Dull Calendars

Guess who was born in Small Heath, Birmingham, about seventy years ago and grew up having a passion for football and history and is now known as the Dullest Man in Britain. I’ll give you a clue. He supports A.... V....

Yes, it wasn’t me but how a boy from Small Heath supported the V is beyond me.

The man’s name is Kevin Beresford and it all started back in 2003. Here’s how:

"I run a small print shop in Redditch, and in 2003 I wanted to create a calendar for our customers. Redditch had three prisons, no cinema, but copious roundabouts and so, for the laugh, my employees and I decided on Round-A-Bouts of Redditch.

"I was in a pub one Friday night when a friend called to say it was on the Graham Norton Show. Graham was flicking through a calendar of gorgeous Greek islands with his guest and brought Roundabouts of Redditch out as a comparison. I absolutely loved it. It changed my life. Demand rocketed for the calendar. We had initially printed 100 copies – soon we were selling to people around the world."

It sold 100,000 copies.

Since then, he has published a series of calendars reflecting his interest in the ordinary things in life. For example Village Notice Boards. He says: "Why was I drawn to village notice boards? I have found you can learn a lot from a village notice board. As you approach one you can see even from a distance that with the amount of notice sheets pinned to the board you can get a fair indication of how much is going on in this small part of the world. Quantity on the board of course is not the be all and end all. One proud board can boast an art-house village cinema albeit a tiny one. Another trumpets Shakespeare’s play, Richard III....the half hour version. Boards proclaiming 44 days of art festival. And there is always the obligatory lost cat. Bless."

In 2022 he published 'The Wonderful World of Jack Grealish’s Calves'. 

"When he left V.... to go over to the dark side, I felt that he was leaving us behind. So, when I first printed the calendar, I guess it was a little act of revenge. But I have forgiven him now."

This year is a belter with him publishing a celebration of his top 12 mobility scooter riders he spotted riding around Benidorm when on holiday at his mate’s flat. "While I was walking about I was amazed just how many people were on mobility scooters so I decided to take some pictures. I even snapped a chap who was dressed in a Santa Claus outfit".

He has made calendars of benches, bus routes, telephone boxes and other seemingly unexciting features of British life. He’s produced calendars of prisons and old asylums. He loves grisly subjects, steeped in history, although he’s also thinking of doing one on recycling centres.

He tries to do ten calendars a year. He gets inspiration from everyday life. Martin Parr, the celebrated British photographer, sent him a text saying he admired his work. He says that made him feel wonderful.

His major claim to dull fame came in 2018, when he was named Anorak of the Year by the Dull Men’s Club. It’s an international collective of people that welcomes everyone, not just men, who find joy in the mundane. Their motto is ‘celebrating the ordinary’. Other members include a drain spotter and a fellow who has collected 20,000 milk bottles. After that, newspapers began to dub him ‘Britain’s dullest man’.

His website can be found at: https://dullkev.com/

I’d have a calendar of Billy Collins poems.

Invention

Tonight the moon is a cracker,
with a bite out of it
floating in the night,

and in a week or so
according to the calendar
it will probably look

like a silver football,
and nine, maybe ten days ago
it reminded me of a thin bright claw.

But eventually --
by the end of the month,
I reckon --

it will waste away
to nothing,
nothing but stars in the sky,

and I will have a few nights

to myself,
a little time to rest my jittery pen.

                                                    Billy Collins

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

Read More

Restaurant

My idea of hell is eating out at a restaurant so I am probably amongst the least qualified people to talk about this subject in the UK. Give me a jam sandwich and a cup of tea at about 6 o’clock and I’m happy.

I wasn’t thinking about this when I was listening to my latest Freeman Wills Croft audio book set in the 1920s (I’m addicted to the Golden Age of crime fiction). Two of the characters were arranging to meet and they settled on a Gentleman’s Club. It was then that I thought why don’t they meet in a restaurant. Why not indeed? So that is where I started to have a look as to why not.

Actually, in one way or another, people have always been able to eat out (i.e. away from their normal residence or the home of another person), and the ancient wayside inns and market town taverns bear testimony to the needs of travellers and traders over the centuries. Even in the early 1900s office workers, often commuting from the suburbs, had been recognised by ABC restaurants and, more famously, by J. Lyons & Co. with their teashops and, from 1909, their Corner House restaurants. People all over the country knew of Lyons Corner Houses even when there were none locally.

a typical Lyons Corner House

However, World War 1 had been a social and political watershed. The peace of the 1920s remained contested with rich and poor experiencing changed social and economic circumstances. Not only had so many families been devastated by loss of life and injuries, in post-war Britain the established values were more frequently questioned.

Voices of authority were less convincing to those who had survived military service, or escaped domestic service for the munitions factories. Those who had hoped for a more equitable social landscape in the aftermath of war were being disappointed. The war had drawn men from the labour market for military service and provided opportunities for young women, in large numbers, to engage with employment in offices and factories rather than domestic service.

domestic servants, a disappearing breed

There was a desire among middle and upper class households to re-establish patterns of domestic service. Although this servant problem had existed at the turn of the century (and still does in my experience) this was a turning point. The servants had learned that there was life outside of Downton Abbey.

