167

In this posting...
*AGM VI
*Gravy-Wrestling
*Lit and Phil
*T Dan Smith
*Clean Rivers
Read on, Macduff...

AGM VI: TYNEMOUTH STATION MARKET
Anyone even remotely familiar with the way I tend to organise things that need organising will already have expressed astonishment - many times - that I’ve managed to reach 60 without disorganising myself out of existence. Although I always arrived at the Big Blue Bus in time for the programme to go out, it was a close-run thing far more often than I care to admit. On one unforgettable occasion, I mistook the A19 for the A189 and contrived to get to Shiremoor with 29 seconds to spare before going live. Producer Jamie Wilkinson was the unfortunate victim that day. Amazingly, we are still on speaking terms. I think.

My planning skills came to the fore once again at AGM VI, as you may have read already in comments posted afterwards on this blog. It simply never occurred to me that telling everyone to meet up at Tynemouth Station Market wasn’t enough. After all, the site is a large one and, at that time of day, is busy with dozens of stalls and hundreds of visitors. What could possibly go wrong? Er...

To add spice to the mix, the Metro wasn’t running properly that morning AND I got caught up in road closures and diversions in Newcastle. I was almost half an hour late. By the time I arrived, truckshunter Vivienne had arrived, surveyed the scene and gone. Hildie was on the brink of giving up, too, when she saw me urgently looking out over the crowds from the overbridge. Ada, too, was on her last scour looking for familiar faces. So all was not quite lost, even though it got pretty close.

Ironically, AGM VI turned out to be one of the best so far. We were only, I think, on our second coffee when the redoubtable J Arthur Smallpiece - aka Gerry Fenwick - turned up with his partner Hillary (probably misspelled here) and his dog Molly. (You can read about Molly's heart-stopping adventures on the Metro in the comments to blog 165.)

And whirlwind appearances didn’t end there. As you can see from the picture above, no less an august personage than Alfie Joey arrived - more by our luck than his judgement, I should say. (Any blogsters who don’t know who Alfie Joey is should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.)

So from the jaws of Robinsonian ineptitude was snatched one of the most rewarding AGMs we’ve ever had. We were there for over three hours! My thanks to everyone who took the trouble to go all the way to Tynemouth, specially on a day when transport could have been a lot easier than it actually was. A particularly big hug to Vivienne who, had I organised things a little better, would not have made the journey in vain.

A final apology to Ada. I gave her a lift home after the AGM and will never, ever forget the look on her face as she climbed into my car. Usually, when people ask you to forgive the mess inside their car, they don’t usually mean it to quite the same extent that I do. My car is a kind of mobile cesspit and I’m fairly sure that poor Ada would have preferred, on reflection, to crawl home on her hands and knees through the sewers than to undergo the ordeal of spending almost ten whole minutes amongst the discarded sandwich wrappers, crumbs, dust, carrier bags, empty pop bottles, ash and half-eaten snacks from 2003 that largely occupy the space normally called the ‘back seat’. Ada may never be the same again.

AGM VII
Thanks to the deliberations of the Birkheads Ad Hoc Committee, the next AGM will take place next Wednesday 30 September. We’re all going to be mustered at the cafe in Saltwell Towers, which sits grandly on the eastern side of Saltwell Park in Gateshead, at 1100. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

If you think you may have transport problems, please say so in a comment to this blog. We truckshunters are a resourceful bunch and I’m sure we can help out somehow.

GRAVY-WRESTLING
As if to show how resourceful we actually are, Sid has sent me this picture from the Third Annual Lancashire Gravy-Wrestling Championships that I mentioned in blog 166. I definitely think we should organise a chara for next year!

Thanks Sid.

LIT AND PHIL
The Guardian has a daily column called In Praise Of... which highlights a person, event or institution which the paper regards as needing public approbation. This is today’s (Friday 25 September).
"From this foul drain," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of Manchester, "the greatest stream of human industry flows to fertilise the whole world." Even as it littered the north with slums and satanic mills, the industrial revolution fostered an appetite for ideas which found expression in literary and philosophical societies, where the discussions inevitably mixed beauty and truth with the latest technological wheezes for turning muck into brass.
Manchester, Leicester and even tiny Whitby all had societies that survive in some form, but it is Newcastle's Lit & Phil that retains the most visible presence, thanks to a 150,000-volume library which is housed in a splendid building on the course of Hadrian's wall. Although a private member's club, it is a very public institution, and one that becomes even more open today, with the conversion of the Georgian lecture rooms – in which Joseph Swan demonstrated his electric light bulbs in 1880 – into a new exhibition space which will link local history to wider themes.
The first offering is a reappraisal of Newcastle's 1960s power broker, T Dan Smith, who transformed the city's landscape and ended up being jailed for fraud. That might raise a few eyebrows, but then so too, no doubt, did the Lit & Phil's decision to admit women as early as 1804. The membership roll meanders from George Stephenson of the Rocket to Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant, via the tea-sipping premier Earl Grey. A society founded on faith in progress has never stopped evolving with the times.

I've thought for some time that we don't sing the Lit and Phil's praises half enough. If you've never been, take a look some time.

I intend to make it my business to go and see the T Dan Smith exhibition. To me, he’ll always be a rogue, a philistine and a crook who not only wantonly deprived us of large swathes of Newcastle’s historic - and monumentally beautiful - city centre but also replaced it with a desert of truly awful buildings and roads which continue to blight the city and will probably do so forever. I wonder if the Lit and Phil exhibition rehabilitates him. Even slightly.

CLEAN RIVERS
Over recent days, reference has been made in the media to England’s comparatively dirty rivers. BBC News said that of the five cleanest rivers, four were in Northumberland. It did not, however, identify them.

Thanks once again to Kev’s persistent research, I can reveal that they are the River Till and the Barrow, Ridlees and Linhops Burns.

Thanks Kev.

CONTACT ME
Post comments on this blog or email me: truckshunters@googlemail.com