Are you old enough to remember the 1970s? Are you familiar with the county and equestrian show circuit? Maybe you can help me identify where, and possibly when these pieces of footage were filmed.
We’d emptied all the stuff it once held but next, we had to lift the huge York stone slabs from the floor. Weighing in at about a quarter of a tonne each, we needed some proper machinery to get the job done.
10 years ago | Another Place, Crosby, Merseyside, UK | 8th March 2014 Ten years ago, we decided to fill a boring late winter weekend with a a few hours at a free local attraction – and realised we’d found somewhere amazing: Antony Gormley‘s Another Place, at Crosby Beach. Gormley is most famous for Gateshead’s …
50 years ago | Bradley Lane, Standish, UK | ??th ?March 1974 Fifty years ago, I moved into our first family home: 161 Bradley Lane, Standish, part of the brand new development on land adjacent to Broomfield House. For fairly obvious reasons, I can’t be sure of the date but looking at the budding branches …
10 years ago | Chamberlains Farm, Shevington Moor, UK | 22nd February 2014 Ten years ago, I looked out of an upstairs window one night and saw the unmistakeable orangey flicker that instantly made my stomach lurch . A raging fire at the neighbouring farm. It’s only technically a neighbouring property. It’s more true to …
The view downstream, could not have been less evocative. Derelict warehouses, idle cranes, dark, foreboding facades, all reminders of London’s lost status as a world-leading port…
Any announcement like this would have been a happy one but this was a particularly special one because it would be the first child of a new generation in both of our families…
I can’t believe it’s now fifteen years since I signed up to a website that has delighted and disgruntled me in equal measure. A site which has allowed me to converse with my heroes and has, all too often, become the refuge of some absolute villains.
We took the turbo lift to the top floor and walked around the entire level, looking out in all four directions, over 1,300 feet below. We resisted the charms of the sprawling souvenir shop that took up most of the rest of the floorspace but, thankfully, remembered to take some video footage.
For safety’s sake, only the least difficult runs were floodlit but that didn’t stop us racing down them as fast as we could. The speed, the etherealness and nothing but the sound of metal edges on ice was a truly special experience.
…it isn’t really about the artistic merit (however that may be defined) as much as it is about its power to evoke memories. In those many brief moments when you’re doing the mundanest of tasks, with your mind on three other things….
I can’t tell you anything significant about the evening, the clock striking midnight or even the taxi ride back to the hotel, wherever it was, because like any other legendary night out, the details don’t really matter.
I’m kind of glad it wasn’t a real one because if it was, I’d be gutted that I’d have missed the chance to have a go at learning it, many years before I finally did start to teach myself, in about 1990.
My friend unlocked it and proceeded to climb over the various summer-season items of merchandise, rather like the subject of a Channel 5 documentary on people who fill their house with junk. A minute or so later…
One day, in Junior School, I was asked “Why are the curtains closed at your Grandma’s?”. I had no idea – and I was utterly oblivious to what that might mean. A few hours later, I found out.
For decades, I’d seen my Dad doing these kinds of drawings, even when I wasn’t old enough to appreciate the practical value of what looked more like a nice art project. I’ve always had the same artistic ability and the prospect of drawing up an entire house filled me with enthusiasm rather than trepidation.
I have to say, it didn’t disappoint. The storyline, the production values, the conventions of the genre, the dance moves, the resolution and the final twist all combined to make it every bit as memorable and significant as the hype suggested it was going to be.
We Skyped home in the morning and ironically wished everyone ‘Happy Thanksgiving!’. Then we set the table and swam/watched the game. As the sun set, we served up the feast, which was basically a Christmas dinner in all but name, and then, also like Christmas, flopped onto the couch to watch a film…
We found a bar and got some drinks in, as the national anthems were playing. Before any of us had even taken a sip, England were already 1-0 down. To possibly the worst team in the world. Like “legend”, the word “unbelievable” is far too easily thrown around in sport…
The wedding aired in Australian in the July of that year but, being on the other side of a world without an internet, UK audiences, eleven hours behind Melbourne in the real world were several months behind Erinsborough in the made-up one.
