Alex J. Cavanaugh’s Underrated Treasures Blogfest

Prompted by Alex J. Cavanaugh’s Underrated Treasures Blogfest, as posted on one of his follower’s blog, I have come up with this, a day late.  If nothing else it gives me the chance to talk about things I like.  Everyone has a favorite movie or band that no one else has ever heard about. For whatever reason, they remain undiscovered and underrated. Now is your chance to tell the world about this obscure treasure!

Movies: well there are a lot I like that no one seems to have heard of except me, here are some.

1 Les Visiteurs - Jean Reno

 OK so it’s French, but it is a riot. A medieval French knight is magically transported to present day France, where his castle has become a hotel. He was on the point of getting married in his time and is desperate to get back and caused mayhem looking for a means to return home. They tried to make a version in the US, but that one sucks.

 2 Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire – Phil Daniels, Alun Armstrong and Bruce Payne

Nothing supernatural about this one, just a grudge match between the new snooker whizz kid on the block and the old established Snooker champion, set to music. Yes, it is a musical and somehow it works.

3 Hoodwinked – voices Anne Hathaway, Glen Close, Jim Belushi, Patrick Warburton and Anthony Anderson
A brilliant reworking of the Little Red Riding Hood story. It has been, turned into a criminal investigation with surprising and completely logical results. Very clever and wasted on the kids.

4 The Odd Job – Graham Chapman, David Jason, Diana Quick
Arthur Harris, Graham Chapman, is deeply depressed when his wife, Diana Quick, leaves him and decides to commit suicide, but cannot find a quick and painless method. When an odd job man, David Jason, calls at his house on the off chance of work, he hires him to kill him, but on condition he will not know when he is about to die. Shortly after this, his wife returns to him but he cannot find the odd job man to stop him. Soon the inept odd job man manages to off all manner of people all over London, never hitting his proper target. That sounds a bit grim, but it is very funny with David Jason hamming it up as the single-minded hit man trying to kill his contract come what may. After all, he has accepted the fifty quid, so he is honour bound to complete the job.

5 The Ritz – Jack Weston, Jerry Stiller, and F. Murray Abraham
Originally a Broadway farce, the movie is full of rapid humour and great one liners. A man married into the wrong kind of family has a hit put on him by his dying father-in-law and he tries to hide in a bath house his taxi driver recommends. It turns out to be a gay bath house and he is straight. The most outrageous queen, F Murray Abraham, takes him under his wing and then the mayhem steps up a notch when his gangster brother-in-law arrives with the intention of killing him. Mix in a really bad Mexican female entertainer with dreams of stardom, a balding sexual pest who knew him from the army and an undercover cop with a Mickey Mouse voice and you have a really funny film.

 6 The Life of David Gale – Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney
This seems to have dropped out of sight, but is a very serious comment on capital punishment. As the blub says, ‘the crime is clear, but the truth is not. ‘ A man in prison for what appears to be an open and shut case of murder will only talk to a particular reporter. His story unfolds slowly through the film and his guilt or innocence depends on a bit of missing video tape and the tension mounts as the reporter searches desperately for this final proof before it is too late. Very well put together, deserves a wider airing.
 
There are many more but I am probably boring you, so on to TV.

TV:

Chelmsford 123 - Rory McGrath, Andy Hamilton, Philip Pope etc A sitcom set in 123AD in Roman occupied Britain. Based in Chelmsford, as you may have gathered from the title, Aulus Paulinus, Philip Pope the new Roman governor has to deal with Badvoc, Rory McGrath the chieftain of the Trinovante, a rather unscrupulous character, always accompanied by his two stalwarts, Blag, Howard Lew Lewis and Mungo, Neil Pearson. Equally as good as Black Adder and much the same kind of humour, but largely ignored because it was aired on Channel 4 early on when hardly anyone could receive that channel.

Books

1 A Year of Wonders – Geraldine Brooks
Set in 1666, it is the story of Eyam the village that quarantined themselves to prevent the plague spreading as seen through the eyes of Anna Frith, an eighteen year old who experiences the ‘year of Wonders.’ Have some Kleenex handy.

