Halcyon Days on the Post Office Motor Bikes.

Hi folks: I wrote this in 2011 and for some reason it is being widely read again so I thought I would re issue it here. I have made the font different from the one before – Ariel Black 14 - easier to see. 

I was living in Hollywood, California, when I wrote this, about to return to London and Brexit and at the time of writing this I had never heard the word let alone know what it meant.

I got a great kick reading it just now so I hope you enjoy it.

Aged 18 the day before I was going on my SAS selection course I was forced into a bag and my hair parted down the middle - boys will be wags!!!

I was driving around here yesterday in the sunshine, with the sun roof open and really enjoying the bends in the road and listening to The Chieftains on the stereo, and my mind went back to the days I worked for the post office in Birmingham riding a motorbike.

I remembered doing the same thing then; the sun was beating down onto my crash helmet as opposed to my white hair but I got the same feeling of gratification which you get sometimes when you enjoy riding or driving.

Driving is possible to enjoy which is why I don't use freeways or motorways unless I have to; there have to be bends in the road and a certain amount of variety with regards to hills and valleys and because of this you concentrate on the enjoyment of actually driving.

I can't understand people who use cruise control and just sit there wishing the journey would be over – wishing their lives away.

Of course it's different if you're driving with children and their 'are we there yet' comments. I am all for putting DVD players in cars and SUVs (with head sets) for children to look at as more accidents are caused by parents looking at the children in the mirror, to make sure they're okay, than anything else.

There's a mini biography of me on the Internet Movie Data Base and it says that before I was an actor I (he) had the 'best job of his life delivering telegrams for the post office' – that is a true statement and I remember the time when I actually felt it and said to myself 'I will never have a better job than this ever' and I was right.

It was obviously on a summer's day and I had to go along a dual carriageway on Bristol Road South in a suburb south west of Birmingham; I turned left off the main drag onto a road, I have forgotten the name of, but it was full of bends, twists and turns and I was going down a slight hill; the bends were just right so I could fully open the throttle and swung left and right, banking over each time with the foot rests coming very close to the ground. What a job, I thought. I was my own boss – we all were when we were on the road – and I didn't have a care in the world.

Well I cared very much for a girl I used to meet in Rose's Cafe in Selly Oak; that cafe was on Bristol Road in the main high street of the Selly Oak suburb. It was a cafe with a great jukebox and I would drive everybody crazy by playing Love Letters by Kitty Lister on it – it just wasn't rock 'n' roll but listen to it today and see how great it sounds.

The office, we worked out of, was in Selly Oak and when we entered the yard at the back of the office we had to turn off the main street and if there were any girls looking some of us would let the foot rests scrape along the floor. The footrests were made of steel and the street made of concrete and what do you get when that happens? Sparks! That's right.

So the 16 and 17 year old girls would see us ride up and the sparks flying which looked very impressive to our youthful minds; especially in the dark.

I had another little trick I used to do: I would rest the motorbike on the concrete floor of the space where we garaged our bikes and open the throttle turning the handle bars slightly in. This would cause the bike to skid and spin around in a circle and as I would put the head lights on, it looked like the wall of death with those sparks flying, the engine revving and the supervisor yelling at me to stop.

When I stopped I took the crash helmet off and walked into the office feeling like John Wayne or James Dean; or what I thought was like them.

Of course I had filled the place with exhaust fumes but it didn't matter to me; I was young and I was going to live forever and in any case the exhaust fumes didn't bother me as I lit up a cigarette and moved to take my riding gear off in the locker room where we also drank tea and broke each other's balls.

We would drive the supervisors up the wall but what did they expect? We were mad headed 16 and 17 year olds with motor bikes on our minds half the time and sex the other half.

One of the supervisors was a very sexy girl from the north of Ireland who was in her late twenties and was the Brigitte Bardot of Belfast as far as I was concerned. She hardly looked at me but she would go weak at the knees if ever she heard the voice of Frank Sinatra. She dated one of the lads but he was a tall good looking fella who looked a bit like Elvis.

