Moseley Road Swimming Baths

There was something that happened at Moseley Road Swimming Baths when I was about eight years old which, I suppose, I will remember for the rest of my life.

It is as clear to me today as when it happened all those many years ago; sounds like ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier doesn’t it but let’s proceed.

Someone posted some photos on the Internet from a book about Balsall Heath and Highgate; both neighbourhoods of Birmingham, UK.

I bought the book they were in from Amazon; Amazon.co.uk, that is, and there was a photo of Moseley Road Swimming Baths in it; it looked exactly as I remember with dressing rooms surrounding the pool.

So before telling you this little story I looked up to see if the place is still there and in fact the building is being rescued by the Birmingham City Council.

Moseley Road Swimming Baths sounds a strange title and of course there is no such thing; the correct expression would be Moseley Road Baths and if you look above you will see the massive Edwardian Building that is situated on Moseley Road, Birmingham; looking at it from this perspective it looks like some Russian Government Building which I suppose a lot of Edwardian buildings in the do UK look like.

For instance a very good film about Guy Burgess, the spy, called An Englishman Abroad was filmed in Dundee for Moscow.

But back to the baths; the building was built in 1907 about ten years or so after the Public Library, which is a similar looking building, next door.

At the front of the building there are three entrances: one for the first class facilities for men, another for second class facilities for men again and the third was the women’s entrance for all classes.

England was more obsessed with the class system back then than it is these days.

The first class facilities included a slipper bath and a swimming Pool; next to the pool there were cubicles for the men to change and the baths would supply swimming trunks and a towel; a slipper bath, by the way, was a hot bath and the bathtub, itself, was called a slipper bath because when it was upside down it looked like the underside of a slipper.

The second class men’s facilities included a slipper bath and a swimming pool but the pool didn’t have changing cubicles; the men had to change from a bench on the side and the water, which was used in the first class pool, was decanted into the second class pool every week; now there’s a thought!

The women’s facility was just a facility – the slipper bath.

The place has closed down now but in its latter days the homeless and the elderly would go there for a bath; the elderly because it was a safe place to take a bath and the homeless for obvious reasons.

When I started to go there to swim there was only one pool being used; the first class one and you can see a picture of it below.

I attended Clifton Road Junior School and when I was around eight years old we would go there once a week to for swimming lessons; I used to love to go in those days although I was never any good at swimming and spent most of my time in the shallow end which was around three feet deep; the middle of the pool was five feet and the deep end with the diving boards was six feet three inches.

Freddie Bishop, a friend of mine, never came swimming and no matter how hard I tried he would refuse.

His excuse was that he had no swimming trunks and I told him that he could get a slip; a slip is all it was as it was just a piece of thin cloth you tied around your waist with a piece of string which was attached; it looked a bit like a baby's bib; unlike the swimming trunks of the old days of first class service.

We would walk from Clifton Road School, up Clifton Road itself and onto Moseley Road and to the swimming baths building which was situated on the west side of the street; so it took a lot of supervision by the teachers getting us across busy streets and the walk must have taken about fifteen minutes or so.

After our swim I think we were allowed to buy Wagon Wheels or other pieces of chocolate of the day.

After a lot of nagging from me Freddie Bishop finally decided to come and we trotted on our usual route; I was delighted that my friend was coming.

When we got there I shared the dressing room with Fred; the cubicles went the length of the pool with the boys changing rooms on the left and the girls on the right, in the picture.

Our cubicle was by the deep end and I quickly got changed and ran to the shallow end to join everybody else; we would start with the same exercises every week which consisted of holding on to the bar, which encircled the pool, and kicking our legs out at the back to simulate swimming; we did this for quite some time and soon everybody was in the pool; except Freddie.

So I got out of the pool and went to the dressing room to sort him out.

He still had his socks on, when I got there, but couldn't sort out the slip. I think he couldn’t undo the previous knots, or something, and after I tried to help him for a while I left and went back to the pool.

The teacher looked at me and wondered where I had been but I just got back into the water and continued splashing.

A few minutes later I saw Fred leave the dressing room and jump into the deep end; he had his hands in a kind of dive position with his palms flat and as he hit the water they caused an enormous splash; I wondered what was going on and when I didn't see him come up I shouted to the teacher “Freddie Bishop has jumped in the deep end.”

“Don't be silly” the teacher said and started to supervise some children at the other end of the line telling them to kick harder.

I looked back up to the deep end and saw his head bob up and then disappear again.

“Look sir! Look!” I shouted.

The teacher looked up as Freddie’s head came up again – then disappeared.

