March 2nd, 2010
I was rung up out of the blue the other day by Tom MacAlinden, an old friend of mine.
“Robin, I’ve just tried to get hold of Willie.”
“He’s out of the country, Tom. I got an email from him two days ago.”
“Well, I just had to tell someone this, so I phoned you up.”
“Okay?”
“Right, so I’ve just been into a pub in Broughty Ferry for my lunch and at one end of the bar was this huge soup terrine. Well, it was completely and utterly empty, not a drop of soup in it, and it had a ladle sticking out of it and that didn’t have a drop in it either, and there were no soup bowls, no spoons anywhere near it. Anyway, the barman saw me having a look at it and came up to me and asked if he could help me.
“Got anything to eat, mate?” I asked.
He picked up the lid off the terrine and said, “How about some of the Emperor’s New Soup?”
Good one, isn’t it?!
February 22nd, 2010
This is a really old joke – what were Tarzan’s last words?
‘Who greased the viiiiiiiiiiiiiiine?’ (and you say that with your voice faded off into nothing.)
I was brought up at a time when the two main Scottish ski resorts, Aviemore and Glenshee, used to enjoy decent seasons, and because the latter was only just over an hour away from my home, I was up there nearly every weekend in the winter. Consequently, I sort of became an ‘above-average’ skier – well, in Scotland anyway. At the peak of my ability, I built up enough courage to ‘shuss’ one of the ‘difficult to intermediate’ slopes at Glenshee and I remember quite distinctly, as I tore down the piste with my legs juddering like shock absorbers and my eyeballs vibrating in their sockets, that my brain was screaming out, ‘I’m gonna diiiiiiiee!’ (again, voice fading away to nothing.)
Now, I reckon I probably reached a quite staggering 30 mph on that gentle run, so it is quite mind-boggling to me that a determined slip of a girl like Chemmy Alcott can launch herself off the edge of a Canadian precipice and for the next couple of minutes follow a tortuous course at 90mph, trying to keep focussed on staying upright and resisting the huge temptation to over-edge her skis and lose speed. And then there’s Amy Williams, who has the looks of a girl who might scream on a fairground merry-go-round, throwing herself onto her faithful ‘tray’, Arthur, at the top of a lethal frozen drainpipe and appearing at the other end, with her chin no more than a centimetre from the ground, in a faster time than any of the other Olympians.
It actually quite annoys me to hear the female Canadian ski commentator for the BBC saying, “And I’m afraid she really has let it go now. She is two hundredths of a second down at the last timing point. This will be a big disappointment for her because right now she really should be attacking this course, not thinking about being technically correct.” Oh yeah? Well, my dear, maybe you should think about what you say about the skiers when they’re waiting to push off from the starting gate, because that might give you a hint why there are some skiers who are ‘two hundredths of a second down.’
‘Next to come is Julia Mancuso from Squaw Valley.’
‘And here we have the French skier Ingrid Jacquemod from Val d’Isère.’
‘And here is Andrea Fischbacher from Eben in Austria.’
What do these places have in common? Yes, you’re right, they’re all ski resorts.
So let’s now try this -
‘And next up for Great Britain is Chemmy Alcott from…London?’
Or even –
‘And here she is, going into her final run in gold medal position, Great Britain’s Amy Williams from…Bath.’
You don’t have to be a mastermind to grasp the situation, do you? The cost, the hardship, the dedication that these girls and other members of the British team have had to take on outclasses by far the achievement of those who simply have had to walk out of the back door of their houses, strap on their skis and head off down the slopes. But, of course, it doesn’t win them medals, does it?
And then, a month ago, another hefty spanner was thrown into the already creaking and grinding works when the British Ski and Snowsport Federation, the governing body of the Winter Olympic team, went into administration, and it is rumoured that many of the athletes have had no option other than to fund themselves during the Games.
So, what I’m wondering in a way is why do we bother casting hugely expensive telephone votes for pretty mediocre artists on TV programmes like ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ when we already have true talent which happens to be in real and deserved need of funding? I would much rather watch Chemmy Alcott or Amy Williams walking onto the stage in front of Simon Cowell and his cronies and just standing there, smiling at them.
‘And what do you do?” he would ask.
