A face in the distance

Michael McIntyre seems to be about a quarter of a mile a way. Just a dot in a red shirt skipping up and downstage. From our seats we could see that he does have a face. We just couldn’t see couldn’t see any facial expressions. Fortunately, the NIA in Birmingham (see image below) had erected huge screens. So, for our £35, we swivelled around in our uncomfortable seats so that we were facing the stage, and watched Michael McIntyre perform his routine. On a great big telly.

But enough complaining…he is a funny man, who appears to have popped up from nowhere but who in fact was roundly ignored by the critics for years before releasing Britain’s fastest selling ever comedy DVD in 2008. But for comedians the curse of TV fame is regular primetime exposure. TV devours material that will last on the non-televised circuit for years.

So for McIntyre, this will was the first time he has had to deliver an entire set of brand new material. And it works. His comedy is middle England, middle class, middlebrow. It’s not angry and it’s not confrontational. He skips and bounces around using the whole stage, using his self-acclaimed campness to its full theatrical advantage. His routines centre on the day-to-day frustrations and embarrassments of life. He sums up the discomfiture of everyone (except dreadful wine snobs) when the wine waiter asks us to taste the wine – he argues that he expects the wine to be fine, and really would expect the restaurant to operate on that presumption too. They wouldn’t, he reasons, ask you to sniff the milk before they put it in your coffee.

He tells stories about his wife, his children, his new house (the first one he’s owned after years in the wilderness) that are affectionate but still sharp and bright and without a trace of sentimentality.

This all combines to make him a very easy to laugh along with comedian. You don’t feel you’ve let yourself down for laughing at his jokes as you sometimes do with Jimmy Carr, or feel that you’ve joined a pub-drunk rant as you do with, say, Frankie Boyle.

He is the comedian for the reasonable person. If Waitrose had a corporate comedian, it would be McIntyre.

(Michael McIntyre’s national arena tour continues until 2nd December 2009 at various venues)

Goin' back to my roots....

I knew researching my family history wouldn’t be straightforward, and made more difficult in my case by the fact that my parents had both died some years ago. As well as this, my parents and grandparents were Irish, so I knew I had a challenge ahead of me.

My grandmother (far right) as a bridesmaid

But I had faith in the powers of the internet. Type “family history” into Google and you get 237m results. I felt if I searched and googled enough I would piece it all together. Ancestry is big business. The UK Public Records Office is gradually putting more and more resources on line. Surely, I reasoned, Ireland is no different? I was confident I could do it all from the comfort of my own laptop.

What I hadn’t reckoned on was the Irish civil war. In 1922 a landmine blew up the Four Courts building along with all of the public records that were stored there, some of which went back to the 13th century.

This affects more people than you may think. 10% of the British population has one Irish grandparent and approximately a quarter have some Irish ancestry they're aware of. There are also 44 million Americans who claim Irish ancestry. You only have to type “trace Irish ancestors” into a search engine to see that the lack of Irish records drives them nuts.

But it also presents a business opportunity for thousands of on-line ancestry sites who claim to have millions of records – at a price.

In general, I distrust internet sites that ask for money and, I particularly distrust American sites that ask for money. So I didn’t cough up.

I kept plugging away using Google, and Google.ie. Typing in names, places, dates that I knew for sure.

My father was born in Co. Leitrim but lived in Co.Roscommon. While entering those details into a search engine and I came across the the Leitrim-Roscommon Database

This is a free database set up in 1996 by two family researchers, Ed Finn and Laurie McDonagh who came across each other by chance in an online geneaology forum. It holds surname databases, maps, parish indexes, but most importantly, the volunteers have transcribed thousands of returns from the 1901 census. These were the initial returns taken locally and not stored in Dublin. The 1901 census file now has almost 300,000 individuals for seven different counties Galway, Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon, Sligo, Wexford and Westmeath and they continue to add more and more.

I quickly found my grandfather who would have been 17 in 1901. And so now I had the names of my great-grandparents (Nicholas and Mary-Anne) and their ages in 1901.

