronounced it Holloween.
I don’t remember celebrating Hallowe’en as a child: I certainly never trick-or-treated. Was it a deprived childhood or am I right in thinking that we only became aware of it when we saw E.T.? I know it’s supposed to be an ancient custom, dating back to when our Celtic ancestors wore masks to ward off the dark spirits of approaching winter, but it only became a retail jamboree a few years ago. I couldn’t believe how seriously the Americans took the festival till I saw the huge bags of sweets we had to buy to placate the hordes of children in our Los Angeles neighbourhood.
Our Americanisation shows no bounds. We didn’t have school proms when I was young, and yet now all our teenagers are going to them, clad in hugely expensive outfits. I went to a prom when I was 17, but it was at the Royal Albert Hall and they played Mahler. I bet Izzy won’t be content with a cat costume when she goes to her first in just 16 years time.Sadly one English tradition never crossed the Atlantic the other way. This morning Jo asked me, in all seriousness, to explain “your George Burns night.” I looked at her mystified. I wasn’t aware the comedian had been given his own festival. Mind you, lines like “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city” are probably worth remembering.
“You mean Robert Burns, the haggis man. That’s not till January.”
“No, it’s this Friday, your Burns night thing.”
Finally I twigged: Guy Fawkes. Jo couldn’t understand why we’d blow the cost of a decent handbag on some brightly coloured cardboard which we then incinerate. Only a Brit can appreciate the fun of standing in a damp garden trying to light a roman candle, or waiting for a catherine wheel to fall off its stick or a rocket to whimper into the air with a single pathetic star. All to celebrate the defeat of a catholic gunpowder plot to bring down the protestant king.
Apparently Guy Fawkes Night is in decline. It’s partly due to our elfin safety laws, but mostly because we haven’t worked out how to commercialise it properly. We still think of bonfire night as a homespun community activity. Even though the fireworks we watch from behind our safety barriers are getting more spectacular, there are no commercial products for our children to buy, now we’ve stopped them buying fireworks. 
That’s why for the last fortnight our retailers have been forcing Hallowe’en masks, ghoulish costumes and latex skeletons into our shopping baskets, and we’ve readily succumbed.
This Friday Izzy, probably still wearing her ghost ears, will go “weee!” at her first firework display. Sadly, it could well be one of her last.
The car park of the Splash Landings Hotel at Alton Towers is a miserable place at 5am, especially if you’re in pyjamas and bare feet. A fire alarm is a great leveller. I was once evacuated from a conference hotel with the entire senior management of the BBC. You can tell a man’s character by his pyjamas: Greg Dyke’s were very colourful, I recall.At Alton Towers we all shivered in the darkness, vainly scouring the hotel for signs of smoke that might justify our discomfort. There were hungover parents wearily herding children, peroxide Cheshire blondes cruelly exposed without their makeup, bulbous couples who’d evidently only come for the eat-all-you-can buffet, and me, doing paternal duty with my soon-to-be-13-year-old and his two friends. This was Sam’s birthday treat: two days of rollercoaster heaven.Jo escaped the trip by claiming Izzy was too young. I know the real reason: that ghastly night we spent in Disneyland a few years back. In fact, Alton Towers is much more parent-friendly. Sure, they play the theme from Captain Pugwash in the lift, which made me smile the first few times, then drove me to the stairs, but the bar, which looks like the tropical set from ZingZillas, serves a decent marghuerita, and the food is varied and edible. But this wasn’t my treat: the real test was my son’s reaction. So, for anyone stuck for a plan this half-term, here is Sam’s unexpurgated, no-holds (but firmly strapped in, particularly when you’re going upside down) verdict. From what I can gather, he had a pretty good time.
The spooky girl in the advert looked like something from The Exorcist as she whispered “Thirteen!” - that’s what made me want my birthday weekend at Alton Towers.
The park is miles from the train station, and the signposts, pointing us in the opposite direction to our satnav, added an extra 20 minutes to the journey time (we tested it on the way back). Yet, aside from the patronizing Pirate Pete voice on the park’s monorail, Alton Towers is a 13-year-old’s dream.
Towering, spinning, looping structures erupt in the middle of a picturesque landscape of trees and a gothic 19th century house. So even for Dad it was mildly exciting as he got to talk to Alton Tower’s gardeners about orchids. He said it nearly justified the cost of the hotel rooms.
First, my two friends and I raced to Oblivion. Our hearts were pounding as we were hauled up the chain lift. At the top, there was a terrifying pause as we overlooked our fate, then we plunged 180 feet underground at 70 mph. Seven goes later we decided to try the other rides.
Air, a steel flying coaster, was more comfortable than thrilling, although the “flying” experience was one-of-a-kind. Nemesis, which practically had more G-force than a space shuttle launch, wasn’t particularly special; Rita Queen of Speed is a launch rollercoaster and although not as fast as Stealth, has a sharp, eye-popping bend at the beginning and unique soaring turns.
Eventually we reached the most disappointing attraction in the whole park - the new ride ‘Thirteen’. We needn’t have bothered. It was horribly slow and depressing. Sure, the horizontal drop was a first, yet it only felt about two feet. It was as though they had spent so much money on the little drop, that they forgot the rest of the ride, which consisted of a few turns and bunny hops.
We felt let down, but it didn’t spoil our day and we fell asleep as soon as we hit the pillow in our “starfish” room, only to be woken at 5 because someone set off the fire alarm. The next day our faces were a picture. Dad looked like he had a massive hangover. We still had a brilliant time and I definitely recommend it.
The old boys, some in their eighties, nearly choked on their chocolate cake. 17-year-old school prefects, invited by their headmaster to last week’s annual reunion of old and ancient pupils, gasped in disbelief. Meanwhile the rest of us stroked our black ties and stared down at our wineglasses in embarrassment. Could this man get any worse?The former pupil turned entrepreneur, who had built an empire out of repairing the nation’s drains and plumbing, was crowning an after-dinner speech of relentless arrogance with a story of such breathtaking vulgarity, I couldn’t begin to hint at its substance, other than it involved an act of intimacy and a girl in a wheelchair. It was so horrendously inappropriate that one group of distinguished north east professionals, all hardened men of the world, stormed out in disgust. It was all quite scandalous and unprecedented, but at least it gave us plenty to gossip about over coffee. There’s an art to giving after dinner speeches and clearly a knowledge of emergency plumbing, even if it buys you your own helicopter, isn’t a much of a qualification.School reunions generate mixed emotions. I went to my first a full 30 years after I’d left the institution and still found it daunting to push open the big oak doors of the main entrance – a gateway that had always been strictly reserved for teachers and governors. Inside, the massive pillared school hall, with its towering organ pipes and creaking pews where we’d crushed together during morning assembly, the smell of the wooden floors and the tall lockers around the walls, had stimulated feelings of both nostalgia and fear. The lockers from where the plumbing entrepreneur boasted he’d started his career by converting one into a sweet shop and sold overpriced Mars bars to fellow pupils bored with school meals, stood beneath an engraved roll of honour that ran the length of the hall. This was a list of boys who had achieved the only goal the school deemed worthy of honouring: a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge. They were the elite prizewinners in a nearsighted educational system that believed that only Oxbridge mattered, and anywhere else was merely second-class. Neither the entrepreneur nor I were on that list - we both went to York. But nowadays the function and status of universities have changed beyond recognition, and so too must the focus of our secondary schools. At last week’s dinner, there was a senior prefect at my table who told me he was hoping to go to Oxford to read English Literature. Very commendable: and after that? He wanted a job in television. I felt bad about putting him straight, but felt obliged to tell him that, despite the prospect of joining the elite band of heroes around the school hall (if indeed they are still carving names in the wood), and possibly learning the art of after-dinner speaking, if he really wanted a career in media, he should instead head off to Bournemouth, which has a first rate media school. Even an Oxford degree would be poor competition against the smart showreels of graduates who will have already have acquired the skills of editing, shooting and scriptwriting that our demanding industry requires. We like people who arrive ready equipped to offer cheap, trained labour. The days of extended training courses on the job are long gone.In our day a university degree was merely the next rung above A Levels before we were thrown out into the real world to choose a career. Sure, there's a lot to be said for the contacts and bonhomie to be derived from a few years at our finest academic institutions, but nowadays there's a more important consideration: employment. And now, thanks to student loans, the choice of university course is something all our children must consider much earlier, particularly as they, not us, are being asked to pay for it. As the customer, not pupil, they’ll demand value for money in the form of a guaranteed job, not a piece of paper with a grade or a fond memory of the student bar. This week’s cuts in subsidy signal a turning point not just for universities but for our entire education system. The old school will never be the same again.