These supervisors were only in charge of us after six in the evenings when the proper supervisor would go home; they were actually telegraphists who received and sent telegrams by sticking the tape onto the telegram form (photo below), putting them into the telegram envelope and giving them to us to deliver; we got to know every street, alley, crescent and avenue in the Birmingham postal districts of 15, 16, 17, 29, 30, 31 and the suburbs of Rednal and Rubery.

There was a rock singer in the area called Jimmy Powell who suddenly shot to fame with a minor hit called Sugar Baby and another supervisor, called Tinkerbell Jackson, said that I could sing as good as Jimmy Powell as she'd heard me when I must have been singing to myself. 'You can sing better than he can – I've heard you do your Little Richard.'

Hummm, I thought, that's what she thinks of my Frank Sinatra, which I was trying to perfect for some reason!!!!

Most of the telegrams we delivered were to businesses and lots to weddings and birthdays but some were bad news; sometimes a supervisor or telegraphist would tell us it was bad news and to 'make sure the person is not by themselves.' Sometimes we would knock next door if we knew it was some old lady by herself to try to break the bad news gently. There were hardly any phones in those days – hardly any land lines don't mind mobile phones!! God however did we manage?

One or two people would scream when they saw us coming as they knew it was bad news; must have given some of us complexes.

The weather wasn't always so nice and sometimes we had 50 or 60 telegrams to deliver and maybe some express packets too which we kept in our paniers; it rained, the roads became slippy we would skid on a manhole cover and come off. We hit lorries, buses, cars and it is a wonder none of us were killed. We were taken to hospital, sometimes detained, sometimes in a coma or concussion but we all survived.

I was only taken to hospital once when a truck turned right in front of me without signalling as I was about to overtake him; as he hit me, one of the hooks that they use to tie rope to on the side snagged under my gauntlet and twisted my arm around. The driver didn't even know he'd hit me and was quite content to carry in driving which would have dragged me under the rear wheel but I shouted something very apt to stop him; the first thing that came into my head which was 'you stupid oaf!' Not a word I'd used before or since.

I tore the tendons in my arm and had a few days off work.

Accidents always seemed to happen in hazy lazy weather; we rode in the snow and ice and terrible rain conditions but it was the sunny days we should have been watching for.

There are no more telegrams now they have gone the way of the dodo and are replaced by every other means of communication. No more Rosie's Café in Selly Oak and no more hanging around in there playing on the one armed bandit and the jukebox.

The girl, I mentioned earlier, would come and sit with me every night and we would talk. Her friend would talk to the other telegram lads – they called us wags for some reason. I never asked her out on a proper date; I don't know why but I would get a kiss and a cuddle when I left her at the bus stop. That's what it was like in those days you just dropped them off at the bus stop.

A lot of my pals stayed on at the post office but it wasn't for me; I didn't like the job you had to do when they 'retired you' from the motorbikes at 18 – a postman.

I went to drama school to study speech, drama, dancing, singing and sword fighting and later on I went back to school to study sociology, English Literature and Film Studies and ended up writing this for you – hope you enjoyed it?

telegram from 1944

Ten minutes, 38 seconds.

Ten minutes, 38 seconds. There's a phrase for you. I have just bought a book with that title and it's got me thinking.

I have only read a few pages so I can't give an opinion on the book but Ten minutes, 38 seconds is the length of time it takes your brain to die after you die. How they know this, I have no idea but it's worth thinking about.

I remember in LA I drove a friend of mine to visit her husband in hospital and as we drove away she got a phone call from the same hospital; it was to tell her that her mother had just died. She went straight up to her mother's room at the hospital because, she said, she wanted to get there before her mother actually went. She was talking about spirits and that the soul of her mother would still be there.

She came back to me after a short while and I believe she believed she had caught the spirit.

The other thing I heard was that the very last bit to go from your brain is your earliest memory. I can understand that in a way as that is the time when we are still living in a world of wonderment, seeing things for the first time and having the luxury of being naive and not caring who knows we have never been there before. That is opposed to someone who likes to pretend they know the place, knows the best way to get there and those are the people who do get lost.

I remember when I went to India the woman who was a member of our party was absolutely amazed by me because I wanted to see everything. I asked what certain tubes were, what they were for and nobody laughed at me. One of the other people knew everything – he hadn't been there before either but he told us that we were going through the Western Ghats and that they are a mountain range that runs parallel to the western coast of the Indian peninsula, located entirely in India. It was way before the Internet (where I got that bit of info from) so he'd looked it up in a book before the journey but it was me who was experiencing the wonderment and excitement of India.