Chemmy/Amy would turn to a huge split screen behind them and simply say, ‘This’. The phones would be ringing long before the final image of Chemmy collapsing exhausted at the end of her run, sliding the last twenty yards into the inflated safety barrier, or Amy jumping up from skeletal Arthur – the other ‘man’ in her life – in celebration of the first British Women’s Winter Olympic Gold for 58 years.
I really mean it, girls, to you both and all your fellow team members – huge respect.
February 17th, 2010
I’ve just got back from two very different weeks in Kenya, hence the slight blip in the blogs. The second week (and the initial reason Kirsty and I were to be going there) was spent with friends on the island of Lamu in a house that was fronted by an 8-mile stretch of beach that we had completely to ourselves. In contrast, our first week was spent helping out at an orphanage and a primary school at Timau, a small township that lies in the leeward shadow of Mount Kenya. We were actually set up as guinea pigs by student GAP year company, Africa Ventures, to see if there might be call for a more ‘senior’ age group to take part in their schemes. AV wanted to call it Denture Ventures which I riled at immediately, seeing I’m still in possession of all my teeth. More appropriate would be something about ‘shedding years’ because that’s exactly what seemed to happen to us.
I won’t go into huge details about it all, but it has to be one of the most enthralling weeks I have ever spent. The kids in the orphanage, aged between 10 and 16, were there because of HIV, sectarian violence and general poverty. Peter and Frederick had both witnessed their parents killed in front of them, and Frederick, aged 14, was still traumatized by it. Doreen and Anne had lost mothers to AIDS and Anne was HIV positive herself, but being treated. Fridah, aged 10, was brought in by the police two years ago. She has no memory of where she came from or who her parents were. Yet, together, these children, 14 boys and 10 girls, formed one of the strongest units I have ever witnessed, supportive of each other and loving to those younger members. And never, for one moment, was there a smile off their faces.
The credit for this has to go to Mrs. Esther Mwiti who started the orphanage in 2002 and continues to fund it out of her own pocket. She is a remarkable woman with a deep faith and enormous energy, even though she had suffered a life-threatening illness not so many years ago. And she has been clever enough to surround herself with some quite remarkable people to help – Grace, the project administrator; Joseph, the scout leader and ex-international marathon runner; Peter, the church deacon, who leads some pretty raucous services with a good bit of ecclesiastical rhythm in his own movements.
We walked with the kids most mornings to their primary school about 4 kms away, and were joined on the way by a fair amount of the 630 pupils. The Kenyan government granted free primary school education after the last election, a magnanimous gesture but one that has proven totally impractical, as schools designed to cope with 200 have had to stretch their walls to cope with more than double that amount. Mia Moja was no exception. Class sizes were 40-50, children squeezed into desks, their writing hands the only thing they could move, and yet you could tell by just looking at their faces that they were there to learn.
A couple of observations:
• The 10-year-olds were learning exactly what our 10-year-olds would have been learning.
• They would have come to school in the first instance only speaking in their mother tongue. They would have had to learn English and Swahili in their first two years.
• They loved singing so I taught them the song ‘Michael row the boat ashore’. In explaining the song, I asked them which river Jesus was baptised in. Every hand in the class went up. I wasn’t really aiming to go on this line of questioning, but I thought I’d just seen how far I could go with it. So I asked who baptised him. The answer was immediate. What relation was John the Baptist to Jesus? They knew that as well. And they learned the song in fifteen minutes.
• Back here in Scotland, I’ve just today given a talk at the local primary school for their Book Week. I told this story to the head teacher and she said that there was no way any of her children would have known the answers to those questions. It makes one wonder a bit, doesn’t it?
January 22nd, 2010
I’ve just gone to pick up a prescription at the chemist in the village and in front of me in the queue was a woman who obviously had the job of looking after her young granddaughter during the day. The woman was showing the young chemist a small rash on her arm, and I know that she was just hoping beyond hopes that he would just reach behind him, take a tube off the shelf and say, “That should sort you out in a day or two.”
But I’m afraid that was not to be. As I suspected, the chemist shook his head slowly and said with a comforting smile,” I think the best thing would be for you to pop in to see your doctor.”
