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Lucy’s column for July 22.
Dancelo…1
It’s difficult describing to your nine-year-old granddaughter the intricacies of the Gay Gordons and the Eightsome Reel, and the great gusto with which this granny danced them on the lawns, fields and playgrounds of her childhood, when Grace has spent the past month or so practising to perfection a 50s style jazzy-jive Jools Holland number before making her debut on the Assembly rooms, Derby, stage.
My reminiscences were all but dismissed with one of those waves of the hand which spell "Get a life, gran" or, worse still, "What-e-verr…..". She’s not that rude, but you get the drift. And she was slightly more impressed to learn that I went on to bop many a Saturday night away at the Pavilion, Matlock Bath, and that it was my generation, and not her teacher, Rhiannon Jones, or her daughter Catherine – a professional dance student, who taught them the steps - who invented the hand-jive.
But this was Derby’s dancing divas sixty years on, and I was privileged to be in the Assembly Rooms audience last week when the Derby City School Sport Partnerships presented a celebration of dance 2008. Although "privileged" was furthest from my mind when I turned up, as requested, at 9.30 am – to discover that out of the 28 schools taking part, Our Grace’s, Mickleover Primary, was number 27 on the programme.
I confess a groan escaped as I anticipated three hours of nerdy music, clod-hopping routines, screeching kids, and performing prima donnas, and thought of that basket of ironing, and great clumps of weeding, I could be doing back home.
But even the little lad sitting behind, and kicking seven bells out of my seat with such determination and intensity that even a polite complaint to his parents from the women in the adjoining seats, let alone one of my looks, could not quell, failed to mar the sheer joy of that wonderful morning.
Hip-hop and be-bop, bhangra and Bollywood, boogie and ballet – oh what a lot of talented and diverse dancers and dance styles we have in our Derby schools. There were cheerleaders with their pom-poms, little poppets in space suits strutting their stuff to David Bowie, street dancers, break dancers, and tiny tots cavorting to Pop Goes the Weasel and Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush.
The event incorporated children from reception class to Sixth Form, and the versatility of the programme, and putting it all together in one great, glorious, colourful show, is a credit to their teachers and all those who took part front or back stage.
It was heartening to learn that the Government has invested some £5-million in dance in schools. It sure beats PE and rounders as a form of exercise, and is far more appealing to the majority of children. I was well impressed. Gay Gordon? Eat your heart out!
End
Tealo..1
Oh dear. Regular reader and the man I regarded as an ally in all things old fashioned and traditional, George Wride, writes that he is "saddened, disappointed, and feel let down" to learn I no longer use loose tea. It seems that my ritual of pot-warming, mashing, brewing, milk-in-first, is no longer good enough because there are state-of-the-art tea-bags lurking at the bottom of my tea-pot, where there should be tea-leaves. George, of Hollies Road, Allestree, reckons that in keeping with my penchant for the past, traditional tea-making would have been an essential in the Orgill household.
It is, he says, one aspect of the past that will never die in the Wride household. And he wounds even deeper by signing off : Yours, with betrayed trust. Dear George, don’t desert me, I need all the readers I can get. If this heralds the end of our special relationship, just let me say, I hope your down-pipe never clogs! end
Friday 25 July 2008
Tuesday 8 July 2008
Headscarves
Lucy’s column for July 8.
Scarflo…1
They say that if you hang on to it long enough, it will come back into fashion. So it’s sod’s law that, within a couple of years of divesting my drawers of my stash of headscarves, some of which dated back to my teens, the fashion afficianados are threatening a revival.
I say "threatening" because, let’s face it, the only folk who could wear this horrible head-gear with any semblance of style or panache were the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Jackie Onassis, who teamed hers with over-sized sun glasses and became an iconic trend-setter.
The rest of us resembled our grannies on a bad hair day. Indeed, every day must have been a bad hair day for my own gran, because my overwhelming image of the lady we called Little Nell was of her, hail, rain or shine, scurrying off to feed her hens, housed half-way up the highest hill in Two Dales, her woollen head-square firmly knotted under her chin.
She wasn’t the only person in my childhood to adopt this accessory. Come to think of it, just about every female I knew wore one. But they were more out of practicality and necessity than any fashion statement. If they weren’t keeping out the cold, they were keeping the curlers in place. Stand outside the gates of any factory in the 40s and 50s, and the headscarf, or, when tied another way, the turban, was as part of the uniform as the overalls and dungarees.
