Sitting at home in my comfy chair this weekend, revisiting the final lines from my previous Blog, I've come to the realisation that I really do need to start writing something a little bit different from this standard diary of 'What Ernie did this week'. It could go on for ever, there's always going to be something, interesting or not, to write about.
I could go on, (as you're probably aware by now) for hours about Jacquie and I watching the clear night sky from our bedroom window in Caistor a couple of weeks ago and seeing, with our bare eyes, the space shuttle Discovery, after disconnecting from its mother ship, embarking on its final journey towards our planet, leaving the International Space Station to orbit the Earth ad infinitum.
Equally, I could quite easily go on about Jacquie replying to a Facebook offer last week and winning two tickets to see comedian Boothby Graffoe at the Ropery Hall in Barton upon Humber last night, or our early evening visit to Grimsby Minster to see the fantastic Lightworks event last friday.
I could rabbit on for hours about my return to working in the extensive gardens at Healing Manor especially after all of the extraordinary events that have been taking place there over the past few months, or I could regale you with comical tales of a couple of talks which I gave to the Caistor Flower Lovers Club and the New Waltham Methodist Wives group last week, but would you really, honestly, be interested ?
You might like to know that Jacquie and I have been given the invitation date for our trip to Buckingham Palace for an afternoons tea party with Her Majesty the Queen in July and I'm sure that you'd really like to hear about my latest attempt at TV presenting, appearing on a series of four mens health programmes called 'Ernie Pit Stop' ........but, to be perfectly honest with you I' don't believe that I'm going anywhere with this blog so I'm going to give it a rest for a while.
"Write it down", I said. "Get it all of your chest", I implored, as I finished writing episode 9 of my Trivial Background Noize blog. But it's only now, after rereading all of the episodes together, that I've realised that that's exactly what I've been doing and that was really what the whole elaborate escapade has been all about......... getting things off my chest.
It definitely was a wrench, almost three months ago, when I walked away from the highly enjoyable pastime of running Grimsby in Bloom. But, it really was hard work and it really was all-consuming in its demands upon my time. Its constant requests for my attention in a way, forced me to become a slave to its master, leaving me no time at all, to even earn a crust some weeks.
This strangely named blog of the last 10 weeks ( I was the singer in a local punk rock group in the late 1970's with the same name), has really helped me to recapture the thrill of seeing a blank page before me. It has helped me to refocus my sights on the more important things in life. It has also helped me to break free from the shackles of continuity which I forged in haste, 3 and a half years ago. The next part of my lifes' journey does not need a running commentary to accompany it and for that reason, I'll not be writing my blog for the next few weeks or even more.
That doesn't mean that I won't be writing stuff. Just that I'll stop writing it all down in diary form for you all to read. I'm now toying with the idea of changing my style and stretching myself with an attempt at writing some poetry as a means of expressing myself. Maybe that will become my literary outlet, who knows?
Thanks for reading Trivial Background Noize over the last 10 weeks and I hope that you've enjoyed reading them as much as I have enjoyed writing them.
Just for a laugh, if you've got a moment in your busy schedule, please have a look at the series of mens health programmes called 'Ernie's Pit Stop, which appeared on Channel 7's website a couple of days ago. My youngest, Leon, couldn't even bear to watch past the opening credits. He saw the first few moments, up until the point where his oh so embarrassing dad begins to play air guitar with a mucky old sweeping brush and it suddenly became to much for his sensitive teenage sensibilities and he ran, groaning from the living room.
click here for link to Ernie's Pitstop
Have a look for yourself, you deserve a laugh.
Let me know what you think!
Take care everyone, I'll be back again in another literary form sometime soon I hope, but for now, thank you very much for reading Trivial Background Noize.
Ernie x
Showing posts with label Grimsby. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grimsby. Show all posts
Sunday, 20 March 2011
Sunday, 20 February 2011
A winters ramble through the woods
The heavy rains this weekend really have scuppered my plans for work next week. I'm going over to Immingham for a three day course on Woodland management on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and I was hoping to get out and do a bit of paid work at a garden in Scartho either today or tomorrow, to make up for my midweek absence from work.
Jacquie and I joined a local community group called 'The Friends of Mayflower Wood' earlier on this year, after attending a meeting of like-minded individuals at Conoco Phillips offices at Killingholme, in North East Lincolnshire. Mayflower Wood, I read last week, is the largest privately owned community woodland in England and if you ever get a spare moment, take my advice and have a walk around this massive burgeoning woodland site. There are over 70,000 trees planted here and they're all between waist to shoulder height but it'll only be a matter of a few years more and they'll be towering majestically above our heads.
We joined this friendly little group after I helped out at a couple of their intriguingly named 'Tree Spiral Removal' days last Autumn. A couple of years ago, when these young trees were first planted as 'whips' and 'heels', they were extremely vulnerable to the danger of being eaten alive during their first winter. Rabbits and deer, which live in abundance in and around these woods, always suffer from a lack of food when winter comes around and as their preferred diet of assorted fresh green leaves comes off the seasonal menu, they have to find an alternative food source in the form of the tender bark which grows on the newly planted young tree saplings. They never eat right through the trunk of the saplings and they only choose the youngest and sweetest of trees to nibble on, but once they've had a chew, the damage is done. The inner bark is very important as it's where the sap travels on its journey around the tree. Once the tree gets a little bit older and the bark gets a little more gnarled and woody, it becomes less attractive as a snack time treat.
"Excuse me!" shouted a chap out walking his dogs. "My curiosity really has got the better of me. What are you all doing?".
I stopped for a moment, straightened my back and with my hand shielding my eyes from the low lying autumn sun, I saw the stranger approaching. "Good morning", I replied. If you want to come over here I'll show you, it'd be easier than trying to explain". Before I'd even finished my sentence his two black slobbering labradors were upon me, licking, panting and bounding, with tails wagging so hard that I swear they could've been used to harvest some form of free eco energy to power the nation.
Before this visitor had arrived upon my peaceful scene, I'd been busying away, surrounded by people, yet obliviously adrift in a world of my own, removing tree spirals. "These flexible plastic shields were placed around these trees when they were first planted, to protect them from rabbits and deer. But, they've got to the stage now when the trees are big enough to look after themselves. In fact, if you look down here, you'll see that the base of this tree, where it's been surrounded by one of these tree spirals, is covered in mould caused by the build up of loads of damp leaf litter and dead insects all of which have collected inside the plastic ring.That damp rubbish has caused the mould which could, in turn, allow infections to grow and the tree to rot. That one over there", I said pointing to another young tree about 10 feet away. "That poplar has grown so quickly that it's completely outgrown its protective spiral and it's now starting to impede its growth, and stilt its progress."
"Don't I know you from somewhere?" asked my inquisitive visitor. "I'm not sure" I replied. "I do get out and about and meet a lot of people in my role as Chairman of Grimsby in Bloom, maybe we've met doing something like that?"
"Ernie Brown!" he exclaimed "You're Ernie Brown. You write that column in the Grimsby Post every week. I do enjoy reading that, it's really nice to meet you." he said, shaking me firmly by the hand before stooping and roughly patting his dogs , which were by now champing at the bit with an excited enthusiasm keen to be getting off on the journey through the woods.
"I come here every morning with these girls", he shouted back to me when he was about 20 yards away. "They need a good walk at least once every day to keep them out of mischief. Would it help if I stopped every now and then and took a few of these spiral thingies off for you?.