“Yes, I’ll just do that,” the woman replied but, in honesty, she could barely disguise her exasperation. You see, ‘popping’ to see the doctor was going to entail her fixing up an appointment, which could well be in a couple of days, get someone to look after the granddaughter, walk to get a bus, change buses to get to the surgery, travel all the way back again, pick up prescription at the chemist, get her granddaughter and walk home. There was no ‘popping’ involved. This was a drudge, a slog, and a huge disruption to her day.
The inference of the young chemist was that ‘popping’ was not going to be any bother, that it might be rather light-hearted and fun, maybe do a bit more ‘popping’ on the way, like going to the cinema or having a cup of coffee with a friend. Why couldn’t he just have said, “I know it’s going to be a crashing bore for you and you’ll probably feel like killing me for saying it, but I think you’ll have to see the doctor?”
I’ve been on the receiving end of it too, usually from one of those swish, all glass-fronted car dealerships with whom I’ve just had my car serviced at vast expense, only to get it back to find that something is not working in the car that was never not working when I took it in. “Ah, right, we’ll see to that,” says the service manager in the dark suit, white shirt and tie, who has never stuck his lily-white hand anywhere near the innards of an automobile and therefore has no knowledge as to whether it really can be ‘seen to’. “The best bet then would be if you could just pop it back to us again.”
“Of course I’ll do that,” I reply jauntily, longing to pop, but not really taking into account that it happens to be a 55-mile round trip to the garage, that I managed to coincide the last service with a meeting in town, that my appointment diary is full for the next week, and that precious, expensive fuel will be flowing through my car engine on the way there and back again. “Thank you, I’ll look forward to seeing you again,” I say before hanging up the phone and bursting into tears.
Bank managers use it too. “Good morning, Mr. Pilcher,” says the voice on the phone. “Could you just maybe pop in to see me when you’re passing?” Why can’t they be honest and say, “Come by the office, your overdraft is excessive and I want to flay you alive.”
So I suggest we keep the word ‘pop’ to champagne bottles, good-fun grandfathers, bursting balloons, top-of-the-…, and double barrelled cork guns. Hey, I wonder if you can still get those?
January 18th, 2010
I read an article the other day about Peter Mayle never expecting his first book A Year in Provence to become a phenomenal best seller. And neither, it seems, did his publisher. The initial print run of the book was 3000, yet eventually it sold one million copies in the UK and six million copies worldwide. I just wonder though how his publisher might have reacted when he realized that he had a winner on his hands. Did he gleefully call out, ‘Quickly, let’s print more copies!’ or did he take a similar course of action to that of another publisher recently?
Willie Robertson’s first book On the Milk came out at the beginning of October last year. Being written about a young lad’s adolescent years in Dundee at a time when the town was in industrial decline, it was thought the book might be a bit limited in its appeal. The reality was quite the opposite. Demand was such that the book sold out completely. Just before Christmas, no book retailer, not even Amazon had a copy. So what do the publishers do? They say ‘sorry about this, but you’re going to have to wait until June now when the paperback comes out.’
Now, I’m sure the publisher has a first rate explanation for all this, but to me, it seems to fly in the face of all good marketing practice. If a supermarket sells out of, say, potatoes, they go out to buy more – immediately, from whatever source possible – because they know that potatoes are selling and they want to cash in on their popularity. They certainly wouldn’t put up a notice saying to their customers that they were going to have to wait until the next growing season before they are able to buy more. In the intervening period, customers would simply have to learn to do without potatoes or, more likely, find an alternative. Once the new batch of potatoes come in, then the market will have declined and a vastly expensive ‘product confidence’ programme would have to be initiated to restore interest in the potatoes. Then, at this stage, after financial evaluation, some might say, ‘Actually, what’s the point?’
I’m sure it’s very frustrating for Willie Robertson to understand this, especially when Amazon are putting up the message ‘We are no longer able to offer this item for sale. Our supplier has informed us that this item has been discontinued and is no longer available.’ There is no mention of the reason for it not being offered for sale (ie. it’s actually sold out!) nor does it mention that, in five months’ time, the book will be available in paperback.
I suppose it all boils down to priority, and that the reprint of the memoirs of a past celebrity who has just mastered the basic art of ice dancing on television would satisfy the present literary market more than Willie Robertson’s extremely funny and nostalgic social commentary.
Dammit, I was being quite objective up until that moment!
