COLUMN: October 27, 2016

IT WAS one of those evenings during which everything went wrong at the worst possible time, and yet we still managed to bring out a newspaper.

Not that readers would have been able to tell, for newspaper production staff are like ducks – we are calm and unruffled on the top half, but covered in water and lichen on the bottom half, and we quack and taste great on a pancake.

Anyway, battered and bruised and covered in hoi sin sauce, I staggered away from my office into the night, half an hour later than usual. This probably does not sound excessive to you people who work a nine to five day, but to somebody who works my hours it can only mean one thing – I had missed The Bus Window.

I had three choices: go back into the office and sleep under my desk, walk four and a half miles through a number of what the charitable would call “up and coming” areas, or hail a taxi.

And so I traipsed through the city centre in search of transport, shivering, Medium Coat flapping behind me in the wind. Younger men were wandering about me in shirt sleeves, but I no longer have anything to prove, nor the ability to prove it. I shall say it loud, I’m nesh and I’m proud.

After about 10 minutes, an orange light appeared in the distance and moved towards me. Could it be…? It was! It was a taxi. I felt like a shipwreck victim sighting land.

I had to wait till it got closer, though, otherwise I would have looked to passers-by like a madman frantically waving at ghosts. I know that I have to work on my cab hailing technique, but I have been trying for 40-odd years to learn how to whistle with my index fingers in my mouth and it still sounds as if I’m blowing into a glass to clean it.

The cab got closer and closer… Just a couple more seconds and I would be able to hail it… And then the driver turned off the main road and down a side street. I raged at the injustice of it all. How on earth could he possibly have not seen me in the dark in my dark grey suit and dark grey coat and black scarf?!

I chased after the cab. Perhaps it would lead me to more cabs. I didn’t know, I am a bus man.

But there was nothing. I continued to walk, and there, stopped at some traffic lights, was a cab with its orange light on. I took no chances. I waved my arm for all it was worth. A passing jumbo jet pilot would have been able to see my signal.

The taxi driver indicated. He had seen me! Better than that, my weird hailing motion had not put him off. And then, just as the lights started to change, a couple appeared – a man and a woman. They, like me, had clearly been searching for some time for a taxi. But, unlike me, they had clearly been spending some time carousing in several bars.

They started running towards the taxi, but the driver had already committed himself to stopping for me, and he moved off, driving away from them.

Now, put yourself in the couple’s place. They had hailed a taxi, which had its light on. They had got within inches of the door, and the taxi had moved away, towards another person. Imagine their sense of injustice at being gazumped.

I do not have to imagine it. I witnessed it. The man let out a bellow of rage and charged towards the taxi like a rhino as I struggled to open the door.

I stumbled inside the cab and slammed the door shut as the angry carouser banged on the window. “Get out of my [expletive deleted] taxi,” he suggested forcefully.

His face, squashed up with rage, pressed up against the window and I made a sort of shrugging gesture as if to say, “I am sorry, my friend, but your quarrel is not with me, it is with the ways of the taxi.”

“You [expletive deleted],” he said, as he banged again on the window, as the taxi drove off.

I do not want you to think I am a coward, but I had had a long and difficult day in work and I really did not want to end it in a brawl with an angry drunk. Especially as I wasn’t even on a bus.

My Pete Burns Story

landscape_showbiz-pete-burns-2 — The late Pete Burns

SO, about a dozen or so years ago, Pete Burns had one of his flurries of millennial fame, long before Celebrity Big Brother.

As a result, my newspaper, the Liverpool Echo, did a spread on him, seeing as he was a local chap. It was a nice interview, the sort that newspapers regularly carried in those days. We did not take a picture of Pete, though. Interviews conducted by local newspapers tend to be done over the phone, and Pete’s publicist emailed us a portrait of the reborn star.

It was quite a restrained look for Pete. He was wearing a suit and patterned tie, and he had short hair. The suit, though, was purple, and his hair was green, and his lips were pink. He basically looked like The Joker.

You can see a cropped version of it at the top of this blog entry.

Still, it was a decent picture, and I used it well, even if I do say so myself. I am a newspaper designer by trade, and it was my job to lay out the spread. I did a cutout of Pete’s torso, and ran the text around it, and it looked jolly good.

It appeared in that Friday’s Echo.

On the following Monday morning, my editor at the time called me into his office, and suggested that I might elaborate on the thought process which led me to use that picture of Pete Burns. He explained that he had received dozens of complaints from readers.

I made some noises about homophobia, and said that we, as a modern newspaper, should be treating…

“No”, said the editor, “I’m talking about the tie.”

“Oh,” I said.

I peered at Pete’s patterned tie.

“Oh,” I said.

The pattern was not apparent in the black and white proofs of the pages which I had checked and had been checked by others, nor was it apparent on screen as the pages were laid out.

Only when it was printed on a colour page did it become clear – abundantly so – that it was not a pattern at all. It was an anatomically correct line-drawing of a eye-wateringly enthusiastic gay orgy.

Cheers, Pete.