There was nothing else for it but to step in – literally. Martin and I took up position at each end of the blockage and physically waved through the traffic, like policemen used to do before the installation of traffic lights. It seemed to reduce the effects of the gridlock but in reality, we were only reducing the worst symptom of the problem.
From the players’ tunnel, we filed out onto the pitch and then along the centre line. The first pair were to walk to the marked spot about a third of the way onto the pitch. The next pair followed along the centre line and then turned ninety degrees to line up parallel to the touchlines. In short, we did exactly what you’ve seen hundreds of times before an international sporting fixture.
I remember slinking back up to Lancaster and sleeping off the stubborn queasiness. I suppose student parties are principally meant to be enjoyed, not necessarily remembered – even if it’s a curse that their after-effects must be more memorably endured.
Maybe I could come up with some sort of Kipling’s ‘If’ piece of life-lesson for the ages. I soon decided against that. Apart from anything else, the pretention to presume that sort of gravitas is exactly the sort of thing I’m trying to rail against at the moment. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time for me to do that sort of thing when I’m old enough.
When I was looking for somewhere special for a short break in the days after our wedding, there was only one choice. It turned out to be such a personal choice that we even bumped into Helen’s horse vet and his wife, who were fellow guests, during our stay.
35 years ago | ABC Cinema, Wigan, UK | ??th October 1988 Thirty-five years ago, I had my first ‘Python’ moment – a film about a fish…sort of… A friend and I went into Wigan, to the old ABC Cinema to watch ‘A Fish Called Wanda’, written by and starring John Cleese, with fellow Python …
A unique opportunity to buy a barely-used, top-of-the-range caravan, with over £1,500 worth of additional accessories…
The most common, clichéd way to describe this whole nightmarish episode would be to say it was ‘surreal’ but technically, surrealism is generally light and frivolous in tone. This was a much darker level of mind-bending. More Hieronymus Bosch than Salvador Dalí. We couldn’t even bring ourselves to watch it on television. Anything with horses involved was far too painful.
Speaking of chancers, one well-known feedstore ‘regular’ was Derek Hatton, fresh from his fall from grace of crashing Liverpool City Council’s finances but somehow managing to fall into a lifestyle that included owning horses and, if I remember correctly, a red BMW with the registration D3 GSY, his well-known nickname.
To schools, the child is clearly the beneficiary, the parents are merely ‘stakeholders’. Thus, I realised I’d stopped being ‘Paul’ and suddenly become ‘Charlie’s Dad’, in my dealings with them.
Then we entered the famous red quadrangle and walked towards the famous covered entrance, where all the freshly-awarded MBEs and OBEs are shown off. As we walked inside, up the famous red-carpeted stairs, I realised I’d stopped caring so much about what Mike was thinking about all this – I could feel my resolve was starting to slip.
The evocative summer sunset made for a far more special memory than that blustery autumn ascent I’d made almost 22 years before, with Paris glowing more splendidly as we ascended each of the Tower’s three stages
And then, the whale-watch suddenly became something far more spectacular and multi-sensory. No more than twenty metres from the side of the boat, there was a flurry of activity. Gulls began to dive to the water while others circled overhead. Tightly-packed sea lions writhed about the surface, like worms under a lifted rock.
In addition to all the studying we did… …this was the site of numerous parties, countless film nights, lots of football matches, a few verbal fights, and a host of other assorted events. It’s where I woke up one morning, having somehow acquired a selection of traffic cones and still-flashing lights from road works on the A6.
I remember standing in crowds that were maybe two-deep on Pepper Lane as the Carnival procession made its way along the route. I remember the gasps that swept those around me as Chris/’Brian’ swung into view, waving from an open-top car. Moments later, he was gone. If we’re being slightly unkind, we might say it was a portent of his career.
Director: Stephen Frears
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Steve Coogan, Mark Addy
Running time: 108 minutes
Director: Gracie Otto
Starring: Krew Boylan, Daniel Webber, Rose Byrne
Running time: 94 minutes
We got a taxi to Rajput’s, a kebab shop on the ‘Headingley Mile’. I’m so pleased to see that it’s still going strong today. From there, we made our way from pub to pub until we arrived at the spiritual home of the Headingley pub crawl, The Original Oak. I’ve had some great times in this legendary place since then but none were better than that night.
