Home is where ....

Lucy’s column for November 25
Homelo..1
They say that home is where the heart is. Or, it has been said, the hearth. And in my very early days, that usually meant a black-leaded grate, with a side oven which permanently housed a simmering stew pot, and a shelf-like contraption on a bracket which swung back and forth over the fire on which sat a blackened, but non-stop bubbling, kettle.
After years of fiddling with flues, dampers, spitting kettles and boiled-dry casseroles, how my mother glowed with pride, and sighed with relief, when the great lump of heavy metal, which took her most of Friday to clean within an inch of its life, was yanked out, and replaced with thoroughly modern tiled fireplace. She still had to deal with the ashes, the coal bucket, paper sticks, kindling, and the twice-yearly mess known as the visit of the chimney sweep. So that, on the eventual installation of a flick-of-a-switch gas fire, she must have thought all her birthdays had come at once.
Fast forward a generation or two, and what have we got in its place? In our case, central heating, with a pretend coal-fuelled stove in one room, which glows like the real thing if we can be bothered to plug it in, and in another, a rather smart dog grate, complete with real logs, but with a red-glow bulb where the flickering flames should be. It could have been different. We could have opted for pebbles and posh candles.
But there are house-hunters who still crave those old-fashioned forms of heating the house – though they insist on the back-up of radiators, just to be on the safe, snug and warm side. I’ve watched them swoon at the sight of an ancient range, sigh over an ingle-nook, go potty at the idea of a belching pot-bellied stove. And how do I know? Well, I’m a closet day-time telly-viewer who occasionally catches a glimpse of these "to buy or not to buy a house in the country/in the sun" shows which crop up with alarming regularity.
Fireplaces apart, the wish-list of some of these home-seekers never ceases to amaze.
It’s hard not to hark back to dolly-tubs and wooden mangles in the back yard when they’re presented with fully-fitted, shiny utility rooms bigger and better than the average kitchen, and the tin bath hanging on the kitchen door when they’re viewing family bathrooms, wet rooms, shower rooms, and the ubiquitous en-suites, sometimes all in the same building. Other home-comfort must-haves appear to be a study, children’s room, summer room, TV room, snug, loft living space, and a kitchen vast enough to incorporate a banquet-size table, three-piece, family games computer, and 52-inch flat screen TV just in case there isn’t somewhere to house the home cinema.
In one recent airing, the would-be purchaser also demanded a room for the dogs. It’s not that long since it was the norm for kids to not only share a bedroom, but sleep three or four to a bed. The dog often had its own space, admittedly. It was known as a kennel.
I’ve not even touched on the basement, with its rumpus and games rooms, wine cellar, or the triple garage with electronic up-and-over doors. In the majority of the programmes, these are families with fewer than 2.4 children, and often couples looking to "downsize". Is it all a bid to keep up with the Jones’s? Or simply, like me, a deep-seated phobia of coal buckets and fire-lighters?

Ginlo..1
I’ll raise a glass to my favourite tipple, the gin and tonic, which last week celebrated 150 years as the world’s first cocktail. It’s long been a nightly treat as I cook the dinner. And I assuage any guilt by considering its juniper berries and lemon slice as two of those five-a-day fruit portions the health police are always banging on about.
end