2 Passage – Connie Willis
Set in a believably chaotic hospital, research, both good and bad is being done into near death experiences (NDE). A cast of characters who are believable, are wading through the flack thrown at them by an unscrupulous researcher, who only wants to promote his book and the vagaries of working in a busy hospital. Dr Joanna Lander eventually acts as a volunteer to be drugged into a state that closely resembles near death. Soon she is getting closer to the truth about what lies at the end of the passage. Can it really be what she keeps encountering? A good job one of her patients is an expert on the Titanic. Read it you will be intrigued.

3 Pirates in the Deep Green Sea – Eric Linklater
A children’s story of two brothers who meet eccentric Gunner Boles an ancient sailor and his octopus Cully. They discover the world is held together by huge underwater ropes, attended by pirates who have gone to work for Davy Jones when they drowned and a plot is afoot to cut the ropes. This is the work of the unpleasant Dan Scumbril and Inky Poops, who must be stopped at all costs. Harmless and charming fantasy which I devoured as a child and never forgot it. It has been in and out of print since 1949 and was reprinted in paperback in 2001 Well worth a read if you are still a child at heart.

I could think of a lot more books and movies, but I have run out of time, maybe a part two could follow.

Just a thought

As an English born citizen of the United Kingdom, I am aware that the nation I was born into may soon be changed beyond recall by a minority vote that I am not allowed to enter into. This firstly offends my sense of democracy and secondly annoys me that an organisation, with one letter in its name different from the reviled BNP has that kind of power over my country.
So I suggest that instead of an independent Scotland, we now hold a new referendum to join our countries to Scotland and all become Scottish. In this way, The First Minister will be able to give us all free NHS prescriptions, free university courses, full employment, lower taxes and all the other benefits that his vison of an independent Scotland entails. So to hell with the Yes and NO vote, vote for a United Scotland with Wales, England and Northern Ireland all joined together as one big Scotched up nation and hurrah for the - er… white and blue.

An Unexpected Journey

During WWI, in 1916 The Better Half’s (TBH’s) grandfather died in Mesopotamia which is now Iraq.  His regiment were present at Gallipoli and after that terrible slaughter, only 181 survivors out of 1000, they went to Egypt to rebuild the regiment.  We do not yet know if he was present at Gallipoli, but he obtained a promotion from private to lance corporal around the time that his regiment was in Egypt, so it is likely he was one of the survivors.  Once back up to full strength, the regiment went on to Basra and after a lot of fighting their commander surrendered to the Turks.  TBH’s Granddad died from dysentery whilst in a Turkish prisoner of war camp and is buried just outside present day Baghdad.   A grave we are not likely to visit.   TBH, managed to get his name registered for the roll of honour which is read out each evening at sunset amidst the poppies in the moat of the Tower of London.  We only found out a few days ago that his name would be included Sunday the 10^th of August. 

The weather forecast for Sunday was grim, so we debated whether or not to go.  Ex-hurricane Bertha was heading across the Atlantic and was due to arrive on Sunday.   Yellow weather warnings were making it seem that attending the roll call might not be such a good idea, but watching the weather reports regularly as Sunday approached, it began to seem less likely we would have travel disruptions or even very much rain, so Sunday morning we girded our loins and took a trip into town to witness the event. 

We decided to go by train, driving into London  is not an option these days and anyway we have senior rail cards, so we pitched up at the station in time for the eleven o’clock train to Paddington.  This particular train was very crowded and not having booked a seat, we had to sit separately until Didcot, where we were able to grab two seats either side of the gangway.  This was great until Reading when, what I can only describe as a hairy arsed baboon and his side kick stood between us.  Admittedly because there was no other space for them, but the baboon then went on to moan about everyone he knew to his long suffering  sidekick in a most irritating and penetrating voice.  The list of people he was criticising was endless, his wife, his wife’s friend, his best mate, his other best mate, an acquaintance of both him and his sidekick and so on and so on.  This in my left ear all the way to Paddington and  I longed for the days when trains were so noisy, you could barely hear the person sitting next to you, but the modern trains are much too quiet and I did not have an iPad to drown him out.

First Great Western boast an entertainment coach with interactive screens on the back of each seat, and we were in it, but all the right hand screens had crashed, so no matter what you did all you saw was the VoloTV logo.