The thing he didn't do was to try some Indian food before leaving for India so he spent most of the time being ill – this was, of course, after eating fish'n'chips as opposed to the local bill of fare.

The 10 minutes and 38 seconds has fascinated me since I heard the phrase and I was thinking, as I walked down the street the other day, that if I dropped dead at that particular moment with the garbage laying around the street and bits of rubbish being discarded that I would be experiencing the worst things of modern life with my 10 odd minutes.

By the way the 38 seconds was put on by the author so it's just 10 minutes.

Some of the things of modern life that disturb me is the rush to get everywhere quickly. Someone knocked my wife over at Baker Street Tube Station running for a train on the Jubilee Line. Now when you think that the Jubilee Line has a train every one minute why would the guy run to save one minute?

I was having a cup of coffee last week with a pal and I told him I'd been to Mousehole in Cornwall (pronounced Mowzel); he asked what I did there and I told him nothing – and that's what I went there for. Five and a half hours on the train which gave me plenty of time to read my book and then five and a half hours back. Wonderful! Read: have a sleep: look out the window, have a snack and another read. What more could I want? Then to think about that man who ran into my wife to save one minute. And I actually did nothing. No schedule, no itinerary no nothing. My wife would go down to breakfast at 8.00 and I would stay in the fart sack till she came back with The Guardian – I'd have a browse then walk to another fishing village called Newlyn for a late breakfast – I have a very late breakfast every day which I usually eat sometime after lunch.

My wife would take the tiny bus to meet me and took the photo, above, of me arriving one day.

At Newlyn I saw the fisherman statue by a local artist called Tom Leaper. The statue shows a fisherman casting his line as the boat arrives in port. It was built to honour dead fishermen with over twenty local men having died fishing since 1980. Here's the photo I took of it. 

Greta Thunberg

This is very unlike me to do two posts for my blog in as little as a couple of days but I thought about writing this a few minutes ago when I saw the demonstrations all over the world and all because of one little girl; her name? Greta Thunberg.

Cities throughout the whole world are demonstrating today because of her. The one person who won't be taking any notice will be Donald (Fake News) Trump. I don't think his latest screw up concerning Ukraine will be satisfied with his usual sobriquet especially as he is part to blame after cancelling the Paris agreement concerning climate change. 

Like Jeremy Corbyn's brother he denies that there is a climate change emergency.

I don't want to get political – BTW regular readers should know my politics by now – but aren't there so many lies told these days; blatant lies not just tiny fibs and so so many conspiracy theories.

I mention Greta Thunberg – who I only have praise for – but you can bet your bottom dollar that someone somewhere has some kind of theory about her doing something bad like how much money she makes or something else that I won't speculate about.

I remember all the money Bob Geldof raised for the famine in the eighties, Red Nose Day, Children in Need – and loads of others where someone said that the money didn't get there. Bod Geldof and Midge Ure have private jets and a fortunes stacked away – all that stuff and all bullshit.

You mention anything: Princess Diana's death, every football match (fixed they say), all the cricket matches (the same), the lottery, the horse racing you name it. Some guy must sit in his little bedsit and be so angry with the world that he makes up stories and some people believe them.

Do you know I bet someone somewhere will say that the aeroplane that crashed killing the Cardiff City footballer is suspicious that the pilot's body was never found and that the pilot swam away – yes funny but I betcha!

So let's celebrate Greta on this wonderful day and consider the earth when you try to destroy it and start taking notice of her and the people that follow her instead of the liars and fantasizers – good wishes.

John Humphrys

All the nines today – 19.09.19 in the UK and 09.19.19 in the USA. Strange number nine, isn't it. Multiply nine by something and the figures will add to nine. For example 9 x 9 = 81. 8 + 1 = 9. Try it: 4 X 9 = 36. 3 + 6 = 9. Or to be difficult 9 x 184 = 1656. Add those together = 18 and those together? = 9.

There we go work that into a code or a crossword clue.