Ross-Brand affair

Lucy’s column for November 18.
Celeblo…1
Assuming the dust has just about settled on the Brand-Ross affair – nothing to do with fish fingers – and the Beeb, can I stick my head above the parapet and give my two penn’orth?
To get it out of the way, until the recent furore, I’d barely heard of the chap Brand, except to gather he was a long-haired, sex-mad, would-be "comedian" with a penchant for puerile behaviour, and not a lot going on upstairs. As regards his oppo, the boy Ross, he was the one whose juvenile Saturday morning programme on Radio 2 – complete with a sycophantic Andy who was forced to titter uncontrollably at his boss’s pathetic attempts at humour – made us switch the off-button on our hitherto happy weekend wireless listening many years ago. To be fair, I shouldn’t really be commenting because I’ve rarely been privy to the pathetic pair. Except they belong right there. In the privy.
But I can. As a wartime baby, I was brought up on the wireless. This was in the days before TV reared its intrusive head. We listened to elections, Grand Nationals, Wimbledon, the news. And if we hadn’t been fortunate enough to have a neighbour with a telly, the Queen’s Coronation would have been heard, and not seen.
Our crackling, Bakelite affair was permanently tuned in to the Light Programme, as opposed to the Home Service, which was a bit more serious.
Friday night was Music Night, with Henry Hall and his Orchestra. There was a daily dose of Housewives’ Choice, which my mother and her four sisters wrote in to regularly with birthday requests, to no avail, though the thought of hearing their names over the airways kept them glued.
Who could forget Workers’ Playtime? - with the presenter visiting office and factory locations all over the country, and the euphoria of Down Your Way, with Franklin Engelman, actually coming to Matlock is embedded in my psyche because we knew most of the people interviewed. And no Sunday dinner and its lazy aftermath was complete without Two Way Family Favourites, the Billy Cotton Band Show, and Sing Something Simple.
It wasn’t just music which raised the wartime, post-war, and rationing spirits. The likes of Al Read, Charlie Chester, Tommy Handley, Richard Murdoch and Kenneth Horne kept the nation chuckling, and Round the Horn, with its clever innuendo courtesy of Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, may have been a tad risque, but was never the in-your-face vulgarity we hear today.
Compare Have a Go, with Wilfred Pickles, and Violet Carson, who went on to find fame as Coro’s Ena Sharples, at the piano, Twenty Questions, and Top of the Form, with the current offering of brash, garish quiz shows, and you had entertainment without the glitz and the greed.
Way before soap operas, and even The Archers, we had our everyday stories of family folk with Meet the Huggets and Life with the Lyons. Educating Archie made ventriloquist Peter Brough a household name – no, you couldn’t see his lips move – and stars of that cheeky little wooden puppet Archie Andrews’ sidekicks, Petula Clark and Max Bygraves.
This is not to dismiss totally BBC radio’s present-day offerings, though I can’t speak for Radio One because I’ve never actually sought it on my dial. But early morning "Bunty" – Sarah Kennedy, who can be a bit of a hoot, but never vile – Wogan and his TOGs, Ken Bruce, Jeremy Vine, Steve Wright, and Chris Evans, and the occasional dose of deep and meaningful discussion on Radio Four, are the characters and programmes which make for a favourite "Auntie".
Those who need their daily dose of vulgarity and bile should do what I had to when my mother whittered on at me for listening to Radio Luxembourg’s brain-numbing, wall-to-wall music: get under the bedclothes, with a fading battery and a dodgy station.
end

Blast from the past

Lucy’s column for November 11th.
Pastlo…1
A blast from my past flew through cyber-space all the way from 6514 Joy Road, Dexter, Michigan, a couple of weeks ago. And if anybody from the Canal Street/Carrington Street area of Derby, circa late 50s, early 60s, remembers the corner off-licence there, run by Ray and Betty Greatorex, then their son Clive wants to hear from them.
I recall the couple who kept what was known as "the 10 o’clock shop" – presumably because it stayed open until 10 pm – and their children, though, 50 years on, I wouldn’t have known their names. But Clive reminisces about his parents rushing over to the Barley Corn Inn, Canal Street, which my parents kept for a while, for the last half-hour’s drinking. And it was there that I, apparently, gave him some Elvis 78s, which he still has, hanging on the basement of his home, in what looks from the photograph to be a shrine to the King.
With his missive came a few more photos, including one of his mum – now 85 – and me, at a dance. I’d have been about 20 at the time, and we were both dolled up to the nines, yours truly, in what must have been a Grace Kelly moment, sporting a strapless gown, what looks like my granny’s "good" pearls, hair done up in a chignon, and with not just a waist, but one measuring little more than 20 inches. That’s near enough my dress size today!
Another photograph is of customers presenting Betty and Ray with a clock, when they retired from the shop. I don’t recognise anybody, but these are some of the people Clive wants to track down because he’s writing an account of his life for his grandchildren – grandchildren? He’s nowt but a lad.
I’m still waiting to hear where his mother lives, and how he arrived on Joy Road, Dexter, but from images on Google Earth, Clive has done very well for himself because his house looks like Southfork.
Incidentally, he and his wife supported Barak Obama, Michigan being an Obama State, and this isn’t his first venture into the hallowed columns of the Derby Telegraph. A few years ago he wrote an article for Bygones on the group he played in during the 60s, as a lead up to the Big Beat Bash in 2002, at the old Locarno, which resulted in "hooking up" with a few old friends. He can be e-mailed on clive_gtx@yahoo.com
I’m not too sure these recollections of our youth do much for our today’s image.
Twice every year, I meet up with my friend Pauline Worthy, nee Cowley, formerly of Darley House Estate, which was a bit posh, and with whom I shared my primary school days, and teenage and early motherhood years. We had such a day just the other week. Pauline, still as bright, bubbly, and talkative as ever, is a constant reminder of my School Certificate failures – she went on to teacher training college, and by the age of 22, was teaching English and maths at a Matlock secondary school. She gave up teaching to go into a heady and Very High Powered career with the Civil Service. And during all this, she and husband Alan produced four strapping sons – two more than me.
She turns up in blue mascara, the latest must-have fashion, perfectly coiffed hair, and is totally wrinkle-free. She regularly reminds me of when I was the flirty, flighty, blonde bombshell of what was known as the Matlock monkey-run, which took us across the town’s stone bridge, along Dale Road to the wooden foot-bridge, and back along the Hall Leys park, all the while pretending not to be on the look-out for lads!
Memories are made of this. Perhaps readers could help Clive Greatorex with his.
end