We were ordered out of the pool and the teacher ran towards the deep end; we kind of wandered up there too.

Thinking back I can't understand why the teacher or a member of the baths staff didn't just get in and pull him out; Freddie kept coming to the surface and then he would go back down and it was obvious to us, even then, that he was drowning – but nobody got in.

A grown up found a big hook on the side and tried to hook him but he went back down again under the six feet of water; the next time he came up he reached with his hand outstretched; thinking back now he might have seen the hook but all I saw at the time was his hand and then we saw it go down to the depths of the deep end again and I thought it was for the last time as there was a look of finality about it – then we were kind of shooed away.

They did get him out but I never saw it happen.

I got back to the cubicle and his clothes lay there; I kind of thought it was my fault for persuading him to come swimming when he could have been back in the safe warm school.

When we were dressed and ready to go back to school I saw Freddie sitting behind a desk near the slipper baths entrance with towels and blankets wrapped around him; he was breathing very deeply and I could see his very frightened brown eyes staring ahead like a wounded fawn that had been rescued.

The missing fourteen hundred and thirty nine words.

Well this has been a bad week for computers in our house; I had some kind of bug or adware or whatever and it was called ‘Security Tool’ which was a great nuisance. I looked it up on the Internet and on You Tube there was a demonstration as to how to get rid of it but their computer wasn’t like mine so I had to buy a spy ware doctor.

I won’t go into chapter and verse on the removal but suffice it to say whatever ‘Security tool’ did was to mess up my machine and I had to do a ‘system restore’ which meant I had to download everything again which I had put on to the computer over the years like my photo shop and the pass words to the recording facilities I have.

I am driven towards asking the following question: who benefits from sending viruses around the Internet apart from snotty nosed kids who live with their parents and spend all the time in their rooms? The people who make the spy ware, I suppose.

So here I am almost back to normal; my head shots are on an external hard drive (LaCie) which has become corrupted.

I think it’s because there is a lot of footage on there from the filming I did in Ireland last year which was put on there from a MAC computer. I couldn’t access it from my PC so had to use a MAC drive – which wasn’t very good but I kept my head shots and other photos on there too and I think the mixture of the two systems has corrupted the drive; that’s only my theory.
I went to Kinko’s the other day to see if I could access it and they don’t have MAC computers there any more so I am lost.

It means of course that I haven’t been able to write anything lately; I was getting on so well with my novel but then I had the computer trouble; funny thing I just noticed – I write with Microsoft word but find Open Office a bit more ‘book’ or ‘novel’ friendly but what I find strange is that on ‘word’ I have written 47,103 words and in Open Office I have written 48,542 which means that fourteen hundred and thirty nine words are missing – now isn’t that strange?

So that’s all for now as I have to get on with it – toodleoo!

British Teeth and Food.

There I am above and those are my choppers; they're not that brilliant but at least they're mine.

I have had work on them some times through necessity and sometimes for cosmetic reasons and for actors dental work is usually tax deductible.

Once when I had no money our union, Equity, paid for some treatment so when other members of Equity who have lapsed ask me what Equity has done for me I tell them about my dental bills.

So the first thing that happens to you when you come to America – well to be more precise Los Angeles – is that people look at your teeth.

You wonder why they do this and then when you put the TV on the late night comedians crack jokes all the time about British teeth and British food. Jay Leno being the number one pain in the arse on both subjects; Jay Leno whose teeth you cannot see and who eats nothing but pizza.

There was a joke about the police identifying murder victims by their teeth x-rays which cannot be done on Britain due to the lack of dentists there; he's about as good as a British dentist; some joke about the British not knowing what tooth floss is. Loads of jokes and if they were funny it might not be so bad.

They laugh at Hugh Grant's teeth which, to me, look okay. They function, they're probably stronger than the average American's teeth but I think one or two at the front kind of touch each other, or are crooked or something equally as silly.

There is a TV show here called The Bachelor where one man has to choose a wife from 25 beautiful model type girls. One of the bachelors was an Englishman, some time ago, who they liked, but before they put him on the show ABC spent $20,000 on his teeth. I don't know if he chose a girl or if he got married but I hope he can still eat nuts.

I was watching Luciano Pavarotti on TV the other night singing duets and he sung 'It's a Man's World' with James Brown. It was absolutely fantastic but I couldn't help noticing James Brown's teeth. They were as white as – I have to say it – the driven snow; and they were all there and perfect and I thought I bet he didn't eat many nuts in his lifetime. The thing is he probably paid many thousands of dollars to get them like that but no matter they didn't look real.

By the way is driven snow whiter than ordinary snow?

