This City Is Ours, La

Mrs H and I are overly infuenced by reviews these days when it comes to what we watch on TV. Life is too short to watch even half of the first episode of a new series before having the debate about whether it's worth persevering with. It always feels as if we've failed to give it a chance if we bail out so early but the alternative is sticking with it all the way through only to conclude that's several hours of life we wasted and won't get back. 

Based on positive reviews we gave the BBC series This City Is Ours a go. It's based around a drug dealing family in Liverpool, which sounded fairly grim and unpromising. But we gave it a go and can recommend it.  

The lead character is played by James Nelson-Joyce who, despite his seemingly posh double barrelled name, hails from Orrell Park 3 stops on Merseyrail towards the city centre from the suburb where I was brought up. Most of the scouse accents are convincing, but his is real. He's the mean looking dude in the centre below:

Nelson-Joyce plays Michael Kavanagh, correctly pronounced in the northern way, to rhyme with Savannah with the gh having essentially no impact, rather the the southern way as in a colleague I worked with in Oxfordshire whose surname Cavanagh was pronounced Ca-vn-are. 

Kavanagh is not part of the family but is the patriarch's trusted and long serving number 2 introducing inevitable tension with the oldest son, who is somewhat younger than Kavanagh but has also come to believe he should take over the business now its founder has started thinking of retirement. And also, as a result, got greedy for larger returns, setting it up for things to go wrong.

Which made me ponder - how many drug dealers get to retire peacefully anyway? Spoiler alert - the patriarch, played by Sean Bean (who makes no attempt at a scouse accent) doesn't get to retire in good health.

We liked the many authentic scouse touches, such as the son referring to Kavanagh as "soft lad", which doesn't mean he's a softie, it's a form of mild scouse abuse meaning soft in the head, i.e. a bit dim. Soft lad can also be used as a term of teasing endearment. An example is when Mrs H, finding she needed to buy a new golf glove before playing and with no means of paying, told the our club pro shop to "put it on soft lad's account" (i.e. mine). Which produced a slightly surprised "what did you call him?" response. "Soft lad". "Oh, right then".

It turns out that Kavanagh is a bit of a softie in some ways, as well as a hard case. But I won't say more in case you decide to watch.

The series is well made, with some good choices of music and some stunning views of Liverpool as well as the inevitable grittiness. I could readily nitpick - as an example would the Colombian cartel's Spanish contact man really walk around the streets of Liverpool without a minder? But we'll definitely watch the second series which has already been commissioned.

I told Mrs H that that I'd read several years ago that Liverpool was the only English city in which the drugs trade hadn't been taken over by foreign gangs. Indeed, according to the Guardian 5 years ago, Liverpool gangs dominate the trade in guns and drugs everywhere in the UK outside London. The lead dude at the National Crime Agency's Firearms Threat Centre was quoted as saying "the evidence is that the north-west groups pretty much dominate the rest of the [criminal] communities in the UK".

Amongst their 'achievements' are gun factories which use cheap components sourced from China to convert £135 handguns from Slovakia and the Czech Republic into automatic firearms they can sell on for £5,000. They import cocaine from South American cartels via the city's container port and feed the "county lines". Links have been made with organised crime gangs in Ireland and they have good connections into Scotland.

"In Liverpool and the north-west there is a combination of really good business entrepreneurs that have evolved...learnt new mechanisms, means of communication, transport and concealment" the NCA source said. This criminal skill set should be considered alongside the city's demographics: before the pandemic a third of the city's children lived below the poverty line. "You look at the consistent demographic of unemployment and deprived areas and how serious organised crime has evolved. If you did an assessment of how society has evolved with serious organised crime, Liverpool's gangs have probably been at the forefront.... It's about sculpting your business model".

In a way that isn't at all right, proper or approriate it makes a son of Merseyside feel rather proud in a strange kind of way.

Liverpool gangs dominate guns and drugs trade outside London. The Guardian 11 July 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/11/liverpool-gangs-dominate-gun-and-drugs-trade-outside-london

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nelson-Joyce

Not My Country

I find I don't live in the country I thought I did as I grew up. 

Not due to immigration, though how one cannot be concerned at the remarkable numbers of people still arriving and claiming asylum puzzles me. Blair and Brown were culpable for engaging in a deliberate experiment with open borders but Boris Johnson lost all semblance of any control. However, that argument seems to have been won, with 56% of people saying in a recent poll that it was their biggest concern and most political parties trying to outdo each other with tough statements, though not much sign of any practicable solutions to back them up.