In London, we had lunch and then had some time to kill until sunset.   A slight misunderstanding occurred at this point, TBH had wanted to visit the tower and do one of the tours and I had forgotten this and had invited one of my cousins, who lives in North London, to join us.  So instead of heading straight for the tower, we wandered around the West end looking at shops and eventually getting coffee and cakes in a nice restaurant recommended by my cousin.   We were lucky because at this point Ex-hurricane Bertha made her appearance in the form of a massive rainstorm and gusting wind.  By the time we had finished and chatted with my cousin, the weather had dried up and we continued our wander into Trafalgar Square.  The beggars were out in full force, perched on their levitation frames, dressed as silver and golden people or Yoda.  Within a few dozen yards we found three Yodas levitating and begging for money.  

One of the many Yodas levitating mysteriously.  Nothng to do with the metal pole and platform of course.

A strange golden figure.  The mask this character was wearing was for some inexplicable reason a caricature of Richard Nixon

Two exceptions were Death and a pretty good pirate statue.

The pirate

The weather started to cloud over and was beginning to look as if Bertha was back, so we decided to go into the National Gallery and have a look at the pictures.  Inside not only was it dry, but it was rather hot.  The darkening skies periodically made some of the galleries very dark as the clouds passed over and a foreign lady was haranguing one of the staff about not switching on the lights.  He replied that they were controlled by light sensors and would only come on when the whole building was dark and because sunlight was shining on some parts of the building and only this end was under clouds, there was nothing anyone could do.   I am not sure her English was up to this explanation, because she continued to argue as we went on past into the next gallery.  After a handful of galleries, from about the16th century to the 20^th, we came back out only to find that the anticipated rain had never happened.   But it was worth a visit to see some of the originals of the big names from the world of art.

After a while my cousin had to return home and we wandered down to the embankment walking towards the Tower.   Having been on our feet for a considerable time, by mutual agreement, when we came to Temple station, we took the tube on to Tower Hill. 

The ever changing skyline of London

The unchanging part of London

There we wandered around looking at the impressive display that the poppies made admiring the way that they were arranged.   

It was still some time to sunset, which would be at eight forty that particular day and so wandered some more around the outskirts of the tower.   By around six, we decided to go for a meal and finding one of the chain of restaurants with the rather off putting name of The Slug and Lettuce, we stopped for dinner.  The food was plain but excellent but I am often amazed that that name was used for this really rather good chain of eateries.  I first encountered that name in a comedy sketch done by Peter Cook and Dudley More when they were in one of the Amnesty International charity shows.  They were discussing a new restaurant that inexplicably was not doing too well and in the end decided that

this was because of the then rather unusual name of Slug and Lettuce, which was considered a joke at the time.  Since then this joke name has belied their comic wisdom and not put people off and I can recommend them as a good place to eat.

We then wandered back to the tower, the long way around and found a good spot overlooking the grass mound where the Beefeater (Yeoman of the Guard) was going to read out the roll of honour.  Each evening, a Yeoman reads out the list and a bugler then plays the Last Post.  There are around 180 names to be read and it takes a little under half an hour.

When we first arrived at the tower, there were a lot of foreign tourists, but as the evening drew on they gradually thinned out until the area became much less crowded.  Whilst we waited, a number of families with many a grey head amongst them started to line up along the viewing area next to us.  One lady was quite chatty, having come to listen for her Great Uncle’s name to be read out and another lady was walking along the line asking people’s names, looking for a long lost relative who she knew was attending, but had never met.

At the appointed time a Beefeater and a soldier wearing a bearskin helmet arrived and the Yeoman read out the list, including TBH’s Grandfather who was at number 84 on the list.  Finally the bugler played the last post and the event was over. 

The Yeoman reading out the Roll of Honour

By now it was beginning to get dark and we were rather foot sore, so we limped and staggered our way to the station and returned to Paddington via the District and Circle lines.  

   

The train home was not crowded and so we were able find a pair of seats and so were able to sit together all the way home.    We were very lucky, the weather was dry all the time we were out in the open and all in all it was a very satisfactory trip.