"Yes, thanks, just leave all of the tree spirals in a pile near the the path edge and someone will collect them. With 70,000 trees, we need all the help we can get. Thank you! Bye." I shouted to my visitor as he strode off down the hill towards his 'girls' and they bounded, full of life up the other side, doubling the distance between them and him with every pace.
Because I've helped out on a few of these voluntary events and because we joined the 'Friends' group we were offered the opportunity to go on next weeks Woodland Management course at no cost to myself and as I keep saying, a bit of free knowledge should never be turned down.
As a maintenance gardener, I'm not a complete stranger to the practice of woodland management. For the last couple of years, one of my regular customers has been Healing Manor on Stallingborough Road near Great Grimsby.
Most gardeners really struggle to find enough work to keep them in full employment through the long, barren winter months when the drastic drop in temperatures means a drastic drop in the growth rates, no more grass to cut, no more hedges to trim and no more weeds to pluck from their secret undergrowth hiding places.
Last November, the unusually early snow fell thick and fast and lay heavy upon the ground for weeks on end, not leaving the lawns of Northern Lincolnshire until the middle of January. For the first two weeks I couldn't even get the car out of the courtyard in Caistor until finally, after a mammoth community 'dig out' we all broke free from our snowy shackles. Fortunately, once out of the courtyard the roads were reasonably clear and I was able to continue my work in the 20 acres of neglected and ancient woodlands at Healing Manor, where I managed, even when the snow was knee deep, to find plenty to do to keep myself busy.
The woodlands at Healing Manor haven't been properly looked after in many, many years and in this, my third winter at the Manor, I've been able to continue my own quiet woodland management scheme. During my first winter I re-opened nearly all of the major pathways around the ancient woodlands surrounding this medieval moated manor estate. During my second winter I started to clear the brambles and elder shrubs which were beginning to take over in a couple of the larger clearings. This, in turn, let a lot more sunlight shine down onto the ground level and during last spring I was rewarded with a fantastic display of spring flowering plants from snowdrops to bluebells and every narcissus in between. This winter, I spent my time in the woods coppicing the many years of growth that has been accumulating around the bases of scores of Lime trees around the estate and curtailing the phenomenal growth of ivy on just about every tree, again to let in more light, so that hopefully, we'll get even more spring flowers this coming season.
The ivy was really out of control. Even in the depths of winter, when the leafy canopy of these major trees had all been thrown to the ground, the all invasive ivy continued to shade the woodland floor. Its branches reached high into the loftiest branches of tallest ash trees, over 250 ft into the air. They needed curtailing before they begin to pull the trees down with their weight. During the winter, when we have the strongest, harshest winds, the trees are bereft of their summer complement of leaves, helping them to ride out the worst of the storms. With a full dressing of ivy foliage to act as a sail, the winds are able to catch and pull the weakest, uppermost branches causing lots of damage to the trees. So, out came my bow saw, my loppers and my secateurs and with the snow lying above the tops of my wellies I began my journey around the hundreds of trees on the Healing Manor estate.
It was a lovely time, when the snow lay thick on the ground, to be out in the woods working. The peace, the silence, the solitude, it really was a beautiful place to work. There were the occasional dog walkers and the odd poacher or two and one lady who jogged around the pathways every morning. We all greeted each other with a smile and a wave but nothing was said, we were all happy in our own individual little worlds. My sister and her husband came along as well one morning, a couple of weeks before Christmas. They'd come, with permission of the owner of course, to collect some greenery to decorate the chalet where they live on Humberston Fitties, ready for Christmas. I showed them where all of the best and easiest to harvest holly, ivy, yew and laurel plants were and gave them my secateurs, while I got on with my work behind the 'rose walk', on the edge of the medieval moat.
When they'd finished, they came back across to where I was working. As I watched them trudging knee deep through the snow with arms full of black bins bags bulging with green plant matter they looked to all the world like the ancient 'Stickers', granted permission from the landowner to collect fallen firewood for their winters hearth.
A police helicopter suddenly swooped down low above us and hovered just above our heads for what felt like minutes but was probably only a few seconds. As I said earlier, I've worked at Healing Manor for just over two and a half years now and I'm quite used to it being on the police helicopter flight path between Kirmington and Great Grimsby. It passes over twice, sometimes three times a day, you tend to get used to it. But this time, for the first time ever, it stopped, came much, much lower, waited and watched us, before flying off in ever increasing circles into the distance and was gone, out of sight beyond the treetops. "That was odd", I said to my sister as she and her husband stood next to me, each of them clutching a brace of black bin liners filled to the brim with fresh, green holly boughs and ivy trails. "They must've wondered what on earth we were up to on such a cold day".
And now, at last, the rain has stopped and I can get a bit more work done in the garden. Don't forget to tune in next week when I'll be brewing some very tasty beer indeed.
Jacquie and I joined a local community group called 'The Friends of Mayflower Wood' earlier on this year, after attending a meeting of like-minded individuals at Conoco Phillips offices at Killingholme, in North East Lincolnshire. Mayflower Wood, I read last week, is the largest privately owned community woodland in England and if you ever get a spare moment, take my advice and have a walk around this massive burgeoning woodland site. There are over 70,000 trees planted here and they're all between waist to shoulder height but it'll only be a matter of a few years more and they'll be towering majestically above our heads.
We joined this friendly little group after I helped out at a couple of their intriguingly named 'Tree Spiral Removal' days last Autumn. A couple of years ago, when these young trees were first planted as 'whips' and 'heels', they were extremely vulnerable to the danger of being eaten alive during their first winter. Rabbits and deer, which live in abundance in and around these woods, always suffer from a lack of food when winter comes around and as their preferred diet of assorted fresh green leaves comes off the seasonal menu, they have to find an alternative food source in the form of the tender bark which grows on the newly planted young tree saplings. They never eat right through the trunk of the saplings and they only choose the youngest and sweetest of trees to nibble on, but once they've had a chew, the damage is done. The inner bark is very important as it's where the sap travels on its journey around the tree. Once the tree gets a little bit older and the bark gets a little more gnarled and woody, it becomes less attractive as a snack time treat.
"Excuse me!" shouted a chap out walking his dogs. "My curiosity really has got the better of me. What are you all doing?".
I stopped for a moment, straightened my back and with my hand shielding my eyes from the low lying autumn sun, I saw the stranger approaching. "Good morning", I replied. If you want to come over here I'll show you, it'd be easier than trying to explain". Before I'd even finished my sentence his two black slobbering labradors were upon me, licking, panting and bounding, with tails wagging so hard that I swear they could've been used to harvest some form of free eco energy to power the nation.
Before this visitor had arrived upon my peaceful scene, I'd been busying away, surrounded by people, yet obliviously adrift in a world of my own, removing tree spirals. "These flexible plastic shields were placed around these trees when they were first planted, to protect them from rabbits and deer. But, they've got to the stage now when the trees are big enough to look after themselves. In fact, if you look down here, you'll see that the base of this tree, where it's been surrounded by one of these tree spirals, is covered in mould caused by the build up of loads of damp leaf litter and dead insects all of which have collected inside the plastic ring.That damp rubbish has caused the mould which could, in turn, allow infections to grow and the tree to rot. That one over there", I said pointing to another young tree about 10 feet away. "That poplar has grown so quickly that it's completely outgrown its protective spiral and it's now starting to impede its growth, and stilt its progress."
"Don't I know you from somewhere?" asked my inquisitive visitor. "I'm not sure" I replied. "I do get out and about and meet a lot of people in my role as Chairman of Grimsby in Bloom, maybe we've met doing something like that?"
