ALISON BEST

Alison's funeral will take place
at 1100 this upcoming Friday, 12 November
at Durham Crematorium.

231

In this blogposting…
*AGM XXI
*The Glories of the NHS
*The Archers
*News From Nowhere
*Re-translation
*And Finally…
Onward and upward...

AGM XXI
The next AGM will take place this upcoming Thursday, 11 November at 1100 in Sunderland’s Winter Gardens cafe.

It will be the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

THE GLORIES OF THE NHS
Don’t read this if you’re about to go into hospital….

Every year, the NHS’s National Patient Safety Agency produces a report on ‘wrong-site surgery’ - operations carried out on the wrong limb or organ, or even on the wrong person altogether.

Apparently, there were 111 instances of wrong-site surgery in the last twelve months. Of these, no fewer than 57 involved patients undergoing surgery on the wrong part of the body.

And their were 41 instances of misplaced feeding tubes, putting patients at risk of being fed directly into the respiratory tract.

Just thought you'd like to know.

THE ARCHERS
I’ve been an Archers Addict for decades. Every Sunday morning I would snuggle down beneath the duvet with an iced finger and listen to the Omnibus Edition of the programme. Life was simply incomplete unless I kept myself up-to-date with all the unlikely and implausible goings-on in Ambridge.

Until, that is, now.

Last weekend I made the fateful decision to stop listening. My life seems to have taken several Archers-unfriendly turns recently and keeping my weekly appointment with them has become increasingly difficult.

At the moment, it’s still cold turkey. I’m desperately unsure how long it will be before I’m forced to relent and take a sneak aural peek at Radio 4 just to make sure that everything’s all right in Borsetshire.

If you’re an Archers fan, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

As a kind of final salute to my friends in Ambridge, here is a News From Nowhere list of surprising things about the world’s longest-running serial drama….

*Richard Attlee, who plays Kenton Archer, is the grandson of Clement Attlee
*Charles Collingwood (Brian Aldridge) is very proud indeed of his ancestors, one of whom was our very own Admiral Collingwood
*Tom Graham, who plays Tom Archer, has just started a PhD in psychology
*Charlotte Martin (Susan Carter) is a research psychologist
*Felicity Finch, who plays the Geordie Ruth Archer, is also a BBC journalist who has been to Afghanistan four times in the last ten years
*Tim Bentinck (David Archer) is the 12th Earl of Portland; until recently, he was also the voice of London Underground’s Piccadilly Line, telling passengers to ‘mind the gap’
*Ian Pepperell (Roy Tucker) runs a pub in the New Forest.

I’ll miss them all.

NEWS FROM NOWHERE
A Scot has reclaimed the title of the world's best porridge-maker (see picture above) after it was won by an American last year.

Neal Robertson, from Auchtermuchty in Fife, used a spon – a double-backed spoon he invented – instead of a traditional rod-shaped spurtle – to prepare the dish. He said the spon and water from the hills above Auchtermuchty were the secret to making the perfect porridge.

Neal, who runs the Tannochbrae Tearoom, faced competition from last year's winner, Matthew Cox, of Portland, Oregon.

Other competitors prepared unusual mixtures such as west coast seafood porridge with scallops and hot smoked salmon and langoustine tails.

RE-TRANSLATION
One of the reasons I’ve had to stop listening to The Archers is that I now have even more trivial and superfluous things to do. Recently, for example, a friend introduced me to the delights of ‘re-translation’.

It works like this.

You take a few famous lines of, say, poetry and paste them into one of the many free, internet translation sites, like Google Translate or Babel Fish, with a request that they be translated into French (or any other language you choose).

You then take the new version and paste that into the same site, this time requesting a ‘re-translation’ back into English.

The first verse of The Lady of Shalott comes out as…
'On each side the lie of river
Long fields of the barley and of rye
Which cloth the wold and meet the sky
And by the field the road runs close
At much-dominated Camelot.'