Most of rural Northumberland isn’t on the map. While the rest of the UK is marked green or dark blue, where I live is just a white void. Perhaps nobody round here has an iPhone, or maybe we’re just too happy to care, but so far my part of the world has yet to appear on Mappiness, the latest online phenomenon.
It’s a project being run by two jolly academics from the London School of Economics with (judging by the profiles on their website) rather irritatingly smiley faces. They look like happy-clappy christian converts, the kind that you want to argue with just to wipe a frown across their annoyingly self-righteous foreheads. Their mission is to find out how happy we all are.
They’re measuring the nation’s mood swings on something they call a hedonimeter. They expected 3,000 people to sign up, but there must be so many iPhone addicts bored with life, 20,000 downloaded the “app” in the first three weeks. Once you’re happily apped up, your phone beeps two or three times a day and asks you how you’re feeling, what you’re doing and whom you’re with. You’re then invited to upload a photo of where you are.
So far, it seems people in Dorset and Arbroath are the happiest, City bankers are miserable, and people in Northumberland don’t exist. It pops your information into its database, and draws you a flowchart of just how miserable you have been since you joined.
In the last 24 hours, I found just five people from Tyneside on the map, all of whom had proclaimed themselves very happy indeed by uploading blurry photographs of half empty beerglasses in garishly lit bars. So I guess Saturday night was a success, then. There was also a single photo of a public loo in Gosforth with the caption “extremely happy” – I guess this euphoria was caused by relief at finding one open at 3am after a night in the Bigg Market (not that people in the Bigg Market normally bother with such niceties).
Mappiness was set up to monitor how people’s feelings are affected by their environment. Are people less happy when they’re surrounded by pollution, loud noise and bad body odour? Not the sort of question you might think you’d need a research grant to answer, but I suppose universities have to justify the impending hike in tuition fees.
Already this vital scientific investigation has discovered that, shock horror, people are happier at the weekends (apparently Sunday lunchtime is quite a happy moment, presumably just after the hair of the dog that lifts you out of your hangover and before the miserable realisation that it’ll be Monday tomorrow), whereas Tuesday is the pits (because there’s so much of the working week still to go, I would hazard – but then I’m not an academic, so we must await publication of the official findings in a couple of years’ time).
I reckon my own personal happiness has nothing to do with my environment and everything to do with the mood of people who may or may not want to buy my television programme ideas. Right now there’s a bloke in Los Angeles called Simon who’s trying to decide whether or not to give me a series. I’d love to have a hedonimeter on him, so that I could judge exactly when to make my final pitch. Catch him in a bad mood, or on a Tuesday, and we’re sunk. Get him just after lunch on Sunday and I reckon we’re in.
In the meantime, my wife does have an iPhone, which I’ve just borrowed to take photographs of Izzy giggling hysterically while wearing some absurd comedy ears she found in a drawer.
Now I don’t need an academic with a hedonimeter to tell me that these are pictures of true happiness.
The result was too close to call: an entire nation held its breath. By now just two were in contention, and it could have gone either way. As the winner was announced, the audience erupted and the finalists embraced, one triumphant, the other smiling in carefully rehearsed generosity. The victor gave a noble speech, complimenting the opponent, who, despite the fixed grin, could not conceal a look of disappointment across the eyes. Then there was a pause. “Oh my God, I don’t know what to say right now. I’m feeling a bit sick about this.” Not half as sick as the production company making Australia’s Next Top Model must have felt this week: they had announced the wrong winner. Not only had they brought global ridicule upon the network and created an instant Youtube hit, but they had also embarrassed their presenter by feeding her the wrong information, and she just happened to be daughter-in-law of the most powerful man in media, Rupert Murdoch. And it wasn’t an Australian embarrassment either, because the production company was our very own Granada, part of ITV. “This is what happens when you have live TV, folks, this is insane,” said Sarah Murdoch, as she ploughed on through the audience’s jeers.You can say that again. I’ve produced all sorts of live awards programmes, from talent shows like Star For A Night to theatre awards and the Booker Prize. There’s always that moment of impotence as your presenter reads out the winner’s name. What if they misread it, or the autocue pulls up wrong page or, worst of all, you’ve put the wrong name in the envelope? Quite often only the producer knows the result and I used to check and recheck the gold envelopes myself just to be sure. I was on the original Camelot team that won the National Lottery contract and my biggest fear was that the “voice of the balls” might mistake a 6 for an upside down 9 during the live show: we drew up a detailed contingency plan for getting out of that one. When I was responsible for the BBC’s General Election coverage, I made everyone rehearse the nightmare scenario that a returning officer might read out the wrong result.On the other side of the cameras, nominees at results ceremonies have a different problem. You hardly ever see an honest reaction, from either winner or loser. The former profess amazement that they could have been chosen over their more worthy rivals, whereas losers can never show how dead they feel in their stomachs. At the BAFTAs, where I’ve had to smile sweetly in defeat so many times, a handheld camera swings under your chin five minutes before the result, with a closeup of your tear glands. So when your defeat is announced, there’s a protocol that you can only put on a “jolly well done, I don’t really hate you at all” expression. Why can’t we be honest? Like country music singer Faith Hill, who threw her arms in the air and raged “What?!” when American Idol winner Carrie Underwood beat her. Or like, most famous of all, American rapper Kanye West, who stormed the stage after losing at the MTV Europe Music Video Awards and interrupted the winner’s speech, ranting that his video should have won because “it cost a million dollars, had Pam Anderson in it and had me jumping across canyons”. How great it would have been to have a camera inside David Miliband’s brain when he found out he’d been beaten by his younger brother. I guess we’ll never find out what he really felt at that moment, even in his autobiography. The two Australians, Kelsey, Next Top Model for just one minute, and the real winner Amanda, were vacuously magnanimous in both defeat and victory. But I’m sure we all know what they were really thinking.
Disaster. Jo’s just rung me to say that Poppy is getting worse. Our new Jack Russell, saved from Battersea Dogs Home, may have the cutest ears in the world and a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-dogbowl expression, but the chemistry just isn’t working with poor Mabel.
This all-female experiment is failing. The three dogs are happy to sleep together in the same bed at night, and pad after each other round the house. Every morning we take the three of them out and they madly dash round our 14 acre hayfield, searching out rabbits and fox poo (which Poppy is always the first to roll in – her white coat now smells of Timotei as she's already exhausted our supply of doggy shampoo).