Sex education

Sexlo contd…2
It has to be said that this bit of role play was more to do with bandages and broken legs than giving birth, because in our tender years, babies came in a doctor’s little black bag, or from under a gooseberry bush, so I probably believed I was born on the local allotments because all we had in our garden was a few sticks of rhubarb. But we kept our eye on that doctor’s visits, and lo and behold, the sighting of the local GP with his Gladstone often resulted in Mrs So-and-So emerging a week or two later with a swaddled infant.
I really don’t recall any serious sex education, either from school or from my mother, and it was probably at secondary school where I learned the life-cycle of a frog, and the prolific mating habits of rabbits, which all ended up in a bit of a giggle-fest. But I was fortunate enough to spend the first few years of that secondary education at boarding school, so what I learned from after-lights-out girly talk, plus the bodily-changes of my peers, was enough to set me on the straight and narrow as a teenager. My mum, bless her call-a-spade-a shovel character, must have fought shy of the whole shebang.
Apart from regularly uttering the mantra : "Like time and tide, wait for no man" - which has stood me in good stead all my life! – her one acknowledgement of my coming-of-puberty was two bras, two pairs of stockings, two suspender belts, and a pack of you-know-what, languishing on my bed one half-term.
I’m not suggesting that my experience was proper and correct. But I’m convinced that a childhood free of all the trials and tribulations of womanhood when you’re nowt but a nipper is the innocence today’s children deserve. And guess what? None of we ignoramuses became teenage mothers.
end

Sex Education

Lucy’s column for November 4th
Sexlo…1
Now, what was I doing when at infants and primary school? I certainly had the three Rs drilled into me, by a lovely team of teachers who I thought were ancient, but with some perhaps only in their 30s, but delivered with such intensity and interest that by the time I left Class One, I could read, and ‘rite, though ‘rithmatic baffled me then. And continues so to do.
It was a school play-time of hopscotch, skipping games, hand-stands, and leap-frog, all the while willing the lads to loan you a conker or a bull’s eye marble to show your prowess on the macho front. Before sulking on the back row of the form’s afternoon music sessions with the miserable triangle when you craved the front row with the tambourine – the boys always got the drums – or dreaming of the day you were asked to read out YOUR poem, or landing the part of the Virgin Mary in the school’s nativity instead of a one-liner angel with dodgy wings and chunky legs.
What I’m getting round to saying is that there were far more things to worry about as a school-kid than sex-n-drugs-rock-n-roll. This comes in the light of the latest edict from our nincompoop nanny state, which proclaims sex sessions for tiny tots as young as five. It’s something I cannot get to grips with.
When we weren’t belting around the playground, playing hide and seek or tick-a-nit, the majority of my female compatriots were at home with whips and tops, a dressing-up box, in the back yard under the clothes horse covered with a sheet with a tea-set and soggy sandwiches our claim to housewifery fame. We had dolls and prams – my friend, animal lover Lil Bancroft, didn’t have dolls and made do with the family cat, done up in a bonnet, lolling in the pram, until one legged it in the Arboretum, but that’s another story - before moving on to Doctors and Nurses.