It’s with these visions in mind that me and the headscarf never quite clicked. I tried it knotted right on the neck, perched prettily on the point of the chin, or, quelle chic, fastened at the back with the bow barely visible, swashbuckling-style, and there was always the danger of somebody asking me if I’d got ear-ache, or was I merely disguising a pile of pin-curls. I guess I just had the wrong sort of face. It helped if you were pretty, pert and elfin.
Come Friday night being Amami night, my sisters wore theirs in bed. They wouldn’t be seen dead is something as frumpy as a hairnet to keep their rollers in position, but a chiffon scarf, styled a la Hilda Ogden, was, to them, acceptable. And this curling-and-covering ritual carried on night after night, until the next hair-washing and setting session – though, unlike the loveable Coro character, they drew up short of actually going out in this get-up.
My own collection must have come from the days when these fancy squares slipped from the head, to make a fashion statement sitting casually on the shoulders. I spent my trendiest years sporting the finest silks, satins, Paisleys, and okay, the odd rayon number, nestling nicely on the cleavage – before cleavages became compulsory – knotted, nattily, to one side, or, John Wayne style, tied at the back, with the point down the front. How rakish was that.
At the start of my dotage, age around fifty, I embraced the shawl, which covers a multitude of bingo wings, Rugby prop-forward shoulders, wrinkled neck, sagging chest, kept the frozen shoulders and rheumatics at bay, and is easier to cart around than a cardi. Okay, I may have moved on to the odd Pashmina, especially those you can pick up, three for ten Euros, on Spanish markets, garish colour compulsory, but the shawls won’t be following those scarves to the charity shop because one of these days, just like headscarves, Vogue will no doubt herald them as the latest fashion accessory. And for once, I’ll be ahead.
Actually, if push came to shove, I’d rather sport a headscarf than a baseball cap. But at my age, it could just be that a Benny bobble beckons.
end
Scarflo…1
They say that if you hang on to it long enough, it will come back into fashion. So it’s sod’s law that, within a couple of years of divesting my drawers of my stash of headscarves, some of which dated back to my teens, the fashion afficianados are threatening a revival.
I say "threatening" because, let’s face it, the only folk who could wear this horrible head-gear with any semblance of style or panache were the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Jackie Onassis, who teamed hers with over-sized sun glasses and became an iconic trend-setter.
The rest of us resembled our grannies on a bad hair day. Indeed, every day must have been a bad hair day for my own gran, because my overwhelming image of the lady we called Little Nell was of her, hail, rain or shine, scurrying off to feed her hens, housed half-way up the highest hill in Two Dales, her woollen head-square firmly knotted under her chin.
She wasn’t the only person in my childhood to adopt this accessory. Come to think of it, just about every female I knew wore one. But they were more out of practicality and necessity than any fashion statement. If they weren’t keeping out the cold, they were keeping the curlers in place. Stand outside the gates of any factory in the 40s and 50s, and the headscarf, or, when tied another way, the turban, was as part of the uniform as the overalls and dungarees.
It’s with these visions in mind that me and the headscarf never quite clicked. I tried it knotted right on the neck, perched prettily on the point of the chin, or, quelle chic, fastened at the back with the bow barely visible, swashbuckling-style, and there was always the danger of somebody asking me if I’d got ear-ache, or was I merely disguising a pile of pin-curls. I guess I just had the wrong sort of face. It helped if you were pretty, pert and elfin.
Come Friday night being Amami night, my sisters wore theirs in bed. They wouldn’t be seen dead is something as frumpy as a hairnet to keep their rollers in position, but a chiffon scarf, styled a la Hilda Ogden, was, to them, acceptable. And this curling-and-covering ritual carried on night after night, until the next hair-washing and setting session – though, unlike the loveable Coro character, they drew up short of actually going out in this get-up.
My own collection must have come from the days when these fancy squares slipped from the head, to make a fashion statement sitting casually on the shoulders. I spent my trendiest years sporting the finest silks, satins, Paisleys, and okay, the odd rayon number, nestling nicely on the cleavage – before cleavages became compulsory – knotted, nattily, to one side, or, John Wayne style, tied at the back, with the point down the front. How rakish was that.
