John Sharrock Taylor

I dedicate this story to Foney Pharaoh, Priceless Prince of Pedants on the Times Educational Supplement Overseas Forum and to all those poor deluded job applicants who so often assure us that spelling doesn’t matter.

It seems that ‘in the quest to cushion the effect of the global financial crisis’ the FBI has abandoned communicating sensitive information by certified mail or face-to-face interview, so this morning I received an email from Mr J. Edgar Hoover. Or I’m sure it would have been from Mr Hoover if that particular gentleman were not currently labouring under the considerable handicap of being dead. That being the case, the message was understandably signed by one of his colleagues at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington DC.

Apparently, in spite of the said world crisis, there is a great deal of unclaimed moolah floating around and the Feds’ Global Intelligence Cyber Division have (sic) discovered my name in a list of unpaid beneficiary (sic). All I have to do to claim my USD $10,700,000.00 is reveal my name (something of a surprise that they don’t know it, given that it’s on their list of deserving legatees) together with a few other helpful bits of personal information and, hey presto, I shall be quids, or at least rupees, in. Rupees? Sorry, I forgot to mention that the spondulicks are unaccountably (there’s a joke in there somewhere) lodged with the Reserve Bank of India and it’s the babus in Delhi who are eagerly awaiting the access details for my paltry life savings with the Walmington-on-Sea branch of Swallow Bank.

There is of course a drawback to this golden prospect of lucre and no, it’s not just the one you’re thinking of. Skulduggery is afoot. A certain Mr Cox-Jialo based in Canada and purporting to be my cousin (thinks: must be one of those wretched Yukon Cox-Jialos. If only Great Uncle Septimus had managed to resist his fatal weakness for Inuit ice-dancers) is also applying for the money ‘on my behalf’ so I need to contact the babus pretty damn sharpish to avoid having my claim jumped.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that I enjoyed the prospect of blazing in the lustre of unaccustomed pocket-money for no more than twenty minutes before my best beloved came down to breakfast and shattered the glittering prospect. Leaving aside certain arguably unlikely practical details in the Feds’ shining scenario she pointed out that the language used by Mr Hoover’s colleague didn’t quite ring true. The FBI, she said (and how she knows about these things I have no clue: Has she told me absolutely everything about her past life before our eyes sparked mutual fire in that fateful Wigan rehearsal of The Gondoliers in 1967?). The FBI, she assured me, does not use such emotive phrases as ‘this depressing recession’ or such miserable clichés as ‘swung into action’.

But even though my wife seemed so certain that my sudden windfall was not genuine I was about to argue the case when I noticed a detail she had not commented on. My message was signed Agent Shawn Henry, Assistant Director, FBI Cyber Division. Shawn? A cross between a large turd and a small deer? Would the Feds employ a man who couldn’t even spell his own name? The case, as they always used to say in the black and white courtroom dramas, rests.

Val and I have lived ‘overseas’ for more than twenty years. Ten years ago, reflecting on the fact that we had no settled base, we bought the old house we call Cortijo del Rector in the hills of Andalucía. During our pottering about on four continents we have seen a host of expat friends come and go and we notice that the same pattern carries on repeating itself. At first the sun shines every day and everything in the tropical garden is lovely. Then, gradually, little black clouds begin to appear. Usually it’s nothing as crude as ‘these damn foreigners will insist on speaking their own language’ though the expat’s own struggles with the host country idiom can certainly be a factor. No, it’s often the little things that begin to grate. And grate. And escalate. Watching a cookery programme on TV last night we found ourselves muttering that Spanish butchers are clueless about how to produce a decent piece of fillet steak. And warning bells began to jangle faintly. But most of all it’s ‘foreign’ bureaucracy that becomes the tipping point. To hear some of our friends talk you would think that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was a land free from functionaries, so we occasionally find it helps to reflect on some of our actual experiences.

Twelve or so years back, after much research I finally established that both our sons were legally eligible for 'home' university fee status. The simple key concept was not the twenty-four years of direct and indirect taxes we had paid in the UK but the fact that we were employed abroad on temporary rather than permanent contracts. Was I vouchsafed this important piece of information by HMG? Was I heckerslike. The jobsworths at the DfE played dumb and suggested that I apply for charitable assistance in ‘my own country' which, according to them, was poverty-stricken little Malawi.

Several years ago Will, our younger son had several weeks of hassle before the UK jobsworths finally deigned to assign him a National Insurance number (without which you can't legally work or sign up with a GP). Grilled extensively for details of the last medical centre with which he had been registered, he had difficulty remembering, having been all of nine years old at the time. The fact that he has a British birth certificate, a British passport and was born in the UK of British parents didn't seem to cut any ice. One of the major frustrations was that he knew several illegal immigrants who seemed to have no trouble working the system/ jumping the queue. At PM's Question Time last week, Dave promised an MP that the Government really would get round to ending the loophole which allows illegal immigrants to acquire National Insurance numbers so easily. ¿Hasta cuando?