EDIT: @anyabike off of Twitter found the picture in question, for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend. I’m not putting it on my website, but here is a NSFW link to the article in Digital Spy.

COLUMN: October 20, 2016

YOU know how in films the hero’s friend survives an attack and then either limps on, or appears perfectly fine for a while, but then collapses and dies?

“Oh, no,” says the person with medical knowledge conveniently nearby. “Billy Yourmate must have had internal injuries. You couldn’t have known. There was literally nothing you could have done to prevent this.”

I had just arrived on a railway platform. I had had to go down to London for A Thing at which I would have to talk to actual people about stuff the previous day, an exhausting task. All I wanted to do was go home and make a cup of tea that did not feature a guest appearance by UHT milk – the worst substance in the world.

Why is UHT milk the worst substance in the world, you ask? Because people who hate milk hate it and people who like milk hate it.

But I digress. I had just stepped onto the platform. In one hand I held a heavy suitcase containing my laptop. In the other hand, I had an Oyster card, such is my preparedness to “tap out”. (If you are not from London and do not know what an Oyster card is, it is a card with the word Oyster written on it.)

And snaking from both of my ludicrously belobed ears was an earphone cable, leading to the phone in my jacket pocket. This is a recent development. I do not generally listen to music on my phone, but I have been trying to learn a couple of foreign languages in an attempt to make myself more interesting.

The point is that I am not used to having my head wired up to my phone. And so when I reached forward to tap my Oyster card on the sensor, my arm caught the cable, yanking the phone out of my pocket.

My hands were full, and, in any case, if my reflexes were to be compared to those of a cat, that cat would be Garfield. I was helpless as I watched the phone tumble groundwards. The cable was pulled taut by the phone, and then gravity pulled the phone away from the cable.

“Oh, good,” I thought, watching the incident unfold in slow motion, “NOW the cable comes out. Why didn’t it do that when the phone was in my pocket?”

The phone hit the floor hard. “Oh, dear,” I thought, “I hope, with some force, that the screen isn’t broken.” I picked it up. It was unscathed. I tried to use it. It was working. “Phew,” I thought, which is an odd word to think, “That was close.”

About an hour later, as I was learning the German for the important phrase “A duck is a bird”, my phone froze. None of the buttons would work, so, in a huff, I removed the battery and replaced it, my standard “I used to work in IT” solution to phone freezing.

It must have had an internal injury. Reader, my phone would not come back on, a calamity beyond measure and scarier than Ed Balls twerking while dressed as a killer clown on the Hallowe’en edition of Strictly.

Now you are all saying at this point, “Poor Gary!” But half of you are being sarcastic, and remembering war and refugees and suffering. And the other half are genuinely realising that you would be completely stuck if that happened to you, and angry I did not put a trigger warning on this column.

And it would be even worse if you were in a strange part (i.e. Barnes) of a city in which you do not live (i.e. London). And if the code you had to type into the ticket machine at the station to get your ticket home was only on your phone.

And it would be even even worse if you didn’t know anybody’s phone numbers these days because nobody knows anybody’s phone numbers these days because they are all on your phone. Or if you had to tell a German that a duck was a bird and you had forgotten the word for “duck” because of the business with your phone.

Essentially, it has made me incredibly aware of how stupid it is to have everything upon which you depend stored on a single mobile device, which you can break just because you are trying to learn conversational Portuguese and you don’t have three hands.

And now I have to buy a new phone.

COLUMN: October 13, 2016

kickbucket

THEY say that before you die your life flashes before your eyes, a Big Brother-style showreel of your best bits. I have often wondered how they know this. Seances, probably.

It must be awful finally to remember in which programme you first saw that man who was in that thing, but not be able to say because you are now dead.

Sorry for the morbid thought. It was prompted by one of my surprisingly infrequent brushes with death. It may appear unlikely that a man as accident-prone as myself is rarely confronted by mortality, but my mishaps are usually minor, if frequent.

For example, only yesterday morning I had a minor mishap. What I did not realise at the time was that it would turn into a more serious threat to my wellbeing.

This story features, as so many do, a cup of tea and a bus. I was due to work an early shift. An early shift to me is what most people would call an ordinary shift – a nine-to-five slog involving traffic-clogged journeys to and from work and a lunch break taken at exactly the same time as everybody else. I don’t know how you do it.

I got up, made a cup of tea, showered, dressed, and drank my tea. I was a model of early-morning efficiency. And then I went to wash my cup and it all went horribly wrong.

There was a teaspoon in the sink, and I had somehow managed to leave it in exactly the wrong place. The water hit the spoon, and it was then deflected into the air making a textbook arc straight for my light blue shirt and turning it into a piece of modern art.

I chuckled. “Ho, ho,” I said, as I removed my sopping wet shirt. “At least my daily mishap has already happened. Argh! I don’t have any ironed shirts.”

I set up my ironing board and started the pointless time-sucking job of temporarily removing creases from a clean shirt. Seconds were ticking by, but at least I would just about make it to the bus stop in time. Years of practice have taught me exactly what time my bus will arrive at the stop.