At the start of my dotage, age around fifty, I embraced the shawl, which covers a multitude of bingo wings, Rugby prop-forward shoulders, wrinkled neck, sagging chest, kept the frozen shoulders and rheumatics at bay, and is easier to cart around than a cardi. Okay, I may have moved on to the odd Pashmina, especially those you can pick up, three for ten Euros, on Spanish markets, garish colour compulsory, but the shawls won’t be following those scarves to the charity shop because one of these days, just like headscarves, Vogue will no doubt herald them as the latest fashion accessory. And for once, I’ll be ahead.
Actually, if push came to shove, I’d rather sport a headscarf than a baseball cap. But at my age, it could just be that a Benny bobble beckons.
end
Tuesday 1 July 2008
Teabags
Lucy’s column for July 1
Tealo…1
The first time my (now) 47-year-old son, Simon, clapped eyes on a packet of tea-bags was forty years ago, at my parents’ home. In a rare "helping grandma put the shopping away" moment, she found him in the kitchen, studiously emptying each and every tea-bag into the caddy.
It was then my mum realised that the contents of these new-fangled and revolutionary little sachets bore little resemblance to actual tea leaves, dismissed them as the "sweepings-up" – and never, to my knowledge, bought another, reverting to that old-fashioned method of leaf tea and strainers.
It was only about twenty years ago that I, too, clogged up the sink for the last time with the soggy remnants of the pot, and a friend in Mallorca always puts at the top of his regular shopping list to this visitor, along with extra-mature Cheddar and Bramley apples, as many packets of proper, strong tea as I can carry.
But who can blame him. The Mediterraneans and the Continentals may have cornered the market on their coffee-making skills. But they can’t conjure up a decent cuppa. Which is hardly surprising, since their funny little bags, attached to the tea-pot with a piece of twine which gets wound round the stirring spoon, contains only 2.5 grams of tea, where our British brew holds 3.125 grams.
It’s hard to grasp that this month, the tea-bag reaches its centenary, and although we tend to think of the cup that soothes being quintessentially English, the bag was invented by an American – though quite by accident. According to some stirring statistics sent out by Tetley’s to celebrate this birthday, New York tea merchant Thomas Sullivan, in an attempt to cut costs, sent samples of tea leaves to potential customers in small, silk purses. Confused by this marketing ploy, the recipients dunked them into hot water. And the rest, as they say, is history.
But as far as our tea-mashing history goes, the bag is only just over 50 years old, and it took Tetley’s several years to perfect the perfect bag, which now comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, and has, on average, 2,000 little perforations.
But even though its intention is to make life easier for us all, old habits die hard. And at Orgill Towers, the tea-making ritual carries on, because I don’t go along with the dunking-in-a-mug method. Oh no. The tea-pot rules. It’s warmed. The bags are popped in, and it’s at least 30 seconds before pot goes to boiling kettle for the mashing ceremony. The contents are then stirred, and it’s another minute or so before it’s poured, with milk in first.
Himself has been known to make himself a sneaky mash in a mug. The vile, brown stains on the best china (can’t stand pot!) tell the tale. But even if it’s only one cup of Rosie-lea for myself, I make it in what is known as the Brown Betty – a little, fat, earthenware pot which holds one cup – and everybody thinks I’m a little bit barmy.
Not so grandson Jacob. Ever since he’s been trusted to make the family cuppa – four mugs, four tea-bags, no sign of a pot – he’s hung his nose over Betty, and for years pestered me to leave it to him in the will. I went one better. Instead of a chocolate egg last Easter, I bought him his own tiny tea-pot. He now brews with impunity, following granny’s method to the letter. If I’ve taught him one thing, it’s how to make the char that cheers. Incidentally, he becomes a teenager today. He has a lifetime of tea-making ahead of him. I’ll drink to that.
end
Tealo…1
The first time my (now) 47-year-old son, Simon, clapped eyes on a packet of tea-bags was forty years ago, at my parents’ home. In a rare "helping grandma put the shopping away" moment, she found him in the kitchen, studiously emptying each and every tea-bag into the caddy.
It was then my mum realised that the contents of these new-fangled and revolutionary little sachets bore little resemblance to actual tea leaves, dismissed them as the "sweepings-up" – and never, to my knowledge, bought another, reverting to that old-fashioned method of leaf tea and strainers.