We old uns are high-maintenance. I have just had my hernia 'done' and Val’s cataract operation last week has left her exclaiming rapturously about the colours of Nature and nearness of the wind vanes on a distant hill. Our Spanish National Health hospital is big, spotless, state-of-the-art but far from impersonal. The surgeons and the cleaners call each other by their first names. The professional pressures are considerable but everybody has time for a laugh. I contrast this with some of the nonsense my family in the UK have to endure from indifferent GPs and rude receptionists. The waiting time for both 'ops' was less than three months from the first chat with Maricarmen our friendly local doc who is the image of Goya’s Duchess of Alba.

Bureaucratic bolox exists in every country, including here, but let's not delude ourselves that 'east, west, home's best'. We've encountered jobsworths in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. Some of the worst were in India, but remember who set up that system.

Soak the rich and harry the poor,

That's our motto and our law;

We are the rulers of this land,

We are the babus, a merry band,

Under the table or through the back door,

We'll empty your pockets and ask for more!

We are the babus, this is our law --

Soak the rich and harry the poor!

(Ruskin Bond)

As this started as a discussion on the 'Teaching Overseas section of the Times Educational Supplement website it has rather a blackboard bias, but I hope it may ring the odd bell (and, always in my view,  the odder the better) with expats and others in general.

Too many themes to contemplate efficiently in the aftermath of last night's Gran Reserva, but a few disconnected jottings not necessarily involving the finite verb:

It sometimes has to do with roots, in the Haleyan sense. In my first 'Breetish' School, over twenty years ago, there were precisely four children with mother tongue English (and Mrs T assures me that I'd fathered at least two of them). Not a few others sported very British labels. Frederick Ashton and Piers and Lavinia Bensley-Bromilow were native speakers of castellano but their grandparents had certainly had impeccably home counties credentials. Language is certainly a big part of ‘Britishness’ but not the only one. A Salvadoran parent told me his fecklessness about punctuality had once lost him an important contract so he'd put his son in the British School 'to acquire English and learn to arrive on time'. In passing, my PA in a Santiago, which is parochial in outlook but cosmopolitan in its streets signage, used to delight in my stubbornly North-Gwalian pronunciation of Calle Llewellyn-Jones which, as you will readily imagine, emerges rather differently in Spanish. Talking of Santiago, there seems to be a bizarre assumption South of the Border that big strapping girls look fetching when they are bulging out of 'jumpers' (gymslips to those of us a certain UK generation). Such sights may have made Terry Thomas's heart beat faster in the St Trinian’s days but I have to say I prefer a pisco sour.

A fairly frequent phenomenon in 'British' schools of my acquaintance has been the staffroom pundit who pronounces at frequent intervals and with serene authority on how things are done 'at home'. He may not have seen the white cliffs since Maggie marmalised ILEA and he thinks SATs are merely an essential part of the weekend, but he knows many cheerful facts about what he confidently (and totally inaccurately) refers to as the UK National Curriculum. And that there ol' ‘British’ National Curriculum has often been fertile source of entertainment, with some of the most vocal parents insisting on every jot and tittle on the grounds that their offspring would otherwise be irretrievably disadvantaged if and when they reintegrated into the British system. In my experience some of the most stubbornly 'British' parents were pretty young Asian ladies married to middle-aged chaps like me. One such zealot, who had striven for years to keep us up the mark, amused me when, on returning to UK, she placed her children in Sevenoaks, an International Baccalaureate school whose website loftily declares that it merely 'takes note' of the NC. It wasn't just the parents. A Head of English of my acquaintance would insist that the purity of Holy Writ would be compromised if our Central American primary school staff failed to teach every unit in the English text book. 'Including the one requiring the children to bring their ice skates to school?' inquired somebody innocently.

Another of my British colleagues used to insist that all of us expats were only there among the palms and panama hats because we had blotted our copybooks at home. 'We never dine on steamers/ For they are English ground' he would mutter, slyly echoing Kipling. I later found out that he'd done time in a South American slammer for child molestation. Mind you, I have to agree that some of us international educators would hardly pass muster at a vicarage tea party and it's not necessarily middle-aged testosterone that's to blame. When one of my erstwhile colleagues was told one Monday morning that she was looking a little peaky she explained that it was because she'd shagged two thirds of the Malawian national football team the previous night. I think she probably included the reserve, but if she had gone in for fractions they would almost certainly have been vulgar.

