Lowlife 116 – Labour Pains

Labour Pains

By Dominic Horton

So the general election will soon be upon us and the politicians have burst into action in a frenzy of activity spewing forth their policies, promises and polemics. The main parties are all looking for an angle, any angle, to give them an advantage over the competition, much in the same way that big businesses do to sell their goods and services; the businesses pursue profit and the politicians power.

The late Screaming Lord Sutch - general elections

are just not the same without him.

When I have a number of jobs to tackle I usually get the hardest, most onerous tasks out of the way first. So, for example, if I have a number of shirts and T-shirts to iron I will tackle the more difficult shirts first. The ironing will follow changing my bed sheets, such a quick yet tedious chore I find, just like voting in a general election I suppose. Labour leader Ed Miliband must use a similar approach to mine when undertaking tasks for the election as last week he decided to get his visit to Blackheath, West Midlands, out of the way on his campaign trail. 

Blackheath forms part of the constituency where I live, Halesowen & Rowley Regis, which the Labour party inexplicably lost to the Conservatives in the last election when the bouffant-haired, permanently grinning James Morris took up the seat. It is very off putting when Tories like Morris try to be nice all of the time. It makes you wonder what dark skeletons they have in their cupboards.

The race between Labour and the Tories for the seat of Halesowen & Rowley Regis is likely to be a close fought one, hence the appearance of the Labour head honcho on Wednesday. You could describe the Black Country town of Blackheath as “earthy” and it is unlikely to be Miliband's ideal type of place. Blackheath is apparently a bastardisation of the words “bleak heath” so that gives you an indication of the kind of town that it is. I like it, mind you. You can be sure that he didn't kiss any snotty nosed babies or visit a local public house so that he could hold up a pint of bitter to the cameras. I hope he didn't anyway, on both fronts, for his sake.

The front page of this week's edition of my local newspaper, The Halesowen News, shows a photograph of Ed Miliband and local party candidate, Stephanie Peacock, greeting the crowds in Blackheath. When I ask my dear son Kenteke to pose for a photograph he has a very distinct grin, where the muscles around his mouth form a smile for the camera, but it is false, for show. This was exactly the kind of smile that Miliband was putting on for the newspaper's camera. In truth he couldn't wait to get back to the safety of Westminster. 

Stephanie Peacock and Ed Miliband with his false grin.

You can picture Miliband asking his secretary on Wednesday morning what places he had to visit on that day and being told that Blackheath is on the agenda. “Oh fine,” Miliband would say, “that's only down the road.” “No, not Blackheath, South-East London,” his secretary would correct him, “Blackheath, West Midlands.” “Oh dear.”

Miliband has sent me a personal letter and I know it is personal as it is headed, “Dear Dominic.” But in Ed's letter to me he refers to “me and my family” and my “working family” but he should know, with it being a personal letter, that I live alone as a bachelor and that I am currently a job seeker. I wish Ed would either get his facts straight or just head the letter “Dear Sir/ Madam” (or even better “Dear Madam/ Sir” as I don't see why women have to come second all of the time) to show the letter for what it is, a mass mailshot to the electorate. So Ed Miliband has annoyed me this week. The Liberal Democrats have been annoying too as they keep sending me emails despite me repeatedly clicking on the “unsubscribe” link. The Tories have not done anything specific to upset me this week but they don't need to as they are just plain annoying.

But even the Tories are not top of the league table of annoying political parties as they are outdone by the madcap fantasists of UKIP. The UKIP pound sign logo looks like a joke and reminds me of the pound sign that used to be on the box of the board game Monopoly in the 1970's, which is indeed very fitting as UKIP almost have a monopoly of being hapless politically inept berks. I thought that our local UKIP candidate is a man named Nathan Hunt as Neddy La Chouffe told me about him as he is one of Neddy's neighbours, but it transpires that Hunt is not standing for UKIP in the election, though he did stand in the council elections earlier in the year. It is difficult to have any confidence in a man who has misspelt tirelessly as “tirelsly” in his council campaign literature and put a rogue apostrophe after the word “business” in a sentence where none is needed – he obviously didn't work tirelessly enough in proof reading his leaflet.

James Morris MP with an even worse false

grin than Miliband's, by request of Toby In-Tents.

But at least Hunt has his priorities right. In his list of six key issues he cited his second priority as, “clean all signage coming in and out of the ward.” I reckon that is a guaranteed vote winner if ever there was one; I just hope Hunt is not given the responsibility of spelling any words that appear on new signs.

At least I have yet to have a door knocker disturbing the quietude of my Codger Mansions home. Thinking about it, I have never had a political candidate knock my door in the build up to an election. Maybe they give Codger Mansions a wide berth knowing that they will get short shrift from me. James Morris MP certainly got short shrift from me when he approached me after a fun run in Halesowen last year. I was having tea and cake with Kenteke and with his perma-grin Morris asked me, “Did you enjoy the run?” An innocent enough question you might think but politicians are never off duty and they always have an agenda so I replied, “You are wasting your time talking to me I will never, ever vote Conservative, I vote Labour and that's that.” My words, and the menace in my delivery, did the trick and he sloped off to irritate another potential victim.

