– lavish sets, for example, and costumes, lighting, full orchestras, Topol, Ron Moody; pretty much everything, in fact, that makes a good musical a good musical.
* For a full account of the ongoing dog-fouling controversy, see the Impartial Recorder, ‘Letters to the Editor’, 1982–Present.
* This, of course, seems unlikely, but it’s not impossible: there are happy endings, even for fish and the proverbial tin soldier. On 19 May 1991 the Impartial Recorder ran a story about Monica Hawkins (née Williams), from the Longfields Estate, who went on holiday to the Isle of Man in 1971, aged twenty-one. While swimming in the sea she lost a solid-silver locket which had been a gift to her from her mother, and which contained a small gold tooth, her father’s only mortal remains after he’d been cremated at what was then the town’s newly opened crematorium on Prospect Road. Twenty years later, at a car boot sale in the car park at the Church of the Cross and the Passion, not half a mile from the crematorium on Prospect Road, Mrs Hawkins, by that time twice married and twice widowed, happened to be going through a pile of costume jewellery in an old Quality Street tin when something caught her eye – a locket just like the one she’d lost all those years ago. And on opening the locket she found and yes, the gold tooth. The stallholder could offer no explanation of how she had acquired the locket – she bought bags of stuff from men in pubs – and after Mrs Hawkins’s death her daughter Joanne bequeathed the tooth to P. W. Grieve, the dentist who as a young man had made the gold tooth for Mr Williams in the first place, back in the 1960s, and who now has the tooth proudly on display in his waiting room, along with a bible open at the passage, ‘The law of thy mouth is better unto me than thousands of gold and silver’ (Psalms 119:72).
* The Woolly Hat for Seamen Scheme has long since been abandoned: the Mission now seeks instead to provide every sailor of every nation with a small, waterproof, shockproof CD player and an evangelistic CD containing hymns, sermons and prayers. The original knitting patterns and accompanying pamphlets can, however, be consulted in the Mission to Seamen Special Collection at the library – contact Divisional Librarian Philomena Rocks for details. A typical 1952 pattern and outline reads thus:
WOOLLY HAT FOR SEAMEN
Ladies, keep up the good work! Not only do these colourful hats provide much needed protection from the harsh sea winds, but also a cover for many a bible smuggled on board ship bound for pagan lands. Every one of us can share in God’s ministry to the needy simply by picking up our knitting needles! So don’t hesitate, ladies, get knitting today, to advance the kingdom of God!
Pattern for Hat:
3 balls 20g d.k. wool.
Using No. 10 needles cast on 132 sts.
1st and every K.2 P.2.
Continue until work measures 2½ inches.
Change to size 8 needles and continue to double rib until work measures 9½ inches.
Shape top:
1st row *K.3 tog. K.9 repeat from * to end (110 sts).
2nd and every alt. row Purl.
3rd row *K.3 tog. K.7 repeat from * to end (88 sts).
5th row *K.3 tog. K.5 repeat from * to end (66 sts).
7th row *K.3 tog. K.3 repeat from * to end (44 sts).
9th row *K.3 tog. K.1 repeat from * to end (22 sts).
11th row *K.2 tog to end (11 sts).
Thread wool through sts, draw up and fasten. Sew seam.
* An unorthodox view of the Virgin Birth which Mr Donelly happens to share with Barry McClean, the Gnostics, David Hume, Friedrich Schleiermacher, certain twentieth-century German theologians and the former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins.
Describing an auspicious occasion – a party in a pub – which demonstrates the wholesomeness of life amidst the usual waste and humiliation
You wouldn’t have thought so, but the range of temperatures here in town can be pretty extreme. It can get all the way up to the seventies on occasion in July and even on a winter’s afternoon, when the sun’s out, you sometimes see young men sitting outside pubs in their shirtsleeves. In February, on a good day, on a bright day, outside the Castle Arms it’s like a playground: little groups, little huddles, jackets off, joking and having fun. In our town such an opportunity is not to be missed: the sun here always tends to go to our heads.
But, alas, the unseasonably warm weather has not been good for my old friend Billy Nibbs: in the heat, the smell coming out of the skips and those big metal bins can be pretty stiff. In the summer you can actually smell the dump from the car park outside the Plough and the Stars, which is two roundabouts downwind, where all attempts at landscaping have failed to solve the problem. A few scented-leaf pelagoniums on the windowsills and some sweet william outside in huge terracotta-plastic planters are no match for the stench of the accumulated waste of our town. Goodness knows what people are putting in there: Billy spends half his time redirecting gardeners with grass cuttings to the GREEN WASTE ONLY bins, and the other half directing householders with stinking black plastic bags away from the NO FOOD WASTE bins. People do seem to be ashamed about their rubbish, or confused. There’s been talk of recycling – one of the town’s councillors, Mrs Donelly, no less, who has a cousin in Canada, is very keen; she says that’s what they do over there – but whether this will solve the problem of people’s shame or increase it, it’s difficult to say. No one wants to be reminded of their own waste: to have to separate it all out would simply be embarrassing. We’d rather future generations sort it all out for us – and Billy, of course.
It may just be the sweat and the bins, then, that make Billy smell so, but it may also be the ham. Billy Nibbs is addicted to ham. Absolutely addicted; there’s no other way to describe it. He lives by himself and has never been that interested in cooking, and after a few years he found he’d got into a routine. Every night on the way home from work he buys his bacon for his breakfast from Tom Hines, our one remaining butcher, and every morning he eats it straight from the frying pan, mopping up the juices with a slice of bread, dispensing neatly with the need for a knife, or a plate and, indeed, for any washing up whatsoever, since the frying pan will always do for the next day, and the next; and then for lunch he has a ham sandwich with mustard, and for dinner he usually eats at his mum’s, or at Scarpetti’s, the Italian late-night café in Market Street, which is no longer owned and run by Italians, Mr Scarpetti and his family having eventually returned to their native land like most incomers within a short time of having arrived here, once they realise that our town is, in fact, like every other small town on the face of the earth and no better than what they’ve left behind, unless, of course, it’s a civil war or state torture, and even then it can be a tough decision to decide to stay. We have no actual culture to speak of and no cuisine, unless you count the tray bakes and the microwave morning sandwiches from the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop. We can boast no local beer even, let alone a wine, and we have no town square, our festivals extend only to the traditional half-hearted summer parade and fireworks – Frank Gilbey’s attempts to organise a jazz festival a few years ago having ended in disaster – and we are not known for the warmest of welcomes.