However, after a couple of days of reasonably cheerful team bonding, we noticed that Mabel and Poppy were starting to argue about who was allowed to run the fastest, and Truffle, as self-appointed leader of the pack, would come snarling in to separate them. Poppy is sweet and funny and quite loveable, and she’s wonderful with Izzy, but she clearly wants to be the dominant dog and Mabel was determined to fight her ground.
Yesterday morning, while I was in London, Jo rang in a panic to say that on the walk Poppy had seized one of Mabel’s ears and started shaking it, in much the way Jack Russells like to kill rats. Mabel was shaken but unhurt, and life resumed. But this morning Poppy went for Mabel again, teeth bared and growling. Mabel had enough, shrieked and ran home alone. So now Jo and I are admitting defeat.
It’s a bitch too far: Poppy needs a new home.
Challenge Anneka, that’s what Delhi needs right now. A lycra-clad superwoman rushing around the city in a buggy with just a mobile phone and a television network for help. She’d have the job done as soon as you could say “product placement”.
“Gosh – we need 1,500 plumbers, 1,000 electricians and 7,000 mattresses to replace the ones the wild dogs walked over, and our athletes are arriving by teatime” she’d gush to her trusty soundman, and in a trice an army of volunteers would appear. Seeking no greater recompense than a smile from their heroine and a plug for their employers’ companies, the workers would set to and, just before the opening ceremony, the last paintbrush would be put down, the lights switched on and everyone would cheer.
I have a terrible feeling it isn’t going to end that way. As I write this, the Indian army has been summoned and it looks as though some poor athletes are just going to have to grin and slum it.
When I wrote the first Radio Times blurb for Challenge Anneka (“Making the impossible possible through the power of television”), I already knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Our first challenge was a disaster, largely because I naively thought you could restore the White Horse of Weymouth in an afternoon. You could if you had the Indian army and a thousand tons of Portland stone waiting in a layby. We only managed to muster a few boy scouts and 7 volunteers from the local Rotary Club, and just about completed the horse’s head by the end of the show.
We took no chances with the rest of the series. Three highly efficient television producers called Julia, Janine and Beverley planned it all like a military campaign. Could we build a footbridge over a Cornish river in just a weekend? Of course not. It took three months to persuade British Steel to give us the materials, and a contractor to turn it into struts, and a transport firm to loan us a lorry to carry it. The whole thing was planned down to the last rivet and Anneka’s first call merely triggered a tightly controlled chain reaction. 20 years later our bridge still hasn’t fallen down, unlike the one in Delhi.
The person I feel most sorry for is Lalit Bhanot, hapless secretary general of the Commonwealth Games organising committee. Not only has he brought the wrath of a proud nation on his shoulders by his committee’s inability to organise a poppadom in a curry house, he compounded it by saying Western standards of hygiene are different to India’s.
I spent a whole year living in India and found it perfectly comfortable, even in 1980. That’s possibly because I slept in a campervan, which my girlfriend and I had driven over from England. Occasionally craving a shower, we would drive into a remote village and imperiously demand of a crowd of excited children, “Where’s the Inspection Bungalow?” We’d then be led to the only stone building in town, built for the travelling magistrate in the days of the Raj. An ancient retainer would emerge from behind its dusty doors and, assuming that the British had finally returned, make up the four-poster bed, cook us a meal and boil water for the rusty showers – all for around 50 pence.
In Delhi itself we stayed at the very grand Imperial Hotel, but only in the car park, where the manager allowed us to camp and use the showers. It was very comfortable and I recommend it to any athlete stuck for a roof over his head. Although if the building work isn’t finished in time, I doubt even Anneka would be able to rustle up a spare camper van to help out with Delhi’s accommodation crisis over the next few days.
As soon as I heard the question, I knew I was in trouble.
“Babe, please can I ask a huge favour?”
Normally my wife doesn’t ask, she tells. But now she was ringing me at the office for a huge favour? I clearly wasn’t going to like this. “Well, there’s this Jack Russell…”“No”, I cut her off. “No more dogs”.
“But our friend is moving to London on Friday so Poppy’s being sent to Battersea Dogs Home, and…”I firmly put my foot down. “She? Poppy? Absolutely, definitively no way.” We already had two female dogs, one female cat and a one-year-old daughter. That was already more women than any house could handle.
“But she has great big ears like Muka”.This was below the belt. Muka was the dog that died. I’d taken her to the vet and held her as they injected the blue poison. Her big bat ears were outstretched as she collapsed in my arms. I’d cried so much I had to stop the car on the way home. Jo knows my weakness for dogs with cute ears. I felt my foot, only just put so firmly on the floor, begin to raise itself. Perhaps we might discuss it tonight. Then I heard a familiar pause. Men can always detect the sound of a guilty woman’s brain. There’s a distinct gap between thought and word while they’re putting together a sentence explaining how the shoes were half price in the sale and the last ones in the shop, or how it was only a little dent in the bumper, or how it had been quite impossible not to invite her mother to stay for six weeks. Then the pause was broken by an unfamiliar bark.
“Oh no, you’ve done it already – she’s there, isn’t she?”
“Kind of.” I am the only man in a house of needy females. Apart from Jo, who’s actually rather lower maintenance than her Los Angeles background might suggest (thank God there are no decent designer clothes shops in Newcastle), there’s Truffle and Mabel, the most neurotic spaniels in Northumberland, Poncho, the cat who terrorises both, and Izzy. “Daddeeeee” she screamed as I opened the front door, and watched her runnning the length of the kitchen into my arms, all wild hair and giggles.
“Daw”, she laughed excitedly, pointing at the new arrival. Yes, there was the daw, lying on a clean blanket in front of the Aga, tail wagging in greeting. I tried to ignore her, but Izzy wanted to tell me all about her.
Izzy’s language is incredibly advanced. She speaks in long flowing sentences of great intensity. If you look away, she pulls your face towards her and forces you to look into her bright blue eyes while she gabbles. I really should capture her language on film and send it to a codebreaker, for the only words I understood were “daw” and “Mama”. Yes, Mama had got a new daw, and Daddy wasn’t very happy about it. If I was uncertain about Poppy, Truffle and Mabel were devastated. 
Poppy was clearly used to being top dog. Truffle soon put her straight, but poor, sweet Mabel, was very confused, slinking unhappily round the room.
Then Poppy saw the cat, and went wild. It was just the get-out we needed. Jo and the cat had been inseparable for thirteen years. “You’re right, Poppy must go”, she said. I made us a coffee, opened a packet of biscuits, and began to plan her eviction. A few minutes later we heard a wimper and turned round. All three dogs were sitting together, staring at the plate of biscuits. Poppy, head on one side, with a large ear sticking out and the other flopped over, slowly raised her paw in supplication. Jo and I sighed in unison. Welcome to your new home, Poppy.
Having been silently fuming all week about a BBC4 documentary about Newcastle at the weekend called Michael Smith's Deep North, I was delighted to read Keith Hann's withering comments, published in The Journal on Tuesday and reiterated with even more venom in his blog, where he wrote:Then I switched channels to BBC4 and also felt compelled to cram in some abuse for “Michael Smith’s Deep North: the novelist returns to his native city of Newcastle upon Tyne.”