I haven't been able to watch too many variety shows on TV here, not proper variety shows, in any case, but I have never seen a man pulling a steam roller with his teeth. I have never heard if such an event either; in Britain it happens all the time and when you see those people close up their teeth are not like James Brown's.

So are English teeth worse than American teeth? Well if you travel to the boonies of America there are some families who only have one tooth between them and that one is full of decay. It's the tooth they share when they're having nuts for tea; the person with the tooth chews the nut then passes it to their relations to suck and swallow. I should imagine it's quite a spectacle.

And what about the food? When I first came here it was as if I'd landed on the island where The Lord of the Flies was set. If you remember it was about a load of boys who were suddenly on an island looking after themselves and making up their own rules and suddenly I'm in America and they are eating a bacon and egg breakfast with syrup poured over it. They also put jam on their toast and eat it at the same time as their bacon and eggs; in other words they are barmy.

It's a great treat when you get here with the pizzas – has to be a New York or a Chicago pizza - their In-n-Out burgers and the rest of the novelty foods, which are usually full of fructose corn syrup, but when you've had your fill of the fillet Mignon steaks and the rest of the stuff you long for a decent leg of lamb with mint sauce and the trimmings.

Maybe a sandwich of Marmite – which I never ate in Britain - or some cheese. Any cheese!! All the cheese here is processed. Sometimes the Brie or the Camembert cheeses are okay as they have to be processed but by and large the quality of cheese, milk, fresh cream or anything dairy is really piss poor.

So the jokes about British food as well as the ones about British teeth fall on deaf ears in this house and what am I cooking for dinner tonight: liver and onions with bacon and mashed potatoes – yum yum.

Gullane and the Academy Awards.

Well it's been over a week since I made a contribution to the blog with a post but here I am back and ready.

There are a lot of other things I have to do; I have to write my novel, organise my one man show for the Edinburgh Festival and do my taxes.

What appears to be taking a lot of time is the one man show; I did the classic thing of registering my show on the Edinburgh Fringe web site and then forgetting what user name and password I had chosen.

Ordinarily this would not be a problem as all you do in that case is click on 'reminder of password' and it gets e-mailed to you automatically but there is one snag.

AT&T in the form of SBCGlobal are my servers and they put a block on foreign domain names they do not recognise. So when the reminder came to me from the web site in question it was blocked and sent back. The name of the domain where the e-mails were coming from was edfringe and edfringe might look a bit shifty to a computer.

So I have made many a phone call to Scotland over the past week and it still isn't sorted out. The big problem with calling them is that they finish work at 6:00 pm so all the calls have to be made before 10:00 am Los Angeles time. If the person I want is in a meeting they never get out of it before the end of their day.

So it's a bit of a bind.

There is a place called Gullane which is a small town – or more like a village -on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth in East Lothian on the east coast of Scotland. It's about twenty to thirty miles from Edinburgh and in it there is a village hall which I want to use for a few rehearsals before the show; there it is above.

I know of the hall, and Gullane, because my uncle used to live there. He had half a Dublin accent and half a Scottish one and my dad couldn't understand a word he said.

When I was staying there with my brother, many years ago, we took a job in Gullane at the fair ground collecting the fares on the Dodgem Cars.

The first thing we were taught to do was to give incorrect change to the punters. It's something I never did but our boss, who was a little fella who wore a hat with a feather in it, would show us how to let the customer see the change in our hand and then as we put it into their hand we would somehow keep a coin in the folds of our fingers; I don't think I could have done it even if I'd wanted to.

We collected the fare when the cars started to move and we had to jump between them and kind of flatter and chat up the girls to try to keep them in for another ride; I liked doing that.

The thing you couldn't do was to touch two cars at the same time as the electricity would go through you and give you a nasty shock. I can still feel the pain from trying it once – it wasn't touching cars exactly, but the bar that was on the back which would reach the ceiling of the rink to give power to each car.

There was that, of course, and trying to avoid being hit by the cars.

I remember it took us some time to get paid too as the people running the dodgems tried to get away with it.

My cousin, who still lives in Gullane, always reminds me of the time my brother Pat and me worked at the fair ground.

So I think a nice little drive out to Gullane each time I rehearse would be nice and pleasant when I am there and I can get some fish and chips with my wife and wander along the beach.

When I go there I have another blog which I will be posting so I hope you will be able to follow me there.

It's been over a week since the Academy Awards and I wasn't too disappointed with the outcome. I'm glad Hurt Locker won but I would have liked to have seen Up in the Air win. It was a brilliant script and well performed and was about a man who thought he had everything but he didn't and it was a really good satire on America. Try and see it if you can; it's not a rip roaring comedy or a thriller but well worth a watch.