It was only about twenty years ago that I, too, clogged up the sink for the last time with the soggy remnants of the pot, and a friend in Mallorca always puts at the top of his regular shopping list to this visitor, along with extra-mature Cheddar and Bramley apples, as many packets of proper, strong tea as I can carry.
But who can blame him. The Mediterraneans and the Continentals may have cornered the market on their coffee-making skills. But they can’t conjure up a decent cuppa. Which is hardly surprising, since their funny little bags, attached to the tea-pot with a piece of twine which gets wound round the stirring spoon, contains only 2.5 grams of tea, where our British brew holds 3.125 grams.
It’s hard to grasp that this month, the tea-bag reaches its centenary, and although we tend to think of the cup that soothes being quintessentially English, the bag was invented by an American – though quite by accident. According to some stirring statistics sent out by Tetley’s to celebrate this birthday, New York tea merchant Thomas Sullivan, in an attempt to cut costs, sent samples of tea leaves to potential customers in small, silk purses. Confused by this marketing ploy, the recipients dunked them into hot water. And the rest, as they say, is history.
But as far as our tea-mashing history goes, the bag is only just over 50 years old, and it took Tetley’s several years to perfect the perfect bag, which now comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, and has, on average, 2,000 little perforations.
But even though its intention is to make life easier for us all, old habits die hard. And at Orgill Towers, the tea-making ritual carries on, because I don’t go along with the dunking-in-a-mug method. Oh no. The tea-pot rules. It’s warmed. The bags are popped in, and it’s at least 30 seconds before pot goes to boiling kettle for the mashing ceremony. The contents are then stirred, and it’s another minute or so before it’s poured, with milk in first.
Himself has been known to make himself a sneaky mash in a mug. The vile, brown stains on the best china (can’t stand pot!) tell the tale. But even if it’s only one cup of Rosie-lea for myself, I make it in what is known as the Brown Betty – a little, fat, earthenware pot which holds one cup – and everybody thinks I’m a little bit barmy.
Not so grandson Jacob. Ever since he’s been trusted to make the family cuppa – four mugs, four tea-bags, no sign of a pot – he’s hung his nose over Betty, and for years pestered me to leave it to him in the will. I went one better. Instead of a chocolate egg last Easter, I bought him his own tiny tea-pot. He now brews with impunity, following granny’s method to the letter. If I’ve taught him one thing, it’s how to make the char that cheers. Incidentally, he becomes a teenager today. He has a lifetime of tea-making ahead of him. I’ll drink to that.
end
Holidays
Lucy’s column for June 24
Mosklo…1
The first time he set foot on an aeroplane was on our honeymoon trip to Jersey, on what was affectionately called a vomit comet. It appeared to hedge-hop all the way there and back on a couple of wings, a prayer, and a propeller.
Yes, it was that long ago, that short-lived golden era when, still trying to impress, he forfeited his phobia and fear of flying to whisk his loved one to a paradise isle when he’d have been far happier tootling along to Tenby and pitching a tent.
As it turned out, Tenby in a tent would have been the romantic option, because he spent the entire week away whittling about the return journey – nudge-nudge, wink-wink – that anything remotely connected with honeymoon, June, silvery moon, turned into his neurotic nightmare.
It was years later before his feet left terra firma for the second time. This was a Derby Telegraph trip to Moscow. I was going, anyway, on a freebie, to report on events. He, always fascinated by Russian history, was just a tintsy bit envious. So, saint that I am, I bought him a ticket as a birthday gift, wrapped him up in a camel-hair coat, because this was March, and Siberia sprang to mind, and led him, kicking screaming, aboard a jumbo jet.
Together with friends in our party, and believing the horror stories of rationing and shortages which emanated from that Spartan land at that time, we wrapped our winter woollies around fruit cakes, Mars Bars, great lumps of Cheddar, crisps and biscuits so fearful were we that we wouldn’t survive. And we packed, as bartering fodder, bars of soap, cigarettes, chewing gum, and the ubiquitous tights which, we understood, the Russian women would give their right leg for.
We weren’t far short of the mark on the frugal food front. Two meals spring to mind. One was something fishy, as grey and mucky-looking as the River Moskva, which the anglers among us put down as perch. The other was a bowl of equally grim-looking liquid with a boiled egg floating in it. And yes, the bread was as black as was rumoured, vegetables non-existent, and the wine only slightly less dodgy than the dinner-table water.