Wordsworth’s Daffodils...
'I wandered only like cloud
This fleet on the high one above the valleys and the hills
When the only one feature I saw a cloud
A crowd of jonquils however.'

And the National Anthem…
'God except our kind queen
Long our noble queen
God except the queen
Send you live it victoriously
Happy and splendourful
Over us long govern
God store the queen.'

It’s addictive. Try the words of your favourite song, or a great quotation from history.

AND FINALLY…
...congratulations to Robin Hendrickson (pictured) and Eric Brandsness of Reno, Nevada. The Guinness Book of World Records has recently confirmed that their maine coon cat Stewie (also pictured) is the longest cat in the world.

He measures 1.2 metres (just over 4 ft) from head to tail.

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

Sherry...isn't she lovely?

Lawrence at our regular breakfast meet this morning....isn't he - er...

230

In this blogposting…
*AGM XXI
*Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know
*Top Ten
*Spepere
Now, let the devil take the hindmost…

AGM XXI...
...will take place at 1100 on Thursday 11 November in Mowbray Park, Sunderland.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month...

THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU DIDN’T KNOW
A big thankyou to Dave Shannon who has directed me to the Magazine Monitor of the BBC’s website. One of its features is the wonderful 10 Things We Didn’t Know Last Week - grist to the truckshunter mill. All these unlikely snippets of (comparatively) useless information were taken from last week’s tv, radio, newspapers and magazines.

* Crows go to school.
* Flamingos use make-up.
* John and Margaret were the most popular baby names for 30 years.
* Polar bears wave.
* More than half of all Americans dress up at Halloween.
* The normal lifespan of an octopus is three years.
* Liberalism is genetic.
* A footballer can be allergic to grass.
* Mount Everest has its own 3G wireless network.
* Some 7.2 million British people get by without a wristwatch.

Aren’t they wonderful?

(Personally, I’d feel naked without a wristwatch.)

TOP TEN
Kev has sent me these heavily-sarcastic lists of the Top Ten Reasons To Be….
I hope that, like me, you’re able to lay your laudable sense of ‘political correctness’ to one side for a while and find them as harmlessly funny as I did.

TOP TEN REASONS FOR BEING DUTCH
1 You can get arrested for growing plants, but not for smoking them.
2 You can make jokes about the Belgians and still drink their beer.
3a You can legally kill yourself
3b You can legally be killed
4 You're exactly like the Germans, except that nobody hates you.
5 You think you are a world power, but everyone else thinks Copenhagen is your capital...
6 You get to insult people and defend yourself by saying it's a national tradition.
7 You can put your finger in a dyke and it will save your country
8 You live in the most densely populated country in Europe, and still you've never seen your neighbours.
9 If the economy is bad, blame the Germans. If a war is started, blame the Germans. If you lose your keys, blame the Germans.
10 Bikes are public property. Locks are a challenge.

TOP 10 REASONS FOR BEING BELGIAN
1 You get to speak three languages, but none of them intelligibly.
2 If other countries want to fight a war, they will do it in your country.
3 You can brew drinks out of fruit, and still call it beer.
4 You are either
4a Like the Dutch, just less efficient
4b Like the French, just less romantic
4c Like the Germans
5 Decent fries. Real mayonnaise. Great chocolate. The best beer.
6 No one knows anything about you, except for the Dutch and French and they make fun of you.
7 More scandals in a week than any other country in a decade.
8 You can drive like a maniac on the road and nobody cares.
9 All your famous countrymen are either imaginary, or sex-offenders.
10 Face it. It's not really a country, is it?

TOP 10 REASONS FOR BEING FRENCH
1 When speaking fast you can make yourself sound gay.
2 Experience the joy of winning the World Cup for the first time.
3 You get to eat insect food like snails and frog's legs.
4 If there's a war you can surrender really early.
5 You don't have to read the subtitles on those late night films on Channel 4.
6 You can test your own nuclear weapons in other people's countries.
7 You can be ugly and still become a famous film star.
8 Allow Germans to march up and down your most famous street humiliating your sense of national pride.
9 You don't have to bother with toilets, just @!#$ in the street.
10 People think you're a great lover even when you're not.