If a one Sir K Frazer Commons was standing for office then I would definitely vote for him given his opinions. For my Uncle Albert's birthday my brother, Albino Duxbury, bought him the wonderful gift of a leather bound volume of Aston Villa related newspaper articles from the late 19th century to the present day. Some of the match reports were accompanied by other articles and one such piece caught my eye because of the fascinating headline: “Injustice of Abstainers Escaping Taxation.” The article from an edition of the Daily Mirror from 1913 explained that Commons had put forward a view in the Commons (confusing I know) that teetotalers should be taxed as unlike their beer drinking contemporaries they are not contributing to the Treasury through alcohol duty.

The author & Kenteke, shortly before being 

disturbed by James Morris MP.

In effect Commons was arguing that abstainers were shirking their responsibility to the nation by not drinking. I have never thought as beer drinking as a patriotic act but it is an interesting angle. There were a few inmates in the Flagon & Gorses last night who were extremely patriotic by the time I arrived. There was no point trying to discuss the election with the drinkers in question as given the state they were in they probably wouldn't have been able to remember who the current Prime Minister is let alone be able to engage in constructive political debate.

In this country we scoff at foreign elections that are rigged, usually in favour of the ruling party who are dictators in all but name. We British can smugly declare that our electoral system is fair, uncorrupt and water tight in its security and integrity. That being the case the oddest thing about the voting process is when you come to the big moment of casting your vote pencils, and not pens, are provided for you to put a tick in a box. Hardly foolproof as a simple rubber eraser could compromise the process. It is a shame that Nathan Hunt didn't have an eraser when he was drafting his campaign leaflet as he could have corrected his glaring mistakes. Except for the biggest mistake of standing for UKIP of course.  

© Dominic Horton, April 2015.

Lowlife is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall

Email: lordhofr@gmail.com

Lowlife 115 – Rough Treatment

Rough Treatment

By Dominic Horton

In last week's edition I wrote about Joe Mallen, the chainsmith from Cradley Heath, who used to make chain by hand in the middle part of the last century. Given the physicality and rigours of Joe's job it would be no surprise if he suffered from a bad back during his time and I would imagine that it was an occupational hazard for him. The bad back that I suffer from periodically has got progressively worse recently and it has lead me to seek physiotherapy treatment from the NHS. But given that the cause of my discomfort is not due the kind of physical exertions that Joe Mallen undertook, but rather by sedentarily sitting at a desk for long spells, I feel like a bit of a fraud.

Jolly D daring to sit in Tom Corneronly's seat in the
Flagon & Gorses - it didn't last long, when Corneronly came
in the pub Jolly D moved immediately, out of respect. 

I first experienced the back problem 10 odd years ago while I was playing for Greenhill FC. I took a throw-in during a match I felt a sudden pain up my back and in my shoulder and consequently I couldn't raise my arm above waist height as it was agony. I told the team manager, my associate Harry Gout, that I wasn't able to take throw-ins because of the pain and that I was going to have to be substituted as I was in great discomfort.   His predictably unsympathetic reply was, “you'll be ok, just get someone else to take throw-ins. You're not coming off, just get on with it.” We won the game so I suppose Gout was justified in his decision, though it was hardly reminiscent of Jose Mourinho. 

I sought treatment and the physiotherapist, Lucy, told me that I have an incredibly stiff back and in her opinion it is due to being desk-based all day. She explained to me that she was going to manipulate my spine, which would hurt but it would do me good. She was right on both counts. Lucy is only a wee strip of a woman so I don't know where she found the force from to bash my back around so vigorously but her frame belies her strength. Lucy said that she is going on holiday for two weeks but another physio at the practice, Jerome, would continue the treatment. At the next appointment Jerome walked into the room and he was a muscle bound man mountain of 6' 5” and 17 stones and he said, “I am going to give your spine a good working to loosen it up.” I thought, “Oh, f*ck, if little Lucy generated that much power this fella is going to kill me.”

Jerome started to manipulate my back and I was bracing myself for a battering from the big man but it turned out that he was a gentle giant and instead of the force ten gale I was expecting I was given what seemed like a pleasant massage. I could have kept silent but I knew he needed to exert a bit more pressure on my back for the treatment to be successful so I said, “Lucy was a little more robust when she manipulated my back so you can put a bit more clout into it if you want to.” This was a mistake. His first thrust on my back winded me and I thought he was going to break my ribs with the pressure. I thought that I was going to walk out of the surgery as flat as a cartoon character that has been run over by a steam roller.

A sinister looking Neddy La Chouffe outside the Flagon

 & Gorses

Now that I no longer work for the bank I don't have the luxury any more of private health care where you can pick your physiotherapy appointment date and they even pop the kettle on for you when you turn up. This time my GP told me that I would have to wait weeks for an appointment but not to worry as one of the GPs in the surgery is an acupuncture specialist and that will be of great help to me. But the receptionist informed me that all acupuncture slots are full and she told me to call back in a month.