Celebrating 50 years

Friday we went to the Royal International Air Tattoo at Fairford, where they were celebrating 50 seasons of the Red Arrow display team. Being a little past our first flush of youth and beginning to find standing for long periods on uneven ground more of a chore than it once was, we booked a ticket that included The Cotswold Club enclosure. This provided tables and chairs arranged right up to the edge of the display area, so no need to carry our camping chairs. They also included a brunch in the ticket, so early risers could get something to eat after travelling to the show. We only live a few miles away, within earshot of the show in fact, so travel is not a great problem but once a year on International Tattoo days, we try not to go anywhere near Fairford. During the run up to the show and the three days it is open to the public, most of the roads around the area are either restricted to official use, turned into a one way system or closed altogether. The main A419/417 dual carriageway which runs from Gloucestershire to the M4 motorway is always busy at any time and during the show has special lanes put in place to guide through traffic around the queues. Fairford is within what is known as the Cotswolds and most of the lanes around the small picturesque town of Fairford and the nearby villages are not built for heavy traffic, being quite narrow and winding country lanes, so when a couple of hundred thousand people start to arrive for the show, it gets more than a bit busy. Friday is a good day to go because although the show is not fully open, there is much less traffic and arriving and departing is much less hassle. We were early enough to miss most of the traffic, but the organisation of the pedestrian access to the entrances from the car park was not very good and we twice found ourselves in the wrong queue for our particular entry ticket.
Once inside we were then able to stroll through the display area and look at the static displays until we decided to go to our enclosure to sit down.


On display were old aircraft

 and the Red Arrows,

   very old aircraft

 and the Red Arrows,

shiny aircraft

 and the Red Arrows,

  ugly aircraft

 and the Red Arrows,

unusual aircraft

 and the Red Arrows.

Happy iarcraft

 and, all together now...

The Red Arrows

 Whilst we were looking at the static display and before the Red Arrows took to the air up in the sky there were powerful jets, roaring until your ears rattled, climbing out of sight and zooming back again,

 

helicopters that could turn upside down,

huge aircraft carrying out aerobatics that no giant cargo carrying aircraft should be able to do, but which would be very handy if they were supplying a war zone

and eventually the long awaited Red Arrows.  To mark the anniversary, the first flight was accompanied by one aircraft from four different display teams from other countries, flown by their team leaders.

The four guest aircraft with the Red Arrows

After a flyby in formation, the guest aircraft left the display and landed whilst the nine Red Arrows circled around and waited for another display to finish and then put on their 50th season display, which was amazing.

Around half four, still high on spectacular aviation, we slowly walked the mile along the display stands and then back to the car park and home.

Another Short Trip - The Reunion

We have just been to our annual reunion with my ex colleagues and this year it was based close to the home of our erstwhile North East trainer. We were all going to stay in a hotel in Saltburn, a seaside resort that I have never been to before. Since it is on the North East coast and we had to pass Bridlington and Flamborough to reach it, we decided it would be interesting for me and The Better Half (TBH) to stop off at those places on the way up. This is because some of my family used to live along this part of the coast and I used to stay with them during some of my school holidays and TBH had never been to that part of the country before.  So it would be a bit of nostalgia for me and somewhere new for TBH. Accordingly, we had booked ourselves into a seafront hotel at Bridlington for one night.  TBH always likes a sea view if at all possible and the hotel we picked gave her just what she wanted.

A room with a view

To the left we could see the harbour and Flamborough Head

 From our room we had a great view of the wide sandy beach and in the distance, the cliffs of Flamborough Head and the lighthouse. The lighthouse is still operating and we could see the beam sweeping around that night.

We arrived in the early afternoon and spent the rest of the day wandering around looking for places I could recognise. Since I must have been in my teens when I was last there (and that was quite a long time ago), very little seemed familiar, but it is a pleasant place and we both enjoyed the good weather we had brought with us until evening when we took a meal in the Rags restaurant overlooking the harbour.

The harbour

This round the bay tripper looked familiar, although the name seems to have changed

This picture is from way back showing Bridlington's round the bay tripper, looking rather similar to the one above, apart from the name

Some of the sea front fun palaces seem to have gone a bit Disney since I was last there

Some work was taking place whilst we were there and this rig was part of the wet end of the works, which were taking pipes under the beach to the deep water.

The next morning, we checked out and went on to Flamborough Head. We drove to the lighthouse and right to the tip of the head. On Flambourough Head there is a golf course which, a long time ago, was managed by my uncle. His children, two of my cousins who blog regularly on Blogspot, lived there when they were children.