It is a sad day today for British Broadcasting.

John Humphrys decided to hang his writing and interviewing boots up – who's he? I can hear you say, you who only hear background music from your radios in the background of your very busy life, maybe not even listening to the music.

I remember entering a friend's house (not you, he doesn't read this) and he was sitting waiting for me and I could hear Take Five by Dave Brubeck being played. A great piece of modern jazz from my youth, in fact it was so long ago it should be called Was Modern Jazz.

Dave Brubeck, I said, I love him. Then I told him that when he was at The Hollywood Bowl the other four members of his quintet were held up in New York, and four local musicians in LA filled in for them as it didn't make any difference to Dave.

My pal said Dave who?

Brubeck, I said.

Oh, I haven't heard of him.

That's what was playing when I came in, I said.

Well there we go.

So back to John Humphrys, that well known spelling mistake.

He retired today from the flagship Radio 4 current affairs programme on BBC Radio. Radio 4 is my favourite station and is similar to NPR in America; the Today Programme is similar to Morning Edition and later on they have shows like All Things Considered plus lots of news and art shows.

John Humphrys was one of the half a dozen or so presenters but some of the current politicians would never be interviewed by him as they were scared. He would ask the right questions and interrupt if they didn't or just wouldn't answer his questions.

I have 'seen' footage of him interviewing Gerry Adams who was supposed to be in the IRA and he was challenging him to answer; he didn't know whether Adams was a gunman or what (as it happens he wasn't) but Humphrys stood his ground. It was the same with others – he was a young lad when he covered the Indian/Pakistan War, the first man to the Aberfan Disaster, in Wales, which was the catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip in October 1966. The tip had been created on a mountain slope above the village and 144 people died; most of them school children.

So it's sad he's gone on to other things.

I'm not sure if I'd like him though - who knows?

NPR, by the way, is on my computer at the moment and I hear that the USA are holding $160 million from Afghanistan. Is there anywhere where Trump doesn't want to upset? California yesterday and Afghanistan today.

Guardian Readers and LA Flea Market

I wrote this on my Facebook page today:

Guardian Readers: just lately it seems that people like Banks and Farage use the phrase 'Guardian readers' as if we're some kind of weird specimens from Mars or Snowflakes from Hampstead. I have read the Guardian since the 1970s for the great journalism. John Arlott was one of the greatest and Neville Cardus was too.

There they are above.

In the 1980s one of my favourite journos was James Cameron (no not that one) who corresponded with me – hand written as did the chess correspondent.

And before anybody says that was then and this is now, there are still great journalists contributing and not all from the liberal left – on Saturday there was a piece in the Journal by Katy Balls, of The Spectator (the Tory speccy), so not just one sided and they even pay 'rude boy' Owen Jones.
The greatest thing about The Guardian is that nobody owns it unlike The Telegraph which is owned by someone who owns The Ritz and one of the channel islands; and by de way - who reputedly doesn't pay tax!

The Times is owned by the Murdoch empire and The Mail – oh who cares who owns it – it supported Hitler in its day – but that was then and this is now. What they do now is bad mouth the royal family.
The greatest guy who ever wrote for The Guardian and The Observer was Clive James.

That's what I wrote or, to use an anonymous (to me) American writer 'that's all she wrote.'

Going on – in the 1920s there was a publisher in London called Grant Richards; he was a bit of a dandy, never without a monocle or a handkerchief flopping out of his top pocket (no he never had a monocle flopping out of his top pocket). He lived his life regretting the writers he either didn't or couldn't publish. He lost James Joyce's first book Dubliners as he wanted to edit it but Joyce would not let him – good old Jimmy.

Richards published works by George Bernard-Shaw and A.E. Housman - A Shropshire Lad , Housman's most famous work, was included and, when he was approached by Neville Cardus, who sent him a scruffy packet of news-cuttings, he published Cardus' A Cricketer's Book, even though he knew nothing about cricket, saying anything that came out of The Guardian stable was worth backing on general principles.

So there that's what I have to say about The Guardian today.

Now I do not want to mention the name of the famous actress who is interviewed in today's copy of the paper so I won't but there is a lot of paranoia in the article; she keeps thinking her phone is being tapped or interfered with – it's an unfortunate expression as the poor woman is one of those who was a victim of Harvey Weinstein – that Adonis of a man who women would fall over themselves to be with – I don't think.