If you can think of any more, please feel free to send them to me.

And speaking of being French…

SPEPERE
Eagle-eyed truckshunters may have noticed that Serge has become the latest follower (or ‘member’) of this blog - and not before time.

If you click on his photo at the top-left corner of the ‘Followers’ box on this main page, his membership pop-up window will appear. Click on the topmost ‘spepere’ link and you’ll be taken directly to his blog. (At least, that’s how you do it on a Mac; I’m not quite sure about Windows.)

Serge’s blog is still very much a work-in-progress; he only started it two days ago as a kind of experiment.

It’s in French (naturally) but he has included quite a few photos that you may like to take a look at. The one at the top is of the ancient, and very beautiful, city of Annecy. Then there are some pictures of the AGM Serge attended in August at the Tanfield Railway, followed by a few images (including a video) of the amazing Parc des Oiseaux (Bird Park) at Villars-les-Dombes.

I hope you like them.

Incidentally, I felt it was only polite, in view of this new international dimension to our friendly society, to devise a French version of ‘truckshunters’. However, because of the analytical nature of that abominable language, the best I’ve come up with is…...wait for it….

Aiguillieres des Wagons a Plate-Formes.

If anyone can concoct something less tedious, I’d be very grateful.

CONTACT ME...
...either by leaving a comment in the Comments box of the blog or by sending an email to truckshunters@googlemail.com

Alison (on the left) at the June AGM

ALISON BEST

It was with very great sadness that I learned today of the death of Alison Best last night.

My friendship with Alison began many years ago when I was a presenter at BBC Radio Newcastle. She had sent me some photographs of her startlingly original paintings and I knew at once that I wanted to record an interview with her.

I can remember very well the midwinter’s day I travelled through the snow to her house in Kyo, where I was greeted with her warm smile which seemed to banish the cold and gloom of the weather.
When I saw her paintings ‘in real-life’ for the first time that afternoon, I was genuinely awestruck. Alison had single-handedly invented a new art form: Impressionist Stencilling. She showed me the methods she used to choose her subjects - almost always based on plants and other elements of the natural world - and how she composed her paintings.

This latter was a long and painstaking process. And, because Alison was breaking new ground with her work, she had only her artistic intuition to rely on. No-one had ever done what she was doing.


But all her efforts were well worthwhile. The way she combined form with colour and depth was breathtaking and unique; her pictures are almost mesmeric and yet always present something new to see on each viewing.

I love her work and am very proud indeed to possess two beautiful examples of it.

Alison was driven by her passion for, and deep interest in, the work she did and the way it was developing. That the innovation and beauty of her designs were not more widely recognised (especially by the iniquitous Biscuit Factory in Newcastle) is, I think, an indictment of the elitism and innate snobbery of the local ‘art mafia’. In my ideal world, Alison’s work would adorn local galleries, private homes and public offices (including the Pink Palace).

I like to think that she knew of the high-esteem in which I, and many others, held her, both personally and professionally.

With her death, the north-east has lost a colourful and imaginative artist of the highest order, and I have lost a friend.

Gare de Lyon, Paris

The Geneva to Paris train

The Louvre

229

In this blogposting…
*Robinson’s Grand Tour: Fourteenth Day
*AGM XXI
Now - go for it…

ROBINSON’S GRAND TOUR: FOURTEENTH DAY
GENEVA TO PARIS
THURSDAY 1 APRIL

I wonder if all of Switzerland’s cities are like Geneva; breathtakingly proper, clean, polite, joyless and dull.

Think about it. Have you ever heard of anyone who’s ever had a fun holiday - full of memorable thrills, spills and excitement - in Basle, Zurich or Berne?

I thought not.

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Breakfast in the hotel was acceptably dull, Geneva-style. Everything you’d expect to be there was there. Three different kinds of bread, a few scraggy bits of ham, some unidentifiable floppy cheese, a few small bowls of watery jam, and muesli by the bucketful.