The present day golf club enterance

I took this picture in 1966 when I was in the area.  This enterance is much further along the road towards the sea than the present entrance

The new clubhouse is very different from the old buildings

I must have spent more time at Flamborough Head than Bridlington, because I found it a lot more familiar and recognised all the places we visited as if nothing had changed in all the mumblty mumble years since I was last there. I was pleased to find that the open areas were still populated with skylarks, something becoming increasingly rare around our home.

Nothing much different here

Or here

This still looks the same

North Landing still looks exactly the same and they may well be the same boats pulled up on the beach

This picture is most likely from the mid fifties

This faded notice is now redundant as all the UK foghorns have been switched off, but when it went off in the night, you were blown out of bed by the sound

By lunch time, we had walked ourselves to a standstill and so reluctantly left to head north. We had intended to visit Scarborough, but when we got there, the traffic was so clogged that we decided to skip it and keep on heading north. Due to the heavy traffic in the outskirts of Scarborough, time had been moving on and we were by now rather missing lunch and so on the road out of Scarborough, we stopped at the Daisy Tea Rooms. This was a very popular place and the car park was quite innocent of any free spaces, always a good sign. We were able to park in the road and found an empty table inside. After a snack, we carried on towards our reunion hotel at Saltburn-by-the-sea, using the coast road and arrived around three PM. We checked in and found some of the rest of our crowd already there and after the greetings and all that goes with seeing a friend you have not seen in a whole year, we went for a quick wander around the sea front. The main business part of Saltburn is on a high cliff or as the locals call it, a 'bank' and you can walk down or use the lift. We walked down, but since it is 120 feet back to the top and we had done a fair bit of walking around Flamborough, we decided to use the lift to return. Saltburn’s cliff lift is claimed to be the oldest working water powered lift of its kind in the UK. This kind of lift is commonplace throughout the world and found at a number of seaside towns where there is a high cliff or in this case a bank.

The water powered lift

 They consist of two cars, on rails running up a slope. The cars are usually on a single cable and counterbalance each other. There are different means of powering them, but the simplest is to have a large tank underneath the passenger area that can be filled with water. The one going up is empty and the one going down is filled to act as a counter weight, so that the heaviest car will pull the other up as it descends. Once each car is respectively at the top and at the bottom, the bottom tank is emptied and the top one filled and the change in weight allows them to swap places. On more recent versions, an electric motor is used to winch them up and down, still counterbalanced to a great extent, but much less efficient than the water counter weight method.

This is the end of the pier

During our walk, we kept encountering our friends who had gathered for the reunion and we stopped and talked each time, making the tour of the place slow but friendly. Saltburn has a small pier which unlike the piers I grew up with, does not have anything on it. I am used to piers with rides and amusements and dancehalls and so on. This one is quite small and stretches out to sea for about 680 feet. Because the beach is quite shallow here, at low tide the pier does not reach the water, so is only useful as a promenade. At most times it is over some water, but it is quite shallow and diving off the pier is not recommended, since a broken neck is not something many people want.

Because the pier is more over hard packed sand and only shallow water, anyone who needs this notice should be nominated for a Darwinian Award. 

Whilst we were there, the World Cup was taking place and some charity group had knitted small players and symbols for all the different teams where they were fixed along one rail of the pier and attracting a certain amount of interest.

Little knitted football heroes from all over the world

Once back at the hotel, we changed and then we sat around and chatted until it was time for dinner. The next day we were to take the steam train to Whitby using the North Yorkshire Moors Railway (NYMR) and so we got up early for breakfast so that we could be out of the hotel in time to catch the train. Breakfast was served from 7:30, but because the service was overwhelmed by our group all coming down at the same time and despite being there just about 7:30, we only just got out by 9. Because the nearest station for the NYMR only had a small car park, this year’s reunion organiser had decided that it would be best to double up in our cars and travel by road to Grosmont station, a little over half way along the railway’s route. He had reasoned that it gave us a chance to drive across the Yorkshire Moors and see the views and there we would all be able to find a parking space.

