Life in a Northern Town
A quick perusal of the BBCs website this afternoon and it was confirmed that some unseeded Croatian had ended Tim's Wimbledon for yet another year. Straight sets an' all."I'll let the rest of the office know" I thought.
"Henman lost in straight sets" I hollered.
You should've heard the laughter, the cries of "bottler", "wanker" and the like.
The women too. "Didn't think he'd do it, he never does. He always loses his bottle".
Later I listened to a phone-in on Five Live. With a few exceptions (that only serve to prove the rule), calls from the North were generally anti-Tim and those from the South pro. North South divide? I'll say.
Now, I've made my opinion of the loser known elsewhere, but when I hear people trying to say he's a success because he gets to quarter and semi finals, then I know why he'll never win. I don't hear anybody claiming the English Football team were successful losing to Portugal last week - and quite right too. They lost - just like Timothy did.
Hopefully England will learn from their defeat, Tim won't. I don't know if you can learn bottle.
Mind you, at least the TV, radio and press will give up their canonisation of him and I won't have to listen to the plummy voices, loose with too many Pimms, making him out to be the greatest living English sportsman.
Just the final few days to get over and then we can get this yearly middle-class jamboree over and done with.
I had to nip into Oldham tonight. I was under orders from Dearest to pick up a copy of the car insurance documents that have been mislaid (or, more likely, thrown out in one of Dearest's cleaning frenzies). So, with a 'grin' and a air of 'bearing it' I sullied forth.
"Ay up" I thought - being Northern an' all, "I'll nip into the charity shops and peruse the bookshelves like I usually do when I'm up here".
The beauty of the bookshelves of Oldham's charity shops is that they are mainly stocked by the inhabitants of Saddleworth. TV producers, theatre directors, novelists, artists and the bored partners of captains of industry.
When you combine this with the obvious fact that the vast majority of charity shop customers - in Oldham at least - are not pre-disposed to the stock of books in particular and reading in general, it usually leaves juicy goodies for me.
Today there was a bumper crop of novels I had already read so the final booty was a little restricted. Nonethless, for less than a fiver I walked away with almost pristine copies of Jung Chang's 'Wild Swans', Damon Runyan's 'On Broadway', Dee Brown's wonderful history of the North American Indian 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' and an anthology of short stories from Manchester by writers such as Val MacDiarmid, Jeff Noon and The Fall's Mark E Smith.
Now, if only the Saddleworthians would start donating some decent DVDs and CDs as well.....
As a lapsed member of the Labour Party, I am not surprised that Party membership has fallen to its lowest level in 70 years.
But it's all ok because they've gone from having a deficit of nearly £1million in 2002 to an operating surplus of £2.6million.
I can only assume they're going to pay canvassers and leaflet posters at the next election, because, round here at least, the hard core members who were out on the street election after election, have gone.
Fortuntely, like Labour in the mid-eighties, the Tories seem to be dedicated to making themselves unelectable.
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