The female concierges on each floor of the vast Rossia Hotel were built like brick out-houses, and made Sylvester Stallone look effeminate. We couldn’t even soft-soap them with a tablet of Imperial Leather, and it took almost our entire stock of chewy and cheese to get ours down the corridor to sort out the sewage leaking into the bathroom. But it wasn’t all bad.
Waking up to the vista of snow atop the minarets in Red Square was a sight to behold. So, too, the treasures of the churches and the Kremlin, the two-hour countryside drive to a summer palace, the joy of the Bolshoi, the Saturday brides in Red Square, the intricacies of the changing of the guard at Lenin’s tomb.
We now learn that the streets of Moscow are paved with gold. They have overtaken Bond Street, and are only slightly behind Fifth Avenue and the Champs Elysees, as third most expensive shopping streets in the world.
Does this mean the famous Gum – dubbed Glum, such was its lack of customer appeal – has had a makeover? On our visit, we found a window full of Dansette-style record players, a rail of what our grannies would have called "good washing frocks", a few bolts of Crimplene curtaining – and little else. But it all added to the atmosphere and style of the famous Square. The thought of Russia’s new, rich tsars gobbling up the designer gear and sparkly stuff makes me glad we went when we did.
end
Mosklo…1
The first time he set foot on an aeroplane was on our honeymoon trip to Jersey, on what was affectionately called a vomit comet. It appeared to hedge-hop all the way there and back on a couple of wings, a prayer, and a propeller.
Yes, it was that long ago, that short-lived golden era when, still trying to impress, he forfeited his phobia and fear of flying to whisk his loved one to a paradise isle when he’d have been far happier tootling along to Tenby and pitching a tent.
As it turned out, Tenby in a tent would have been the romantic option, because he spent the entire week away whittling about the return journey – nudge-nudge, wink-wink – that anything remotely connected with honeymoon, June, silvery moon, turned into his neurotic nightmare.
It was years later before his feet left terra firma for the second time. This was a Derby Telegraph trip to Moscow. I was going, anyway, on a freebie, to report on events. He, always fascinated by Russian history, was just a tintsy bit envious. So, saint that I am, I bought him a ticket as a birthday gift, wrapped him up in a camel-hair coat, because this was March, and Siberia sprang to mind, and led him, kicking screaming, aboard a jumbo jet.
Together with friends in our party, and believing the horror stories of rationing and shortages which emanated from that Spartan land at that time, we wrapped our winter woollies around fruit cakes, Mars Bars, great lumps of Cheddar, crisps and biscuits so fearful were we that we wouldn’t survive. And we packed, as bartering fodder, bars of soap, cigarettes, chewing gum, and the ubiquitous tights which, we understood, the Russian women would give their right leg for.
We weren’t far short of the mark on the frugal food front. Two meals spring to mind. One was something fishy, as grey and mucky-looking as the River Moskva, which the anglers among us put down as perch. The other was a bowl of equally grim-looking liquid with a boiled egg floating in it. And yes, the bread was as black as was rumoured, vegetables non-existent, and the wine only slightly less dodgy than the dinner-table water.
The female concierges on each floor of the vast Rossia Hotel were built like brick out-houses, and made Sylvester Stallone look effeminate. We couldn’t even soft-soap them with a tablet of Imperial Leather, and it took almost our entire stock of chewy and cheese to get ours down the corridor to sort out the sewage leaking into the bathroom. But it wasn’t all bad.
Waking up to the vista of snow atop the minarets in Red Square was a sight to behold. So, too, the treasures of the churches and the Kremlin, the two-hour countryside drive to a summer palace, the joy of the Bolshoi, the Saturday brides in Red Square, the intricacies of the changing of the guard at Lenin’s tomb.
We now learn that the streets of Moscow are paved with gold. They have overtaken Bond Street, and are only slightly behind Fifth Avenue and the Champs Elysees, as third most expensive shopping streets in the world.
Does this mean the famous Gum – dubbed Glum, such was its lack of customer appeal – has had a makeover? On our visit, we found a window full of Dansette-style record players, a rail of what our grannies would have called "good washing frocks", a few bolts of Crimplene curtaining – and little else. But it all added to the atmosphere and style of the famous Square. The thought of Russia’s new, rich tsars gobbling up the designer gear and sparkly stuff makes me glad we went when we did.
end
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