Rather, I always tended to think that we lived in a basically decent country where one could trust that public officials would be efficient and honest rather than being self serving and engaging in cover ups when things go wrong while leaving a trail of wrecked lives in their wake.

This specific thought occurred to me after belatedly watching the wonderful ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. I didn't feel the need to watch the series at first as I've followed the story in the Sunday Times for over a decade after they picked up on the original Computer Weekly item from 2008. It's been like watching a slow motion disaster movie for most of that time. The lead characters and villains, specifically Paula Vennells and the Post Office's ability to bring prosecutions seemingly at a whim were all well known to me, as was the damage it had caused to so many innocent individuals. I'd been horrified by the saga for so long why watch the programme? But the reviews and the continued dragging of heels in resolving the claims caused us to watch. It was well worthwhile, from the opening scenes at Mr Bates's Post Office at Craig-y-don, just two and a half miles down the road from us. Indeed here it is:

As you can see it's a charity shop, now not a post office, though the post box is still in use on the pavement.  Here's how they made it look for the TV drama:

Awful as the Post Office scandal was - and still is - it's far from the only sorry tale of the UK's uniformly useless response to it's seemingly institutionalised inability to do the right thing by its people.

I give you as further examples the contaminated blood scandal, the numerous health trust scandals involving maternity care in particular and the poor regulation that allowed crooked businesses to create the Grenfell Tower inferno followed by the totally inadequate response that has also left many individuals all over the country suffering prolonged consequences.  

There's also the sodium valproate issue, another slow burn problem with evidence emerging in the 1980s and 1990s that the anti-epilepsy drug could cause problems for foetuses. It was downgraded as a first line treatment for women of child bearing age in 2004 but children continued to be born disabled and mothers were denied the truth. In 2018 Jeremy Hunt, then Health Secretary, commissioned a report by Baroness Cumberlege to examine valproate and two other health scandals. Her report, published in July 2020, found that patients had been "dismissed, overlooked and ignored", in some cases for decades. The government accepted some recommendations but rejected compensation. In 2022 Hunt, then chairman of the Health Select Committee, called the scandal "the most egregious injustice" and said it was time "the British state faced up to its responsibilities". England's patient safety commissioner, Dr Henrietta Hughes, was asked to examine redress and how it would work. See reported 18 months ago since which silence.

One of the points I cannot get my head around is the poor safety and accountability culture in the health service revealed time after time by the various health trust scandals. I don't begin to understand how the NHS can be so dysfunctional at escalating what we used to call "unusual occurrences" in the nuclear industry, learning from events whether they caused actual damage, constituted a "near miss" or just struck someone as possibly being "not quite right". All employees and contractors were actively encouraged to report what we called UNORs (unusual occurrences) and they were all investigated appropriately with feedback provided. The culture was "if in doubt, report it", whereas the NHS seems to adopt "if in doubt keep your bloody mouth shut".  To be fair, I later found that the UK rail industry had more of a climate of fear, with contractors reluctant to report issues in case they count against their companies in future bids for work.  Perhaps nuclear, chemicals and aviation which also have strong safety cultures, are the outliers. In many other fields of endeavour whistleblowers are not encouraged or actively bullied into silence.  

Most of these industries - don't kid yourself the health service is an industry, after all it's England's biggest employer by a street* - act in silos, pretending but not actually spreading best practice within but ignoring anything "not invented here".

Grenfell is a more complex story with an interplay between ineffective regulation and dishonest pactices by private developers and suppliers but the awfully inadequate and painfully slow response is from the same playbook.

It seems we just cannot trust that our political leaders have the know how, willpower and common decency to sort these things out.

Paula Vennells eventually returned her CBE, a few weeks before the King revoked it. But that is unusual. The majority of the culprits of that scandal and all the others just seem to sail on. The lack of accountability is concerning, but not as concerning as knowing that the culture all remains in place. So the scandals will continue.

I used to be horrified by these scandals, but now I feel ashamed as we just get empty words from empty suits who seem capable of belated apologies but never willing or able to actually fix anything.

As I said, not my country, or at least it's one a long way from the one I thought it was.

* The NHS employs around 1.5 or 1.6 million people in the UK depending which source you believe. If you add together the next nine largest employers in the UK (in order Tesco, Sainsbury's, The British Army, the DWP, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Defence, HSBC, the Metropolitan Police and Barclays Network Rail you still don't get to much more than a million. You could add HMRC (which I suspect should be in that top 10) the RAF, the Royal Navy, the BBC, the Home Office, the Scottish and Welsh governments and the UK Parliament and still get nowhere near the NHS total. 