Why is it all the ugly fat bastards think they are god's gift to women? I mean can you imagine poor Mrs Trump having to wake up each morning beside that great big lump of a leviathan – oh I think he's great for the economy – they said that about Hitler.

Hey that's twice on this page he is mentioned.

The actress was married, one time, to a restaurateur who, when I met him, was an actor and played a small part in one of David Lynch's films; he was English and when I said I saw him in it, he came out with the line we all use 'I had more than that in the movie – it was gonna be a series but ya know!'

What I found strange was that he was English and the gonna and the ya know kind of stuck out a bit.

His ex- wife – did I say they were parted? Well yes – would come to the flea market in Los Angeles and I would recognise her and wonder about him.

He was fine and spoke nicely about David Lynch but I saw him many times at that market and we never said another word to one another; I found out that he was also a song writer and I was going to mention it to him but when I saw him the next time he skulked behind a car, looked in the side/wing mirror and adjusted his hair; then he patted his head on top to see if he could get that bit of a quiff to lay down. When he did this it came back up again, just like the boy in the strip Hergé's Adventures of Tintin .

So he had to pat it down again.

This would have been enough for me but as he walked towards me he went behind another car and started slapping his head again. By this time I ducked behind another car as he came passed. I was going to throw him a comb at this point but the thought did cross my mind that I should throw a sock full of dog shit at him instead.

So there we are for today – always remember, when you are on your soap box, what Shostakovich reputedly said to Pablo Picasso “it's okay being a communist if you don't live in a communist country.”

The Sofa, the pulley and the manager.

There we are on my favourite ever sofa. I put the photo up on Facebook recently because I like it.

I'll repeat here what I said there: when Fred MacMurray, the Hollywood movie star, died, his wife was left a widow for about fourteen years and then when she died, all of their belongings were put into auction, and that was his sofa; we bought it and got it at a good rate. He was in one of my favourite films Double Indemnity where he would call Barbara Stanwick 'baby' throughout and that's what I would call my wife as we sat on that sofa, and ever since, no more than a mile or so from where the classic movie was shot and set.

I bought other things at that auction too over the years: I bought Liberace's candelabra; I didn't keep it as I bought it on behalf of someone else. I think on that day there was a piece of paper, ordinary lined exercise paper from the UK – you can always tell as their paper sizes are different – and on that paper was the lyric, written by John Lennon in his own hand, to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds ; it went for a fortune, well a fortune to me. Maybe around $25,000 and well worth it too as other sales, consequently, are much higher than that. When the hammer went down on it there was a burst of applause.

I think we also bought stuff from the Anne Miller estate when she died and it went up for auction – what's that? you never heard of her? Your loss!!

Most of her stuff was jewellery and monogrammed make up utensils etc. – one sale had an Oscar which was won by Charles Coburn. I held it, posed with it etc. but no photos. They don't sell Oscars any more as they are the property of the Academy who give them out - hang on Oscar® - that's better. 

That one would have found its way to Kevin Spacey who would buy all of them and donate them back to the Academy – there we are, you see, not a bad man after all; fancy him making a pass at another man – tut tut.

Look at the picture (above) and just passed us is our front door; it led to a walkway outside which was five floors up, looking out on to a court yard which was beautiful when we first moved in but a new owner of the building decided to dump the plants and beautiful fountains and left some false kind of plants down there on the concrete.

It took two goes at laying the concrete as it wasn't flat and in the El Niño rains, around the year two thousand, the rain water ran under some of the doors on the ground floor and ruined some of their stuff.

Us? five floors up and a flood? You wouldn't believe it but yes.

The owners did something to the French Windows so that the water out on the balcony rose above the bottom of the door and into our apartment – so our carpet was ruined and replaced.

When it was being replaced we had to put all our stuff in to the bathroom, on the balcony and through that front door. I put my guitar in to the bath with a few other things.

The chief carpet man was a keen guitarist and kept asking me a lot of questions about my guitar and I would say 'would you like to play it' and he would say 'no signor, I have to lay the carpet.'