The woman at physio department said to me on the telephone that it would be eight weeks before a therapist could see me and she gave me details of the appointment and she said she would send me a confirmation letter. I said you don't need to confirm things in writing as I have it down in my diary. The woman said no, she has to send me a letter; I said just pop me an email then, it's cheaper than the post but she said no, it has to be a letter. One wonders how much money the cash strapped NHS wastes on sending out letters in this digital age where in most cases people are happy with an email or text message, which are considerably cheaper to send (not to mention better for the environment as no paper is used and there are no transport costs.)

Geraldine Strathdee, Clinical Director
for Mental Health, NHS England.

The woman called back later in the day to say there had been a cancellation and that I could have treatment first thing the following day. I thought I had better see the physio with a clear mind given my previous experiences as the treatment was painful enough without being groggy headed after a few tipples the night before. But being Magic Monday I had already planned to meet Neddy La Chouffe, Jolly D and the rest of the crew for the usual start to the week routine at the Flagon & Gorses. It will be fine, I'll take it steady I thought. Which in my defence I did.

I drank loads of water before I went to the appointment and all in all I didn't feel too bad. But the surgery waiting room was roasting and immediately I felt dry mouthed and dehydrated. I started to emit a light sweat and the booze terrors kicked in. I couldn't look at any of the other waiting patients in the eye. I glanced up to the TV, which like most doctor's practices does not show normal programmes but broadcasts short health information films and the like. Ominously the screen had facts and information about boozing from Drink Aware and it told me that alcohol can lead to suicide, self-harm or psychosis: top of the morning to you too.

A recent article by Geraldine Strathdee, Clinical Director for Mental Health NHS England, in The Guardian stated that a third of all GP visits are by people with a mental health condition so scanning round the waiting room I decided to pass the time by having a game of guess the mental health patient. There were six people in the room including me so it was perm any two from the remaining five. A fella with a beard, a sullen demeanor and shoddy, unpolished shoes looked like a prime candidate (not that I am stereotyping as anyone can have mental health problems of course) but before I could assess the other runners and riders the physiotherapist popped her head around the door and shouted, “Dominic Horton please.”

The physio was an attractive woman in her 30's, Laura, and her sunny disposition made my booze terrors melt away into the spring day. Laura asked me a series of questions and put me through a number of tests to determine the problem and to make a diagnosis. She opined that there is more to my back issue than sitting at a desk as given all of the exercises that I do daily to loosen my spine up it should not be as stiff as it is. Laura said she wants to me to go for an x-ray, a blood test and possibly an MRI scan to investigate further. The booze terrors came back with a vengeance and my mind ran wild with the possibilities of what is causing the bad back.

Jose Mourinho having bubble trouble, by request of 

Toby In-Tents.

As is usually the case the whole of the appointment was taken up by the physio's examinations so I didn't receive any treatment. I asked Laura if she could manipulate by back, even if it was just for ten minutes or so, but she said, sorry time's up. And I have to wait three weeks to see Laura again as she is going on holiday which means I'll either have to bite the bullet and pay for a private physiotherapist or get my dear son Kenteke to watch a Youtube video of how to manipulate a back so he can perform the procedure on me. For payment of a bag of sweets of course.

My comfy sofa doesn't do my back any good at all and Lucy the physio advised me years ago that hard seats and beds are more helpful than soft ones. That is the very reason why I spend many an hour sitting on the firm settles in the Flagon & Gorses, it is not for enjoyment but purely for curative reasons.

© Dominic Horton, April 2015.

Lowlife is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall

Email: lordhofr@gmail.com

Lowlife 114 – Mondays, Magyars & Movies

Mondays, Magyars & Movies

By Dominic Horton

On Monday evening I had the pleasure of attending a Black Country film night at Netherton Arts Centre, presented by the organisation Multistory as part of the Flatpack Film Festival. I was reticent to go to the film night at first as it meant missing a chunk of a Magic Monday at the Flagon & Gorses – my favourite night of the week at the pub – but I am delighted that I went as it turned out to be a really special evening and the three shorts films that were shown were simply wonderful.

Tom Corneronly in the Flagon & Gorses

More than any other time in the Flagon on Monday all hands converse together and join in with the general laughter, discussion and bonhomie. All gather in the bar leaving the back room and the Barbara Cartland Suite unoccupied and unloved. Everyone knows each other and the comfort of that means that the evening has an intimate ease to it, like dinner in a favourite restaurant with your sweetheart. Tom Corneronly occupies his customary corner, leaning on his stick, and Weston Super-Leeds sits at the other end of the L-Shaped bar, reading the paper and making odd little notes, and everyone else sits somewhere in between drinking beer and eating communion wafers (Mini Cheddars.) I have yet to learn the nature of the notes that Super-Leeds scribbles but my guess is that he is secretly working on a screenplay about the pub, which he is hoping will catapult him to stardom. If he is successful his movie might be shown at a Black Country film night at Netherton Arts Centre in years to come, you never know.