PS Jeremy Hunt seems to be one of the few good guys in all of this, pushing for reparations for contaminated blood as Health Sec but being frustrated by the Treasury - until he went there. 

PPS I only just realised that Craig-y-Don means rocks and waves, very apposite for its location near the Little Orme.

Abandoned. Five years after a report called for payouts - and 100 parliamentary questions - the families of children born diabled as a result of an anti-epilepsy drug await justice. Sunday Times 17 August 2025

Who are the UK's top 10 employers in 2024? https://ukvisajobs.com/blog-detail/87

https://historypoints.org/index.php?page=post-office-whistleblowers-former-shop-llandudno

Liars, damned liars and dissemblers

Are NHS waiting lists coming down? A simple yes/no question it would seem.

NHS England claimed last month that"hard working staff" had delivered "record numbers of treatments" with waiting lists falling by 260,000 since Labour was elected.

But there are two things going on here.

According to reserach by the Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation the NHS is still treating fewer patients than are joining this waiting lists. So the trend remains upwards.

So why has the waiting list total come down? It seems hospitals have got round to validating the list by removing those who have had private treatment, left the country or died. Nothing unusual in that, they should be maintaining the list. But they are doing it because they're getting paid to do what should be their job anyway. NHS England, as part of its recovery plan, is paying hospitals £33 for each patient removed from the waiting list. Since the NHS doesn't spell out what the reasons are for taking people off the list, there is a lack of transparency.

I am left wondering why on earth hospitals have to be bribed to do part of their job. Personally I'd suggest a "negative bonus" for the managers responsible for not doing their jobs if there isn't eveidence of waiting list maintenance would work just as well.

What is clear is that  public statements by the NHS and health ministers on the waiting list issue should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

What is worrying is that they must know they are, at best, dissembling. Or maybe I should just say lying?

Waiting lists being cut for £33 a patient. Sunday Times 17 August 2025

A trio inspired by statistics

 The "interesting statistics" part of the rubric below my blog title has perhaps been ignored a tad recently. So, to put that right... Some dishes are called a trio (of say lamb, or desserts). Well here's a trio of pieces inspired by statistics that caught my eye.

Racism by Machine

I was reading recently about how many first round job interviews are now carried out by AI. So, as many applicants CVs will have been generated by AI, we are in a circular competition of the bots. However, there are problems. Candidates report that the process is soulless and they don't get any feedback or sometimes any response whatsoever and are just "ghosted". But it's worse than that. University of Washington researchers used real CVs but varied names associated with white and black jobseekers in AI recruitment systems and found that the AI favoured the white-associated names 85% of the time. Female-associated names were picked only 11% of the time. "If we're not careful, AI will just automate discrimination at scale". They also found that AI interviewers trained on datasets dominated by American speakers could be biased against different accents, non-native English speakers or individuals with disabilities that affected their speech. "Candidates... can be ruled out regardless of [their] skills...reinforcing existing workforce inequalities".

I'm waiting for the first legal case of discrimination to be taken against a company which was using AI for recruitment, or other employment related processes. It wouldn't surprise me if the first such case was taken out by a law firm using AI to generate its cases.

Meanwhile we all carry on playing games and viewing videos on our phones, the modern equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns.

The significance of the dollar as the world's reserve currency

I've long known that the dollar is the predominant currency for currency transactions around the world. But I didn't realise that the dollar is used in 88% of global forex transactions. Nearly every commodity is priced in dollars. This simple fact is one of the main reasons for the USA's enduring financial strength and resilience. It also gives the USA the platform to bully/impose order/sanction miscreants (delete as appropriate). It is undoubtedly a big part of the strength and influence of the West on the world. 

The dollar's overwhelming position as the world's reserve currency is coming under threat by the USA's long term shift to being utterly spendthrift - one expected it of the Democrats but not the Republicans - but that is now being amplified by President Trump's economic "policies". China, Russia and probably quite a few other countries would much prefer to conduct business without recourse to dollars. The so called BRICS countries are making some progress towards that end. But it seems to me that the seeds of the fall of the West are already there to be seen and are of the West's own making.

The implications of falling birth rates

Tom Calver, who writes a fact rich column in the Sunday Times titled Go Figure, recently reviewed a book called After the Spike: The Risks of Global Depopulation. The book's central premise is that we are on the upper left side of a gigantic population spike. In about 50 years we will reach the peak and then humanity will start shrinking. And shrinking fast. The cause is simple. Nearly every country is on a downward fertility trend. To maintain the same population size the average woman must have two children, the review said. (Actually it must be a bit higher. It was generally reckoned to be about 2.1 depending, I guess, on infant mortality rates).

