🦆
My old mate Fitz died on Thursday.
We hadn't seen each other for a few years, but we kept in touch with random, usually hyphenated, insults via email and text message. His final text message to me, sent a couple of weeks ago, read:
Smeg-head
At times like these, it's conventional to say nice words about the departed. But, in Fitz's case, this would feel like a betrayal of a long and treasured tradition. So I'll just say:
What an utter tosser!
I take it all you Gruts Gangers have been watching Happy Valley out of morbid curiosity as to what life is really like in Upper Calderdale. Good, isn't it? The show I mean. As, indeed, is living in Upper Calderdale.
But you shouldn't believe everything you see on telly. Five episodes in, and how many hippies, lesbians, or fat blokes with beards have they shown prowling the streets of Hebden Bridge? Zilch, that's how many. How realistic isn't that? Meanwhile, if Happy Valley is to be believed, we can't move for drug addicts, psychopaths, kidnappers, rapists, cop-killers, and (I'm not making this up) ghosts.
I didn't realise, until I saw the scene where Sarah Lancashire and her grandson come out of Oasis, having bought a bag of sweets, that I actually saw them filming the series. (For the record, Oasis doesn't sell bags of sweets.)
But the real howler came right at the end of episode 5. The seriously injured psychopathic triple murderer and kidnapper climbs on the 595 bus at Tuel Lane and heads off to Hebden Bridge for, we all presume, a final showdown with an unsuspecting Sarah Lancashire.
But here's the catch… The 595 bus doesn't go anywhere near Tuel Lane in Sowerby Bridge. It runs from Hebden Bridge station, down Commercial Street, up Birchcliffe, around Dodd Naze, up Wadsworth Lane, past our house, then takes a sharp left down Nook Lane through Old Town and Pecket Well to the Crimsworth turning circle, then all the way back along the same route in reverse to Hebden Bridge station.
I do wish the BBC would check their facts before airing misleading nonsense about local bus routes.
My mate Bill has added a new feather to his bow. I reckon it could turn out to be a nice little earner.
Bill was reluctant to pose for this photo, as he was worried it might end up on Gruts. But, as we all know, there's no such thing as bad publicity. So I'm doing him a big favour, really.
This is a game I usually play in Italian restaurants, to check if the staff are authentic Italians. It's dead easy to play: all you need to do is to challenge them to say the word elbow in Italian.
The following conversations happened on Saturday evening:
Me [pointing dramatically at my elbow]: What's the Italian for elbow?
Head waitress: Gomito.
Me: That's right!
Head waitress: I know.
(A short while later.)
Me [pointing dramatically at my elbow]: What's the Italian for elbow?
Other waitress: I don't know, I'm Polish.
Me: I meant, what's the Polish for elbow?
Polish waitress: Łokieć.
Me: That's right!
Just doing my bit for international relations after all that nasty Farage nonsense.
(One of the ringtones on my phone.)
Yesterday, the BBC reported that a bunch of Iranian youths had been arrested for making a Pharrell Williams tribute video. A short while later, they reported that the Iranian youths had been released.
Until I read these stories, I had never heard of Pharrell Williams. I'm still none the wiser as to who she might be. Some sort of pop-star, I presume.
Which raises the question: when did I become less trendy than a bunch of Iranians?
(The first person to observe that I have always been less trendy than a bunch of Iranians will be deducted 20 points.)
James Wood, London Review of Books, 20-Feb-2014:
In The Emigrants, [W.G. Sebald] wrote about four such wanderers: Dr Henry Selwyn, a Lithuanian Jew who arrived in Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, and who lived a life of stealthy masquerade as an English doctor, before committing suicide late in life…
I have it on very good authority that most people who commit suicide do so late in life.