The first film we were treated to on Monday was Teddy Gray's Sweet Factory (directed by Martin Parr, 2011), which was a delectable, heart-warming 20 minute vignette about the legendary family owned business in Dudley, established in 1826. Betty Guest and Ted Gray now run the company and they have worked there for 65 years and 50 odd years respectively. Although demand for Teddy Gray's sweets far outweighs the firm's maximum production the business has effectively remained a small cottage industry which has resisted the temptations of expansion or takeover. All of the confectionery is still hand made and incredibly Gray's operates with no computer or fax machine – the whole operation is organised by Betty, Ted and the other office staff by paper methods and via a landline telephone. Betty does all of the figures and arithmetic (or “reckonin' up” as Black Country folk usually call it) for the books in her head and she is apparently highly accurate.

It is most likely that when Betty Guest and Ted Gray retire or pass on that the next generation of Grays might well modernise the business so I would imagine that Martin Parr was keen to make a record of the old fashioned and traditional firm before it changes. It reminds me of the work of the painter and author George Catlin, who died in 1872, who spend a large part of his life recording in paintings and print the culture and lives of native American Indians. Catlin knew that much of the native Americans way of live would die out given the dominance of North America by settlers of European origin. Catlin was of course right, but his work remains as an amazing legacy and record of the subject.

Joe Mallin the Chainsmith, by request of

Toby In-Tents.

Teddy Gray's boiled sweets remain enduringly popular and one wonders whether this is because of a sentimental hankering for the past or whether certain old fashioned ways and products are just better than their contemporary counterparts and worth keeping alive as a consequence. Due to the persistent and dedicated work of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) cask beer has seen such a meteoric resurgence that it is now rare to walk into a public house that does not sell it, which is incredible given that at one time cask beer had almost entirely been replaced by the less satisfying nitrokeg equivalent. Like the ever loved Teddy Gray's confectionery, the demand for quality cask beer is not based on rose-tinted nostalgia but it is because drinkers like and desire the product.

Cask beer featured in the second film, Joe the Chainsmith (directed by Philip Donnellan, 1958) which is a 30 minute snapshot of the life of Cradley Heath chainmaker Joe Mallen. The film is an amazing chronicle of the Black Country in the 1950's and it features such typical Black Country set pieces as Staffie's, pubs, heavy industry, pigeon racing and grim landscapes. There is one unbelievable scene in the film where Joe and three of his chainsmith work colleagues are making a large, thick piece of chain which is about 4' by 3' and it is a job that takes them the whole day to complete.

In the scene in question four men shape the chain with heavy lump hammers, with all four hammering the chain link in sequence in split-second synchronicity: if one man makes a mistake and mistimes his hit with his hammer the lethal weapon could strike a fatal blow to his mate. The strength, dexterity, skill and timing shown by the men as they shape the chain is a phenomenal sight to behold and I was transfixed viewing the film clip. The fitness, endurance and physicality shown by the workers in continually working the hammers for a number of minutes is formidable and Joe was by no means a young man in the film, he looked to be in his 50's or 60's.

Betty Guest & Ted Gray, proprietors of Teddy Gray's sweet factory. 

That said it is hard to fathom the age of people from olden times. For example, in his pomp Wolverhampton Wanderers and England legend Billy Wright (who was married to the Beverley Sisters) looked like a pensioner and in this regard he was not alone among his contemporary footballing fellows. In fact Wright must have felt like a pensioner when England famously lost 6-3 to Puskas's Magical Magyar Hungary team at Wembley in 1953, but that is another story.

The final film that we watched was another by Philip Donnellan, entitled House of Friends (1964) and it focused on drinkers in the Turk's Head pub in Brierley Hill. In the programme the film is described as “an unsentimental picture of a vanishing world” but the pub life portrayed in House of Friends is remarkably similar to the reality of today in a whole number of pubs across the country. One of the drinkers in the film said, “we like a good drink of a night. We don't try to escape it.” The words could quite easily have been uttered by my associate Neddy La Chouffe in the Flagon & Gorses.

Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton in Karel Reisz's 1960 film 

adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's book Saturday Night & 

Sunday Morning

In their work Donnellan and Martin Parr have documented the lives and culture of ordinary British people. “Ordinary” doesn't adequately describe the likes of Betty Guest, Joe Mallen and the other subjects of the film but I think you know what I mean. When we were at school we were force fed Shakespeare and none of us understood it, let alone enjoyed it. Shortly after I left school I read Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe, the celebrated novel about young Nottingham machinist, drinker and rebel, Arthur Seaton. The book made me connect with literature because I could identify with the lives of the characters that Sillitoe wrote about. At the time I thought to myself, why couldn't we have studied this book in school, it would have made more sense to me? I might have even passed the English Literature exam but as it was I failed it spectacularly. This was mainly on account of me only having read the first chapter of the book that we were studying, so trying to write the exam paper referring to the opening pages only of the text was a task beyond my youthful capabilities.

In a round about way Saturday Night and Sunday Morning lead me on the path to writing this column and the other things that I scribe. So if you want someone to castigate for having to put up with these ramblings every week then blame Alan Sillitoe not me.