All of which takes me back to the last years of the Designated Schools Board of Malawi, a motley mob of arithmetically-challenged bean counters, morris dancers and old pith helmeteers which claimed to 'run' our group of six international schools. In fact our particular slice of the fiefdom had already been 'run', to all intents and purposes into the ground, by a small coterie of the former Headmaster's cronies with the aid of copious supplies of a liquid mysteriously 'designated' as MGT. There was also a tough, leathery, allegedly female Bursar called June, with a voortrekker accent like the crack of a sjambok who would greet prospective parents who interrupted her endless games of patience (oh the irony!) with a friendly 'What the f*** do YOU want?' and who, if she needed to communicate with the Water Board, would bellow down the phone 'I want to talk to the Chief Coon.'

In spite of the fact that the gloriously-situated campus was falling to pieces, we had a maintenance crew (all from the same tribe as the Estate Bursar) which bid fair to outnumber the Malawian Army. The day, early in the Summer vacation, when I arrived unexpectedly on the Heinkel from Jo'burg these worthies were in the process of dismantling the girls' hostel roof and passing it piecemeal over the fence to commercially-minded cousins in the neighbouring township. We had painters who painted straight lines resembling the bars on a Wavy Navy officer's sleeve and boilermen who hadn't even seen a boiler but wore smart suits and ran a very efficient loan-sharking business. With what LEAs (was it in the Baker days?) used to call 'falling rolls' we were extravagantly over-staffed in almost every subject area. A quick examination of the previous year's phone bill showed 8,000 of our English quids in unpaid personal calls to turf accountants and maiden aunts in Basingstoke and Bognor.

Our esteemed Bursar was due celebrate her 60th at the end of the coming academic year, so I cryptically wrote 'THE END OF JUNE' in the diary space for the thirtieth of the sixth. Through the application of Thatcherite stringency we rapidly became much slimmer, fitter and better looking at all levels and in just twelve months we went from break-even to a $500,000 surplus, with the 'rolls' reversing their downward trajectory. Unfortunately the old DSB was still at its last faltering gasp and the Bosnian Serb Head of our sister school, mouthing the old Marxist slogan 'What's yours is mine and what's mine's me own', managed to divert much of the loot in building a perimeter wall costing roughly the same amount as the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

Does all this rambling have anything to do with Britishness? Well, yes it does in a way. Colleagues of various nationalities used to assure me that the cheerful ruthlessness (a man may smile and smile and be a villain) needed for giving surplus colleagues the old heave-ho is a VERY British quality. 'Beware of us Indians,' Colonel Gupta told me in the Delhi Gymkhana Club,' We may stab you in the back. Unlike the British, who'll stab you in the front but always with the most impeccable courtesy.'

I was walking with my son Will in the famous Lanes at Brighton where to his evident pleasure and mine we met a very pretty Spanish girl. He kissed her on both cheeks and they launched into the ‘I haven’t seen you for eons and how the heck are you anyway?’ kind of conversation when friends meet for the first time for over a week. But after a minute or so the young woman said seriously:

‘William, we are being discourteous to your father.’

My son grinned cheekily back at her and replied, still in Spanish ‘Don’t worry about my father. He speaks better Spanish than you do.’

Though not true it was a nice compliment and also something of a standing joke in our family. We both started to learn Spanish in El Salvador almost twenty years ago when Will was nine and I was forty-four. I rapidly became a competent enough speaker for most purposes and my grasp of the grammar is also quite good though I still ask my friend Mári to check anything such as a concert programme which is going to appear in public. Will on the other hand refused to speak a word of Spanish for the first two years of his life in Latin America then went off to play rugby in Buenos Aires and returned both fluent and voluble, though when I commented that it was a great thing to grow up with two languages he muttered darkly ‘Yes, you end up talking pidgin in both of them’.

In spite of that early touch of linguistic pessimism his twenty-ninth year finds him with an impressive portfolio: translating, copywriting for the tourism industry and working as the only non-hispanic member of BUPA’s bilingual advisory team.

The El Salvador years were so long ago that it would be difficult to remember a time when our family couldn't make itself understood in Spanish. Difficult, that is, if we did not have such vivid memories of my colleague Ian Robertson’s heroic efforts as our translator.

We reached San Salvador in the middle of the school vacation when almost all the staff were on leave. We arrived on the evening of the exact day I had signalled to the Mr McQuiggan, the Headmaster, and he in turn had briefed Ian to meet us at the airport. Ian duly sat at the airport all day anxiously scanning the arrivals from every Miami flight but no Taylors had materialised. This should not have been surprising as I had also advised the Headmaster that we were coming by road via a circuitous route from Connecticut via Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Mexico and Guatemala, a fact which Mr McQuiggan, who was habitually slightly vaguer than mist, had forgotten to pass on.