I left the guys working on the new carpet as I had to get to rock'n'roll Ralphs and when I got back I went into the bathroom and could see he had played my guitar. Maybe he thought I was a professional and was a bit shy to play in front of me – that thought has just come to me now.

I can't believe that I sat in Arturo's guitar shop on Sunset Blvd (another post) as he very expertly played flamingo guitar to me, on an instrument he had just made with his bare hands and he would play that guitar with his nails clicking on the plectrum board and other places on the guitar and when he handed it to me, a guitar player of . . well let's put it this way - I was to a guitar what Steven Seagal is, or was, to acting.

What I can't believe is that I took the instrument from him and played. 

Played accompanying myself as I sang Robert Johnson's Crossroads and The Beatles I will! 'hey you got a great voice' said the great man; nothing about the guitar playing.

Back to that door again; that is the door that that sofa came through. It was too big for the elevator/lift so we had to haul it up on a pulley on the outside of the building.

I had a friend who had an open truck and he, me and Nobel, the manager of the building, hauled it up.

'Pull. Pull. Stop. Hold it. Lower it back down. Pull. Too far. Etc. 

Our voices echoing through the building. A building we lived in for may fifteen of the seventeen years we lived in LA.

And Nobel the manager? The first sight of Nobel was of a Sikh with long white hair in a pony tail, and a beard. But he wasn't a Sikh at all. He had an Indian accent but said he was British. He also said he was 99 years old – he wasn't but he told everybody he was and when I told him my name was Sullivan he said 'pleased to meet you, Mister Callaghan.' 

He was hard of hearing but never used a hearing aid and would cup his hand around his ears with a big 'what??' if he didn't hear what was said.

Before we moved in I called him on the phone and said 'it's Chris Sullivan here' and he said 'hello Mister Callaghan.'

Always a bit of humour.

He would always complain about The Beatles getting the M.B.E. - bloody Beatles, he would say.

I gave him a lift somewhere one day and there were others in the car too, as we had a big Chevy Nova. We went to a pharmacists and there was an old woman in there who was trying to spend her Ralphs Card as if it had any value. She was getting really upset and wanted her purchases as she called them. I found out she didn't live far so I gave her a ride home.

I said to Nobel 'the poor women was trying to use her Ralphs card in there' and he said 'what do you mean, she's your accountant?'

I have never figured out how he deduced from what I said to what he thought I said.

He was actually about 80 years old and did some work, in his youth, with Albert Schweitzer, the French theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary, in the leper colonies in Hawaii.

When he was in hospital I would go in and cut his hair and beard. He was in the same hospital, The Good Samaritan, where Robert Kennedy died after he was shot in the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Blvd.

A couple of times when I would cut Nobel's beard I would nick him on the lip and he would pull a terrible face but he was always very grateful.

He was a hoarder and would never throw anything away – his apartment was full of stuff: mattresses, shopping carts – you name it. The owners promised to clear the apartment if he would vacate it and that's what happened and he went to live in a home. But they kept taking him to hospital and I think the move – making him homeless - killed him. He just gave up.

The last time I went to cut his hair, at the hospital, he was fast asleep and two ambulance men came in and woke him up to take him back to the home. 'you can't take me away' he said 'I'm dead.”

He actually thought he was. But he did die fairly soon afterwards. I didn't have anything to do with things after that as he didn't have a funeral – he was burned by the city in the monthly cremation; that happened to a lot of people I knew in LA. Nobel knew that was where he was going.

He had two bank accounts with around $250,000 in each account as I used to draw his money out of one of them every month and put it in to another account to pay his rent – I don't know what happened to all that money but I have my suspicions.

Why and Where.

   

                   

Do you know I can't remember if I ever put this up; I remember writing it but I can't remember who I wrote it for. So let's hope I haven't sold it to someone who wants their money back. In any case, as you will see, if you're paying attention, I have added to it.

I remember in the wonderful tributes to Seamus Heaney, his pronunciation of the wh words; whale, wheat, why, when and the wonderful while or whilst etc.

Seamus pronounced 'why' correctly, as most of the Irish do as hwahy – try it!

The aitch is on the breath of the double-u as the lips pucker themselves together for the double-u plunge – fun isn't it?