-The Irish population fell from 8m to
 4.4m between 1841 and 1901

- 70million people worldwide claim Irish ancestry

- The population of Ireland today is 4m

Great-grandfather's house in 1967

To go back further, I needed their marriage details. I guessed from the ages of their children, that my great-grandparents would have married about 20 years before the 1901 census.

I searched Leitrim County Library’s geneaology site -Leitrim Roots, for couples with those names marrying around 1880. I found a few that might have been them.

There is a charge of 5euros per record. I probably looked at four or five before hitting the jackpot, an 1877 record of the marriage between Nicholas Flynn and Mary Anne McGovern. Now I had their fathers’ names and occupations. So I had traced the Flynn line back to about 1815. Not bad going from my armchair.

I got in touch with the only Irish cousin I knew to tell her all I’d found. Her branch of the family was in still in touch with my father’s relatives. One email led to another, and a family get together in Leitrim was arranged.

I met my father’s first cousin. She lives in the house that was built by her grandfather (my great-grandfather) Nicholas. I recognised the house from old photographs but hadn’t known its significance. Across the road from the house is the school (now a community centre) that Nicholas and Mary Anne founded. On the wall the dining room there were photographs of Nicholas and Mary Anne amongst a host of other ancestors. There was absolutely nothing my research could tell her.

Great-grandfather's house in 2008

So the search that had taken me months could have been reduced to a couple of phonecalls – if only I’d known who to call. But, I had been completely absorbed by my search, and as a result I have re-established contact with a branch of the family I barely knew.

Now, for my mother’s side …do you think there are many Kellys on that database?

You couldn't make it up

Jacob Rees-Mogg outed on Twitter today. 

Prospective Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg was parodied in 1997 for canvassing in Fife with his nanny.

 

He later told the Mail On Sunday: "If I've got a nanny, I've got a nanny. And if anybody doesn't like it - tough!"

(But the best was yet to come.....)

He then added: “I do wish you wouldn’t keep going on about my nanny. If I had a valet you’d think it was perfectly normal."

The Joy of Nigel

Oh bliss.

This Twitter site in the style of Nigel Molesworth, co-author (along with Geoffrey Willans) of the the St Custard's stories, is going to seriously exercise my creative writing skills.

If you didn't read "Back in the Jug Agane" or "How to be Topp!" or the others by the time you were twelve, then don't bother now. Yes, it's puerile (Nigel would say that sounds like weedy lat prep)and very very old fashioned. But, oh, how happy I am. I couldn't be happier if I found out that there's Bunty tweet group, with everyone speaking like the Four Marys or plucky orphans.

Never break the chain

The mental (as in thought process inside the brain, not insane) starting point for my homework interview was to be based around the imaginary headline: “Top MSc lecturer is also Reiki practioner”. Maybe I’d have added an exclamation mark in case you didn’t know that that was an surprising and unexpected juxtaposition. I thought I had my twist, my “hook”. And that was going to be it, really.

I’ve known my interviewee, Catherine, since our children were small. So I know, without having to interview her, that she has two teenage children and has been married to Richard for 25 years, having met him during their first week at Birmingham University. I know she trained as an accountant and went into management consultancy. I know that she now specialises in educating business graduates at Warwick University (though I had to ask her her title – Teaching Fellow). Her subject is supply chain management. She also began training as a Reiki practitioner a few years ago.

"Catherine” I said “ I need to do an interview with someone with an interesting hobby, and you’re the only person I know who’s got one. Do you mind if I interview you about your Reiki?”

I guess I had a strong preconception of the form the interview would take. “Businesswoman seeks alternative dimension to her life”. I’ve spoken to her a few times over the years about the Reiki training, but never about the whole supply chain management thing.

So before I began the interview, I googled a definition of her subject.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is the management of a portfolio of assets (human, equipment, components, etc.) and relationships (customers, suppliers, staff, etc.) to transform a customer’s product from raw material to finished product as efficiently as possible.

This interview was taking place in the foyer of a hotel. We were about to go in to a charity ball. Paying heed to my writing class, I began by checking my facts.

“First of all though, Cath, you’d better tell me exactly what supply chain management is ”.