First thought: if this bloke is a novelist, how come an eager reader of the literary supplements like myself has never heard of him? Second thought: if he is Geordie, how come he sounds nothing like one? It could be argued that I don’t sound much like one myself, it is true, but this bloke did have some sort of accent, just distinctly not a Newcastle one. He first outed himself as coming from “a small town about 30 miles away” and later apparently confessed that it was Hartlepool. (I had lost interest by that point and was only half-watching the programme, as I indulged in a vigorous debate on Facebook about where this wanker came from and how on earth he had got the gig). I am profoundly sorry that space did not permit me to get the popular description “monkey hanger” into the paper.(Note for overseas readers: Hartlepool is a port in County Durham famous for capturing and interrogating a monkey that had escaped from the wreck of a French ship during the Napoleonic wars, and hanging it as a spy. Even more bizarrely, the mascot of the local football team, who paraded around in a monkey suit under the name of H’Angus, stood for election as mayor AS A JOKE in 2002, under the slogan “free bananas for schoolchildren” and was not only elected then, but has been re-elected on two subsequent occasions. I know London also has a joke mayor in the shape of Boris Johnson, but surely this must be uniquely absurd in all the annals of representative democracy? And, yes, I do know about the English Democrats in Doncaster.)Third and final (for now) thought about Michael Smith: if the BBC wanted to make a programme about Newcastle, why couldn’t they have got a genuine Geordie to do it? One with some original ideas, who would not stumble over his lines? I am open to offers. And, failing that, there are undoubtedly several thousand other people on Tyneside who could also have done what Sir John Major would almost certainly describe as a not inconsiderably better job.
Well written, Mr Hann. I gather Michael Smith is some sort of pundit, the sort of chap periodically wheeled out by arts programmes and BBC4 when they need someone with northern roots and a regional accent. I'm sending the BBC a map of our region, so they can see that Hartlepool has no more connection to Newcastle, culturally or geographically, than Southend has to Chelsea. Apparently Michael Smith went to Tynemouth on his holidays: I spent every day of my childhood there.
At least the BBC will have added a few thousand extra shots of the Tyne Bridge to its library (perhaps they could use them again in their coverage of the Great North Run on Sunday), but there wasn't a single image of the real Newcastle. Perhaps that was because the film was made by a London production company?
On Friday I received an evening to a formal dinner with the stipulation: “Black Tie or Lounge Suit”.
What an appalling choice. Wear the former, and I could be the only penguin in the room; people might hail me and ask for bottles of mineral water. Yet if I opt for the latter I’ll be sure to be the only one who hasn’t been to Moss Bros. Women have it so much easier these days. They want to look different; men just need to look the same.That’s why in the old days men wore uniform from school to the grave. Short trousers till 12, caps till the Sixth Form, black tie for dinner: life was regimented and stable. This deregulation is utterly stressful for males like me who are incapable of dressing themselves – or so my wife claims. At least going out to a nice restaurant just meant putting on a jacket and tie. No longer, apparently. According to a report I read yesterday, none of Britain’s top 100 restaurants now require men to wear jackets and ties. Our region only has two restaurants in that heady echelon (as defined by the 2009 National Restaurant Awards): Secco and Café 21. Thankfully both seem perfectly happy to feed me despite my jeans and loafers.Years ago I was taken for dinner to the Savoy Hotel and, sitting in the bar, was accosted by the head waiter who firmly but politely hissed in my ear, “Will Sir be dining with us tonight?” As I was clutching his menu, I should have thought the answer was fairly obvious, but I bit my tongue and replied “I rather hope so”. “Does Sir have a tie?” No, Sir certainly did not: he had a designer shirt and a bespoke suit, but no tie. Sir was not to worry: the cloakroom attendant could sort him out. So, like a naughty five year old, I was sent to the toilet.Surrounded by bottles of aftershave, ivory-backed clothes brushes and clean white towels, the man produced a battered wooden box from under the counter. Inside was a collection of the scruffiest ties I had ever seen. There were gravy-stained mementos of old boys’ associations, rugby clubs, and the sort of pink and blue things that signify the uniform of solicitors, accountants and estate agents: all quite horrendous. I don’t know how the Savoy had accumulated these monstrosities over the years, but I could see why their owners no longer missed them. Trying to appear nonchalant, I selected the least grim affair, a stripy gold and grey object, too broad to be modern, but passable with my blue shirt. “A popular choice,” said the old man, as he pocketed my pound coin tip. “Do you get many people without ties, then?” I asked. “A few – mostly actors”, he said dismissively. “We had an artist in here last week. Hockney, his name was. He chose that same tie you’re wearing”. I swaggered into dinner. Until last year I belonged to one of London’s oldest clubs, The Athenaeum. I finally resigned when the membership voted, for the umpteenth time, against modernising its dress code. The club only admitted women a couple of years ago, and then only after fierce debate within its crusty membership. I only used it once a year when I needed to impress my bank manager. It was also the only day I ever wore a tie. Now I take the manager to Grouchos and intimidate him with tie-less celebrities.The fact is, places that make you dress up normally manage to combine boring food with dull clientele. The best restaurant in the world, Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck, has no dress code: the owner says to wear whatever makes you comfortable. But that’s the problem: why do I still only feel comfortable wearing the same as everyone else?
Cyril Smith’s enormous backside completely filled the television screen. The Liberal MP was bending down to put a diminutive stuffed chicken into the oven behind him and the cameraman had zoomed in just a little too close for comfort. “There should be a law against that,” said comedian Willie Rushton, who was attempting to put together a toad-in-the-hole. The audience in the majestic ballroom of London’s Savoy Hotel was helpless with laughter. That one shot – in effect a blank screen – was held for about ten seconds and became a defining moment in my television career. At the age of thirty I was moving from news and current affairs into the dizzy world of entertainment. Those were the days when the people who ran the television channels trusted their producers. I remember the call from Brian Wenham, the Controller of BBC2: “Tom, we need to do some literature. You did English at university, didn’t you? I don’t really care what you produce, just make a bit of a splash”. So I put together ten separate programmes about books, all of which were broadcast in a single week. One was about crime writing, which we set on board the Orient Express. We hired the train for the day and drove it to Bognor Regis and back, filming a murder on the way. That show was presented, I recall, by James Burke and Shaw (“Keep ‘em peeled”) Taylor from Police 5. It was terrible: a true crime against quality television. Ned Sherrin presented something aptly entitled I, Me, Myself, which was supposed to be about autobiographies, but ended up as a lot of anecdotes about Sherrin’s friends in musical theatre. There was a live Booker Prize ceremony, hosted by Russell Harty, and also a number of fairly decent documentaries. But the highlight of the week, and by far the most popular, was Cookshow, presented by Esther Rantzen.It was the world’s first celebrity cooking show. Willie and Cyril, together with Gerald Harper, Jane Asher and the singer Suzi Quatro, had to prepare recipes from five cookery writers, including Delia Smith and Prue Leith. Of the five, Cyril Smith and Jane Asher were the only really capable cooks. Jane was already baking cakes for her young family, and Cyril used to cook for his mother, with whom he lived in Rochdale. At 29 stones or more, and 6 foot 2 inches tall, he was the size of a small terraced house. He towered over the tiny Quatro, whom I deliberately put beside him in the cook-off. Smith loved publicity, and throughout the 80’s you could always rely on him to show up as a token figure of fun. He would have been the perfect Celebrity Big Brother house guest. British politics hasn’t been nearly as colourful since he retired, and his death earlier this week was a loss. His famous statement that Parliament was the longest-running farce in the West End now seems way ahead of its time. I can’t imagine what he thought of the current Lib-Tory coalition – he was utterly against the Lib-Lab pact in 1977, and railed against the SDP-Liberal alliance when it was first formed. He was one of those men who always said what he thought (well, to be honest, he often said things before he’d thought about them). He never changed his politics, though he changed his political party several times during his career, and once tried to form a new one.