By the way, as we are at it, aitch is pronounced aitch – not haitch as I have heard a lot these days.

The other place where it's pronounced correctly is Inverness in Scotland; in fact it is said that the best pronunciations of English are in Dublin and Inverness.

Wouldn't believe that would you?

But that spreads to the rest of Ireland and Scotland; thick accents notwithstanding.

The leader of Sinn Féin was on the radio this morning with a vocabulary to die for and using it like a beautiful tool to confound, mesmerize and confuse English journalists into hypnotic states.

When people like Noah Webster come along and try to change the spelling of the words to make things simple for the Americans they are obliterating the origin of words. I mean why did he take the 'u' out of colour; the 'u' tells us where it came from – 1250–1300; Middle English col ( o ) ur Anglo-French ( French couleur ) Latin colōr- (stem of color ) – I mean why didn't he leave things as they were? It was a pain in the arse, when I lived there, that I eventually ended up confusing the two.

Someone said to me at a party one night that the 'U' was only put in to words by the English to be flashy or pedantic; I didn't comment on that at the time and I won't now.

When I said 'people like Noah Webster come along' I mean what I say 'come' along, present tense, as they still do; I knew a teacher there who wanted to see Americans spell catalogue as catalog – now what looks better on the page in this day and age of shortening everything, BTW, the former or the latter?

Yes, BTW, my little joke – or joak, to use a private family joke!

My daughter was talking to one of the school mistresses at her son's school, the other day, and she asked her about the basketball court and the school mistress said - don't you mean the multi-sports hall?

Give me a break!!

Seamus Heaney also pronounced Drogheda the way it's spelt without the 'g' but the very posh English say Droyida – they also pronounce Daventry as Dayentry and a town in the north east of England in a funny way too but I think they do that as a test for 'pretenders.'

Do people in other languages have this kind of trouble? I mean do the Mexicans have Mexican Spanish and the people from Quebec and various African countries have their own French spellings? Are they allowed to say actress in their languages unlike us; The Guardian always refer to females as actors – I know a lot of women don't like the word actress but it isn't exactly a word like poetess or authoress is it? It always seemed silly to me, when old dames die like Dame Wendy Hiller, being described as the actor Wendy Hiller. It seems okay for someone like Germaine Greer or even Vanessa Redgrave but Wendy Hiller?

I was listening to Billy Connelly was on the radio and he, as a Scotsman, pronounced his 'wh' properly; the big Yin is not too great at the moment with his prostrate cancer and his Parkinsons but soon responded when Michael Parkinson, and old chum of his, said that the big Yin wasn't compos mentis.

Ironic isn't it, and he would point it out, that he shot to fame on the Michael Parkinson Show in the 70s. 

He came on to that show, the first time, and told one very famous joke and that joke, that one solitary joke, made him a star.

When he got back to Glasgow, after the broadcast, he was spotted at the airport and a crowd of people saw him and started to clap; there were only about 4 TV stations in Britain at the time and he hadn't quite reckoned how many people were watching and how he would affect people. 

I remember thinking he was the funniest person I had ever seen and when I went to see him live in the theatre he was even funnier; he wasn't restricted by language and he could say anything he liked and that's the problem with censorship – it's for the narrow minded; I mean what's the matter with a word; what harm can it do? If we welcomed words, rejoiced in their original spelling and meaning, things would be easier for everybody; there is not one name you can call me which would cause me offence. I know I'm white, reluctantly middle class, medium height to short, regular looks but I've been called lots of things in my life. When I first started on the post office the old sweats would ask me if I was going on my holidays – they were referring to the bags under my eyes and I hadn't quite worked out what they meant. 

Then I was called the Mekon (I have a big head), the green man (I was usually pale) and the incredible hulk. I didn't figure out the last one till fairly recently; apparently I looked like the guy who played him on TV in the 70s – the David Banner side to him.

I do feel it for Billy Connelly as my mother had Parkinsons and I do realise that the Americans, with their lack of patience for foreign accents, have never seen him at his best but I have and I'm not putting that joke down here – you can look it up.

                            BILLY CONNELLY

                               (THE BIG YIN)

Edinburgh 2010; at the festival and risking life on the number 27 bus.