"Ernie Brown!" he exclaimed "You're Ernie Brown. You write that column in the Grimsby Post every week. I do enjoy reading that, it's really nice to meet you." he said, shaking me firmly by the hand before stooping and roughly patting his dogs , which were by now champing at the bit with an excited enthusiasm keen to be getting off on the journey through the woods.
"I come here every morning with these girls", he shouted back to me when he was about 20 yards away. "They need a good walk at least once every day to keep them out of mischief. Would it help if I stopped every now and then and took a few of these spiral thingies off for you?.
"Yes, thanks, just leave all of the tree spirals in a pile near the the path edge and someone will collect them. With 70,000 trees, we need all the help we can get. Thank you! Bye." I shouted to my visitor as he strode off down the hill towards his 'girls' and they bounded, full of life up the other side, doubling the distance between them and him with every pace.
Because I've helped out on a few of these voluntary events and because we joined the 'Friends' group we were offered the opportunity to go on next weeks Woodland Management course at no cost to myself and as I keep saying, a bit of free knowledge should never be turned down.
As a maintenance gardener, I'm not a complete stranger to the practice of woodland management. For the last couple of years, one of my regular customers has been Healing Manor on Stallingborough Road near Great Grimsby.
Most gardeners really struggle to find enough work to keep them in full employment through the long, barren winter months when the drastic drop in temperatures means a drastic drop in the growth rates, no more grass to cut, no more hedges to trim and no more weeds to pluck from their secret undergrowth hiding places.
Last November, the unusually early snow fell thick and fast and lay heavy upon the ground for weeks on end, not leaving the lawns of Northern Lincolnshire until the middle of January. For the first two weeks I couldn't even get the car out of the courtyard in Caistor until finally, after a mammoth community 'dig out' we all broke free from our snowy shackles. Fortunately, once out of the courtyard the roads were reasonably clear and I was able to continue my work in the 20 acres of neglected and ancient woodlands at Healing Manor, where I managed, even when the snow was knee deep, to find plenty to do to keep myself busy.
The woodlands at Healing Manor haven't been properly looked after in many, many years and in this, my third winter at the Manor, I've been able to continue my own quiet woodland management scheme. During my first winter I re-opened nearly all of the major pathways around the ancient woodlands surrounding this medieval moated manor estate. During my second winter I started to clear the brambles and elder shrubs which were beginning to take over in a couple of the larger clearings. This, in turn, let a lot more sunlight shine down onto the ground level and during last spring I was rewarded with a fantastic display of spring flowering plants from snowdrops to bluebells and every narcissus in between. This winter, I spent my time in the woods coppicing the many years of growth that has been accumulating around the bases of scores of Lime trees around the estate and curtailing the phenomenal growth of ivy on just about every tree, again to let in more light, so that hopefully, we'll get even more spring flowers this coming season.
The ivy was really out of control. Even in the depths of winter, when the leafy canopy of these major trees had all been thrown to the ground, the all invasive ivy continued to shade the woodland floor. Its branches reached high into the loftiest branches of tallest ash trees, over 250 ft into the air. They needed curtailing before they begin to pull the trees down with their weight. During the winter, when we have the strongest, harshest winds, the trees are bereft of their summer complement of leaves, helping them to ride out the worst of the storms. With a full dressing of ivy foliage to act as a sail, the winds are able to catch and pull the weakest, uppermost branches causing lots of damage to the trees. So, out came my bow saw, my loppers and my secateurs and with the snow lying above the tops of my wellies I began my journey around the hundreds of trees on the Healing Manor estate.
It was a lovely time, when the snow lay thick on the ground, to be out in the woods working. The peace, the silence, the solitude, it really was a beautiful place to work. There were the occasional dog walkers and the odd poacher or two and one lady who jogged around the pathways every morning. We all greeted each other with a smile and a wave but nothing was said, we were all happy in our own individual little worlds. My sister and her husband came along as well one morning, a couple of weeks before Christmas. They'd come, with permission of the owner of course, to collect some greenery to decorate the chalet where they live on Humberston Fitties, ready for Christmas. I showed them where all of the best and easiest to harvest holly, ivy, yew and laurel plants were and gave them my secateurs, while I got on with my work behind the 'rose walk', on the edge of the medieval moat.
When they'd finished, they came back across to where I was working. As I watched them trudging knee deep through the snow with arms full of black bins bags bulging with green plant matter they looked to all the world like the ancient 'Stickers', granted permission from the landowner to collect fallen firewood for their winters hearth.
A police helicopter suddenly swooped down low above us and hovered just above our heads for what felt like minutes but was probably only a few seconds. As I said earlier, I've worked at Healing Manor for just over two and a half years now and I'm quite used to it being on the police helicopter flight path between Kirmington and Great Grimsby. It passes over twice, sometimes three times a day, you tend to get used to it. But this time, for the first time ever, it stopped, came much, much lower, waited and watched us, before flying off in ever increasing circles into the distance and was gone, out of sight beyond the treetops. "That was odd", I said to my sister as she and her husband stood next to me, each of them clutching a brace of black bin liners filled to the brim with fresh, green holly boughs and ivy trails. "They must've wondered what on earth we were up to on such a cold day".
And now, at last, the rain has stopped and I can get a bit more work done in the garden. Don't forget to tune in next week when I'll be brewing some very tasty beer indeed.
Sunday, 6 February 2011
The Lay of Havelok the Dane
"Now sailed for England, Denmark's King
And with a mighty following
They landed at Grimsby, on England's strand
To gain for Goldborough, her own dear land"
My overly loud and often excessively flamboyant rehearsals have meant that I've been banished to the far flung reaches of the kitchen this week and all because of a neighbours' request of me to read my favourite poem, out loud, to the townspeople of Caistor.
Caistors' 3rd 'Lyrical Affair' has been organised, once again by our neighbour Michael Galligan and is being held later on this evening at the local Sports and Social Club, so plenty of practice before the event is an essential prerequisite. I've really got into reading poetry over the last decade or so. It's just so easy to pick up a poetry book and dive straight in, whenever a spare moment arises in my busy schedule. With poetry, I'm not confronted by dozens of hard to believe characters or convoluted plot lines, nor do I run the risk of losing the thread of the story when I inevitably have to put the book down and get on with my work. But choosing a favourite poem from amongst the thousands available is not an easy task.
Poetry, for me, is a very personal adventure. Inward looking, quietly considered and often romantically inclined, it never really strikes me a being the theme for an evening of public performance art. If I'd wanted to entertain only myself, I would probably have chosen one of the 1st World War poets, maybe Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen, or I might have gone for the early 19C 'Peasant poet', John Clare, with his insightful, descriptive verses, bearing with them the transience of the English countryside, red sometimes in tooth and claw, right into the heart of my comfortable chair. But, would any of these great 'classics' really be suitable for a public performance in front of a hundred people on a Saturday night in Caistor?
I was also asked, last October, to participate in Caistors first ever 'Lyrical Affair', when this very same problem again raised its ugly head. As a little boy, going to Barcroft Street Junior School in Cleethorpes during the late 60's, early 70's, I clearly remember our year group being asked to write a poem to celebrate the installation of Sir John Betjeman as the nations Poet Laureate. It was one of the few times that I really enjoyed my junior school life. I'd been asked to use my imagination and play with words, what rebellious fun that was in those days.
My mother, really proud of my first steps into the world of poetry, bought me a copy of Edward Lear's' Complete Book Of Nonsense, by way of a reward for my bravery in reading out my poem to the whole school and that was when I discovered 'The Jumblies'.
Far and few, far and few are the lands where the Jumblies live
Their heads are green and their hands are blue
And they went to sea in a sieve.