Beneath his jolly fat man exterior was a politician of steel and, although I detested some of his views, particularly on abortion and capital punishment, I had to admire his resolve. And his roast chicken.
[Prime Minister David Cameron released the first pictures of his new baby daughter this weekend]
Despite the fact that it’s his fourth time round the block, I guarantee that David Cameron will be finding Florence Rose Endellion quite a handful. No hands-on father with a day job could possibly find it otherwise. I’m assuming he is hands-on, of course, and that Florence isn’t being looked after by a phalanx of nannies. After all, the importance of parenting was one of the Tories’ main election platforms. Didn’t they even have some proposal for child-sharing, with both parents enjoying periods of paternity and maternity leave so that each could experience the thrill of rearing? I doubt that idea will find itself on the statute books in the near future, else we’d be seeing rather too much Clegg on the television for Mr Cameron’s liking.However there are reports that our prime minister is taking his parental responsibilities very seriously, even preparing himself for the ordeal by enlisting the help of a specialist father-to-be trainer. What a wonderfully modern notion: I wonder how you get a teaching job like that – do you have to have lots of children to qualify, or can you learn it at evening classes? If such a fathering guru had been available in Morpeth, there’s no doubt Jo would have sent me on an intensive course. Although she is always very loyal to me in public, I’m sure my wife could never have predicted how utterly useless a man with five children might be when faced with just one baby daughter. 
There’s a website in the United States called greatdad.com, established because, they claim, “Dads don’t always think like Moms”. They’re not kidding. While supermums live in a world of neat sock drawers, baby wipes and set bedtimes, underdads like me don’t worry about little things like cleanliness or safety, precise times or putting on the right clothes. 
We love throwing chocolate-covered babies high in the air and hearing them giggle; we dress them in yesterday’s pyjamas and demand a medal when we’ve changed a nappy, which we’re happy to do so long as it’s only one and doesn’t contain the wrong sort of effluent. Sometimes we forget bathtime altogether and treat our babies like teenagers, letting them watch TV till late, eat pizza, and open dangerous kitchen cupboards at will. My notion of discipline is to say no until Izzy cries and then immediately say yes: it works every time. Dads like me wouldn’t know how to sort out a sock drawer if we knew where it was – which we certainly don’t. After so many children, I shouldn’t really plead ignorance as an excuse, except that, try as I may, I can’t seem to remember a single thing about childrearing. Although she politely asks for my advice on everything, Jo has learned to ignore the learned voice of experience, largely because it’s invariably wrong. The mysteries of controlling, feeding, and generally keeping alive a one-year-old remain secret, despite having observed the entire process at close quarters on four previous occasions.
Meanwhile the Californian rock chick I met seven years ago has, without any training or prior knowledge, transformed into the world’s perfect Mum. 
I’m not saying this because it’s our first wedding anniversary today (yes, against the odds and to the bewilderment of some of my oldest acquaintances, Jo has agreed to stay married to me) but because I’m astounded that I could have been so unbelievably lucky as to have fallen in love with two perfect girls, my wife and my daughter.
As for Mr Cameron, once he returns to work after his paternity leave, he could do a lot worse than spending some of the money saved from NHS Direct on supplying free daddy-trainers for every new father. That would certainly win him the mums’ vote at the next election.
{All photos copyright Pam Hordon}
Well, actually it’s far from perfect, but rather better than I looked two months and 20 pounds ago. Here’s the proof:
It was a close run finish. Dr Dukan always conceded that followers of his diet regime might need a little wholewheat to get the system moving from time to time. He’s not kidding.
I rather panicked at the last moment because I weighed myself last night and was still well over a pound short of the target. I suspected this was because of the constipation caused by my relentless diet of morning cardboard (see recipe in an earlier posting) and dry lunchtime chicken. However much fresh garden salad I consumed, nothing shifted the bloating. So I opened my first loaf of bread since June and it did its stuff within half an hour. Sorry to be so basic, but they say blogs should be truthful – and some of you have shared this journey with me for the whole 64 days. I've also had several emails from people who've been inspired to join the regime. Good luck to you all.
As the photographer arrived I weighed in at 195.4 lbs. This is the lightest I’ve been since I was going out with Anneka Rice in the mid-90s. Even then Ms Rice complained about my weight (in fairness, during the relationship I had expanded from 185 pounds, which was, and is, my “true weight” for my height and build). I remember her saying one morning, rather cruelly, but I confess accurately, that I was looking pregnant: this, just as I got out of the bath. That could well have been the beginning of the end.
I began a diet that day, but failed as miserably as I have in subsequent attempts, including the one where Michael Grade and I competed with the Controller of BBC1 and sent each other cakes and messages to try and put each other off. I’ve described that journey, and my failed 2008 attempt to emulate it, in another post.
Alright, a more cynical reader, or indeed an ex-girlfriend, might point out that I look as pregnant now as I did then, but I do feel that my YuKan diet has been a resounding success. I genuinely feel better, lighter, healthier and everything else I promised myself. More importantly, I’m proud of my family snaps, the first of which is published here and more of which will appear later this week on this blog. They were a nightmare to shoot.
The talented photographer, Pam Hordon, was an angel. Unlike Izzy, who had no desire to be part of the polite and formal family group shot that Jo and I had envisaged. She insisted on sprinting round the garden instead of sitting quietly on my lap. Thus the “sitting” became a running.
The shoot reminded me of a film I made about the Walton Sextuplets, which included a photo session with Lord (Patrick) Lichfield attempting to take a family portrait in a formal garden on their second birthday (here's one of the more successful pictures which has been scanned onto a fanzine site). The shoot was a glorious nightmare, with Lichfield waving a little bird at them, which they all studiously ignored. Just as he was set to take the picture, one of the six would run off into the distance. Miraculously, Patrick managed to get all six looking at the camera at the same time, and the Waltons were far better behaved than Izzy. It was fortunate that Pam was more than a match for her.
The pictures show a leaner, more sprightly man than before: still just as old, of course, but perhaps more ready to enjoy the next round of fatherhood with my beautiful young wife and my gorgeous, if rather exhausting, daughter.
I shall be attempting to remain at this weight for some time, despite Dr Dukan’s exhortations for me to carry on down to my “true weight”. Jo doesn't want me to carry on: she thinks I'm just fine as I am. Or maybe she just wants her life back.