I could entirely see how someone who had earned her professional spurs in the West Midlands of the 1980s and 1990s would have developed expertise in a seemingly dull topic. I needed to get this out of the way and onto the interesting stuff.


I offered my own summary: “It’s about procuring the right amount of sheet metal, skilled workers and components, putting them all together in Cowley or Longbridge (back in the day) and turning them into cars, right?” I put to her.

What she said, and more importantly, the passion and feeling with which she said it surprised me.

“Supply chain management” she said, champagne glass in hand, “is a philosophy.”

“It’s about a whole system pulling together with one goal, one end in sight. It’s the opposite of optimising self-gain.”


I was surprised.

“It is about interconnectivity, and inter-dependence. It’s a model for effective communities and relationships. Good supply chain management is like a finely tuned eco-system. At its best, it can be a beautiful thing”

“And the Reiki?” (pre interview reseach defined Reiki as a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing. It is administered by "laying on hands" and is based on the idea that an unseen "life force energy" flows through us and is what causes us to be alive. If one's "life force energy" is low, then we are more likely to get sick or feel stress, and if it is high, we are more capable of being happy and healthy)

“Reiki” she said, “in its purest form is a system to achieve personal perfection. It is a philosophy and a spiritual practice promoting physical and emotional healing to self and others.”

But the spark and the passion had gone. She enjoys being a Reiki practitioner and believes in its efficacy. But, for Catherine, it’s not a patch on supply change management.


Let’s change that headline….”Reiki Practitioner will change your life by application of principles of supply chain management”.

Now there’s a twist

Halfway there

So we are at the halfway mark on the writing course. What were my goals?

I think for me the main goal was to get writing, and it has certainly achieved that. I hoped being part of a group would stimulate and encourage me, and this has proved to be the case. There was/is also always the slightly self-conscious aim to develop a readership. But so far, with 6 followers on Twitter and 3 subscribers to the blog, I would say that aim has been less well achieved.

But what has been an unlooked for bonus of the course so far has been all of the links to information and material and forums (fora?) that, given enough hours in a day, will prove invaluable once I start to take this whole thing seriously and devote to it the time I need to.

I do two 2-hour writing classes a week, and with travelling time, that amounts to about 6 hours a week. Then the homework adds on another couple of hours. That's equivalent to a proper working day each week. So when this course is over, apart from hoping there might be a follow on course, I will no longer feel guilty because I am writing nor regard it as a waste of time. From now on I will devote a day or so a week to researching and scribbling and do so with a clear conscience.

So, more of the same please, tuesdaywritingclass.

Tweeting

I'm really not sure about Twitter. It's a bit like having access to what used to be called a party line. These were shared telephone connections in the days before each user had a their own dedicated line. If you picked up the phone and found your sharer was in conversation, you were supposed to discreetly replace the receiver. And not listen in to their conversation. But there is great pleasure to be had in eavesdropping, even when most of what you hear is pointless.

I see Twitter as an eavesdropping habit. I keep thinking I will unsubscribe but then I am afraid I will miss out on something. But the truth is, the distilled (and well written) versions of "trending" (ugh) topics appear in the papers every day. I can wait 24hours.

And sorry to sound like Outraged of Dorridge, but, really - a woman tweeting her own miscarriage, here. Well, it's time to slam down the receiver.

Royal Progress

Henry VIII: Man and Monarch is the summer exhibition at the British Museum.

The problem facing anyone seeking the man is the ubiquitous authorised magnificence of Henry. The approved, carefully symbolic state portraits. There seem to exist no affectionate sketches of him off duty.

So how was the BM going to show me the humanity behind the image?

Well, by bringing together for the first time a stunning collection of manuscript after exquisite manuscript. Many of these are annotated by Henry himself.

Included is his much-handled illuminated prayer roll illustrating Henry’s simple devout faith. Also, sketches for a very early PR exercise - The Field of the Cloth of Gold - show the detailed planning and no-expense spared mentality behind Henry’s well-documented desire to be taken seriously in Europe.

The BM persuaded the Vatican to release a fascinating letter, hand-written by Henry, setting out his intention to marry Anne Boleyn. Amazing artefacts, but nothing we didn’t know.