Although by no means inadequate, it all managed to be tastelessly unappetising at the same time. As I slurped the dregs of my insipid coffee, I honestly began to wonder if the atmosphere of horrifying and stifling tedium with which Geneva had cloaked the previous evening had somehow seeped so far into my subconscious that the city had become, in my mind, irredeemably vapid; a non-place.

I began to toy with the idea of petitioning Google Earth to remove all traces of it from their satellite maps and photographs just to see if anyone would notice.

These trivial daydreams kept me lightly amused while I packed my bags and trundled down to the reception desk to check out.

Unusually for me, I used the stairs rather than the lift. This is because the lift was peculiarly claustrophobic; it had the approximate dimensions of a tea-chest or, even worse, a coffin. Anyone with the temerity to push their way in when it was already occupied would find themselves uncomfortably and uneasily cheek-by-jowl with other guests, unsmilingly eyeball to eyeball.

And it made a funny noise as it travelled up and down the shaft.

While I was getting my breath back at the foot of the stairs, something happened which went some way - admittedly, not very far - to alleviate the burdensome reputation that Geneva had etched into my mind.

The two receptionists were speaking a language utterly unknown to me.

I ‘did’ German at school and my Grand Tour had made the tones and lilts of Italian familiar to me. The receptionists sounded as if they were speaking a weird - and not altogether unpleasant - combination of the two. At one and the same time it sounded like German with an Italian accent - or Italian with a German accent.

At last - and far too late - something interesting was happening in Geneva.

When I handed in my key, I took the liberty of asking them what language they were using. It was Romanche; Switzerland’s fourth official language - which is seldom heard and thus almost never mentioned in dispatches.

So, in the interests of equity and fairness for which the English are rightly renowned, I’m mentioning it now.

That so many native European languages have managed to survive on our crowded, and linguistically imperialist, continent has always fascinated me and continues to do so. France has Provencal and Breton, Spain has Catalan and even the tiny Netherlands has Friesian (which is said to be the nearest living relative of English and is also spoken where the cows come from).

In Britain we have Welsh and Erse, of course.

But for me, the two European languages which have excited the most interest have been Romanche (because so few people speak it, despite its ‘official‘ status) and Basque (spoken in both France and Spain; a language so utterly and completely unlike any other on earth that no-one knows how it developed or when).

And so, for your edification and enlightenment, here are the numbers from one to ten - Romanche first…

in, dus, trais, quatter, tschintg, sis, set, otg, nov, diesch

...and now Basque…

bat, bi, hiru, lau, bost, sei, zazpi, zortzi, bederatzi, hamar

Like the rest of the language, Basque’s numbers are a total mystery. Zazpi? Hamar? Bost?

It might as well be Elvish or Klingon.

At least the hotel’s receptionists had given me something to think about while I waited for the train that would whisk me out of Geneva - probably for ever.

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As a matter of fact, ‘whisked’ is something of an overstatement. Although the train was a TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse - high speed train) operated by French railways, it countered my enthusiasm to leave Geneva as rapidly as possible by ambling along at what seemed like walking pace. I could almost count the leaves on the trees as we crept from one river valley to the next.

It certainly didn’t feel as if the train would get me to Paris in less than three hours. And the heavily overcast sky and slow drizzle didn’t help, either. I felt distinctly and unmistakeably down in the mouth.

There was, however, one quickly-appearing consolation. Geneva lies at the end of a finger of Switzerland that juts into France. You can take a leisurely stroll from the City Centre and be inside France in half an hour. By train, I was crossing the penultimate border of my journey in just a few seconds.

Mind you, crossing mainland Europe’s national frontiers isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days of border checkpoints, stopped trains, passport controls and customs checks. I didn’t encounter a single baggage search, security guard or peremptory deportation at any of the borders I crossed on my Grand Tour. Trains simply cross any frontier in their path without stopping.