The daftness of the poem just enthralled me.The words made absolutely no sense at all, yet the musical rhythm of the stanza's were absolutely compelling to me as a child. As an adult, I recalled that childhood thrill of reading The Jumblies out loud when I began to read it with my own children. Even today, as our youngest child begins his departure from being a teenager to a young adult, it still manages to strike a chord with them all. I only have to enlarge my voice and release the first line and they all join in with the rest, automatically, from the heart, because they too, in their youth, experienced the joy that dwells within the heart of this poem. It has become part of their being, part of what they have become as adults.
It was the perfect poem to read out to the 100 people who packed their way into the Caistor Sports and Social Club late last year. First I read out the chorus... " Far and few, far and few......" then after asking my audience to join in after every verse, I began my recital.
" No, no, no" I said, as I stopped midway through the first line of the chorus. "You all need to join in, not just those of you over there at the back. Right, let's try again." This time about half the room joined in and by the end of my recital, everyone was taking part, enjoying themselves and feeling as though they too had played a part in this unusual, but well attended, community event. So, when Michael Galligan came to see if I would read out another poem at Caistor's 3rd Lyrical Affair event, I immediately said yes, but I didn't quite know at that moment, which poem I'd be reading.
It had been really heartening to see so many people enjoying the 'thrill' of public poetry reading and I didn't want to dampen anybody's fun night out with poems of bright yellow buttercups, unrequited love or moribund grief. I wanted them to be involved, excited and enthused by the event, not lulled into a somnolent torpor or worse still, get bored to tears and begin chattering amongst themselves.
I remember standing in the centre of the room during that last poetry reading 4 months ago. I couldn't move about very much as there were children sat all around my feet, their parents and older relatives behind them and the rest of the community fanned out, encircling me almost as though in a scene from the days of old when all the villagers would have sat around the communal fire, keeping warm during the long dark winters nights when tales of romance, death, greed and lust where told to entertain and educate.
During the Dark Ages, before history was written down to preserve its accuracy, communities told these campfire tales to preserve traditions and to pass on items of community history. A famous warrior would have had his tale retold around many a village fire, the story changing and adapting itself to the morals of the day, characters added and taken away and battle scenes reallocated to new venues until the early medieval age brought with it the gift of the written word.
One of these tales, first written down in the 13th Century during the time of King John, is 'The lay of Havelok the Dane'. It tells the tale of Grim the Fisherman and his flight from Denmark with the infant Havelok, heir to the Danish throne and their founding of the town of Great Grimsby on Lincolnshires' North Sea coast.
The 'Lay' is an early middle English version of the original spoken tale, written in rhyming couplets. In 1980 it was translated into modern English by Bill Baines, who was then Head of Whitgift School in Grimsby. It takes about 3 hours to read in full, a gargantuan event which would take up a whole evening.
But yes, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense and I resolved to read the final battle scene from the 'Lay', as abridged by Dr Alan Dowling in 2010. I'll begin my recital from the point where Havelok has been crowned as the King of Denmark and sails with his army, back across the North Sea to Grimsby to fight the evil Earl Godrich for the throne of England. It's a fierce and bloody battle scene and I'll tell it as though I'm recounting recent history to a community sat around the campfire on a long winters evening.
Anyway, back to the kitchen to rehearse my lines, Jacquie's getting fed up with my ferocious bellowing, I can see it in her face.
Now you've heard the tale right through
of Havelok and Goldborough too
how they were born and how they were taken
from their parents and forsaken
Plagued in youth with treachery
with treason and with felony
and how villains robbed them quite
of all truly theirs by right
And in the story I did tell
how Grim the fisherman served them well
and how they were avenged at last
as I've explained in hours past.
And with a mighty following
They landed at Grimsby, on England's strand
To gain for Goldborough, her own dear land"
My overly loud and often excessively flamboyant rehearsals have meant that I've been banished to the far flung reaches of the kitchen this week and all because of a neighbours' request of me to read my favourite poem, out loud, to the townspeople of Caistor.
Caistors' 3rd 'Lyrical Affair' has been organised, once again by our neighbour Michael Galligan and is being held later on this evening at the local Sports and Social Club, so plenty of practice before the event is an essential prerequisite. I've really got into reading poetry over the last decade or so. It's just so easy to pick up a poetry book and dive straight in, whenever a spare moment arises in my busy schedule. With poetry, I'm not confronted by dozens of hard to believe characters or convoluted plot lines, nor do I run the risk of losing the thread of the story when I inevitably have to put the book down and get on with my work. But choosing a favourite poem from amongst the thousands available is not an easy task.
Poetry, for me, is a very personal adventure. Inward looking, quietly considered and often romantically inclined, it never really strikes me a being the theme for an evening of public performance art. If I'd wanted to entertain only myself, I would probably have chosen one of the 1st World War poets, maybe Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen, or I might have gone for the early 19C 'Peasant poet', John Clare, with his insightful, descriptive verses, bearing with them the transience of the English countryside, red sometimes in tooth and claw, right into the heart of my comfortable chair. But, would any of these great 'classics' really be suitable for a public performance in front of a hundred people on a Saturday night in Caistor?
I was also asked, last October, to participate in Caistors first ever 'Lyrical Affair', when this very same problem again raised its ugly head. As a little boy, going to Barcroft Street Junior School in Cleethorpes during the late 60's, early 70's, I clearly remember our year group being asked to write a poem to celebrate the installation of Sir John Betjeman as the nations Poet Laureate. It was one of the few times that I really enjoyed my junior school life. I'd been asked to use my imagination and play with words, what rebellious fun that was in those days.
My mother, really proud of my first steps into the world of poetry, bought me a copy of Edward Lear's' Complete Book Of Nonsense, by way of a reward for my bravery in reading out my poem to the whole school and that was when I discovered 'The Jumblies'.
Far and few, far and few are the lands where the Jumblies live
Their heads are green and their hands are blue
And they went to sea in a sieve.
The daftness of the poem just enthralled me.The words made absolutely no sense at all, yet the musical rhythm of the stanza's were absolutely compelling to me as a child. As an adult, I recalled that childhood thrill of reading The Jumblies out loud when I began to read it with my own children. Even today, as our youngest child begins his departure from being a teenager to a young adult, it still manages to strike a chord with them all. I only have to enlarge my voice and release the first line and they all join in with the rest, automatically, from the heart, because they too, in their youth, experienced the joy that dwells within the heart of this poem. It has become part of their being, part of what they have become as adults.
It was the perfect poem to read out to the 100 people who packed their way into the Caistor Sports and Social Club late last year. First I read out the chorus... " Far and few, far and few......" then after asking my audience to join in after every verse, I began my recital.
" No, no, no" I said, as I stopped midway through the first line of the chorus. "You all need to join in, not just those of you over there at the back. Right, let's try again." This time about half the room joined in and by the end of my recital, everyone was taking part, enjoying themselves and feeling as though they too had played a part in this unusual, but well attended, community event. So, when Michael Galligan came to see if I would read out another poem at Caistor's 3rd Lyrical Affair event, I immediately said yes, but I didn't quite know at that moment, which poem I'd be reading.
It had been really heartening to see so many people enjoying the 'thrill' of public poetry reading and I didn't want to dampen anybody's fun night out with poems of bright yellow buttercups, unrequited love or moribund grief. I wanted them to be involved, excited and enthused by the event, not lulled into a somnolent torpor or worse still, get bored to tears and begin chattering amongst themselves.