The stat that caught my eye was that, while western Europe has struggled to reach that number for some time, every other country now has the same problem. In India, the world's most populous country (interesting quiz question that, many people guess China) the average woman has 1.98 children. And that ratio is falling. The comment that really caught my eye was as follows: "No country in the world has managed to consistently increase its birth rate once it has fallen below this rate".

Unless the trajectory changes the world's population will peak at about 10 billion in the 2070s or 2080s, then fall back to about 8 billion by 2150 and - if we continue at this rate - be around a mere two billion people by 2350.

Many of our current environmental problems are caused by there being simply too many people. But the shape of this population spike has huge implications for humanity. One of the big issues with a smaller global population is a declining rate of innovation. Calver gives an example: had the global population been 10 million, not 1.4 billion, in the 1870s the chances of the light bulb being invented would have been considerably smaller.

Birth rates have been pushed back up briefly in some western countries, including in America where, between 1976 nd 2007 it grew from 1.7 to 2.1 despite increased reproductive rights and more women entering the workforce. But these examples have proved temporary. 

Nevertheless, Calver thinks the authors have exaggerated the nature of the spike. It only looks like a spike if we "zoom out". In real time he calls it more of a gentle hill. He reckons we need to find a way of getting the number back up to 2 by 2125. Which gives plenty of time for plenty of bright people to work on it.

But, of course, surely there's going to be AI to do that for us?

No, I wouldn't rely on that either. But the seeds of humanity's downfall, not just the West, are perhaps coming into view.

Interviewed by a bot: how AI is ruling the jobs market. Sunday Times 22 June 2025.

I've read the stat about the predominance of the dollar in global transactions in several places, but I saw it most recenty in Irwin Stelzer's brilliant American Account column in the Sunday Times.

Calver's review of After the Spike by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso was in the Sunday Times on 6 July 2025

The obsession with one particular version of slavery

Why are today's young scholars so obsessed with the supposed wickedness of the European people trade while apparently indifferent to the Roman slave economy, or for that matter the Arab one?

So said Max Hastings in a review of Tom Holland's book The Lives of The Caesars.

The only issue I'd take with that comment is the word "supposed" as there was undoubtedly wickedness.

But I'd go further. The nation that initiated the end of the transatlantic slave trade seems to be castigated more than any. How come?

I can't help thinking there's a simple answer. Those young scholars are suffused with guilt (rarely a helpful emotion, I find).  And so they jump on a bandwagon for reparations etc, being pushed by - guess who? Those who will benefit.

I've often been heard to say that my ancestors do not appear to have directly benefited from the slave trade. Oh, sure, they'll have possibly gained some indirect benefit through the wealth brought into the UK, though I'd estimate it as tiny.

Indeed, look further and I daresay that my ancestors (and yours) were victims too, of feudal system, serfdom etc. Moreover, if you look around the world and through history, enslavement of conquered nations and the less powerful was pretty much the norm. Rome wasn't built in a day - or without slaves.

It is impossible to right all past wrongs. Picking an aribitrary set of such wrongs, or an arbitrary cut off in how far one goes back, has no justification. I would argue that we should not go back beyond the lifetime of anyone's parents, as proving cause and consequence is otherwise problematic. 

Times have changed and, for the most improved at least in what we sometimes call the "free world". Most of the descendents of African slaves living in countries like the USA and UK are arguably better off than if their ancestors had not been taken (or sold by other Africans most likely). I realise that would probably a grossly offensive argument to those descendents of slaves (and those young scholars).

But does it make it any less true?

And, since outside of the "free world" slavery in various forms still persists around the world to this day, aren't there better and more important targets to focus on?

The Max Hastings book review appeared in the Sunday Times some time ago.

This one's for the birds

The transition from spring to summer is not without it's downsides, I've found.

One of my favourite periods of the year is when the male blackbirds are in full song, singing their hearts out in their attempt to attract a mate. It's fascinating that they tend to take it in turns to deliver their performances. They don't try to drown each other out, but wait for a nearby bird to finish, then do the equivalent of "that's nothing, get this!" A bit like two or three guitarists jousting, taking turns to play a solo. Each blackbird has a song that, while recognisably characteristic of the species, is unique to the individual bird, often with a very characteristic ending. Which helps us identify individual birds by their song, especially given they tend to return to the same place to breed each year.