© Dominic Horton, March 2015.

Lowlife is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall

Email: lordhofr@gmail.com

Lowlife 113 – The Party's Over

The Party's Over

By Dominic Horton

Recently I have taken to watching Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares USA when I get back in from the Flagon & Gorses on a Sunday night. I am sure that you are aware of the format of the show in which the chef Gordon Ramsay visits a failing restaurant in America and tries to turn the ailing business around: Ramsay is at first all smiles as he meets the restaurant owners and staff; his smile quickly disappears when he samples food from the menu, which he always labels “disgusting”; he tells the owners a few home truths about their awful food and loss making business; the owners at first refute Ramsay's comments and claim that their food is the best in the district; in between shouting and swearing at the owners Ramsay tells them that if they don't heed his advice they will be bankrupt by Christmas; the owners cry but Ramsay says don't worry, he'll make it all better; Ramsay makes it all better.

The wonderful Richard Adey performing at

The Locked In Festival

Given the lateness of the hour I usually only get to see the miserable part of the show - where Ramsay shakes his head at the archaic and madcap practices of the eatery and bellows at everyone to “get a f*cking grip” - as I usually fall asleep on the sofa halfway through the broadcast. Ramsay is sober, energetic, ambitious and driven but conversely the post-pub audience who are watching the show at that time of night are drunk, sedentary, apathetic and the only thing that they are driven to do is drink. By the end of the show the restaurant's chef (who could barely boil an egg before) is effortlessly banging out top quality gourmet nosh, which puts my supper of cheap Tesco frozen pizza to shame.

Like a lot of light entertainment television programmes Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares USA is highly formulaic and as viewers we find that comforting as we know what to expect and we are safe in the knowledge that there is going to be a happy ending. Given that the show has been running for quite a number of years it is amazing that the restaurateurs featured have not heeded the simple advice that Ramsay gives in all previous episodes: trim the menu and keep the food well cooked but simple; give the restaurant a spruce up; be organised in the kitchen; be nice to the customers. It shows how incredibly dim the owners of the show's businesses are.

The Gordon Ramsay of the footballing world is the pragmatist Tony Pulis, who is currently in the process of saving West Bromwich Albion from the precarious position that they were in at the wrong end of the Premier League table. Ramsay's winning formula can apparently be applied to turning round any struggling institution as Pulis's approach is not dissimilar – trim the squad and get rid of any fancy Dans or slackers and keep tactics simple; give the squad a spruce up when the transfer window opens; be organised on the training pitch; be nice to the fans. Also Pulis follows in Ramsay's wake by shouting, swearing and gesticulating to get his charges to do what he wants.

Gordon Ramsay, Glasgow Rangers FC.

Ramsay now appears to have moved on from restaurants and is trouble shooting in hotels but his next venture could be Ramsay's Relegation Nightmares where like Pulis he tries to save football clubs from the drop. After all, Ramsay was an apprentice footballer at Glasgow Rangers before injury ended his career. Or was it because he was sh*t, I can't remember now. I can just picture Ramsay having a heart to heart with Aston Villa's former manager Paul Lambert: “Paul, you can't stop losing, what are you going to do about it?” “I think we'll be fine Gordon,” “But you have only scored 11 goals all f*cking season Paul, get a f*cking grip !!!”

We nearly had a kitchen nightmare at the Locked In Festival that I helped organise with Cradley Heath Creative as the caterer pulled out at the eleventh hour leaving us without a morsel for attendees to chomp on. Luckily the irrepressible Holly Bush Dave Francis stepped in to the void and provided tasty tucker to sustain peckish festival revellers. At the day-long free festival we had an extensive art exhibition and an installation, eleven hours of varied performance on stage, art/ sculpture/ reading workshops and a variety of films about the local area. The festival took a lot of organising but it was fantastic and well attended, a number of my fellow inmates from the Flagon & Gorses were even granted day release to pop down and have a look.

Like a fool I had offered to write a play for the festival and I also offered to act in it, something that I have not done before, well not since primary school nativity plays (by the time I went to High School my theatrical involvement was limited to pulling the curtains open and shut on account of me being a petty delinquent who could not be trusted with the responsibility of a role in the school play.) The play is entitled Two Men in a Pub and it has a Lowlifian theme of drink and gloom. My writer crony D G Depardieu contends that I am a one trick pony who can only write about booze and misery in a small Midlands town and my play only adds fuel to his argument. Mind you, Depardieu can only seemingly write rodent based children's books, so he is no more versatile than me.

The Author hosting a shared reading group at the Locked In Festival.

As the day of the festival started to draw near and rehearsals got under way it dawned on me that I was actually going to have to get up on a stage in front of an audience and I had a growing anxiety that I would not remember my lines. My memory is awful at the best of times so add stage fright into the equation and I thought that there would be more chance of Gordon Ramsay going through a whole episode of Nightmares without swearing than me being word perfect. It didn't help that a story broke that the esteemed stage and screen actor Michael Gambon has had to give up acting in the theatre as he is increasingly struggling to remember his lines – if such a legendary and skilled actor as Gambon is having difficulty I thought what hope would I have.