(On the Munich to Verona leg of my journey, the train did stop at Brenner station, which straddles the Austro-Italian border - but only to change crews. I was thus able to stand with one foot in each country, a new experience for me.)

Thus - and almost without my realising it - the countryside I was looking at just after we left Geneva wasn’t Swiss but French.

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Truckshunters will know that, since my Grand Tour, I have come to know France (or at least part of it) quite well. But, on this gray and damp Thursday morning, I was entering a country almost totally unfamiliar to me.

This is not a fact of which I am particularly proud. France is, after all, our nearest continental neighbour and, as the TGV picked up a little speed once inside its native territory, it struck me as iniquitous that I had managed to get through six whole decades having only visited Paris a couple of times and without any first-hand experience or knowledge of the French people, their country or their language.

Thus, the ‘voyage of discovery’ element of my Grand Tour had started as soon as I entered Belgium on the first day and had continued right through to this moment. As the train stopped at Bellegarde and then Bourg-en-Bresse, and travelled deeper into France, I was genuinely delighted to see how beautiful and varied the countryside thereabouts was - especially as the sky gradually cleared and the sun came out.

The terrain was heavily indented with hills, valleys and rivers. Dark forests draped the hillsides as the train sped west and north; villages were both small, sparse and, as we left the mountains behind, less and less Alpine.

Quite suddenly - or so it seemed to me - the train seemed to burst out of the landscape of hills, valleys and forests and into a completely different environment. The land levelled out, villages were larger, forests became scattered woodland and vast, verdant fields and hedgerows appeared. I saw my real-life first examples of French road layout, familiar to me from countless films and tv programmes; long, straight and lined with trees on both sides. Almost every road was an avenue of limes, cypresses or beech trees.

Everything in the countryside seemed so clipped, so manicured, so ‘organised’; as if some guiding eye had decided on the aesthetics of this farm or that church or these villages. Nothing seemed out of place, incongruous or untidy. There was little or nothing ‘casual’ about the French scenery I was passing through.

This apparent lack of waywardness and unpredictability - characteristics inherent in almost every aspect of the English landscape - was surprisingly restful and pleasing. It would have been even more restful and pleasing, especially to my untutored eye, if the train I was on had been moving a little slower.

But French TGVs move very fast indeed; twice as fast, in fact, than the speeds we’re used to in England. Imagine travelling from Newcastle to London in about an hour and a half. If they were in France, you could have been doing just that for over thirty years.

The line now turned decidedly northwards as it passed into Burgundy. One of the wayside stations it hurtled through was Macon Loche. At the time, I did not know that just a few miles south of the station lay a small, peaceful French village which, over the succeeding months, I would get to know very well indeed.

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My arrival in Paris could easily have been something of an anti-climax. After all, if the purpose of my Grand Tour had been to visit new and unfamiliar places, then it was already over. Ironically, Geneva had been the last one.

I’d visited Paris several times already and my friend John was at Gare de Lyon to meet me, with his Parisian boyfriend Dominique. Theirs were the first familiar faces I’d seen in two weeks.

But arriving in Paris can never, ever, be described as an anti-climax. It is a city which always meets your expectations of it, no matter what they are or how many times you’ve visited it before.

It is the most-visited city on earth. And that’s because it is beautiful, smug and contrary. It is stressful, tiring and wonderful. It is crowded, peaceful and private. It is monumental, tawdry and graceful. And it is all these things to all people and at the same time.

Parisians themselves give the impression that they believe life outside Paris is pointless - or even non-existent. And Paris’ visitors are similarly - and just as hopelessly - ensnared by its vivacity and the limitless possibilities it seems to offer.

Paris is personal.

I’m delighted that I spent the final afternoon of my Tour there - drinking, eating and talking. After thirteen days and nights, I had a lot to say.

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Not all those who wander are lost.

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AGM XXI...
...will take place at 1100 on Thursday 11 November in Mowbray Park, Sunderland.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month...

CONTACT ME...
...either by leaving a comment in the Comments box of the blog or by sending an email to truckshunters@googlemail.com