At our last house we had one such bird whose song was highly specific and recognisable as it ended with a flourish that sounded just like our telephone ringing. Indeed the first time we heard it we thought it was the phone. Sitting on the decking at the back of our garden, which was on quite a steep hill so the deck was well up towards roof level, we heard this chap for several years in a row, singing from one of the nearby rooftops. It was a sad spring when he didn't return.

In the early spring I was gardening, which often attracts birds that come very close looking for insects and worms that have been disturbed, when I heard a curious song that sounded a bit like a blackbird. Actually it sounded very like a blackbird but the song was curiously truncated, coming to a rather sudden and abrupt end, without a flourish. (Blackbirds do go on a bit). That's odd I thought. Then I spotted the bird, quite close to me on the ground. It was definitely a blackbird. It was a male, the males being black and the females looking exactly the same but brown. The females do sing, despite what many (but not all) of the authoritative texts say, though not as ostentatiously as the males. I've seen one doing it, so close that there could be no mistake.

But this one was definitely black, so male. It looked a bit on the small side and a bit skinny. So I'm guessing it was a young male. I was watching and listening to an adolescent male just starting out and developing his song. You'll need to make it a bit longer and showier if you want to find a mate, chum, the girls will just giggle at that!

That wonderful period when the blackbirds are in full song has now long passed, to be replaced by the squawks of the seagulls. We sleep in our loft conversion bedroom with its windows in the sloping roof. We sometimes call them "veluxes" even though they are a competitor brand, because people understand that as an almost generic term. The windows are locked slightly open at night for most of the year, apart from deep winter. Locked so they don't suddently blow off their hinges in the strong coastal winds we often experience.

This arrangement, with our house up a hillside, has implications. Birds, usually noisy seagulls but sometimes boringly repetitive collared doves*, like sitting right on top of the gable end that is only a few feet away from the open windows at the foot of our bed. But also, because the house is built half way up an untamed Welsh hillside, our open window is at just the height that the seagulls fly while looping around doing circuits above the houses below us.

All of which makes for a noisy time at 4 and 5 am from May onwards until the various mating seasons end the nights start getting shorter.

I find it heartwarming when I wake up in the bright early light of May to hear a male blackbird in full song and drift off back to sleep feeling that all is well with the world. I feel a very different emotion if I'm woken by a seagull squawking on the gable roof.

Some folk seem to find seagulls attractive. I've not got a problem with them in their natural habitat, on the cliffs of places like the nearby Great Orme. The problem is they are scavengers and attracted to the food that people throw away, leave unattended or are just in the act of eating. I'm far from the only one to have lost an ice cream on Llandudno pier to a gull - they sneak up behind you with surprising stealth for such a large creature, knock it out of your hand then swoop around to pick it up (not in my case, I made sure neither of us got the ice cream!) A friend of Mrs H's recently had a sandwich she was eating snatched from her hand on the golf course. That one also came up from behind her. You need to stand back to something like a wall, or have a lookout. Some folk refer to pigeons as flying rats. Seagulls are more like flying foxes: bigger and much more cunning.

You do see foolish tourists feeding the gulls. Presumably they like them - don't they realise that it only encourages them? We've even seen people feeding the gulls while sitting right by a sign telling them not to do so. The tourists also seem to have huge affection for the famous Llandudno goats - which I like, when they stay on the Orme. When we are walking around the Orme, or indeed at some times of year in Llandudno town centre, I'm not fond of wading through piles of goat poo. So I wasn't surprised the other year when cuddly toy goats became a big thing to sell to tourists here. But this year the cuddly toy they seem to want to acquire out of those grab machines is a seagull with a chip in its beak:

Call me a grumpy old sod (fair cop, I am one) but I don't find that at all endearing. But the bigger problem is seagulls make a godawful racket. We have, however, come to recognise some of the characteristic calls they make, besides the straight forward squawk. 

When an old building a mile or so a way was knocked down to make way for our local Lidl (oh great joy, he said sarcastically, being left completely cold by the oddity that is the "middle of Lidl") the large number of displaced birds that used to nest there had to find new locations, many of them on the roofs of the houses we overlook. A near neighbour's dormer roof has become what we call a "seagull mating station". It's probably the same birds that return there each year to make a mess and a lot of noise on our friend's roof. It's very specific, always the one one on the right as we look at the two dormers on the back of his house.

A male homo sapiens probably shouldn't throw this particular stone into this particular glasshouse, but a male seagull takes quite a while to perform and makes a lot of stupid sounds while doing so. There is a difference though: the male seagull can go again (and again and again) much more quickly.  "Oh, get on with it" Mrs H has been heard to say as the repetitive "birdsong" goes on and on.