Despite me and my two fellow actors, Holly Bush Dave and Vicki, slaving over our lines we didn't have a rehearsal where we managed to run through the whole play without a hitch, so I was fearful that things would go awry. My thespian associate Harry Stottle advised me not to drink before the peformance but on the day of the festival Vicki had a drink in her hand every time I looked at her so I was fearing the worst. But I was generally so busy meeting and greeting performers during the festival that I didn't have a great deal of time to get nervous but I had to delay our play at show time to accommodate another act, as he had to leave, so then the jitters started to grow.

The talented Pete Williams performing at the Locked In Festival

At the start of the play I was backstage waiting to go on – at the Holly Bush, the festival venue, “backstage” is the entrance hall of the pub, right by the main front door. Just as I was about to go on Bobby Woods and his band arrived through the front door of the pub, so I couldn't avoid introducing myself and saying hello but as we were shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries I realised that I had missed my cue and that I needed to get on stage immediately. I tried to explain to Woods that I was acting in a play and due on but he was bemused by this and I think he thought I had lost my marbles. And he was probably right.

Fortunately the play went swimmingly well and we all remembered and enacted our lines relatively beautifully and at the end of the play I thought to myself, I don't know what all the fuss was about. And with the acting out of the way it meant that I could finally have a celebratory pint to toast the success of the play, which went down quicker than one of Fred Dibnah's chimney stacks.

Like Christmas, there was a long build up to the festival and things got more frenetic as it came closer. I had a magical day but when I woke up on Sunday morning I realised that the party was over and it was time to get back to cold reality. Which means in the short tern finding a job. Despite my dalliance on Saturday I think being an actor is out of the question. But I wonder if Gordon Ramsay needs a sidekick …..................

© Dominic Horton, March 2015.

Lowlife is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall

Email: lordhofr@gmail.com

Lowlife 112 – Out of Order

Out of Order

By Dominic Horton

The theme of last week's Lowlife was food and after being delivered safely home from the Flagon & Gorses last night (Sunday) by Chilli Willy I decided to round off a triumphant footballing weekend by having a celebratory Asda Sweet Chilli Chicken pizza (“cooks from frozen in just 12 minutes.”) When things are going spectacularly well life has a cunning habit of delivering a smack in the face to bring you down to Earth with a bang and so it was last night. Just as the cooking procedure was reaching its culinary culmination to produce a workmanlike but more than satisfactory pizza the handle of the oven door decided to fall off, rendering the over door to be permanently open. Given the lateness of the hour I secured the oven door with sticky tape (after letting it cool down first of course – I am a fool but not a complete and utter fool) and decided to fathom out how to fix it in the morning. But this morning bought no immediate answers to the conundrum. I suspect the answer to the problem may lie in the use of super glue, which is a substance that terrifies me as I fear sticking my fingers to something and having to spend the rest of my life with my Aston Villa mug attached to my hand is not an attractive prospect.

The Frymaster General, typically eating a fry up. 

The oven and grill being out of bounds this morning was a grave disappointment as I have a few sausages to cook, which are an over spill from the weekend. I didn't want to fry the sausages as they would be too greasy for my tender constitution so the only other alternative was to spark the George Formby grill into action but that would cook the bangers to the other extreme and suck all of the fat out of them leaving them dry and lifeless. So I made do with cooking an egg in the microwave for a sandwich. I learnt years ago via the trial and error method that you have to pierce the yoke before cooking an egg in the microwave or it will explode like a packed Holte End at Villa Park having witnessed the team scoring a goal against West Bromwich Albion.

After years of detailed experimentation I have finally settled on cheap frozen pizzas as my post-pub food of choice. The post-pub pizza (PPP) has many benefits: they are cheap (you can pick them up for as little as a quid each), they are quick to cook (if you have a fully functioning oven that is), they are infinitely more healthy than your average takeaway and most of all they keep me away from my nemesis, the Baby Faced Assassin at the Rhareli Peking Chinese takeaway.  Incidentally, when I walked past the Peking last week the Assassin oddly was running up and down on the spot behind the counter, which means that he might be trying to make his dead time at work useful by exercising. More likely he had regretfully eaten one of his own meals which had given him loose bowels and he was trying to hold a movement in as Mr Ping the chef was on the karsi.

When I lived with El Pistolero at No 2 we used to cook fishfinger curries on return from the pub and we fried the fishfingers for speed. The frying pan that we had – which was more battered than the fishfingers – only accommodated 9 fishfingers so we either had 4 ½ each in our curries or we had to toss for the prize of having 5 instead of 4. If my dear departed friend Alfie C was in attendance he would treat us to a post-pub delicacy which he called bubble and squeak. He would take whatever was in the freezer and defrost it in the microwave, which was often so full that it's contents could not turn. He would then mold the various foodstuffs together before frying them into a kind of pattie which he would then put into a sandwich. The quality of the bubble and squeak was variable as it would depend on what was in the freezer at the time and on how many drinks Alfie C had imbibed on the evening in question.

My out of order oven.