I asked a friend of mine if he enjoyed the Academy Awards and he said that they were a load of shit; a blatant publicity stunt.

Well you know who am I to argue with that; but people enjoy them. I always do and loved last year with Hugh Jackman; I didn't expect Stave Martin and Alec Baldwin to be like that but they were good in their own way.

I know it's a publicity thing but at least members of the academy get to vote – so it's real as far as that's concerned but it's only their opinion. There is never a degree of difficulty point like in the diving at the Olympic games so it really is very hard to say whose performance is better than anyone else's?

Is it harder to play a country 'n' western singer than a company executive? It depends doesn't it – I mean it would be harder for me to play a country n' western singer than Jeff bridges as he is almost there.

And what about directing? What about it I hear you say.

There was one scene in The Hurt Locker when the chap – the protagonist – was trying to defuse a bomb in a car; that scene was almost perfect and it was made up of good acting, good placement of the camera shots and – most importantly – good editing.

What kind of direction went into that scene? We will never know, of course, but the director's job is to get the performance from the actor; a discussion with the Director of Photography about the camera angles too but the main job is to make it believable and if the actor is not believable – over the top, playing it too small or just plain unbelievable – the whole thing is ruined.

The director has to tell the actor, if he doesn't know, what the character wants, what he has just been through and then has to tell him, using the correct words, how he is doing.

If the director tells the actor he is a load of shit where is that going to get him? If the director tells the actor how good he is that could be counterproductive too – the correct words need to be used I repeat.

That is why I am glad Avatar didn't win; I haven't seen the film but every time someone tells me about it they tell me of the 3D effects and the magic but I have yet to hear anyone tell me about the acting.

With regards to how important and correct the awards are I will say one of the greatest actors never recaived an Academy Award for any of his performances; I'm talking of Charlie Chaplin.

The Academy Awards

Well there's the view (above) from our apartment of Runyon Canyon; you can see what the weather is like here and it's the same ten minutes walk away to the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood where today they are holding the Academy Awards.

So the whole world can see what the weather is like here – our kids in England can see as they bask in the cold there.

At the moment the red carpet is on wall to wall television and each star is being interviewed by all the TV stations. As I sit here typing this at 5.22 pm I can hear the multitude of helicopters hovering above sending pictures out to the rest of the world.

Elsewhere in Hollywood streets are blocked off as thousands of limos – some stretch and some not – are welcomed to the show; a lot of them are arriving in SUVs and to try and negotiate the streets just to get home is a pain; but I can stand it as it's only once a year.

The limos have been 'on the road' for many hours as they have to be guided to Hollywood and each has to arrive at a certain time. Then they go through a security system but before he went through the system George Clooney jumped out of his limo and walked along Hollywood to meet the fans and I'm sure they were delighted. He didn't just give them a quick hello he really stayed. There was so much fencing between him and the fans it reminded me of when I was in Belfast 35 years ago.

I've only known one person who actually went to the awards in a limo and she had to start out at 11.00 am and wait in the limo line on Beverly Boulevard; in the limo they had drinks and snacks.

The other person I knew who went was Julian Fellowes who won the Academy Award for writing Gosford Park and he told me he was surprised when he won as he thought the winners were, somehow, informed.

There are only two people who actually know the results at the moment and if it ever leaked out everybody would know where the information came from.

This is the one big event in America that the rest of the world take notice of; the super bowl, the basket ball play games, the so called World Series, The Golden Globes or whatever you can think of mean nothing to the rest of the world but the occasion today does.

On Thursday night The Roosevelt Hotel held a roof top party and today we have a notice on the front door of our building to tell us where we can complain about the noise – which I didn't hear by the way – and it seems to me that the people who would complain would be those who didn't get an invitation.

It's the same with movie shoots; there is a campaign to try and bring movies and TV productions back to Hollywood as over the last few years run away production has taken them off to far away places with strange sounding names – like New Mexico which gives a really good tax incentive.

But can you blame them shooting movies elsewhere when people complain here if you shoot in their street – just like the people complaining about the noise from The Roosevelt Hotel and the fact that for one week in their miserable lives they have to make a few detours around the streets.

Anyway on with the Academy Awards which start at 5.30 – I have my Guinness ready and the oven is cooking dinner timed to be ready for when the awards end.

The Storyteller; The Man with the Pen (Prologue).

Hi folks,

I have been asked to put the prologue onto this blog to see if it can be done; I haven't done this before on here so let's see what happens.

It is the prologue (The Man with the Pen) to my novel The Storyteller and I hope you like it.