I was, however, a bit more amused when I found I could identify variants of the normal seagull cry.

The period when seagull chicks have hatched and are leaving the nest can be quite trying. Before flying they walk around a lot. Presumably they flutter, or more likely do an ungainly flapping tumble, to first get to the ground but then they stand a lot and walk around now and then. Building strength I suppose, before attempting flight. Sometimes you see a parent with them but often not right by them, more likely keeping an eye on them. At that time of year the parent birds sit on vantage points, like the end of our gable roof, periodically making a sound that sounds quite like "quack, quack, quack, quack". Always three or four times and at a tiny fraction of the volume of their standard shriek. I'm guessing this is seagull speak for "I'm here, where are you?" I think I've heard a chick call back in similar vein but generally they just stand there before going for a bit of a plod.

It's not great if you get a seagull chick walking around your garden as the parents are quite likely to swoop aggressively down at you if you venture anywhere near. We found this out a few years ago when a planned barbecue with our son's family nearly had to be abondoned because of a chick we'd seen in the garden. Every time I stepped out of the kitchen patio door I'd hear an agitated version of the seagull cry and had to dodge what felt like a Stuka dive bomber swooping down and over my head. A golf umbrella and a tennis racquet proved useful in defence. The golf umbrella as an "iron dome" shield of course. The racquet was deployed like someone doing a tennis serve while leaping in the air, as the equivalent of anti-aircraft fire as the seagull swooped past. I knew I couldn't possibly hit the bird of course but it was getting sufficiently close to me (and my racquet to it) that it started keeping a bit higher above me. I'm doubtful about unpredictable behaviour as a touchstone of international statesmanship but making the birds think you're crazy does seem to make them steer a bit more clear of you. Eventually a tense cease fire was enacted when the chick, which had been hiding behind some shrubs, walked round to the other side of the house, probably muttering the kind of thing that kids say about their parents.

The "attack" cry is very like a standard seagull cry but sharper and more urgent, so ever since then I've been been alert to the sound of a seagull cry as it takes off from the taller house next door. A standard cry and it's wheeling away over the houses below. Anything that sounds sharper makes me glance up in case the bird is swooping down towards me, in case it thinks the gardener with his hosepipe is hunting their chick.

But this year I heard another variant of the standard seagull cry and with some urgency  and wondered what was going on. The chicks as they are first flying make heavy work of it, flapping away in a slightly unco-ordinated manner, much like a novice human swimmer. I looked up and saw just that but very close behind and adult bird squawking repeatedly and with urgency compared with the rather languid if noisy standard call. Ah, I thought, a parent saying the seagull equivalent of "keep going, don't stop" just as dads do when teaching a child to ride a bike when they are just getting going. This wasn't gentle parenting: the larger bird kept surging near the chick, which flapped ever harder and dodged around a bit. It certainly kept the chick flapping.

I found the seagull flying lesson endearing. Until I heard exactly the same cry breaking through my slumber early the next morning as parent and chick flew laps around the rooftops below our open bedroom window, with the parent making a noise that I could now recognise.

So in addition to the mating season, we have the flying lesson season to contend with.

So it's time for a bit of nudge theory to be deployed in this avian - human stand off to encourage our flying foxes to choose another vantage point than the end of my gable end roof to survey the neighbourhood. The hosepipe, with it's high powered jet setting, gets used during the daytime to move the bird that likes to sit on the gable roof. But what to do at 5am? This modest anti-aircraft gun is now loaded and standing by:

The water pistol only just has the required range so I might have to upgrade the air defences with the equivalent of a Patriot missile: one of those super soakers the boys used to have such fun with in their youth.

Just to reassure you I realise that, though a grown and rather ageing man, I'm trying to understand birdspeak (if not being away with them, or the fairies) while waging a mini-war I can't possibly win.

But I remember what my then teenage son said to me after I'd lured a Labour canvasser into thinking I was sympathetic by saying I was concerned about education and health before giving him a huge piece of my mind. This was back in 2005 and my most caustic remarks were aimed at Gordon Brown, I recall. "I don't know why I do these things" I said to my son afterwards. "My paint brush has started drying out". "Yes, dad, but it had to be done!" was the reply.

Maybe we should get an aircon unit so we can close the windows? No, not going there, unjustifiable use of energy. The battle goes on!

* bird species in which all the individuals sing what appears to be exactly the same simple and boring song remind me of those occasions when one group of football fans chant to another group "you've only got one song!"