My wife Jo is not someone you’d normally describe as a country girl. She claims to have seen neither sheep nor cow during her childhood in Beverly Hills. I can well believe this, judging by the screams of wonderment when she first spotted a herd of cattle shortly after her arrival in the UK. “They’re absolutely huge”, she told her mother.The fact that Jo has survived four years of living on an isolated farm in Northumberland is testimony to the strength of our relationship. She’s still pretty wary of approaching the animals directly, particularly cows, whom she (rightly) suspects of being moody, unpredictable and downright dangerous. “The only good cow is medium-rare”, she says, and, having had the neighbour’s herd force themselves through a gate into our ripe hayfield last week, I agree. Jo has endured bats, mice, bulls and all manner of rural indignities during her time in the UK, but I don’t think she’s ever quite forgiven me for the sheep-jumping incident. It was five years ago, during our first summer in London. We were driving through rural Cambridgeshire to lunch with my half-brother when we passed a paddock laid out with pony jumps; in the corner of the field a few sheep were lazily grazing. “Look!” I said excitedly, “Sheep jumpers.” Jo made me slow down as her brain took in this information. “You’re not telling me they have to jump over those hurdles?” “Yes, it’s a big sport in this part of the world – the land’s flat and dull and so are the people. It’s how they liven up their weekends, training their sheep to jump. They even have championships: animals come from miles around to compete.” She was suspicious at first. But once I’d outlined the rules of the sport, explaining how they use sheepdogs to nip the lambs’ heels in training till they get the idea, she was hooked. I warmed to the subject: “You know how you wear woollen sweaters in winter? Over here we call them jumpers: they’re named after the sport.” It was a long journey. One sly wink and my half-brother joined in the fun. “Oh, it’s such a shame you’re not here next week: we’ve got the European Sheep Jumping Championships in Kimbolton just down the road. Thousands of them are coming from all over the continent, including the Greek champions.” “I hear the Jerseys are pretty strong this year”, added my nephew… and so on, for an entire lunch. By the end of the meal, we couldn’t contain ourselves and confessed through fits of giggles. My wife’s gullibility is one of her most endearing features, but I had to swear never to tell that story in public. However this week I couldn’t resist. Because yesterday morning we were just pulling out of our driveway when we spotted our neighbour carrying a piece of foam and some string. “What’s that for, Dick?” I asked. “Sheep racing”, he said gloomily. “I’m measuring up for the saddles.” Apparently a friend of his had come up with a bright idea for the Whalton Village Show on the 18th September and Dick, being one of Britain’s most distinguished sheep vets, has been designated race organiser. “I’ve no idea how to make them run”, he moaned. “How about sheep dogs running behind to nip their heels?” I suggested, just managing to dodge the side of Jo’s fist as it whistled towards my cheek. “Presumably they’ll have names like Sheargar and Red Ram? Will it be a Sheeplechase?” Dick nodded: “Sheep are pretty good at jumping.” In Waitrose’s car park in Ponteland there’s a poster advertising the event. I reckon it’s going to be the sporting highlight of the year. I wonder if I should invite my half-brother? No, he’d never believe me.
I have a terrible confession about a major weakness of mine – a paranoia, even. I can spot a close acquaintance on the other side of the street and, mid-hail, will stop myself from saying his name – just in case I’ve confused him for someone else.So, to avoid potential embarrassment, I utter a strangulated “Hi there” and wait for him to acknowledge me. Often confirmation of the person’s true identity takes several minutes. I can’t just say “How’s Dorothy?”, or “Are you still with the Gas Board?”, just in case my friend isn’t the friend I think he is, or isn’t married to the right person, or in the right job. So I tend to come out with phrases like “How are things?” and wait for a clue in his reply to reassure myself that I’m both talking to the correct person and that I really do know what he does, who he lives with and all the other essentials to ensure safe ongoing discourse.This long established fear of awkwardness and humiliation would keep a psychotherapist in new couches for life, I’m sure. Something in my childhood, some terrible mortification long hidden behind a mask of uncertainty, will have prompted this terrible discomfort. My two years of therapy in California failed to grapple with it: I had bigger skeletons from my past to uncover.In the 1980s I made the world’s worst talk show producer because I could never recognise any of the guests. I once told a well-known artist in the Groucho Club how much I liked his movies. He replied “I like Lindsay Anderson’s work too, but sadly I’m not him”. I was so distraught, he sketched a portrait of me which he gave me “to remind me who I am”.So, as a result of this perverse obsession with identity, I’ve always been very careful about what I say to anyone. Most of all, I keep quiet about their appearance. I’ve even stopped saying how well people look since a former work colleague whom I did recognise (also in the Groucho Club) revealed, after receiving my congratulations on his slim physique, that he’d just been diagnosed with cancer. Sadly I read that he died last Sunday.So imagine my surprise when three people in the last 24 hours have had the courage to come straight up to me and declare, bold as brass, how much weight I’ve lost. I’m full of admiration – for them, not me. I’d be too scared to say that to anyone for fear of the consequences. But why only three, and why in the last 24 hours, when I’ve been hovering around this weight for a week and a half? Maybe they are secret readers of this very blog?Tomorrow I’m going to wear a big badge with “The Diet's Over – Yes, I’ve Lost Nearly 2 Stones - Congratulate Me!”. But first let's take the photographs: so I can carry the proof with me forever.
Like the discarded heroes of Toy Story 3, for years my Size 34 jeans had been lying neglected at the bottom of a dark drawer, underneath the unworn jogging shorts. Yesterday I yanked them into the sunlight. It’s been almost two months since I started my diet. Shamed into action by a trip to Thin City – Los Angeles – I embarked on a weight loss programme by Dr Pierre Dukan (whom I call Dukant, because that seems to be his sole mantra).My aim was to lose 22 pounds by next Saturday, when a photographer is coming to take a family portrait. This was a clever Father’s Day gift from my wife, who knows full well that I wouldn’t want my lardy lines immortalized forever in a photo. So began the protein-only nightmare that I’ve been summarising in my other blog www.bringingmedowntosize.com. With less than a week to go, I can happily report that I am just a couple of fat-free yoghurts away from my target. I’ve lost over 20 pounds in 7 weeks: I started at 15 stone 5 pounds, but I’m now exactly 14 stone. Compared to a premier league footballer I’m still more Lurpak than six-pack, but, apart from the evidence of my bathroom scales, the tangible proof is the four inches that have disappeared from my waistline. The result: nothing fits. So this week I’ve been searching out the clothes I carefully stored away when I finally admitted defeat in the battle of the bulge. I didn’t officially graduate from size 34 until 2005, though I should have done so ten years before. Since then, the girls in the jeans shops have looked at me disbelievingly when I demanded 36. They were right: it’s amazing how tight you can pull a belt when your waistline hangs over the top. Forever in denial, I refused to dump the old ones, ever hopeful that they might come in useful. But then, I never throw anything away.I’m an incorrigible hoarder. There’s a drawer in the kitchen with all manner of useful things. This morning’s inventory comprised:
4 packets of unpronounceable prescription drugs well past their sell-by date
2 dried-up tubes of glue
4 plastic napkin rings
3 tiny screwdrivers and a keyring – all from Christmas crackers
4 torches with dead batteries
20 new A4 batteries, mixed up with 20 old ones (I’ve no way of telling which is which)
3 ancient mobile phones, without chargers
1 brand new carbon monoxide alarm (bought in 2007)
5 sets of chopsticks from Chinese takeaways
31 keys from long-forgotten houses, cars, sheds and bicycles
1 half-empty packet of broad bean seeds, expiry 2009
8 packets of unopened cut flower food
1 Farrow and Ball paint chart
7 picture hooks without nails
They’ll all still be there a year from now.That’s the contents of just one drawer. I have stashed useless junk all over the house; the garden shed is an embarrassment, my tool-box overflows with spare bits, and the bathroom has a cupboard piled with shampoo from every hotel room I’ve ever visited. All this is based on the philosophy, doubtless learned from my mother, that nothing should ever be thrown away. Well, she was wrong. Because this morning I put on the jeans and strutted downstairs to show Jo. “Look”, I proclaimed proudly, pointing down to where my stomach used to be. She looked horrified. “Take those off immediately”, adding darkly, “and never, ever, wear them again”. I looked in the mirror: she was right. Tight thighs, flares: I must have bought them in the 80s. I’ve put them back in the drawer, just in case 80’s Retro comes back or we get invited to a fancy dress party. They’ll lie there beside their size 36 cousins, who are convinced they won’t be there for ever. Rejected for now, as Jo and I go off to the mall to buy me a new wardrobe, they’ll be waiting smugly for the inches to go back on once this wretched diet fades into history. I just hope they’ll be completely out of fashion by the time that happens.