Together with the Woodcutter, Alfie C would spend a fair proportion of his leisure hours at No 2. The Woodcutter enacted the most impressive post-pub eating performance that I have ever witnessed when he ate a bag of fish and chips whilst he was asleep and snoring and intermittently singing the odd lyric from Elvis Presley's She's Not You. 

Once the Frymaster General and I returned to No 2 from the Imp's stag trip to Torquay in a state of dishevellment only to find Alfie C and the Woodcutter on our sofa drinking vodka and watching television. To this day I have no idea how they got in the house. Alfie cooked bubble and squeak that night, which was the last thing I needed in my condition, and I joined them in the lounge for vodka, which was a decision that I regretted in the morning when I was in such a delicate state that if I was a Catholic they would have given me the last rites. The Frymaster advised me that if I wanted to survive that I had to eat, even if I couldn't face it. As an act of kind charity the Frymaster made me a bowl of chicken noodle soup and for once he managed to cook something without frying it, which was virtually unprecedented given that I have witnessed him fry pasta, fruit and even salad. Fried salad is something that even grossly obese Americans have not thought of. Small doses of the soup lead me on the slow road to recovery and ever since then I have heeded the Frymaster's sage advice when I have woken in a less than optimum state.

Beanfeast, by request of Toby In-Tents

Around the time of the bubble and squeak and fried salad episodes Alexander Sutcliffe and I discovered powdered instant Chinese curry sauce, which was surprisingly good and I suspect that it is the very stuff that the Rhareli Peking and other Chinese takeaways use. No 2 was a bit of a revolving door of waifs and strays and quiet a number of my associates lived there over the years. Sutcliffe was so taken with the instant curry sauce that he had it for every meal, with a few mushrooms and onions and a bit of rice. At the time Sutcliffe was a very faddy eater and he would eat a particular foodstuff exclusively for a fortnight before getting fed up with it and moving on to something else. On a trip to the supermarket he once bought a whole sack of spuds as he planned to eat nothing but baked potatoes for the foreseeable future. On that trip his flatulence was so appallingly ripe that he managed to clear the whole supermarket in ten minutes flat – even one of the cashiers fled the building.

You knew when Sutcliffe had drunk a skin full on a Saturday as to counteract his Sunday morning hangover he would blast out Led Zeppelin at full volume. On the Sunday evening he had a strange practice to chase away the booze terrors: he would chill two bottles of white wine but instead of savouring them over the course of the evening he would guzzle them in 20 minutes flat, leaving him boozeless and only having instant apple tea to drink, which was another one of his fads.

El Pistolero

When I lived at No 2 I was in my 20's so I still had a student mentality to food so I could live off such staples as frozen microwave kebabs (two for £1) and Beanfeast, which was a dehydrated mixture of vegetarian soya mince in either a curry, chilli or bolognase flavouring and when cooked it produced a kind of gruel which even Oliver Twist would turn his nose up at. The soya used to play havoc with my stomach and it made me trump constantly but I was told by Still-in-Fjord that once my system got used to the soya that things would settle down. But things didn't settle down and on average I used to fart 30 times an hour, so that in addition to the Frymaster's feet and frying stenches made for an interesting odour. But Beanfeast was very cheap so I stuck with it, despite the protests of my housemates.

All this food talk is making me hungry and I just fancy those sausages but as the oven is out of order I'll have to make do without. When I pop out to the pound shop to buy some super glue I could always nip into Greggs for a consolatory sausage roll, which will at least make the task of fixing the oven a bit more palatable. 

© Dominic Horton, March 2015.

Lowlife is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall

Email: lordhofr@gmail.com

Lowlife 111 – Food, Glorious Food

Food, Glorious Food

By Dominic Horton

Last week I attended a meeting for the arts group that I am involved in, Cradley Heath Creative, to discuss how we could best contribute to this year's The Women Chainmakers' Festival in Cradley Heath. We decided that a good theme for our project would be food so we discussed various ideas on the subject. At the Festival we hope to get people talking about food, so we can record their stories about what food means to them and what their thoughts and memories are of particular foodstuffs. Food is obviously a subject that is universal to all so it is a good choice of topic for our contribution to the festival.

A 1970's Calculator

Like most people, my food habits have changed over time and generally my meals are very healthy but my Achilles' heel is that I like a nibble of something savoury when I get home from the Flagon & Gorses and this has always been my post-pub habit. When I was a mere youth of 18 years my dear Mom used to have a procedure of shopping on a Friday night but the food that was stored in the left hand kitchen cupboard was not be be touched until it was transferred to the right hand cupboard the following day (it is funny how every family has odd little practices like this which seem to make sense them but to no one else.) One Friday night after I had returned from refreshing myself in the Stag & Three Horses shoes I was foraging in the kitchen trying to find a desirable morsel or two but to no avail. I knew that the food from the Friday shop was in the left hand cupboard, so I opened the Pandora's box and delved in.