Horace Barker – or ‘Pop’ to everyone two or more generations younger than him – was one of only three people I’ve ever met that I know to have been born in the nineteenth century – 1897 in his case. The picture is therefore a visual record of me sat next to an actual Victorian. As we approach the second quarter of the 21st Century, that’s an increasingly profound thing to be able to say.
Equipe hand-made Italian double bridle £250 Equipe black handmade Italian full size double bridle like new with original bag only use twice paid £350 will take sensible offer can post buyer to pay postage. Airowear back protector Adult Small X/short £30 Airowear back protector adult small navy Level 3 (2000) purple badge. WeatherBeeta Thermic Quilt …
“You may dismiss the veracity of schoolyard rumours among nine year-olds but you may be surprised at the detail here. I had it ‘on good authority’ in 1983 that, with the trilogy now completed, there would then follow a trilogy of prequels and then a trilogy of sequels. ‘
Quickly, we started to fashion a rope from the fluffy, chunky towels. Unless you’ve ever tried to do this, you’re unlikely to know just how cumbersome and unwilling to be threaded a beach towel can be. The knots, if you could call them that, seemed chunky and unlikely to hold. Especially the one that anchored the first towel to the balcony handrail.
And so, like the immortals gathering periodically in ‘Highlander’, when the day came, we filtered into our rendezvous pub in Llanberis, with our late-twenties accoutrements and our variable levels of hiking equipment. We had drinks, caught up with each other’s lives and agreed an early start for the next morning. It was just like old times.
Dancing on the canopy roof around Bowland College as the sun was rising beyond the Trough of Bowland, to the east remains etched in my mind like the closing shot of a film. Equally, a very chemically-assisted four-piece Take That karaoke performance (before they even did that) in front of an audience of hundreds of mostly appreciative girls. And – if you’re at all familiar with the campus at Lancaster – the inevitable and very illicit ‘Spine Run’, about which I must say no more…
If I’m honest, The Police were slightly before my time. I remember them being in the charts and on ‘Top of the Pops’ but well before I was old enough to have a musical preference. If I was five years older, I’m sure I’d have been ‘into’ them rather than simply aware of them. I’d also say that ‘Every Breath You Take’ was one of the first songs that I really listened to the lyrics of – and was impressed by its wordplay.
It’s also led to something of an ongoing rivalry between Helen and me. I’ve probably appeared in Horse & Hound about five or six times and, while I think I’ve only ever seen Helen in there twice (for Top 3 finishes in her section at various Events), she claims more than that. We both claim to have appeared on its pages more than the other.
Sometimes you know the journey will involve a record-breaking element, as was the case the first time we crossed the Millau Viaduct in France (890 ft above the valley floor) – the bridge’s reputation preceded it. On this occasion, the significance of our surroundings was lost on us. Happily, because of the internet, it’s possible to learn all about things like that, after the fact.
That’s not what happened. One random Tuesday night, I got a phone call around tea time. The tractor had been delivered, to the dealership, and my friend was driving it home. He was wondering if we were at home as he was planning to pop in, on the way. “Yes, of course!”, I replied, with mounting excitement, looking hastily for my digital camera.
With less time to process all this impeccable logic into two-stage flattery and recognition, even the loveliest descriptions quickly become little more than a mushy word soup, just as Jane Austen would have become to our Boomer parents and grandparents. How can we continue to assume that flattery gets you everywhere, if you don’t have time to do all that? More recently, all we really have time for is just to tell people what to do.
Once at the top, we mooched about a bit and – I’m pretty sure – took a drink or two in the bar. When it was time to descend, either I or the other male in the group had the idea of the two of us walking down to meet “the girls” back in the town. The idea was, I’m sure, initially ridiculed but we were determined and before long, we left them to board the cable car down and off we went on the clearly-marked footpath.
Resonation 