But then, in a little cabinet is a sample of his mother’s handwriting. Next to it is an example of Henry’s signature which we’ve seen again and again in other displays. The explanatory note states Henry wrote the letter ‘r’ as a ‘z’. This wasn’t typical of the day, and the only other person who seems to have done this is his mother, Elizabeth of York

And so here at last is the sense of a Henry we didn’t know and wouldn’t have suspected. Unlike most royal or aristocratic children, he was taught to read by, and so we can assume, brought up by, not a team of scheming uncles or advisors, but by his own mother. Henry the statesman, Henry the general, Henry the beheader of wives started life as a much-loved little boy at his mother's knee learning to write.

300 words

Yikes!

Argh! Just looking at the class website to follow the new blogs - note to self : must allocate some hours to read everything - click back to Tuesday Writing Class and it's changed in the 5 mins I've been away! I'm even further behind than I thought! At least if I haven't read Saturday's paper by Sunday I don't have to open Sunday's till I have. I've been at my desk for half an hour now, which is half of the time I have allocated to finishing off my 300 word informative piece, and I'm no nearer. Sorry about the exclamation marks - these are stressful times.

Enthusiasts required

I quote Sally...."Think of an interesting event. It might be a celebration, a visit to an art gallery, film, or a hobby show. Write it up in your blog ". And there's the rub. "An interesting event". I'm not one of life's enthusiasts, and enthusiasm makes me slightly uncomfortable. It's probably because I 'm a brummie that my natural way of looking at the world is with a bit of a tut. A hobby show? Have you lost your mind? They're like cat nip to enthusiasts - all trying out the latest developments in balsa wood or testing miniature lighting systems for their dollshouses. I don't mean to say that I don't love some things but I feel it is a bit pushy to be enthusiastic about them. Enthusiasm is only a short rant away from evangelicalism. And then there's the responsibility. It doesn't bother some people, they say, all fired up, "you MUST see this film/read this book/see this exhibition", and, gullible fool that I am, I believe them and off I go. Velazquez at the National a couple of years ago was very good. I really like REM and the Beatles. My favourite film is True Romance. Hmmm..300 words of sustained interest is going to be a struggle.

Scare Stories

I have been half-heartedly scanning news stories to put spin on them since Tuesday's flurry, and had even resorted to The Sun (well, 8 million readers can't be wrong. Or can they?) when I saw this headline: Baby's Miracle Train Escape .

Even seeing the word "Escape" and so knowing the baby survives, it still makes harrowing viewing. I often wonder who stands around filming tragedies with their mobile phone but I guess this comes from CCTV.

I've had to drag my daughter in to watch it, email the link to a few friends and generally waste a bit more time. So still no news spin. Perhaps The Sun was not the best place to look.

I didn't have a clue.

Imagine, the inventors of Cluedo and Buccaneer were next-door neighbours in Kings Heath in the 1940s. See this about the Cluedo Inventor

Spinning around

Further to richyork today. Here are my spin-offs from today's news (after failed attempt to spin anything off Al Martino's demise).

These two stories had a common thread:Man in 80s detained over attack

and Woman, 70, held over PM hate mail . Geriatric crime. My spin on this

would be what is life like behind bars for the elderly first offender? I imagine old old lags are used to the privations and indignities, but what is it like for the newbies? What facilities exist for them? Presumably they don't have massive drug habits, except maybe a hankering for Werthers Originals, and I imagine they are not pestered too much for sex. What helps them make it through the night (or the six to nine months with time off for good behaviour)?

And then there was this 'Healthy' yoghurt banned . The headline is misleading, because of course it's not Actimel that is banned but the advertising strap that says it's good at preventing illness in children. My spin for this would be other outlandish advertising claims. You could go with a serious piece about recent claims for well known modern products such as this this , or hark back to the days when smoking was just about the best thing you could do to remain young and beautiful here .

Hmmm, I quite like both of those. If only I hadn't spent so long with Al Martino and his long-lived contemporaries. Oh well, there's always tomorrow.