I wrote this post in 2010 and someone looked at it the other day which reminded me and it made me smile. I had been at the Edinburgh Festival with my show A Bit of Irish with many visits to the poetry nights in The Captain's Bar where I did some of my own stuff together with some by WB Yeats hoping some of his enormous talent would rub off.

When reading this remember – it is before Brexit and before Trump; oh how lucky we were but that's what life is about when you never know the future.

This will finish off the Edinburgh blog; that bus above, as you can see, is the number 27. This bus is a wonderful bus; it runs every 10 minutes and took us into the centre of town in 15 minutes from where we were staying in a place called Viewforth.

The fair would cost £1.20 each way but a daily ticket would cost just £3. The daily ticket could be used all day on as many buses as one would wish to use; the buses have wheel chair and push chair access and certain seats near the front are reserved for senior citizens.

In the evenings the buses are limited to one every half an hour but we knew the time table so didn't have to wait too long very often.

So what is the matter with this seemingly wonderful bus service from Lothian Buses?

The drivers don't know how to apply the brakes properly; that is all except one and that was Bernard.

When Bernard drove the bus you could get out of your seat and feel safe as you walked to the door but when the other drivers drove you risked your life as soon as you got up.

Now it so happens that on most buses you have to get out of your seat before the bus reaches your stop; if you don't the bus will start off again before you have the time to get off.

So when you see your stop coming up in the distance you get out of your seat and walk up the aisle to the front of the bus; this is the cue for the driver, except the aforementioned Bernard, to apply the brakes hard which turns your walk into a trot and sometimes even a little run.

If the bus has to stop at the traffic lights before the bus stop, the driver will have to stop at the light and then accelerate again to get passed the lights and to the bus stop. This will send you on a walk back down the aisle to where you just came from - backwards.

You can prevent this by grabbing on to a bar, if you can, and if not you have to wait for another bar to catch or just hope you might bump into someone on your journey backwards who is big and soft.

Or you can fall backwards onto the floor and bang your head!

This doesn't apply to Bernard, of course, as he would be able to drive the bus with a pint of Guinness on his dash board.

All this might sound like fun and indeed it is if you are fit enough but to see really old people go into a trot down the bus and then see them careering backwards makes you want to cover your eyes or dive to try and rescue them.

The old ladies struggle out of their seats and then seem to have a lease of life as their little legs pump away moving their bodies forward at a speed they have probably never experienced since they were teenagers.

There was a middle aged woman, one day, applying lipstick when the bus went into the full Monty; the full Monty is when the brake is applied for the bus stop, then just before stopping at the traffic lights the lights change to amber before the bus has made its final stop and then it accelerates to the bus stop then stops fiercely again. The lipstick went up and down the woman's face but I find it very hard to describe what happened to the woman sitting across the aisle who was picking her nose; not a pretty sight!

I am not saying that every driver on every bus in Edinburgh drove like this – they just seemed to be. I only ever used the 43, the 10 and the 27 although I used the 27 every day and it happened every time – except once when we met Bernard.

On the last night we had to get our stuff out of the theatre pretty damn quick; so we put all the props into one plastic box; the guitar went into its own box and we had to return a table I had borrowed from the pub back to them.

After that I decided it would be a good idea to get a taxi so after a few pints in the pub – and I sang two songs for which they gave me a glass of black grouse whisky for – we had a cup of tea with a Palestinian shopkeeper I got to know and then caught a taxi. The taxi driver took us on a different route from the one we normally took and we landed in heavy traffic; well, we didn't fall for that trick so when we stopped in that traffic jam we decided to get out and pay him off. So we walked to our usual stop and there was the number 27 bus being driven by Bernard.

I didn't know Bernard was the driver of the year at that point but I was carrying the box of props and my wife had the guitar and the bag of costumes; it was easier that way as the box was giving Margaret trouble when we 'ran' from the taxi to the bus.

So when we made our move to get off the bus we couldn't grab the bars as we walked along the aisle but Bernard drove that bus lovingly and smoothly to the bus stop where he stopped it without even a slight jerk.

 I look forward to risking things again in Edinburgh one of the days where maybe I'll meet Bernard again.