The morning after our arrival we ate a leisurely breakfast, watched a total eclipse of the sun from the hotel garden then telephoned the school secretary who first expressed consternation that we had managed to evade Ian at the airport and then rapidly despatched him to collect us. Once we had made contact we found him to be immensely kind, a big bear-like man who was prepared to devote a week or more of his own vacation to helping complete strangers to find their feet in an unfamiliar situation. The next few days were a frantic flurry of activity as he squired us around house rental agents, supermarkets and immigration offices, supporting us through the hundred and one things necessary for a foreign family arriving in a new country.

While it was clear that most of the time Ian DID manage to communicate at some level with the locals it was not, in Startrek parlance, communication as we know it. He spoke at machine-gun speed in a strong Liverpool accent with frequent ‘I means’ interpolated in English and when we came to know some Spanish ourselves certain characteristics of Ian’s unique version of it began to emerge. He never for instance, attempted to inflect the verb but clung grimly to the first person singular, merely changing the pronoun. For some reason known only to himself, he avoided the word ‘yo’ altogether, so the verb ‘to walk’ went ‘mi camino, tu camino el camino... anything other than the present tense being, of course, out of the question. His treatment of the verb ‘hablar’ was particularly interesting. The English equivalent is, quite precisely, ‘to speak’, so that ‘Hablo español’ means ‘I speak Spanish’. I wondered if Ian had been influenced by German ‘haben’ which means both ‘to speak’ and ‘to have, so that ‘Ich habe Deutsch’ means ‘I have/ speak German’, because he clearly thought that ‘me hablo’ (heavily aspirated) would do for both ‘I speak’ and ‘I have’. In such constructions as ‘Mi hablo septimo grado mañana’ the confusion was not crucial but ‘Mi hablo cinco kilos de patatas’, in which he was apparently admitting to conversing with a bag of spuds, was definitely inclined to raise an eyebrow.

Spanish has two verbs ‘to be’, ser which deals with permanent things and estar which usually (but not always) covers the temporary. There was no way Ian was going to attempt both verbs so he settled for estar which he of course he conjugated as ‘me ésta, tu ésta, el ésta...with the accent firmly on the wrong syllable. In addition to the usual meaning of ‘I am, you are, he is…’ he also used it to denote intention, as in ‘¿Ésta tú La Luna hoy noche?’ meaning ‘Are you going to La Luna (a popular local restaurant) this evening?’

But by far the most interesting of Ian’s contributions to hispanic linguistics was the word ‘consumenty’, which, according to context, could be either a noun or a verb. You can’t find ‘consumenty’ in your Spanish dictionary? Don’t worry. Neither can I or anybody else because it’s neither Spanish nor English but pure Ian. Let me explain. Ian taught Theory of Knowledge in the International Baccalaureate Diploma programme. Theory of Knowledge in Spanish is Teoría de Conocimiento. Ian, having a tin ear, heard ‘conocimiento’ as ‘consumenty’ and via his own unique processes of logic concluded that if ‘knowledge’ was ‘consumenty’ then ‘Mi consumenty’ must mean ‘I know’.

There were two truly positive things about Ian’s Spanish. The first was the fact that he used it at all, unlike so many Britons abroad who are inclined just to speak loudly while bemoaning the fact that the benighted foreigner doesn’t even, by George, speak English. The second was that our Salvadoran colleagues actually encouraged him to mangle their language. Unlike the supercilious French, native speakers of Spanish will seldom insult the floundering foreigner by revealing that their English is ten times better than his attempts at their idioma, though I have to admit that there was also a touch of devilment in it when any contribution Ian made in English during a staff meeting was immediately greeted with joyous demands of ‘Castellano, Ian! Castellano!’ Ian, who knew perfectly well that they were sending him up, was always happy to oblige.

Bizarre as his own version of the language was, one extremely useful piece of advice Ian  gave us in those early days is well worth repeating, albeit with the necessary grammatical tweak: ‘As soon as you start to speak to a local he’ll automatically reply in rapid Spanish which you won’t understand, so it’s best to say right at the beginning ‘Me no hablo mucho espanol’.

Almost exactly a year after our arrival in San Salvador Ian, who was inclined to be careless about his diet, suffered a diabetic crisis. Once again he, Val and I seemed to be the only members of staff who had not gone off on vacation. I bundled him into the car and drove him down to the clinic. The GP took his blood pressure, rolled his eyes to heaven, picked up the phone and spoke rapidly into it. Then he turned to me and said:

‘The endocrinologist is waiting for you. Her consultation room is three doors down the corridor. Get him there as fast as you can. This is serious. His blood pressure is sky high.’

The endocrinologist attempted to ask Ian a number of diagnostic questions but he was semi-delirious and simply rambled on in his garbled version of castellano.