 

Let's go to Glasto again

Great excitement a couple of months ago in the Holden household - well half of it anyway - when it was announced that Roy Harper would be headlining the Acoustic stage at Glastonbury on Sunday 29 June, a few weeks after his 84th birthday.

There had been no signs of Roy playing live since his last tour in 2019 (and before that it was 2016 and then 2013). Most Harper fans had begun to suspect he had, this time, retired from live performance for good. His blog and facebook posts had become very rare and totally silent on the issues of recording and performance. Inevitably I began to wonder if time and age had taken too much toll.

Harper originally retired from playing live more than 15 years ago but was persuaded back into performance by the American singer Joanna Newsom who, like Kate Bush and several others, attributes her presence in the business to being inspired by him. We saw Roy support Joanna in 2010 and, while he played well, his voice seemed a bit frail. But the tour prompted a resurrection. More gigs, a new album Man and Myth - which I'd put in the top half of his career bounty of more than 20 albums - then a tour (when he sang strongly and well) and a burst of recognition greater than he received in most of his career which will now go into a seventh decade. That recognition included a Lifetime Achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 folk awards, a slew of interviews in daily newspapers and music mags, several appearances on TV including BBC Breakfast and a guest spot on Test Match Special playing his 1975 classic When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease.

Disastrously for Roy's Indian Summer period (and quite possibly prompted by the extensive publicity) this was all soon followed by a historical sexual abuse allegation which put everything on hold. Roy's had a knack of upsetting a lot of people over the years. He was persona non grata for 3 years with the media until the case against him, which always sounded tenuous in the extreme, collapsed. 

So it was a relief to see him playing again in 2016 and 2019. And playing without blemish, apart from one song where he caused his backing "orchestra" of a string quartet, double bass and second guitarist to chuckle when he said, after the applause had died down, "you know I always thought that song had four verses, but I found it only needed three". 

Of course people can be forgetful at any age and all musicians make mistakes which they either have to cover or recover from. When we saw Harper in 2013 he was backed by another of his young American acolytes, Jonathan Wilson. Harper had gone to Los Angeles where Wilson produced four of the seven tracks on the album and then they toured together, Wilson playing his own set and then backing his mentor on second guitar and various percussion. I have a vivid memory of two things from that gig. The first is that Wilson took to the stage barefoot, which would always seem odd to someone like me who gets cold hands and feet almost year round - but in Manchester in late October? The second was how gently and with great respect Wilson supported Harper's performance, most notably during Twelve Hours of Sunset which has featured in Harper's stage set since 1974. At a conservative estimate Harper must have played this song to an audience several thousand times. With rehearsals that number must be into five figures. But we saw quite clearly from our front row seats a look of panic in Harper's eyes part way through the song as he reached a transition from verse to chorus: it was clear as he looked up towards Wilson that he couldn't remember the next chord sequence. Fortunately the previous chord is held on sustain anyway and Wilson mimed the next four fret positions which introduce the chorus. Harper's head snapped back round to the front and he went straight into the main motif in the song with such a slight delay that it was probably noticed by few present and certainly no-one beyond the first few rows of seats. These are the moments that I think make watching a live performance so special. But I'm hoping Roy doesn't have any of those heart in mouth  moments at Glastonbury. I'm expecting he will have his son Nick filling the second guitar role this weekend. Nick, a performer and recording artist in his own right of long standing, has made 15 albums of his own. And nobody other than Roy knows the songs better as Nick grew up hearing them. The photo below shows Nick on stage with his dad at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1967

But there is another, tantalising prospect. Harper's big buddy since the late 1960s might be a special guest - Jimmy Page. We can but hope.

Having played there several times before Harper is a link to an earlier, simpler, less commercial and, yes, more "hippy" Glastonbury, though Harper would reject the hippy label just as much as he would the folk label.  He was on the Main stage in 1970, in 1981 on the newly built Pyramid stage, again on the Pyramid in 1982 and, most recently, the Acoustic Stage in 1990. Indeed he headlined in 1982 and there's a story behind that. 

In 1981 Ginger Baker's band headlined on the Friday, with Roy on next to last. There are many accounts on the internet of what happened that night, succinctly summarised by the BBC as follows:

In a moment that certainly trumps Lee Nelson's stage invasion during Kanye West's set, Baker caused an almighty ruckus by setting up his equipment while the previous act, folk-rocker Roy Harper, was still playing. Understandably miffed, Harper confronted him and the two ended up scrapping on-stage. According to an eyewitness account on UK Rock Festivals, the crowd then pelted Baker with bottles during his set, with one hitting him square on the forehead. Some claim that Baker, hardman that he is, simply carried on drumming.