I remember standing in the centre of the room during that last poetry reading 4 months ago. I couldn't move about very much as there were children sat all around my feet, their parents and older relatives behind them and the rest of the community fanned out, encircling me almost as though in a scene from the days of old when all the villagers would have sat around the communal fire, keeping warm during the long dark winters nights when tales of romance, death, greed and lust where told to entertain and educate.
During the Dark Ages, before history was written down to preserve its accuracy, communities told these campfire tales to preserve traditions and to pass on items of community history. A famous warrior would have had his tale retold around many a village fire, the story changing and adapting itself to the morals of the day, characters added and taken away and battle scenes reallocated to new venues until the early medieval age brought with it the gift of the written word.
One of these tales, first written down in the 13th Century during the time of King John, is 'The lay of Havelok the Dane'. It tells the tale of Grim the Fisherman and his flight from Denmark with the infant Havelok, heir to the Danish throne and their founding of the town of Great Grimsby on Lincolnshires' North Sea coast.
The 'Lay' is an early middle English version of the original spoken tale, written in rhyming couplets. In 1980 it was translated into modern English by Bill Baines, who was then Head of Whitgift School in Grimsby. It takes about 3 hours to read in full, a gargantuan event which would take up a whole evening.
But yes, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense and I resolved to read the final battle scene from the 'Lay', as abridged by Dr Alan Dowling in 2010. I'll begin my recital from the point where Havelok has been crowned as the King of Denmark and sails with his army, back across the North Sea to Grimsby to fight the evil Earl Godrich for the throne of England. It's a fierce and bloody battle scene and I'll tell it as though I'm recounting recent history to a community sat around the campfire on a long winters evening.
Anyway, back to the kitchen to rehearse my lines, Jacquie's getting fed up with my ferocious bellowing, I can see it in her face.
Now you've heard the tale right through
of Havelok and Goldborough too
how they were born and how they were taken
from their parents and forsaken
Plagued in youth with treachery
with treason and with felony
and how villains robbed them quite
of all truly theirs by right
And in the story I did tell
how Grim the fisherman served them well
and how they were avenged at last
as I've explained in hours past.
Sunday, 30 January 2011
Let's bake some bread
"We'd better get to the shops to buy some bread before they sell out" said my wife Jacquie, "You remember what happened last winter when it snowed really heavily".
Our family live in the centre of Caistor, a tiny but very pretty little market town, nested into a fold on the western edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds with magnificent views across the Ancholme valley below. Its lofty position with unobscured views of the major conurbation of Great Grimsby with it's 300 ft Dock Tower and further over to Spurn Point in the East, Lincoln Cathedral and the smoke stacks of Gainsborough to the South and West and the twin spires of the Humber Bridge to the north, our home town, perched high on top of the Lincolnshire Wolds always gets the full brunt of the weather, which ever direction it comes from. When it snows in Lincolnshire it always falls on Caistor first and heaviest.
We've lived here for just over 4 years now and if it wasn't for the constant travelling between here and the coastal towns of Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes for work, pleasure or entertainment and the fact that I don't drive, I think that we'd probably have settled in Caistor. Anyway, as I was saying, last November, unexpectedly the snow storms came early, thick, fast, and heavy, settling with a vengeance in deep drifts across the main road. There was no way that I could get out of the drive to work and obviously there's not much call for a self-employed gardener when the snow is 3ft deep on the ground so for the next two weeks I used my time perfecting a simple recipe for home-made bread.
We'd been much too late in organising our gruelling trek across the icy Lincolnshire tundra, panic buying had set in by the time we arrived at the shops and all that was left on the shelves was a slightly squashed pack of 6 soft white buns.
" Why don't you buy some yeast and make your own bread", Jacquie suggested.
It wasn't as far fetched as it might sound. I first made bread many years ago, as a schoolboy in Cleethorpes during a domestic science lesson. Yes, surprisingly boys were allowed to do cookery in the 70's, but none of them, except for me, of course, wanted to take such a soft and girly subject. "You'll be the only boy in a class full of girls Brown do you realise that? You won't be able to stick it y'know, they'll eat you alive", scoffed the woodwork teacher, not yet realising that with my departure he'd lose his least talented and most challenging of pupils. Having just entered my teenage years, I knew where I'd rather be and the choice between studying sawing techniques while learning how to bang home a two inch nail alongside a gaggle of other noisy, smelly, pushing and shoving, testosterone fuelled boys, over-excitedly throwing chunks of wood around the room and my other option of being in a friendly, warm, calm, sweet smelling kitchen, packed to the gunwales with all manner of tastes, colours, shapes and most importantly for me as a fourteen year old boy, girls, lots of girls, yep....there was only one choice.
My first introduction to baking was certainly a pleasant one, I learnt how to bake bread and how to chat to girls, two things which have stood me in good stead all along my journey through life.
A few years later, during my late teens and early twenties, I worked in kitchens all over the country baking far more than my fair share of bread, and chatting up far more than my fair share of girls, but it was during a period of stability, brought on by the love of a good woman, during my early thirties and with a young family to feed that I really started to stretch and grow my baking repertoire. Croissants, pitta bread,sour dough, rye bread, wholemeal buns and pizza bases were hastily dragged from the oven by our hoard of ravenous kids and all because of the price. It was so cheap to make my own bread. At the time, the Tesco value 3lb packets of plain flour were only 12p each. Yes you read that right, only 4p per pound and that was in the 1990's not the 1930's. Baking became not only a fantastically cheap way to feed the family, it also warmed the kitchen and filled the house with the most delicious of smells.
My mistake (and I do seem to make a lot of them with startling regularity) was never writing down any of my recipes. I baked so often, during those halcyon days living on Chichester Rd in Cleethorpes, that I could easily remember all the recipes off by heart. "I mean, they're so simple Jacquie, how on earth could I forget how to make a batch of wholemeal buns". So when the snows began to fall last November and I found myself, in my late forties, with a packet of dried yeast and a bag of flour in front of me, my mind became blanker than the snow laden skies above. I could very easily remember the process involved, but not one jot of any of the recipes needed to make a great loaf of bread, every time. It took a few weeks to get it right, trial and error alone saw me through.
Try it out for yourself, I've written the recipe at the bottom of this blog so that you can all have a go, you'll not regret it. We've not bought a single loaf of bread from the shops for more than two months now and I generally make two loaves at a time which'll last us for about three days. The only preservative I use in my bread is salt and I can't honestly tell you how long they'll last for in the cupboard, because they've always been eaten long before they've started to go stale, they really are just so tasty.
Anyway, wash down your work surfaces, give your mucky little fingernails a good scrub and put on a clean pinny, you're about to make the nicest bread in the world.
Ingredients Tools
2lb plain flour mixing bowl
2oz wholemeal flour 2 loaf tins or 2 shallow baking trays
2oz marg cooling rack
2 dessert spoons salt
2dessert spoons sugar
1 sachet fast action dried yeast
1pt warm water
1 Put all of the dry ingredients into the mixing bowl and rub the margarine into the flour with your fingertips. This should only take a few minutes.
2 Add the water and holding the bowl with one hand, start to mix the contents of your bowl with the other hand. This should only take a minute or so as well.
3 Sprinkle another handful of wholemeal flour onto your work surface, turn out the contents of your mixing bowl and begin to knead your dough. The purpose of kneading ( pushing and pulling your dough with lots of pressure from the 'heel' of your hand) is to stretch the glutens in the flour and make the bread nice and fluffy.