“Oh,” I thought, as I arrived at the stop. It turned out that the bus arrives three minutes earlier at that time of day. I had missed it. “Silly me for thinking that the spoon incident was my daily mishap. THIS is my daily mishap.”

I started to walk. I would have to get the train to work instead. It was annoying, but not the worst thing. Assuming it was on time, I would arrive at work five minutes late, giving my colleagues the gift of less time with me.

The sun was low in the sky as I reached the corner of my own road again on the way to the train station. I checked the road for oncoming traffic, as directed by the Green Cross Man.

The sun was in my eyes, and I looked across the road, seeing a boy wearing the same school uniform as my own son. I wondered what he would have been up to at that time of day, then I stepped into the road without checking again.

That was when the car hit me.

My life did not flash before my eyes. The only thing that flashed before my eyes was the sun, and the strong awareness that I had just been hit by a car, and I was not sure how long that state of affairs would continue.

It must have lasted only a second, but time really did seem to slow down. It hit me in the leg and I felt it buckle, but I did not fall over. Instead I was pushed along the road as my palm hit the bonnet.

Luckily, the car was driving slowly after having just taken the tight corner into my road. If I had been a few feet further down, I might have been in more trouble.

Shocked, I shouted out a bad word. But the impact had been so minor that nobody had noticed it apart from me and, I would like to think, the driver.

And so, all any onlookers noticed was a forty-ish, respectably dressed man screaming out an expletive in the street for no apparent reason.

Embarrassed by the whole business, I fled. I can only hope that it does not appear in my end of life showreel.

COLUMN: October 6, 2016

2-theresa-may-epa — Theresa May – Andrea Leadsom without the giddy sense of fun

SO somebody asked me: “Where are you from?” And I said: “Well, I was born in Liverpool.”

And he looked me in the eye, and he said: “No, but where are you from? Where is your family from?” I blinked. “Er, Liverpool. That’s why I was born there. It was more convenient.”

He stared at me, his eyes boring into me. “No, you’re not getting it. Where is your family from? You’re not British, are you?”

“Oh!” I said. “Well, I’m not really sure about my dad’s side, though Bainbridge is a village in North Yorkshire, so I suppose they must have come from there at some point.

“But on my mum’s side… well, there’s some Irish in there. I mean, see how pale I am. I make milk look brown. I could hide out in a paper factory for months.

“But there’s also some Italian in me from a few generations back. Half my mum’s siblings looked Irish like me. The other half looked like Al Pacino.”

“Ah! I thought so,” he said, and made to wander off. “Hang on a sec,” I said to him, “are you a figment of my imagination?”

He nodded, and vanished in a puff of smoke, his point made.

I’m quite lucky in that I am white, and usually pass for a native. If I were brown or black, I would have been asked those questions so many times I would not have had to make up an anecdote.

But ask yourself: “Where am I from?” If you can go back more than four generations without finding a foreigner in your forebears, you are a very unusual and rare flower. Even the Queen is part German, and married to a Greek.

The fact is we are all immigrants, or the children of immigrants. So when the Government starts talking about cutting immigration, and about taking us out of the European Single Market just so that we can halt immigration, you should feel uneasy.

When the Government talks about cutting the number of foreign students who come to Britain, pay fees to learn here, and then go back home, you should feel uneasy.

And when the Government talks about forcing companies to publish lists of their foreign workers, you should feel worried. Because while this is bad enough, where will it end?

It is becoming clearer than ever that Brexit is going to hit this country hard. The pound is crashing already. And instead of surgically unpicking the legal and social veins which bind us to the EU, this gang of vandals is going to yank us out.

And as the blood spills and the damage mounts up, the Brexiteers in government who blundered and blustered and said we had nothing to fear from leaving the EU will not take the blame.

David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, has already said that if Brexit is a failure we are all to be held responsible. Well, not me, matey – I am not going to be accountable for this disaster. And neither will the half of the country who voted to remain in the EU.

So who do you think will be considered responsible? It will be the ones who always get the blame, the easy targets already being lined up – the unloved immigrants. It will be the people like your great-grandparents, the people who spoke foreign in shops and even so were allowed to stay and work and marry and eventually produce you.

They will be blamed for taking British jobs, as if there is a queue of Brits outside the hotels and fruit farms dying to do a hard day’s work for a pittance. They will be given the blame for why you are unemployed after the car manufacturers and call centres leave this post-EU country. And God help them.

We’ve seen all this before in this continent. It ended with a world war and millions dead. That’s why we had an EU, why we had to make it inconceivable that the countries of Europe would ever go to war with each other again.

But the question is, which side are you going to be on?

Are you going to be one of those cheering as people like your great-grandparents are hounded out of their homes and this country?

Or are you going to remember that you yourself are an immigrant, with foreign blood rushing through your body, and tell the Government “No?” Because that would be the British thing to do.

Gary Bainbridge

A Website By The Above-named Writer

Month: October 2016