‘What is he speaking?’ she asked me in some consternation. ‘Is it French?

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Let me try. Ian, listen carefully. This is how we’re going to do it. The doctor will ask a question in Spanish. I will translate it into English and you will answer BRIEFLY and then shut up while I give her your answer.’

I know it worked, because when I saw Ian in London ten years after his crisis, he was looking a lot fitter and healthier than he had in the El Salvador years which might not have been the case if we had not been able to organise some reasonably accurate communication between him and the specialist. And that, of course is the point of my story. We wince a bit when we read an English version of a Spanish menu which has obviously been done on an auto translator (conveniently forgetting the kindly tolerance of our Spanish neighbours when they hear us massacring their beautiful language) but some situations really are a matter of life and death and require a competent translator such as my boy Will, or if you’re really desperate, me.

Am I alone in finding Facebook a slightly worrying ‘place’? Apart from my date of birth which reveals my age as pushing 106 I haven’t put any personal information on there so I’m not really concerned about cyber crooks emptying my secret Swiss bank account. And I know it’s an American site, so (our two nations famously being divided by a common language) I’m not too disturbed by those constant exhortations to ‘poke’ ladies I hardly know. No, what really bothers me is the ‘friends’ thing.

While I get along reasonably well with the human race in general I’ve never felt the need for those ‘troops of friends’ Mac-you-know-who speaks of so wistfully just before he gets his come-uppance at the end of The Scottish Play. Whether in cyber space or the physical world I only have room in my paucity of spirit for a few real intimates and logging on this morning to check the birthday of one of them I was slightly startled to be presented with twelve pages of names. These, I was informed, were people with whom I might be acquainted because we appeared to have at least one friend in common.

A quick skim through the list demonstrated to my complete satisfaction that I didn’t know eighty-five percent of them from Adam, Eve or the Akond of Swat. Five percent or so were names which rang some kind of bell but I could only vaguely guess at why that might be and I wasn’t sufficiently interested to try and find out. A further five percent had me reaching instinctively for holy water, garlic and a sharpened stake: Apella, for instance, a teacher Val and I used to work with, whose class was in a permanent state of riot because, despite all our considerable powers of threat and persuasion, she spent most of the lesson in the corridor yakking into her mobile phone. Then there was Diewthi. the smiling Principal my employers gave me to ‘support’ my work as Director of our Indian international school. ‘Et tu, Diewthi’ quickly became one of our family catch phrases. The rest were former pupils, nice young folk with whom I don’t feel I have much in common these days, though quite a few of them are already my cyber ‘friends’ because I’d never be so discourteous as to reject their requests. But, with rare exceptions,  I don’t go touting for new members. And if I did they might say ‘no’ and how humiliating would that be?

My other problem with the ‘friend’ thing is the relentlessly cheerful triviality of it all. So what if my cousin in Illinois hates Burger King? It probably won’t deal a death blow to the Chicago meat packing industry or precipitate another world financial crisis. And would you think me callous if I told you that I’m not really bovvered about your cold in the nose? Oh, I admit that it’s pleasant from time to time to exchange nods with family and old friends in Oz and the Americas, though we’ve always done that either by email or even, bizarre as it might seem, by putting pen to paper. And why on earth would I want to gossip online with people I see almost as often as I see my much better half? Just occasionally in my rare Facebook fossickings I come across real gold. Sergio Gajardo was my staunch ally in bringing some kind of decorum to a drug-infested and almost manically disordered South American school in the mid 1990s. After I moved on to take up a headship in Africa he was fired by the new regime for speaking his mind too frankly and we lost touch but thanks to Facebook we are back in contact again.

So apart from such odd bits of serendipity why do I ‘bovver’ continuing to be a member of Facebook? One reason is that the publishing gurus all agree that social networking sites are essential for promoting aspiring and even established writers, though I suspect that my curmudgeonly temperament will make that something of an uphill struggle. Another is that Wendy and Steve, the indefatigable couple who run our local association of English Speakers, use Facebook to circulate information about upcoming events. I’m genuinely grateful that they are prepared to put so much time into this essentially thankless activity and I really do want to know when Chef William is next planning to serve up his excellent roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. So I’ll continue to keep Facebook in my list of 'faves'  though I may never have the courage to ‘poke’ any of my female acquaintances.

I once went to a party at the home of a Coronation Street star. She was still in her teens and lived with her parents in a big house on Wigan Road in Standish and she was called Jennifer Moss. Jennifer who? I hear you ask, but Jenny, who joined the series as Lucille Hewitt in 1960, was as famous in those early Corrie days as Ena Sharples and, with her snub nose, gamine curls and sparkling eyes she was infinitely prettier. I didn’t know her well. What am I saying? I didn’t know her at all, but she’d attended Wigan Girls’ High School with my girlfriend Audrey and I suppose that must have been the connection. Jenny continued acting in the Street until 1973 when her alcoholism got the better of her. She went through four failed marriages before finally finding peace with a fifth husband and dying in 2006 at the age of 61.