So, the more pressure that you use to knead your dough, the better the finished product. I generally knead my dough for about 10 minutes, with some loud raucous music for accompaniment which helps me to find a rhythm for the task. After a couple of tracks the dough is ready for putting aside and proving, (leaving in a warm place to allow the yeast to multiply and grow)
4 Cut your dough ball in half and place into greased loaf tins or alternatively work into two round balls and place in the centre of a couple of greased, shallow baking trays.
5 Sprinkle the tops of your loaves with a little more wholemeal flour. This will keep the crusts soft and improve their appearance after baking.
6 Leave in a warm place keeping the loaves covered with a clean tea towel to stop them from drying out for between three and five hours, depending on how warm the room is. Trial and error will help you to gauge the length of time to suit your home.
7 When your loaves are at least double their original size, place in a preheated oven 180 deg C, 350 deg F, Gas mark 4 and bake for 20 minutes.
8 After 20 minutes take a look at your loaves. If your oven is anything like mine, it will cook at a different speed in different parts if the oven, so you might find that you'll need to turn your loaves around to ensure that they cook evenly on all sides.
9 After another 15/20 minutes remove from the oven and place on a cooling rack.
Bon appetite
Our family live in the centre of Caistor, a tiny but very pretty little market town, nested into a fold on the western edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds with magnificent views across the Ancholme valley below. Its lofty position with unobscured views of the major conurbation of Great Grimsby with it's 300 ft Dock Tower and further over to Spurn Point in the East, Lincoln Cathedral and the smoke stacks of Gainsborough to the South and West and the twin spires of the Humber Bridge to the north, our home town, perched high on top of the Lincolnshire Wolds always gets the full brunt of the weather, which ever direction it comes from. When it snows in Lincolnshire it always falls on Caistor first and heaviest.
We've lived here for just over 4 years now and if it wasn't for the constant travelling between here and the coastal towns of Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes for work, pleasure or entertainment and the fact that I don't drive, I think that we'd probably have settled in Caistor. Anyway, as I was saying, last November, unexpectedly the snow storms came early, thick, fast, and heavy, settling with a vengeance in deep drifts across the main road. There was no way that I could get out of the drive to work and obviously there's not much call for a self-employed gardener when the snow is 3ft deep on the ground so for the next two weeks I used my time perfecting a simple recipe for home-made bread.
We'd been much too late in organising our gruelling trek across the icy Lincolnshire tundra, panic buying had set in by the time we arrived at the shops and all that was left on the shelves was a slightly squashed pack of 6 soft white buns.
" Why don't you buy some yeast and make your own bread", Jacquie suggested.
It wasn't as far fetched as it might sound. I first made bread many years ago, as a schoolboy in Cleethorpes during a domestic science lesson. Yes, surprisingly boys were allowed to do cookery in the 70's, but none of them, except for me, of course, wanted to take such a soft and girly subject. "You'll be the only boy in a class full of girls Brown do you realise that? You won't be able to stick it y'know, they'll eat you alive", scoffed the woodwork teacher, not yet realising that with my departure he'd lose his least talented and most challenging of pupils. Having just entered my teenage years, I knew where I'd rather be and the choice between studying sawing techniques while learning how to bang home a two inch nail alongside a gaggle of other noisy, smelly, pushing and shoving, testosterone fuelled boys, over-excitedly throwing chunks of wood around the room and my other option of being in a friendly, warm, calm, sweet smelling kitchen, packed to the gunwales with all manner of tastes, colours, shapes and most importantly for me as a fourteen year old boy, girls, lots of girls, yep....there was only one choice.
My first introduction to baking was certainly a pleasant one, I learnt how to bake bread and how to chat to girls, two things which have stood me in good stead all along my journey through life.
A few years later, during my late teens and early twenties, I worked in kitchens all over the country baking far more than my fair share of bread, and chatting up far more than my fair share of girls, but it was during a period of stability, brought on by the love of a good woman, during my early thirties and with a young family to feed that I really started to stretch and grow my baking repertoire. Croissants, pitta bread,sour dough, rye bread, wholemeal buns and pizza bases were hastily dragged from the oven by our hoard of ravenous kids and all because of the price. It was so cheap to make my own bread. At the time, the Tesco value 3lb packets of plain flour were only 12p each. Yes you read that right, only 4p per pound and that was in the 1990's not the 1930's. Baking became not only a fantastically cheap way to feed the family, it also warmed the kitchen and filled the house with the most delicious of smells.
My mistake (and I do seem to make a lot of them with startling regularity) was never writing down any of my recipes. I baked so often, during those halcyon days living on Chichester Rd in Cleethorpes, that I could easily remember all the recipes off by heart. "I mean, they're so simple Jacquie, how on earth could I forget how to make a batch of wholemeal buns". So when the snows began to fall last November and I found myself, in my late forties, with a packet of dried yeast and a bag of flour in front of me, my mind became blanker than the snow laden skies above. I could very easily remember the process involved, but not one jot of any of the recipes needed to make a great loaf of bread, every time. It took a few weeks to get it right, trial and error alone saw me through.
Try it out for yourself, I've written the recipe at the bottom of this blog so that you can all have a go, you'll not regret it. We've not bought a single loaf of bread from the shops for more than two months now and I generally make two loaves at a time which'll last us for about three days. The only preservative I use in my bread is salt and I can't honestly tell you how long they'll last for in the cupboard, because they've always been eaten long before they've started to go stale, they really are just so tasty.
Anyway, wash down your work surfaces, give your mucky little fingernails a good scrub and put on a clean pinny, you're about to make the nicest bread in the world.
Ingredients Tools
2lb plain flour mixing bowl
2oz wholemeal flour 2 loaf tins or 2 shallow baking trays
2oz marg cooling rack
2 dessert spoons salt
2dessert spoons sugar
1 sachet fast action dried yeast
1pt warm water
1 Put all of the dry ingredients into the mixing bowl and rub the margarine into the flour with your fingertips. This should only take a few minutes.
2 Add the water and holding the bowl with one hand, start to mix the contents of your bowl with the other hand. This should only take a minute or so as well.
3 Sprinkle another handful of wholemeal flour onto your work surface, turn out the contents of your mixing bowl and begin to knead your dough. The purpose of kneading ( pushing and pulling your dough with lots of pressure from the 'heel' of your hand) is to stretch the glutens in the flour and make the bread nice and fluffy.
So, the more pressure that you use to knead your dough, the better the finished product. I generally knead my dough for about 10 minutes, with some loud raucous music for accompaniment which helps me to find a rhythm for the task. After a couple of tracks the dough is ready for putting aside and proving, (leaving in a warm place to allow the yeast to multiply and grow)
4 Cut your dough ball in half and place into greased loaf tins or alternatively work into two round balls and place in the centre of a couple of greased, shallow baking trays.
5 Sprinkle the tops of your loaves with a little more wholemeal flour. This will keep the crusts soft and improve their appearance after baking.
6 Leave in a warm place keeping the loaves covered with a clean tea towel to stop them from drying out for between three and five hours, depending on how warm the room is. Trial and error will help you to gauge the length of time to suit your home.
7 When your loaves are at least double their original size, place in a preheated oven 180 deg C, 350 deg F, Gas mark 4 and bake for 20 minutes.
8 After 20 minutes take a look at your loaves. If your oven is anything like mine, it will cook at a different speed in different parts if the oven, so you might find that you'll need to turn your loaves around to ensure that they cook evenly on all sides.