In 1993 I was invited to become chairman of PACT, the body that represents every film and television producer in the UK. Although my experience was limited to the small screen, I had to write to the membership setting out a strategy for helping both sides of the production spectrum. TV was easy: as someone who’d left the north east after school and spent his entire career in London, I wanted to help my colleagues who’d remained in the regions. So we started a campaign that led directly to the BBC and Channel 4 quotas for programmes produced outside the M25: they exist to this day, and have resulted in thousands of hours of regional production. Film policy was tougher to get my head around, because I knew nothing about the politics of the industry. I asked the chief executive of PACT, John Woodward, what British cinema needed most. He said simply, “More British films”. Apparently more than 95% of all films shown in UK cinemas were American. “What we need are tax incentives to bring money into UK film production”.“Well, that’s easy”, I said naively, “all our MPs will find it appalling that we’re feeding our children a diet of American movies. It’s a cultural argument.” John shook his head. It wasn’t as simple as it looked. The Conservatives had never looked kindly on film luvvies: many of our stars names were openly left of centre and frequently showed up at Labour fund-raising events. And the cultural argument was a non-starter: one only had to look at the isolationist French film industry, producing esoteric films at a huge cost in public subsidy. Nor could we use anti-American sentiment: our cinemas were controlled by the American distributors, so we had to carry Hollywood with us.This needed to be a commercial, not cultural, argument. There were huge financial benefits to the economy from film production, and we had to convince the government that our industry was capable of making big profitable blockbusters as well as art house classics. So one morning in 1994 John and I hosted a press conference in the Savoy Hotel, with Michael Winner on one side, Tim Bevan of Working Title on the other, and men in ties from Warner Brothers and Paramount nodding tacit approval; together we launched a campaign for tax breaks for British films. It was the first time the entire film industry had come together with a united voice. But it took many years of lobbying and a change of government before the campaign succeeded. To persuade Gordon Brown, we produced a complex financial model that showed the economic benefits that would derive from a relatively modest tax concession. We got our sums right. Since the breaks were brought in, the proportion of UK films shown in our cinemas has more than tripled to 17% and British films now contribute £4.3 billion a year to our economy. So it’s not surprising there’s been such a universal outcry to the knee-jerk decision of the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to axe the body set up to make the whole thing work: the UK Film Council. Run by the very same John Woodward who masterminded our original PACT campaign, the organisation was set up in 2000 as the cornerstone of the revitalised industry. Since then box office takings have increased by 60%, and, more importantly, over 8% of that revenue has been spent on British “indie” films. Currently 44,000 people are directly employed in film, with a further 95,000 working on ancillary services. It’s a multi-billion industry that’s the envy of the rest of the world. Now, thanks to one ill-judged government announcement, the future of British film is in jeopardy. It’s no wonder that stars, technicians and film-lovers everywhere are up in arms.
[This week the government announced a change in the retirement age law. Companies will no longer be allowed to automatically retire people at the age of 65.]
So now I don’t have to retire when I’m 65? Phew, that’s a relief. I wasn’t looking forward to having that awkward conversation with myself in 7 years time when I’d have had to say apologetically that I wasn’t needed any more – not because my ideas had become old-fashioned or my brain too slow, but because the law said I could be sent out to pasture like an old horse. Like most people who run their own businesses, I have no concept of what retirement actually means. On the day I joined the BBC in 1973 I expected it would be a job for life. The pension scheme promised you two-thirds of your final salary when you finally handed back your ID card at the age of 60. I kept mine as a souvenir (Staff Number 155658) when I quit to start my own business at 32. Technically I’m already a pensioner, because the BBC now pays me a pittance based on the final salary I was receiving back then. It would just about buy a subscription to Saga magazine. Of the five trainees who joined on the same day as me, most stayed much longer and did amazingly well: one is even a Lord. I guess their BBC pensions are worth a lot more now.Me? I’m back where I was in 1984: trying to earn a crust as an independent producer. The problem is that all the editors I pitch to are young; many are younger than my son. They’re commissioning programmes for their bosses the licence payers, half of whom are considerably older than me. Most viewers are over 50, so I think I have a right to carry on making programmes, if only for them. And my own life expectancy gives me another 23 years of potential production.Besides, with maturity comes a better understanding of what life is about. I was so busy in the eighties and nineties that I raced through my children’s growth and my marriages, never stopping to take a breath. I lived in London, which is no place for a real human being. In those days I would no more have considered relocating back up north than the current BBC staff who are making such a fuss about moving to Salford. Right now I’d like nothing more than to stop and savour a million things I’ve not made time for. I want to learn the names of all the plants and birds in my garden; I want to read all my unopened books and have one of my own join them; I want to cook more, learn to play jazz piano, and laugh and love through another lifetime of experiences with my wonderful wife. Above all, I want to enjoy every moment of Izzy’s childhood. Retirement would give me the time, yet I know that none of these things are incompatible with holding down a full time job. It’s all a question of balance. Like the spokes on a bicycle wheel, all the elements of life – career, health, family, love, fun, community and spirituality – are equally essential. Sadly it takes a lot of mistakes to realise that.My father couldn’t retire either. He was “let go” in his sixties (“Sorry, Bert, we simply can’t carry you any more”, ran the curt letter I discovered with horror one day in a drawer). Soon bored with his allotment, he became a part time bookkeeper. He clearly knew a great deal more about business than any of the people who were hiring him. One of his clients, a restaurant, was losing money and Dad quickly worked out why: the manager was squandering the profits. So they offered Dad the job instead. That’s why, when most people his age were mowing the lawn, he was a happily full-time restaurateur till the day he died.
At least I’d been warned.
In New York hardened critics had sobbed uncontrollably; 50-year-olds kept their 3D glasses on in the street for fear of revealing red-rimmed evidence; meanwhile, their bemused children were wondering what all the fuss was about. Such, apparently, is the power of Toy Story 3 to make grown men cry. So, fearing that this film might present my masculinity with a bit of a challenge, I came armed with a healthy dose of sarcasm. It’s worked in the past. I watched Titanic at a celebrity preview. At the climax (he dies), the entire audience laughed and cheered with relief that such a clunky, preposterous movie was finally ending. In the 1970s I went with fellow students to see Love Story. At its climax (she dies), a single middle-aged woman about ten rows in front of us started to bawl hysterically. Her cries of distress prompted fits of giggles, which soon turned to guffaws around the theatre. So on Saturday night I reckoned that, with a little cynicism, I could probably cope with some schmaltz about a few plastic toys. No soppy film could turn me to a blubbering wreck. Well, apart from Finding Nemo, Dr Zhivago, The Sound of Music, It’s A Wonderful Life and pretty much any movie with someone being reunited or separated in the final scene. Just in case, I popped a clean white handkerchief into my pocket. I told Jo it was for her.It’s the last in the Toy Story trilogy (I guess it didn’t start out as a trilogy, but Hollywood does likes to cash in on a good thing). Andy, the little boy whose toys come to life when he’s not looking, has grown up and is off to college. He’s clearing out his bedroom to make way for his younger sister, and must decide what to do with the toys. Will they be taken with him, stored in the attic, donated to a day care centre, or dumped in the bin? I’m not going to give the game away, but I guarantee that no man with children (let alone 5, of whom most have left home and one is only just discovering the joy of toys) will leave dry-eyed. I wept into my bucket of popcorn and had to sit right through the credits to calm down. So what makes it strike such a chord? Most children in the cinema appeared to enjoy it, but none seemed overly upset as Andy goes off into the sunset. Critics have suggested that it stirs memories of lost toys and leaving home, nostalgia for happier times past. Not in my case: I was quite chirpy about leaving for university, and dumped my toys at the jumble sale when I was 12. No, I reckon it’s about the transient nature of life and how parents must feel about the inevitable departure of their own children. At 18 months, Izzy has already passed a major milestone on her road to independence. She now says things like “cat”, “dog”, “down” and “Daddy” and has lengthy private conversations of great intensity (although in complete gobbledygook) with her dolls. Almost overnight, she has become a tiny person, living in her own fantasy world, not ours. We’ve only recently noticed the passing of her baby phase, now lost to us forever. “She’ll be leaving us soon”, said a red-eyed Jo, as we recovered from the movie with a bottle of strong wine. “At least the bank manager will be relieved”, I said. Jo threw me a dark look.The fact is, in our child’s eyes we’re the toys, and, much as we love playing with her, sometime soon we’re going to have to give her up to the real world outside. And, as Woody and his toy friends found out, that’s possibly the saddest feeling any parent can have.