Few if any of the intellectual circles Val and I have moved in over the years (and what a disturbing metaphor for life those circles are) have included folk with a good word for Corrie. They don’t actually watch it, you understand, but they do occasionally catch an episode by accident as it were, out of the corner of the eye, perhaps while doing the ironing, restoring an antique corner cupboard or re-reading the best of Schopenhauer, and on this admittedly tenuous basis they all agree that it’s rubbish. The story lines are contrived (unlike Dr Who, Twelfth Night or Romeo and Juliet, for instance) and the acting wooden and unconvincing.

If I’m busy at my favourite conversational occupation of gilding a nugget of truth I enjoy informing my loftily intellectual friends that I became a Coronation Street addict when I watched the first episode in 1960 and have remained an unswerving devotee right up to the present day. It isn’t quite true, of course. During three of those years I was at university, largely preoccupied with what WS Gilbert called ‘beer and beauty’ not to mention my other passions for debating and vintage cars. For the first three years of our marriage Val and I didn’t even possess a TV set and throughout much of the 1970s our evenings were largely occupied with amdram and music-making. Then, belatedly and thankfully, when we had almost given up hope, there was child-rearing followed by almost twenty years abroad in wild and lawless places where even the writ of Granada Television didn’t run.

During home leave and the intervals between doing this and that we did of course watch many individual episodes of Coronation Street but the current rash of documentaries for the 50th anniversary of the show reveal that we missed whole swathes of plot. The 50th anniversary! What an opportunity for our current circle of intelligentsia (hardly bigger than a hoola hoop these days) to tut and shake their heads over the blatant sensationalism of the tram crash which is quite clearly aimed at stealing the soap awards back from East Enders. The same lofty criticisms as ever come trotting out but, I notice, with an interesting variation: the acting is now not just wooden. It is far below the standard of those first, grainy, gritty, black and white episodes. But if they would only take the trouble to abandon Schopenhauer for a moment and sit down to watch an early episode our critical friends might even have to abandon that opinion.

The first episode of Coronation Street, screened in 1960 is a fascinating historical document because in all kinds of ways it was breaking new ground not only in British but also in world television. But most of the performances, even those of Violet Carson as Ena and Pat Phoenix as Elsie Tanner, still have a touch of the Little Theatre about them which has been absent from Corrie since the wonderful, but blatantly stagy John Savident retired from hamming it up behind the bacon counter.

Frankly, my dears, many of today’s Corrie cast could act most of their predecessors not only off the set, but down the Street and into the job centre as well. Comparisons, as Constable Dogberry justly observed, are odorous, and it might seem difficult to pick one name out of a stellar cast but if young Craig Gazely, who plays the eccentric Graeme Proctor, was not put on this earth expressly to play Trinculo, Feste, Touchstone and Launcelot Gobbo, I’ll eat my cap and bells. The great theatrical warhorses such as Ian McKellen have clamoured to get into the Corrie cast. I just hope that when the offer comes from the Royal Shakespeare Company the Street’s management will be generous enough to let Craig out of it for that Stratford season.

Watch that first episode of Corrie. It still stands up pretty well despite my reservation about the staginess of some of the acting, and veterans Jack Howarth and Doris Speed even escape that stricture. And if you don’t nip out to make the tea you won’t miss a bright cheeky little voice just off camera calling Elsie a silly old cow. That was Jennifer Moss.

Quasimodo had been worried about the publicity. He enjoyed his work and, indeed, anything at all to do with campanology and he was blissfully happy in his new life with Esmeralda, though, with the impending patter of tiny hunchbacks, their little apartment in the bell tower high above the Ile de la Cité was certainly going to feel a bit cramped. What worried him most was the thought that the even tenor of their life (even when worried Quasimodo relished a pun) might be disturbed by prying visitors or, even worse, the paparazzi.

It had all started, of course, with the novel. And, it had, of course been just that, a novel. Quasimodo often smiled to himself when he thought of that tragic, and entirely fictional ending with him and Esmeralda embracing in their common grave. Then there had been the film of the book, starring Mr. Laughton, whose Hollywood good looks, Quasimodo humbly believed, had been too conventionally handsome for the role. Then there had been the book of the film for those readers who couldn’t read French or, if they could, would certainly have struggled with M. Hugo’s polysyllables and gothic flights of fancy. Then the radio and TV interviews and the articles in the glossy illustrated magazines (Quasimodo always insisted on being photographed on his good side) such as ‘Allo’, ‘Elle’, and, of course, ‘Bell’.