9 After another 15/20 minutes remove from the oven and place on a cooling rack.
Bon appetite
Sunday, 23 January 2011
Phoenix rising
"Hello, is that Mrs Stocks?.....My name is Ernie Brown, my wife tells me that I'm booked in to speak to your ladies group tomorrow afternoon at 2'o'clock, is our meeting still going ahead?......Good, good, is it still at the Town Hall in Grimsby?.....Okay, I'll meet you there at around 1.45pm, if that's alright with you?......I do have one small concern though, what is it you want me to talk to your group about?.....It's just that well, did you know that I'm no longer the Chairman of Grimsby in Bloom?..... ahh, I did wonder whether you'd seen the report in the paper or not. My problem is that I don't think that I should really be talking about that side of my life without their approval, but if you want, I could just talk about myself and some of my plans for the year ahead. How long do you want me to talk for?......Only 20 minutes, that shouldn't be a problem at all Mrs Stocks. In fact, you could easily find yourself having to shut me up if I go on for too long, I do tend to get a little carried away with myself once I get started.....That's great Mrs Stocks, I'll see you tomorrow, 1.45pm, at Great Grimsby Town Hall.......Goodbye for now."
I've done lots of public speaking over the past few years and the thought of standing up and chattering to the Grimsby Ladies Phoenix Group held no fears for me at all, especially as the theme of the talk was to be Ernie Brown. I couldn't fail, it is, after all is said and done, my favourite subject.
I could easily have been described as being maybe a little bit too blase' about my attitude towards the afternoons performance, a fact which became obvious to all, when I arrived in a very muddy and dishevelled state of dress at Great Grimsby Town Hall. My mud splattered overalls and the ingrained dirt covering my finger ends gave the game away, I'd clearly come straight from work. "Would you like to freshen up before we make a start, Mr Brown?...We don't mind waiting while you go and have a wash if you'd like."
"That's very kind of you Mrs Stocks" I replied, taking off my scruffy black beret and showering the Town Hall carpet with pine needles. "I've come straight from working in a garden on Humberston Avenue and as you can see from my clothes, I really need more than a quick wash so, if you truly don't mind my appearance, I'll just leave my muddy boots in the corner and carry on."
I'd brought along with me a good armful of the Grimsby, Cleethorpes and District Civic Society's local Heritage Trail booklets of Cleethorpes and Great Grimsby town centres, which I'd written a couple of years ago. I passed the booklets around the group and explained to the ladies there, that as the Chairman of the Heritage Committee with the local Civic Society, I regularly lead guided walks for groups around both towns.
"That should get them away from the subject of Grimsby in Bloom", I'd said to my wife earlier that morning. We've been absolutely inundated this last few weeks with questions surrounding our bombshell resignation as Chairman and Secretary of the Gold Award winning Grimsby in Bloom committee. It's not that I don't want to talk about our sudden, unexpected departure, it's just that well, although I still feel quite negative about some aspects of it, I really don't want to be a harbinger of doom and gloom, I don't want to appear to sound negative and I definitely don't want anyone to think that I've been stuffing my face with a bowl full of sour grapes.
"Good afternoon ladies and thank you very much for that wonderful introduction Madam Chairman. I did speak to Mrs. Stocks last night and I asked her then, what she would like me to talk to you about this afternoon. For the last 3 and a half years I've been the Chairman of the Heritage Committee with the Grimsby, Cleethorpes and District Civic Society and you've all got copies of our local Heritage Trail booklets in front of you, so if you'd like me to talk about my work with the Civic Society, I can do that - or maybe, you'd like to hear about my attempt, last year, to become Great Grimsby's Member of Parliament and my relative success, polling nearly a thousand votes, making me one of the highest polling independent candidates in the country. If you'd like, I could talk to you about my time as Chairman of the Great Grimsby Founders Festival and my journey along Alexandra Dock in a Viking long boat dressed as Grim the fisherman, the founder of Great Grimsby, carrying a shield and a battleaxe and leading a parade of 250 people through the town centre towards St. James Square, where a fierce battle for the crown of England and Denmark took place in front of Grimsby Minster."
I waited for a brief moment, looking around at both the expressions and the body language being displayed by the ladies before me.
"Grimsby in Bloom" they replied, almost in unison. "Tell us all about Grimsby in Bloom, will it survive now that you've left and why on earth did you both leave so suddenly?"
Get ready to wash down your work surfaces and put on a clean pinny, next week, we'll be baking bread on Ernie's latest Sunday night blog, Trivial Background Noize.
I've done lots of public speaking over the past few years and the thought of standing up and chattering to the Grimsby Ladies Phoenix Group held no fears for me at all, especially as the theme of the talk was to be Ernie Brown. I couldn't fail, it is, after all is said and done, my favourite subject.
I could easily have been described as being maybe a little bit too blase' about my attitude towards the afternoons performance, a fact which became obvious to all, when I arrived in a very muddy and dishevelled state of dress at Great Grimsby Town Hall. My mud splattered overalls and the ingrained dirt covering my finger ends gave the game away, I'd clearly come straight from work. "Would you like to freshen up before we make a start, Mr Brown?...We don't mind waiting while you go and have a wash if you'd like."
"That's very kind of you Mrs Stocks" I replied, taking off my scruffy black beret and showering the Town Hall carpet with pine needles. "I've come straight from working in a garden on Humberston Avenue and as you can see from my clothes, I really need more than a quick wash so, if you truly don't mind my appearance, I'll just leave my muddy boots in the corner and carry on."
I'd brought along with me a good armful of the Grimsby, Cleethorpes and District Civic Society's local Heritage Trail booklets of Cleethorpes and Great Grimsby town centres, which I'd written a couple of years ago. I passed the booklets around the group and explained to the ladies there, that as the Chairman of the Heritage Committee with the local Civic Society, I regularly lead guided walks for groups around both towns.
"That should get them away from the subject of Grimsby in Bloom", I'd said to my wife earlier that morning. We've been absolutely inundated this last few weeks with questions surrounding our bombshell resignation as Chairman and Secretary of the Gold Award winning Grimsby in Bloom committee. It's not that I don't want to talk about our sudden, unexpected departure, it's just that well, although I still feel quite negative about some aspects of it, I really don't want to be a harbinger of doom and gloom, I don't want to appear to sound negative and I definitely don't want anyone to think that I've been stuffing my face with a bowl full of sour grapes.
"Good afternoon ladies and thank you very much for that wonderful introduction Madam Chairman. I did speak to Mrs. Stocks last night and I asked her then, what she would like me to talk to you about this afternoon. For the last 3 and a half years I've been the Chairman of the Heritage Committee with the Grimsby, Cleethorpes and District Civic Society and you've all got copies of our local Heritage Trail booklets in front of you, so if you'd like me to talk about my work with the Civic Society, I can do that - or maybe, you'd like to hear about my attempt, last year, to become Great Grimsby's Member of Parliament and my relative success, polling nearly a thousand votes, making me one of the highest polling independent candidates in the country. If you'd like, I could talk to you about my time as Chairman of the Great Grimsby Founders Festival and my journey along Alexandra Dock in a Viking long boat dressed as Grim the fisherman, the founder of Great Grimsby, carrying a shield and a battleaxe and leading a parade of 250 people through the town centre towards St. James Square, where a fierce battle for the crown of England and Denmark took place in front of Grimsby Minster."
I waited for a brief moment, looking around at both the expressions and the body language being displayed by the ladies before me.
"Grimsby in Bloom" they replied, almost in unison. "Tell us all about Grimsby in Bloom, will it survive now that you've left and why on earth did you both leave so suddenly?"
......................................................................................................................
Get ready to wash down your work surfaces and put on a clean pinny, next week, we'll be baking bread on Ernie's latest Sunday night blog, Trivial Background Noize.