It seems that there were a few more reasons for the changes in social attitudes. Through these years, and into the 1930s, the UK was beset by the paradox of economic decline and change, old industries faltered dramatically but new ones emerged offering hope. In general terms, there was increased leisure time from shorter working weeks and the establishment of paid holiday entitlement; increased real wages and, in response, increased public and private sector leisure provision. The rapid expansion of cinema and radio opened peoples’ ears and eyes to such different expectations.

In the early 1920s, wealthy young people who ostentatiously dined and danced had been seen as outrageous. But as their exploits became seen or heard folk began to think why not me. The convergence of music, dancing and dining was evident in programming for radio stations.

dining and dancing in a Piccadilly restaurant 

In evidence to the Royal Commission on Licensing on behalf of the Hotels and Restaurants Association in 1930, George Reeves-Smith was to say that … ‘owing to social changes, to the entirely different views now held in regard to taking meals in public restaurants and to the domestic servant difficulty, a large proportion of the public of every class in London and on the road now took their meals in hotels and restaurants’.

Most of the above was taken from an article in the Journal of Culinary Science & Technology, Dining Out: Restaurants and British Society in the 1930s by Phil Lyon.

There was zero chance of me not having this poem below by Billy Collins as the themed poem.

Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant

I am glad I resisted the temptation,
if it was a temptation when I was young,
to write a poem about an old man
eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant.

I would have gotten it all wrong
thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world
and with only a book for a companion.
He'll probably pay the bill out of a change purse.

So glad I waited all these decades
to record how hot and sour the hot and sour
soup is here at Chang's this afternoon
and how cold the Chinese beer in a frosted glass.

And my book—José Saramago's Blindness
as it turns out—is so absorbing that I look up
from its escalating horrors only
when I am stunned by one of his gleaming sentences.

And I should mention the light
that falls through the big windows this time of day
italicizing everything it touches—
the plates and teapots, the immaculate tablecloths,

as well as the soft brown hair of the waitress
in the white blouse and short black skirt,
the one who is smiling now as she bears a cup of rice
and shredded beef with garlic to my favorite table in the corner.

                    

Thanks for reading. Feel free to post a comment. 

Terry Q.

Read More

Roses

Roses are the topic this week! They come high on the list of flowers that I like, along with iris and gerbera. What gives the rose the edge over others in the boquet in my estimation is their delicious scent - and I'm talking about home-grown organic roses here, not hothouse blooms from some euro-polytunnel or those flowers grown in and flown in from Kenya. Imported roses might look good but they have no smell and the means of production is frequently ecologically unsound (all those fertilisers leaching into the water table).

A perfect rose, with its complex array of petals, fascinating gradations of colour and heady aroma is truly a thing of beauty. Love the rose.

It possibly has more symbolism attached to it than any other form of flora or fauna. The red rose is the adopted emblem of my adopted county (Lancashire) as is the white rose the emblem of that lot on the other side of the Pennines - and indeed a series of battles was fought in the late 15th century that bore the name War of the Roses on account of the main protagonists.

My take on the theme has given rise to not one but two poems this week. The first, Roses, is by Billy Collins, a favourite poet of my dear departed friend Christopher (Christo) Heyworth. Billy Collins is a former Poet Laureate of the USA (2001-2003) and this poem is taken from his 2011 collection Horoscopes For The Dead. The second is a composition of my own in which I've tried to give the idea of roses a somewhat lateral literal twist. (It always amuses me to hear people drop 'literally' into conversations.) What you need to know about the protagonists of Twomb, Alec and Lisa, is they are also varieties of rose.

'Alec' and 'Lisa' entwined symbolic above the grave

First, then, this wonderfully observed and wry piece by Billy Collins, written on a visit to England a few years ago...

Roses
In those weeks of midsummer
when the roses in gardens begin to give up,
the big red, white, and pink ones -
the inner, enfolded petals growing cankerous,
the ones at the edges turning brown
or fallen already, down on their girlish backs
in the rough beds of turned-over soil,

then how terrible the expressions on their faces,
a kind of was it all really worth it? look,
to die here slowly in front of everyone
in the garden of a bed-and-breakfast
in a provincial English market town,
to expire by degrees of corruption
in plain sight of all the neighbours passing by,

the thin mail carrier, the stocky butcher
(thank God the children pay no attention),
the swivelling faces in the windows of the buses,
and now this stranger staring over the wall,
his hair dishevelled, a scarf loose around his neck,
writing in a notebook, writing about us no doubt,
about how terrible we look under the punishing sun.

                                                          Billy Collins


To finish, after a little judicious last-minute pruning, your Saturday blogger's dew-fresh offering...

Twomb
Side by side in death as in life
here lie interred a husband and wife,
Alec T. and Lisa Floribunda Rose.

The red and the white, for his verse and her prose,
entwine now symbolic, a sheltering bower
of protective thorn and commemorative flower

over this tomb of two writers of note:
she, the short-listed novelist who wrote
thinly-disguised tales of their marital strife; 

he, whose poems could cut like a knife,
the short-sighted fiery poet, her foil.
Worms compost through their mortal coils,

enriching the soil in this communal tomb,
make of their burial a friable womb
which nurtures both roses, the white and the red.

So despite the fact Alec and Lisa are dead,
their essence lives on in spike and in petal,
rose-blossoming peace after decades of battle.


Thanks for reading. Love one another, S ;-)

Read More