Suddenly, from being an obscure functionary, the bell-ringer found himself the most famous hunchback in Paris...in France...in the whole world. And, truth to tell, he was surprised to discover that he enjoyed it. People made pilgrimages to see him at work, not only from all over France but from every conceivable country on the face of the earth.

As I’ve already mentioned the only drawback to all this adulation was the lack of room to swing a cat. Not that Quasimodo literally wanted to swing a cat. Having himself suffered a great deal of unkindness in his earlier life he was always extremely tender towards the underdogs, and indeed, undercats of this world. In point of fact, he and Esmeralda had a much-loved ginger tom called Robert le Majeur, who had his own tale, though it doesn’t come into the present story. No, Quasimodo didn’t want to swing a cat, but as the Cathedral's senior campanologist he most emphatically did need room to swing a bell, and a very large bell at that.

The bell in question was Emmanuel Le Grand Bourdon de Nôtre Dame, greatest of the Cathedral’s mighty peal, weighing all of thirteen tons. Naturally, Quasimodo was a passed master of the art of change ringing with the usual apparatus of ropes and sliders, but his particular party piece was to ring his beloved Emmanuel using only the strength of his mighty arms. All of which brings us to the tragic incident of the American in Paris.

Emmanuel

It was a bright, sunny Spring day with the plane trees along the rive of the Seine bursting into joyous leaf. The bell chamber was full of visitors all eager to see Quasimodo perform and he was determined not to disappoint them. He flexed his bulging biceps, grasped the great bell’s bronze lip and applied his gargantuan strength. For a moment Emmanuel’s dead weight continued to hang plumb, then centimetre by centimetre he swung on his axis until he was balanced at a forty-five degree angle, sustained only by the hunchback’s straining sinews. Then suddenly Quasimodo leapt clear as the bell swung back to the perpendicular with a deep BOOOM!

It was an amazing feat and the assembled crowd of tourists burst into spontaneous applause. But one young American had watched the bell-ringer’s virtuoso performance with particular fascination and as Quasimodo signed his autograph book with the practised flourish of the celebrity campanologist he whispered in awed tones:

‘Gee, Mr. Modo, I’d just lurve to do that. Do you think I could?’

‘I very much doubt it. It’s extremely dangerous. How do you think the non-photogenic side of my face got to be like this?’

‘Aw gee, Mr. Modo, I carry a stack of insurance. Just let me have a go!’

‘Very well, but on your head be it. Literally, I rather fear.’

To cut a lengthening story short, the young American did indeed try to replicate Quasimodo’s extraordinary feat but unfortunately he failed to leap clear quickly enough. To the horror and dismay of all present the edge of the great bell struck him a thirteen ton hammer blow and he flew straight out between the louvres of the bell chamber and fell a hundred feet to the cobblestones below.

By the time Quasimodo and the shocked tourists had straggled down the tortuous spiral staircase to ground level, a crowd had gathered round the shattered body of the young American and a puzzled gendarme was reaching for his notebook. ‘Can anybody identify this man?’

Gazing down at the pathetic corpse, Quasimodo murmured sadly ‘Non, monsieur l’agent...His face just doesn’t ring a bell.’

An entrepreneur in Colombey les Deux Églises (or some similarly exotic location) was inspired to set up a sex supermarket in a redundant branch of Le Tesceau (Chaque petite chose vous aide). As he worked on the details of the project the phrase that popped into his mind was ‘horses (or at least fillies) for courses’ and he decided to be very precise in targeting the various socio-economic groups of potential customers. On the ground floor, exorbitantly expensive, were the super-models; on the first floor the ‘celebritees’ with which the media is so besotted, on the next floor, the soap actresses, and so on. On the very top floor, definitely cut price, were the teachers.

But after a couple of months, le Richard Bransonne de la Bonque reviewed his takings and was horrified to discover that all the different departments were losing money hand over fist, with the single exception of the teachers, who were absolutely coining it in.

The seely entrepreneur rushed round to his bordello and, listening at a ground floor door, was distressed to hear a rather tense female voice saying: 'Try not to mess up my makeup but DO hurry up and get it over with. I'm out of the cathouse and on the catwalk in less than ten minutes.'

It was the same story on almost every floor. The actresses would only countenance positions in which they could continue studying their lines. The nuns in particular put their customers off their stroke by clicking their rosary beads at all the wrong moments. Beryl, the prettiest of the baristas, reduced her client to complete impotence by constantly referring to the mighty power of what she called her live-in lover's JCB.