I found an 18 packet multi-bag of Walker's crisps and knew that I had no choice but to eat a packet of the forbidden fruit. I cautiously opened the corner of the multi-pack to sneak a bag out, thinking that I would get away with it. The trouble is that one packet of crisps is a wholly inadequate supper for a growing youth in a state of beer-fuelled famishment. So I had another packet of crisps. And another. And another. Once I had consumed eight or so packets of the quaffable Walker's crisps I knew that it would be obvious to my Mother that the multi-pack had been compromised and some of its contents pilfered. So I decided that there was only one thing for it and in an effort to get rid of the remaining evidence I proceeded to eat the remaining ten packets of crisps so that none remained. I then hid the empty packets and multi-pack packaging in the outside rubbish bin, so no trace of the crisps were left.

Next day my Mother asked me if I had seen a multi-pack of crisps anywhere, “I'm sure I bought some at the supermarket” she said but I answered in the negative, leaving Mom to think that she had left the crisps on the counter at the supermarket or in the shopping trolley. If you are reading this Mom I can only offer my belated and sincere apologies and if it is any comfort to you the day after eating the crisps my guilt was accompanied by a feeling of bloatedness and nausea on account of my excessive consumption.

An advertisment for Vesta boil in the bag curry

The introduction of the microwave was a big step forward in post-pub suppers as they heat food up quickly and they mitigate the risk of burning the house down by falling asleep and leaving the hob or the oven on all night. Prior to microwaves boil in the bag Vesta curries were the bright new innovation but they were fraught with danger for the tipsy as they not only involved boiling water but scissors were needed too to cut the bag open. I am surprised that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents didn't seek to ban boil in the bag curries as they were fraught with danger. If you did manage to cook the curry without having a mishap you were generally only greeted with mostly curry sauce and very little meat. In fact if you came across a piece of meat in the dish it was most likely the end of your finger that you had cut off trying to slice the end of the bag open.

Boil in the bag curries were not the only food crime from my childhood and youth, there were many in the 1970's but there could be fewer worse than Smash instant mash potato. Parents would rather fill there kids full of additives and salt that have to undergo the inconvenience of peeling a few spuds and boiling them for 10 minutes. Such were the times. Pot Noodles were also introduced, the ultimate convenience food at the time: boil the kettle, pour the water onto the contents of the plastic pot, stir, add the sauce and Bob's your uncle. Pot Noodle (and microwave meals) always instruct you to let the food stand for one minute before eating it. I assume that the intention of the instruction is: “Please let the food stand for one minute before eating it to give yourself time to decide if you really want to eat this crap.”

When you are little you begin to learn about the world but just when you start to grasp something you invariably find out that it is not as simple as you first thought. As a seven year old boy I knew that a loaf was always the size and shape of a small breeze block. Wrong. Our teacher at Primary School, Mrs Wilson, shattered my heartfelt belief when one day she brought a French stick into class, the likes of which us Shell Corner kids had never seen before. She cut the stick up and we each had a slice with butter. It was simply amazing. It had flavour. It seemed creamier and sweeter than 'normal' bread.

The Smash aliens, by request of Toby In-Tents.

Shortly afterwards Mrs Wilson furthered our understanding of the world by bringing into class an incredible contraption called a calculator. It was the size of a house brick and she plugged it into the socket on the wall. We formed an orderly queue and we were allowed to do one sum each on the calculator. I tapped in 6 x 6 and in the flick of an eye the miraculous machine produced the answer of 36 on it's green numbered display. Technology moved on so quickly that within a couple of years I had a calculator on my digital wrist watch, which was ideal for cheating at maths at school, until the teachers got wind of it and banned such whizzy watches.

Exotic food items started to creep in when I was a teenager, such as pasta and pizza. The pizzas were about the size of a tea plate and you grilled them for a couple of minutes or so and they had a cardboard style bread base and a bland, salty tomato sauce covered by a sparse layer of cheese. They were fantastic. As none of us kids had ever travelled outside of Britain we thought that Italians must eat these manky pizzas and Spaghetti Bolognase (consisting of a ready made sauce and cheap mince beef and an onion if you were lucky) all of the time and we were jealous of them as a result.

Two of the most vivid food memories from childhood concern my two Grandfathers. Grandad Tom was a butcher so he always had decent meat and on a Saturday morning he would have pork chops and eggs for breakfast garnished with salt. Grandad Tom would cut a piece of chop for me and dip it in the rich, golden egg yolk and it was a delicious treat. Grandad Charlie had a large garden where he grew his own vegetables and I used to help him tend to it. After we had finished our endeavours we used to sit on the bench at the end of the garden and our weariness was assuaged by a cup of tea, made with tea leaves and sterilised milk, and digestive biscuits to dip in. I was still learning the art of how long to dip a digestive biscuit into tea – leave it too long and the biscuit disintegrates into the tea and leave it too little and not enough tea is soaked up. We all learn in life as we go along but even after all of these years metaphorically speaking my digestive is still falling to the bottom of my mug. One day with a bit of luck I might get the hang of it; dipping digestive biscuits into tea that is, not how to live my life.  

© Dominic Horton, March 2015.

Lowlife is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall

Email: lordhofr@gmail.com