On the North Yorkshire Moors. The Beggar's Bridge. A medieval bridge with a legend attached to it

We drove across the moors in a convoy of six cars and arrived in time to see our train approaching the platform and steaming gently, waiting to be coupled to the carriages. It had a plaque on the front that I found interesting, since it showed that it had been built in my home town in 1956, possibly one of the last to be built there. The railway works which had been a very large part of our town is now a retail outlet centre that attracts visitors from all the nearby towns that do not yet have a retail outlet centre of their own. By the food outlets of the shopping mall there is an almost identical engine stood by the tables and chairs. It may not be identical exactly, but it is big and painted green, has lots of big wheels and a big thing to put the coal in at the back, so to my eyes it looks the same.

Our train approaching

At Whitby we all went our separate ways and dispersed across the town. Whitby is one of my favourite seaside towns and once more TBH had not been there before, so I showed her around and we had a pleasant morning exploring.

We did not go up the one hundred and ninety nine steps, but visited the old town area below them. The sun was out and I believe that this day was the hottest day of the year so far. Since the North East coast can be very cold, even in summer we were very lucky.

Doing tours around the town is an ancient steam lorry, converted into a bus. We did not ride on it but some of our fellow reunionists did and found it a very bumbpy ride

We went to the Quay side restaurant for the mandatory fish and chips, but because we were going to have a large meal that evening, we had a single round of bread and butter between us instead of chips. The fish was as expected, very fresh.

I just could not resist this wonderful legal firm's name

At about two PM we went back to the station and met up with our group. There was a slight mix up at this point, because one of our group is disabled and needed to go into the goods van via a ramp, the only access for wheel chairs. The NYMR organisers had reserved a coach for the rest of the group which was supposed to be adjacent to the disabled access, but which turned out to be several coaches along and not everyone managed to find it.

 As a result some of the train was crowded at one end whilst the reserved coach had empty seats.

Our return train which was built in Newcastle on Tyne

We arrived back at Saltburn around three and TBH and I had time to explore the top part of the town.

Next morning, we checked out and headed for Beamish open air Museum. This is one of those places where an old otherwise abandoned industrial site has been converted into a museum by transferring historical buildings piece by piece and brick by brick to rebuild a community as it would have been back in time, some buildings and houses being Victorian, some as recent as WWII. Beamish is on quite a large site and has a town, a colliery and a farm amongst other things. One of the things that these museums do for me is to make me realise how old I am because so many of the exhibits are familiar. I grew up at a time when many houses still had outside loos, solid fuel cooking ranges and open fires in every room but the kitchen, where the range provided the warmth. The older generation of great aunts and great uncles still lived like that and so even in 1900s replica houses the interiors in them were familiar to me from visits to my own family. One house was made up for WWII period and that was frighteningly familiar right down to the old Anderson bomb shelter in the back garden just like the one we used during air raids. There is a tramway in Beamish and a motor bus service that runs all around the site which you can use to get from place to place. This is more or less a necessity because the site is so large it would take a long time to walk.

The replica Old Bill bus based on the1912 version

A very old style of tram.  The ones I remember had glass windows and the driver was inside

We were able to ride on several of these at different times and again some of it was frighteningly familiar. I can remember as a child riding on the London trams and I always wanted to look closely at the fascinating big shiny brass controls. In Beamish I was able to have a much closer look than when I was just a kid who was discouraged from getting too close. They had two busses running that day, a single decker and a double decker Old Bill kind of open top bus. The Old Bill type of bus had been requisitioned to carry troops in WWI, but this one, I was disappointed to find, was a replica built in 1988. All in all it was a fun, but scary day, even having a pig sty full of pigs on the farm, just like my childhood home. Yes, I grew up with pigs, which probably accounts for some of my poor manners! After our trip to Beamish, we went on to look for the hotel at Birtley where we were all booked in for the night and in a convoluted drive around some of the most northern parts of the A1M road junctions, which took us close to the Angel of the North, we found our hotel.

Hard to miss and impressive simply because of its size, but in my list of great art, it falls way below Scotland's Kelpies and Morecombe's Eric.

That evening was the last supper for that year’s reunion and we frightened off all the other diners with our slightly rowdy behaviour as farewell speeches and so forth went on until quite late. Late that is for a bunch of pensioners who find museum exhibits more familiar than some of modern day life. In the morning, we bade our farewells and started on our approximately 300 mile journey home. It was a good trip, with few roadworks and no stationary traffic which is something of a record for any long road trip in the UK.