Finally, having taken the lift to the very top floor, the entrepreneur listened at the door of one of the teachers. There was a long pause and a great deal of heavy breathing. Then a female voice said with studied patience: ‘Listen, I don't care how many times we do this, but you’re not going home until you get it RIGHT.'

One of the old-time Shakespearean ‘heavies’, it may have been the great Frederick Valk, was playing in Hamlet at the Leeds Grand Theatre.

On a warm Wednesday in summer when there was no matinée he wandered off into the pleasant West Riding countryside and sat down on a sunny bench outside an old village pub with a tankard of Theakston’s and his copy of The Stage. The bees buzzed sleepily and it was only when a finger of cold blue shadow finally reached out and touched him that he awoke with a start, fumbled for his gold half-hunter and realised with dismay that it was already late afternoon. The pub, of course, was closed but in those days villages still had post offices and it was to the village post office that our worried actor went.

‘Th’ bus? Nay, lad, we only have one bus to Leeds and that’s on Fridays.’

‘Oh calamity! This is very distressing. You see, I’m due on stage as Polonius in this evening’s performance at the Grand.’

‘Ah, Hamlet! Well, if I remember rightly, Polonius doesn’t come on till Scene Two. I’m sure we can get thee there before that. I’ll tell thee what: My brother Jed’s a bargee on th’ Cut. Tha knows, th’ Leeds and Liverpool Canal. It runs reight past th’ bottom o’th’ village street and I happen to know that our Jed will be passing any time in th’ next half hour. Get thisen down theer and tell Jed I sent thee.’

‘Oh, thank you, thank you, dear boy! I shall be forever in your debt.’

The old thespian did as the postmaster suggested and within twenty minutes he was comfortably seated aboard the Swan of Guiseley, clutching his silver-topped cane, cloak gathered about him and fedora pulled well down against the deepening chill of an English summer evening. It was a straight run into the city with only three locks to negotiate and Jed was confident of getting him to the theatre on time but as he relaxed next to the skipper on the stern thwart of the barge our actor gradually became conscious of a pungent odour rising from the open forward hold. And sure enough, when the keeper of the first lock called out cheerfully:

‘What’re you carryin’ today, Jed, lad?’ the kindly bargee stolidly replied ‘A load of shit...and an actor.’

And as they approached the second lock, the same scene was replayed with exactly the same dialogue.

‘What’re you carryin’ today, Jed, lad?’

‘A load of shit...and an actor.’

But as they approached the city limits the old actor turned to his companion and said gently ‘Jed, dear boy, before we reach the next lock, could we possibly have a word...about the billing?’

The following is a distillation of many similar conversations over the past forty years.

‘We’d like you to come and sing for us at our Christmas concert.’

‘Fine. I charge a flat rate of 200 euros if you’re happy with stuff from my (extensive, may I modestly mention) repertoire. Obviously it’ll be more if you expect me to learn anything non-standard.’

‘Oh. It’s for charity. We were rather hoping...’

‘You were hoping I’d do it for nothing? But wouldn’t that be me being charitable, not you? Or have you decided to be charitable at my expense?’

‘Expense? No, no, we’re not asking you for any money.’

‘You think being a musician doesn’t cost me money?’

‘A musician? I didn’t realize you were a musician. What do you play?’

‘The voice.’

‘Ah, I see. You just sing.’

‘That’s right. Like Sr. Domingo I just sing. Mind you, nobody ever takes it for granted that Placido or José will sing for nothing. ’

‘You compare yourself to Placido Domingo?’

‘Not at all, or at least not favourably, but like him I’ve had an expensive education. We both have to buy such things as sheet music, pianos, computers and software and it takes us both at least a dozen hours of work to produce a half hour performance.

'Work? surely singing is, well, spontaneous?

'It's surprising how many unmusical people think that. For the purposes of argument, if I do decide to sing at your ‘charity’ event, who’s going to play the piano.’

‘What about Jim, your regular accompanist?’

‘Good idea. Mind you, I happen to know that he charges 200 euros as well.’

‘But it’s...’

‘For charity. Yes, I know. Listen, I regularly donate to the NSPCC and Save the Children and I’ve done a couple of fund raisers for El Comedor de Santo Domingo in Málaga...’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Of course you didn’t because I’d never dream of asking you to save my pocket by dipping into yours. Listen, I’ll stop teasing you. I won’t charge you a fee for appearing at your ‘charity’ event. I’ll sing for expenses.’

‘Expenses?’

‘Well, yes. It’s a four hour round trip from my place to yours and I’ll have to leave home just after lunch. Just pay my petrol expenses and feed me after the show. A slice or two off the bird, a couple of mince pies, some figgy pudding, and we’ll call it quits.’

‘I’m sorry, we just don’t have a budget for all that.’

‘I’m sorry too.’