Old Crooners Never Die

I flicked through the headlines this morning to see what brilliant ideas they would send sparking around the old synapses. First up, Al Martino's death at the age of 82. Every newspaper mentioned that he was the artist who had the very first UK number one hit when he topped the fledgling NME pop chart in 1952. Here we go, I thought. Who else was in that first chart of 27 years ago, I googled. Well, no one actually. Al made number 1 in November 1952 and stayed there till after Christmas. Ok - let's not nitpick -1953 then. Well, the chartsters of '53 were a roll call from my Dad's record collection...Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell, Perry Como. And Eddie Fisher - wasn't he married to Liz Taylor and died tragically young? There was my angle...how stars of the fifties had burned out young and how amazing it was that Al Martino was the last to go. So a bit more research revealed that Guy Mitchell died 1999 aged 72, Perry Como died in 2001 aged 79 and Frankie Laine died in 2007 aged 94. These were not the hard living rockers I had hoped to find. Well there was still Eddie Fisher. More googling. More disappointment. Wrong husband. It was Mike Todd who died in the plane crash, Eddie's predecessor in the Taylor nuptuals. Eddie's still alive and well at the age of 81. Wish someone had told me that this morning.

Teatime

This evening, as six-thirty approaches and you lay the table for the family meal, ask yourself this. When did we as a nation stop eating tea and start eating dinner?

Tea is a quick meal, and it usually involves toast. Dinner, on the other hand, takes ages. There is, inevitably, the shopping and cooking, but before that there are hours and hours spent just wondering exactly what to cook. Heaven forbid we should cook the same thing twice in one month. We need variety and excitement on our plates. We no longer eat simply to replenish our fuel supply, dinner has to be an event. A mini dinner party for the family every night. Newspapers provide a daily recipe should inspiration be lacking; magazines extol new twists on old favourites. And television is constantly banging on about cooking. The Channel 4 show, Come Dine With Me in which four people throw dinner parties then award each other scores out of 10 in a bid to win £1,000, was first broadcast to a tiny audience in 2005, but it is now watched by 3.5 million every week and is regularly More4's most watched programme. Pressure to cook new and interesting things is all around us.

Of course, quality family time is essential, and how lovely it is to have everyone together around the table sharing a lovingly prepared meal. But what about those couple of nights each week when having dinner together is just too difficult? One of you is late back from work, another one plays squash, and yet another has had a McDonalds on the way home from school and isn’t hungry anyway. Once again, the mildly spiced Moroccan lamb with apricot couscous, which took you an hour and half to make, is wasted.

These are the evenings when everyone just wants tea. So why not a quick plate of beans on toast? Well for a start, it appears you might not have bought any bread for toasting. A spokeswoman from the British Nutrition Foundation said recently that consumption of all bread and white bread in the UK has been declining since the 1940s. However, at this same time the prevalence of overweight and obesity has been increasing. Yes we’re getting fatter, because we’re sitting down to a great big dinner every night when beans of toast would have done.

Obviously, if we haven’t got the toast, we don’t need the beans either. Beans consumption has fallen by more than 20% since 2000. It's such a crisis that, in an attempt to instil the beans habit into young people, food manufacturer Branston has started a "baked beans student loan scheme". If you e-mail them, they will deliver 24 tins to your door every term for the next three years. And you don't have to pay for them until you start work.

But it’s not just young people that are being reminded of the simple and nutritious pleasure of teatime. In August 2008 the MRC Human Nutrition Research wrote and published an article recommending which foods old people should eat to meet their nutritional needs. Toast with pilchards, sardines, beans, cheese, ravioli, tinned spaghetti or well-cooked eggs featured very near the top of the list. Exactly. Something on toast for tea.

By all means still rustle up a complicated authentic tex-mex banquet on a Monday evening after work if you feel you must, but don’t wait until you’re old to rediscover the delights of sardines on toast or the perfect poached egg. Bring back teatime. Reclaim your evenings.

Homework

This first post is my homework. In fact it is two homeworks for two different classes. Monday's class is required to write an article and Tuesday's class has to create a blog. So here is Tuesday's homework, which provides a convenient place to do Monday's exercise. This will not be the most interesting post you have ever read. I hope it will get better.