Enjoying bad health

Lucy’s column for October 21st
Doclo..1
Years ago, my mother once said of a neighbour who was a permanent fixture in the local doctor’s surgery queue : "She enjoys bad health…".In other words, she was a hypochondriac. This was the section of society which my old mum treated with total contempt, since she was one of those stoics who, in the 46 years I knew her, never went into hospital, and succumbed in her latter years only to an under-active thyroid which meant taking a tablet a day – which she loathed and detested doing, treating it as a weakness, rather than a life-saver.
Indeed, on the day she died, in her 81st year, she woke up feeling "a bit iffy", went downstairs and rang the doctor, went back to bed to await his arrival, and shuffled off her mortal coil as calmly and uncomplainingly as she had lived her life, just a couple of hours later.
So this "can’t bother that busy doctor – mustn’t be a drain on the NHS", attitude must have rubbed off on me, because I really have to gird my loins before I pick up a phone and ask for appointments. I don’t suffer from what’s known as the white coat syndrome so far as I know. I like to think I have a fairly good relationship with the young man who’s been monitoring my fairly hum-drum and boringly normal blood pressure for the past 20 years. I tend to limit my visits to perhaps two a year. But when I go, I certainly go, with a list, and the question : "Shall we start with my head, and work downwards, or the other way around?"
That doesn’t mean to say I’m a paragon of virtuous good health. In fact, most days I feel like rubbish, and my one gleeful thought of the day is actually waking up – alive and kicking. So far, I’ve been in hospital for the birth of one of my two babies – I had the second at home – wisdom teeth extraction, varicose veins – which came back with a vengeance just a few years later, and are still there – and the dreaded breast cancer lumpectomy. I can’t really count the cataracts. It only took about 20 minutes and I didn’t even have to take so much as my shoes off.
But despite my reluctance to cave in to what is known in medical circles as "the fat file" – the aforementioned hypochondria – I’m in the hospital appointments, and repeat prescriptions, loop. I have a yearly blood-letting date. And an annual mammogram at the Breast Clinic. And yes, the Statins are washed down with the nightly cocoa. I’m a martyr to a hideous corn, and a "bad back". As I write, the latter has been stopped in its tracks with some over-the-counter pain killers, and a heat-emitting ugly truss thing-y, which himself found on Google, which was lying beside me, stuck to the sheets, along with a corn plaster, next morning.
Talking of feet – oh, those 50s stilettoes have a lot to answer for – he, and Google, have come up with a cheese-grater contraption heralded as The Ultimate Foot File, so gentle it won’t burst a balloon, which claims to remove callouses and dry skin, neither of which I suffer from. I’m not sure what my chiropodist June Allen will make of it. It may trap the shavings in a little egg. But nothing calms a corn like June.
Currently, I’m awaiting the results of recent visits to the jolly vampires at the DRI, and the wonderful girls at the Derby City General Breast Unit. Fingers crossed. Back aching. Corn throbbing. I hope I don’t sound smug. I so want to be like my mum.
end

No diamonds

Lucy’s column for October 7.
Drivelo…1
That promised diamond ring becomes more Zirconian by the minute, the cruise ship has drifted away to just a dot on some exotic horizon.
In their place is a leak-free new roof on the kitchen extension, and a re-vamp of this office-cum-laundry-room-cum-pantry, which now boasts a lick of paint, a potted plant, and pictures of Elvis including a collage of leaves somebody nicked on a visit to Graceland. And since Ower Annie drifted off to the pilchard palace in the sky a few weeks ago, we no longer have to share it with a litter tray and a dish of wilting Whiskas.
Give or take a set of must-have tyres on his ridiculously expensive-to-run boy toy, and some fancy new doors on the ancient garage, the sponduliks have been gushing out of our account faster than the rain poured in through our aforementioned roof.
But new tyres? Posh garage doors? Makes the drive look a tad shabby, he reckoned. Which resulted in a visit from our mate Gary Wilkins and his team from DPL Paving Ltd, which stands for drives, patios and landscapes, but which joker Guggy – for that is his nickname – suggests could be interpreted as dips, puddles and lakes.
It was nigh-on week of diggers and bumpers, hard-core and steam-rollers, endless bacon butties, more tea than a NAAFI canteen, and loads of good-natured banter, resulting in the shiniest, smoothest, car-parking space in Littleover.
When, a few months back, I suggested using some of that rainy-day money to enhance our fast-approaching dotage, the last thing I anticipated was using it on boring, sensible, joyless ventures. I had frivolity in mind. Then along comes the credit crunch, and of course, by now, the diamond is reduced to glass, and the liner has sunk without trace.
But heck, I can now walk to this infernal computer without falling headlong into the clothes basket, straighten the nets, peer in the pantry pull-outs and actually see a tin of spaghetti hoops rather than run the risk of being knocked senseless by one. There’s the added advantage of a paddle-free kitchen without strategically-placed buckets and floating mats – not to mention wet, whingeing cats - and those garage doors could well be the golden gates to paradise, such is their sparkle and allure.
But it’s that vast expanse of shiny Tarmac and prettily paved edges which has done it for me. Guggy has incorporated into the "design" a state-of-the-art wheelie-bin park, and a cosy corner with room for a patio table and chairs from which to watch the washing dry. Oh, the bliss of a back yard, to be able to peg out with impunity instead of side-stepping dodgy concrete and craters.
And who needs a flash solitaire when he’s treated me to a new clothes line?
Catlo…1
Ower Annie’s passing – her demise was well documented in this column a couple of weeks ago - didn’t go without tribute from other cat-lovers. Hot on the e-mail came a note from fellow feline fancier and columnist Anton Rippon, whose own two beauties are the family’s pride and joy, and who wrote with sincerity, and a tear in his eye.
This was followed by a call from, again, Derby Telegraph columnist, former sports editor, and cat man, too, Gerald Mortimer, who was moved enough to pick up the phone and express his condolences. And we also received a couple of thinking-of-you cards – one from my old mate Michael Nazaruk of Mickleover, the other from Doreen Hatton of Allestree, who I’ve not seen for years, but remember as a tireless worker for animal charities. Thank you all for your thoughts. But no, and thrice nay, no more cats at Orgill Towers. No, not even the prettiest, fluffiest kitten in the world.