My brother-in-law sat meekly in the back of the car smothered with bright pink paper. With a gold bow stuck on top, Jo’s first surprise was complete.
Josh had flown halfway round the world to be with his sister for her birthday. Now exhausted with jetlag, he was sweating on the back seat of a hot car dressed as a parcel.
The problem was, Jo didn’t want her surprise. “It’s not my birthday till Tuesday: I’ll open it then”, she said, absorbed with Izzy in The Night Garden. “But it’s too big to hide – please go outside and open it”. She had sighed earlier as I’d said I was going to town to “collect something”.
Like all men, I normally only shop for presents at the eleventh hour, but she hoped I’d at least made an effort for her 40th. The one thing she really wanted was a pair of size 35 Christian Louboutin shoes, quite unobtainable in Newcastle, so, despite a few hints and a magazine left open at an appropriate advert, she guessed I’d ended up making the usual panic buy at Fenwick’s. She hoped I’d kept the receipt. “Just put it in the shed, I promise I won’t look”, she said. “It’s a bit bulky – give me a hand with the…dangly bits”. I’d nearly said “arms”.
Eventually I dragged her outside to look. She gasped when I opened the car door. I admit it did look a little alarming. Josh was holding himself perfectly still, arms strapped to his sides. You couldn’t see an inch of flesh and you’d never have guessed it was a body, were it not for the brightly coloured trainers sticking out the bottom. “Er, that’s just weird”, was the disappointed reaction. “Is it a Raoul Moat doll?”
She was serious. The murderer had been the only thing on our minds for the entire week. Now it crossed her mind that some shop in Newcastle might already be selling replicas. This was too eccentric, even for me. Or perhaps it was a real corpse?
Suddenly the cadaver coughed and Jo shrieked. “Open it before it suffocates”, I urged. She gingerly tore back the top, and there was her beloved brother, face now pink as the wrapping paper: “Surprise!”
Organising Jo’s 40th birthday was more complicated than any television programme.
The climax of the big day was to be a secret party at a friend’s house. For weeks emails had pinged across Northumberland as her girlfriends and I conspired. But with a week to go Jo had become increasingly gloomy. She muttered darkly about missing LA and her family; she wanted the beach and a plate of decent sushi.
Suddenly I twigged: when Jo had started dropping hints about her birthday, all her friends had made excuses because they didn’t want to blow the surprise – some said they were working, the rest were “out of town”. Her great friend Claire, in panic, said she was going to be “in Stockholm”.
Then gloom turned to suspicion: was something afoot? So we arranged decoys: a girly supper here, a lunch there, a beach picnic the following weekend (when Claire had returned from Stockholm).
The birthday dawned with breakfast in bed and a series of unexpected arrivals: a hairdresser, a masseuse, then a huge tray of fresh sashimi, made by the obliging chef at Yo Sushi. 
But best of all was her shock that night as we arrived at the party to the massed screams of “Surprise!” from all her friends. There was an enormous cake featuring a 40-Star Spangled Banner above an image of the present I’d given her just an hour before: the very pair of Louboutins she’d seen in the magazine.
Thank goodness it’s ten years till we have to do it all again.
[Raoul Moat, the gunman who wounded his ex-girlfriend and murdered her lover, then shot an unarmed policeman, was on the run for 7 days - just a few miles from our house. He shot himself after being surrounded by police in the early hours of yesterday morning]
It wasn’t until Saturday evening that we finally unbolted our front door. It had taken us a whole day to accept that Moat really was gone and that the threat was over.From our house you can clearly see the ridge of Simonside, crouching like a dark brooding panther over Rothbury. We’re directly south of the town, just a few miles by crow, maybe an hour or two by slinking foot along the disused railway cutting that runs a few hundred yards from where Moat was eventually found, through the middle of the now infamous Wagtail Farm, towards our own innocent hamlet. Jo and I had studied the map: it would take him maybe twenty minutes along the back roads by stolen car, perhaps an hour by horseback – but if we were him, we’d use that old railway line. The tension blowing in the hot wind across the fields played tricks with our imagination. It was hard not to be scared: the poor dogs scarcely had one long walk all week.Husbands worked from home, unwilling to leave wives and children alone even during the day. Some friends in isolated farmhouses moved out to stay with relatives in Morpeth. Our village shop was full of gossip and sightings: the national newspapers, which had ignored us for two hundred years, screamed headlines about the beauty of our neighbourhood and the beast that was our unwelcome guest. Rumours reached us that Moat might have moved south and crossed into our own valley. On Thursday morning Jo saw a figure walking across the field outside the house and ran panicking to tell me. It was only the farmer, off to cut hay. His family had farmed this quiet land for 85 years and they’d never felt any threat to disturb their peaceful existence, but now even he felt concerned. One friend lives just down the road from Pauperhaugh, where, he told us, a house had been broken into and clothing and food were stolen. According to the owner, police had taken fifteen minutes to arrive, unarmed and unwilling to enter, even though they could see movement behind an upstairs window. It took another fifteen minutes for gun-wielding colleagues to show up, by which time Moat had slipped back into the night. Jo couldn’t understand why the police were unarmed. I explained that our police officers don’t carry guns. “How do they arrest the criminals, then?” It was a simple enough question, but I couldn’t really supply an answer. “They just politely ask them to accompany them to the police station, I guess.” Jo laughed: America is a different world. It certainly is: though, in all the five years I lived there, I never felt touched by crime – it was only something we watched on the news.
That was what made the events of this last week so shocking. Jo and I had chosen this beautiful area largely because of its unspoilt tranquility, its remoteness, because it’s like living in a gentler, bygone era. We go to Rothbury for the market, for the rhododendrons at Cragside in June, for the butcher that sells, eccentrically, crocodile steaks along with the lamb from local farms. Like Raoul Moat, I would come here as a child, loving its isolation. As a teenager I would walk the hills above the Coquet alone, living my own world. It was a place where you could escape.The night that Moat died, five people were injured in a shooting in Brixton. It scarcely made the inside pages, for this kind of violence is commonplace in most big cities. But for this part of rural Northumberland, the happenings of the last week will, I suspect, have brought the cold reality of the outside world just a little too close.
I don’t remember celebrating Hallowe’en as a child: I certainly never trick-or-treated. Was it a deprived childhood or am I right in thinking that we only became aware of it when we saw E.T.? I know it’s supposed to be an ancient custom, dating back to when our Celtic ancestors wore masks to ward off the dark spirits of approaching winter, but it only became a retail jamboree a few years ago. I couldn’t believe how seriously the Americans took the festival till I saw the huge bags of sweets we had to buy to placate the hordes of children in our Los Angeles neighbourhood.