Sunday, 16 January 2011
The Royal Connection
I had wrongly assumed, after resigning from my post as Chairman of the gold award winning Grimsby in Bloom committee last week, that life would become a little quieter now. More time I thought, to sit and read. More time perhaps to write down some old thoughts, think up some new ones and most certainly more time to enjoy the solitude that walks hand in hand with my professional life as a self employed gardener in Northern Lincolnshire. But, it seems to have been yet another week of tying up loose ends, tedious committee meetings and flamboyant talks to Ladies Groups, all of which could easily have made their way towards becoming the theme for this weeks Sunday Night blog, but, after receiving an unexpected midweek letter a couple of days ago, I really couldn't write about anything else and when I finally get around to telling you all about it, you'll begin to understand why.
It'll be twenty years in a few weeks time, since I was incarcerated within Her Majesty's Prison, HMP Hull. I'd been attempting to smuggle cannabis into the country when I was caught by Her Majesty's Customs and Excise Officers and sentenced to twelve months in jail. "Smuggler had drugs in underpants" ran the headline in the local paper. It was, as you can imagine, a very low point in my life. Her Majesty's prisons are not at all the drink and drug drenched dens of debauchery which the media presents them to be, it was bleak and it was severe.
If ever you find yourself travelling along the main road out of Hull City Centre travelling eastwards towards Spurn Point, but before you reach Curlew Corner on the Salt End peninsular, you'll notice the large and imposing Victorian prison complex on your left hand side, it's 30ft high brick walls topped with razor wire mark the boundary between two entirely separate worlds.
It was built over 140 years ago to punish and contain wrongdoers of a very different age, in a time when the punishments didn't always fit the crimes. As part of my own punishment, I was locked into a small, grey, stinking cell for 23 hours a day, accompanied by two other petty criminals, strangers to me from the East Riding of Yorkshire. We were allowed one shower a week, one hours exercise in the prison yard a day, (if it wasn't raining) and a plastic bucket for a toilet, let me assure you, it was not a holiday camp and there were no easy chairs and television sets for every inmate, even though the very worst of the tabloids like to tell you there are.
There was one barred window, quite high up on the outside wall of our tiny, three man cell, opposite to the heavy steel door which opened every morning to the accompanying call of "C'mon now you lot, slop out time!".The window had obviously been designed with the intention of being just too high up the cell wall for inmates to look out of easily, but if we took it in turns, all three of us could spend a few moments every day, before our legs began to ache, watching real life pass by on the busy road, three floors below. By standing with one foot on the bridge of the bunk bed and the other on the flimsy, prison issue table, with our hands gripping tightly on to the bars on the window which separated us from the normal world outside, we could catch a glimpse at the life that we were missing.
As you'd imagine, with a Victorian prison, the barred window didn't have the luxury of glass and more than once a flurry of snow flakes carried on a swirling North Easterly blizzard dampened the pillow of my unfortunate disgruntled cell mate on the top bunk. Conversely, that same unforgiving wind which brought with it the snow flakes, also took away with it the unwelcome smells which came from the 3 plastic buckets with their 3 ill-fitting plastic lids, designed more to hide the contents from sight than to contain any of their smells.
I hope that I don't appear to be complaining and moaning about my lot, or anything like that. I done wrong, I knew that then and I know that now. I suppose that, in a small way my recent attempts at voluntary work over the last few years have always been founded on my need for acceptance within society.
So you can imagine the smile on my face last Wednesday, almost 20 years to the day since I began my punishment within the red brick Victorian walls of Hull Jail, when I opened an unexpected letter from one of Her Majesty's Ambassadors, the Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire.
My wife Jacquie and I, the Lord Lieutenant explained, have had our names put forward to him for doing good work in the area and he wanted to know if we were available on a few dates in mid June/July as Her Royal Majesty, Elizabeth II, Queen of England would like to invite us to one of Her Summer Garden Parties held in the grounds of Buckingham Palace.
There are times in everyone's life when you feel as though you've reached the bottom. But, one thing I can carry from my own experience is that the dual burdens of regret and remorse are far too heavy a load for any of us to bear for a whole life time, look forward to the future and what you can become. A leopard can change its spots.
It'll be twenty years in a few weeks time, since I was incarcerated within Her Majesty's Prison, HMP Hull. I'd been attempting to smuggle cannabis into the country when I was caught by Her Majesty's Customs and Excise Officers and sentenced to twelve months in jail. "Smuggler had drugs in underpants" ran the headline in the local paper. It was, as you can imagine, a very low point in my life. Her Majesty's prisons are not at all the drink and drug drenched dens of debauchery which the media presents them to be, it was bleak and it was severe.
If ever you find yourself travelling along the main road out of Hull City Centre travelling eastwards towards Spurn Point, but before you reach Curlew Corner on the Salt End peninsular, you'll notice the large and imposing Victorian prison complex on your left hand side, it's 30ft high brick walls topped with razor wire mark the boundary between two entirely separate worlds.
It was built over 140 years ago to punish and contain wrongdoers of a very different age, in a time when the punishments didn't always fit the crimes. As part of my own punishment, I was locked into a small, grey, stinking cell for 23 hours a day, accompanied by two other petty criminals, strangers to me from the East Riding of Yorkshire. We were allowed one shower a week, one hours exercise in the prison yard a day, (if it wasn't raining) and a plastic bucket for a toilet, let me assure you, it was not a holiday camp and there were no easy chairs and television sets for every inmate, even though the very worst of the tabloids like to tell you there are.
There was one barred window, quite high up on the outside wall of our tiny, three man cell, opposite to the heavy steel door which opened every morning to the accompanying call of "C'mon now you lot, slop out time!".The window had obviously been designed with the intention of being just too high up the cell wall for inmates to look out of easily, but if we took it in turns, all three of us could spend a few moments every day, before our legs began to ache, watching real life pass by on the busy road, three floors below. By standing with one foot on the bridge of the bunk bed and the other on the flimsy, prison issue table, with our hands gripping tightly on to the bars on the window which separated us from the normal world outside, we could catch a glimpse at the life that we were missing.
As you'd imagine, with a Victorian prison, the barred window didn't have the luxury of glass and more than once a flurry of snow flakes carried on a swirling North Easterly blizzard dampened the pillow of my unfortunate disgruntled cell mate on the top bunk. Conversely, that same unforgiving wind which brought with it the snow flakes, also took away with it the unwelcome smells which came from the 3 plastic buckets with their 3 ill-fitting plastic lids, designed more to hide the contents from sight than to contain any of their smells.
I hope that I don't appear to be complaining and moaning about my lot, or anything like that. I done wrong, I knew that then and I know that now. I suppose that, in a small way my recent attempts at voluntary work over the last few years have always been founded on my need for acceptance within society.
So you can imagine the smile on my face last Wednesday, almost 20 years to the day since I began my punishment within the red brick Victorian walls of Hull Jail, when I opened an unexpected letter from one of Her Majesty's Ambassadors, the Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire.
My wife Jacquie and I, the Lord Lieutenant explained, have had our names put forward to him for doing good work in the area and he wanted to know if we were available on a few dates in mid June/July as Her Royal Majesty, Elizabeth II, Queen of England would like to invite us to one of Her Summer Garden Parties held in the grounds of Buckingham Palace.
There are times in everyone's life when you feel as though you've reached the bottom. But, one thing I can carry from my own experience is that the dual burdens of regret and remorse are far too heavy a load for any of us to bear for a whole life time, look forward to the future and what you can become. A leopard can change its spots.
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