Apparently Michael Eavis felt so bad about what had happened that Harper was immediately invited back as a headliner the following year.

When I told Mrs H about the Glastonbury announcement she reminded me that we "don't do festivals". I said that was irrelevant, which worried her - but then clarified that all the tickets, costing several hundred pounds each, are sold long before the line up is announced. On TV then? Harper fans wait to see whether any of his show will be broadcast: the Beeb doesn't routinely broadcast from the Acoustic stage (there are ten stages at Glastonbury these days). Given Harper's status as one of the few significant performers from the 1960s still around I expect BBC will at least show a snippet (he's due on stage from 9.30 to 10.30pm).

But, on the back of the Glastonbury announcement, a "Final tour part 2" was revealed, comprising 3 gigs in Manchester, London and Birmingham in September. Yes, of course we're going, though in Mrs H's case she says only to keep me company driving back afterwards. But she has always enjoyed Roy's Me and My Woman which I think he has played on most of the occasions I've seen him - around a dozen, since 1971. The song starts with (for me) a classic couplet:

I never know what kind of day it is

On my battlefield of ideals

That's certainly a possible for the Glastonbury set, but if Jimmy Page is with him, they'll play the equally classic song from the very same album as Me and My Woman, Roy's withering take on Christianity and Catholicism in particular, The Same Old Rock.  Oh please....

You can take a listen here. The song is a good, but far from the only, exemplification of one critic's categorisation of Harper as "epic, progressive acoustic - a category of one". I expect mainly shorter songs on Sunday, but we don't have long to wait and, hopefully, see and hear.

PS There's a brilliant book published by Penguin on the history of the Abbey Road studios by music author David Hepworth. After 11 chapters on EMI, the Abbey road building and it's uniformed commissionaires, the producers who wore suits but sports jackets at the weekends, the in house development of equipment and recording techniques, the many famous artists of all types from classical to stars like Noel Coward and Gracie Fields to comedy artists like Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers and of course pop musicians including the Beatles, I came to the chapter where EMI, speculated by creating the Harvest label. They gave studio time and resources to a gamut of obscure artists from the college scene like Edgar Broughton and the Third Ear Band. Amongst them was Roy Harper and I was delighted to find this unexpected excerpt:

...by common consent the zenith of Harper's entire career as a recording artist, also took place in Studio One. Harper had a passion for cricket, one he shared with Ken Townsend (a long serving EMI producer) and the members of Pink Floyd. This had led him to write a song about the strange vibrations which thoughts of the game set off in the English breast. It was decided, with more thought for history than accountancy, that what would set this song off a treat was a brass band. Thus no less august a body than the entire Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band was brought down from south Yorkshire and set up in Studio One, where they performed under the baton of David Bedford. The resulting record, When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease, is one of the dozen greatest records ever made at Abbey Road.

Wow. Hepworth's rationale for that comment is that, while the sound of that brass band could have been attempted by some local session musicians or, in another era, digitally dubbed in, it just wouldn't have the same emotional effect. The song endures in the imagination because one can "close our eyes and imagine the performance taking place", "we knew it had been delivered by a bunch of burly men in their cardigans, men who sprang from the same soil as the song". He called it "proof of the genius of the studio system".

PPS I feel able to call my hero by his first name having met him and spoken one to one for several minutes. Roy being Roy he made as much eye contact with Mrs H standing silently beside me. She said she immediately understood why his compendium of lyrics, The Passions of Great Fortune, is littered with photos of his many lovers (and those were the ones who were happy to be in print...) But he's settled down a bit since the 1990s and I've also met his lovely wife Tracey, who sends out email and facebook updates and deals with all the mail orders personally, on two occasions.

The title of this piece comes from a song called Glasto on Roy's penultimate (as yet) album The Green Man released in 2000:

It has some classically whimsical Harper lyrics:

Michael is running the party (actually his daughter does now of course)/Helping us all pay the rent/So that Billy the kid/Can spend a few quid/Being out of his tree in a tent

 and

And watching the bare naked protest/Is the giggly teengirl from Tring/She can't understand/How a man could have planned/To protest the odd shape of his thing

 with the chorus

Maybe there'll be summer/Maybe It won't rain/Maybe it don't matter/Oh let's go to Glasto again

12 artists you never knew headlined Glastonbury, BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/f4764a16-9f5f-4405-bed0-6d9d0651e4cf