Jogging may be bad for you – but Lew is a good old sport

I’VE said it before: if ever I feel the urge to exercise coming on, I lie down until it passes. That’s not to belittle those who love to run. It’s just that I’ve never been keen on the idea of jogging. Traffic fumes, the possibility of getting something called shin splints, or being run over, or twisting an ankle on a dodgy pavement, not to mention horror stories about internal organs moving around – it sounds a positively dangerous pursuit.
But pounding the streets of Derby has apparently never harmed a wonderful character who celebrates his 96th birthday next month. In fact, Lew Patrick, a stalwart of Derby and County Athletic Club – now Derby AC – when it boasted some of Britain’s finest athletes, was still running every day until he was 83. So what do I know?
When I was a lad, Lew was a familiar figure on his training runs in our neighbourhood. However, unlike some veteran athletes – they know who they are – Lew is no self-publicist. His own trumpet remains defiantly unblown. But I think that Derby AC should strike a medal for him. Not that he’s short of a few after a sporting career that spanned 70 years.
He was 14 when he went to work at the Carriage and Wagon, alongside Jack Winfield, an English international three-miler, who one day invited him to try out for Derby and County AC at its headquarters at the Wagon and Horses on Ashbourne Road. Lew was soon representing the Midland Counties AAA against Combined Universities in a cross-country event.
He was also a good footballer, turning out for Second Division Bury’s reserve team: “They offered me professional terms, but I was earning more at the railway works. And it would have cost me my amateur status in athletics. I wouldn’t have been allowed to compete.”
In these days of Usain Bolt’s huge earning power, that’s hard to imagine. But instead of big bucks, “shamateurism” was rife, according to Lew: “Athletes would sell or pawn their trophies – gold watches, canteens of cutlery, silver cups. Work was scarce, people were on the breadline – you couldn’t blame them for looking after their families.”
He has a fund of stories, including the time a well-known runner from Derby took £100 from a bookmaker to throw a race. Lew won’t tell me his name in case relatives are still about.
For many years, he performed semi-professionally in a Derby dance band, swam, played bowls, and made his own wine. It’s the wine that I remember most. I rarely walked past his house in Harcourt Street without him knocking on the window to invite me in for a tasting. It was good stuff, too. I usually went home slightly more confused then when I’d arrived – “squiffy”, as my dear old Aunt Ivy used to say.
Silver birch sap was a particularly good drink. Or it might have been parsnip and passion fruit. I told you I was confused.
Thirteen years ago, he suffered a mild stroke and his doctor advised him to stop, even though he’d just won a veterans’ half-marathon. “I’ve been running since my early teens. I can’t imagine giving it up,” he told me then. But he accepted the inevitable: “I suppose, if you have any sense, you follow doctor’s orders.”
As Lew says: “You only get one life and one body – make the most of both.” And coming from a man who didn’t run his first marathon until he had passed retirement age, it seems sound advice.
Having said that, if you’ll excuse me, I’m now going for that lie down. After I’ve raised a glass of wine to Lew Patrick. Homemade, of course.

Our taste of austerity is proving a recipe for real home cooking

IT would take a twisted logic to say that economic recession is a good thing. But among the current business failures, job losses and home repossessions that make for gloomy headlines, there is one silver lining: in these cash-strapped times, more people are cooking at home. Which is good news for the nation’s soul; truly, there is nothing quite like producing your own meals from fresh ingredients.
And if that’s bad news for restaurateurs, well there was a time when the choice of eateries, in Derby at least, was severely limited anyway. Unlike today, when you can skip across the culinary globe in next to no time, 50 years ago it was either a hotel or a greasy spoon. There wasn’t much else between the Midland Hotel’s posh nosh, and beans on toast at the Old Boat Café on Cockpit Hill. Even when Berni Inns came along, there wasn’t much variation. Readers with better memories than mine will remember the exact details, but for about 10 shillings (50p to the post-decimal generation) you got a very limited menu.
The future Mrs R occasionally persuaded me to take her to a Chinese restaurant that had opened above Hepworth’s, the gents’ outfitters, in St Peter’s Street. I only ever had their mixed grill, though, which probably negated the point of visiting a Chinese in the first place. In those days, I was a callow youth, an unadventurous soul, much happier with egg and chips than egg fried rice.
But, if age brings experience, with it comes misplaced confidence. When I allowed a friend from Tokyo to order for me in a Japanese restaurant in London, it left a lasting impression: why anyone would want to eat raw tuna and seaweed is still quite beyond me.
And whoever encouraged the French to believe that they could cook deserves to be dunked in a vat of bouillabaisse. A survey of more than 20,000 people in 20 countries, published in the Wall Street Journal, saw French cuisine voted the world’s most overrated. Even the French agreed.
But you have to be careful when you criticise a nation’s food. Or even a county’s restaurants. A few weeks ago, in this column, I ventured to suggest that the woman who’d treated us with such disdain when we’d turned up early for our table at a Derbyshire restaurant might have been in the wrong job. It was my humble opinion that people who don’t like people are ill-suited for a job in a service industry. The piece prompted a string of rebukes (anonymous, of course) from someone I took to be a disaffected waiter. They certainly seemed to have a grudge against diners.
Whatever, when it comes to cuisine, haute or otherwise, only Italians should be allowed to run restaurants. They understand service, hospitality and good food better than any other nation on Earth. Some of my most memorable eating experiences have been in Italian restaurants, not all necessarily in Italy.
Boston’s North End – the Italian quarter of that great New England city – provided many of them. But my favourite had to be an Italian restaurant in Tennessee. There was good food – and atmosphere. A priest was dining in his own private booth, and every heavy, dark-suited waiter looked as if he had done serious damage to someone at sometime. It certainly wasn’t the place to start an argument; a few months after we’d dined there, the restaurant was burned to the ground. I told you there was an atmosphere.
All of which is a great leap from gentle memories of the Old Boat Café. But now we mostly cook our own. Pass the recipe book.

Where do you draw the line when you're compromising your morals?

WHEN I was growing up, down Gerard Street, in a house on the town side of Wilson Street, there lived a busy little woman who could often be seen scurrying about the neighbourhood after dusk, lugging a big sack on her back.
She’d criss-cross the street, knocking on this door and that. And if I answered her furtive tap, I’d be told, in an anxious whisper: “Go and see if your mother wants any tea.” Almost always, my mother did want some tea – or sugar, or butter, or anything else that was in short supply – and money and consumables changed hands on our darkened front step.
The goods had been stolen, of course. But, in those austere days, even otherwise law-abiding housewives broke their own rules in order to put a little extra on the family table. My mother was no exception. Because in the early post-war years, food rationing was more severe than it had been during the war. Which led to my mother making a huge compromise with her morals. Despite being scrupulously honest, almost to the point of eccentricity, there was one area where she allowed herself to dabble on the wrong side of the law: the Black Market.
Somehow, I just can’t see my mother’s name and the words “receiving stolen goods” in the same sentence. But that’s what it was. Albeit the circumstances were, shall we say, extenuating? At least that is what I still like to think. After all, there’d been a war on.
But if you start making excuses … Honesty? Where does it start? Where does it end? Is it black and white? Or will you allow shades of grey?
When I was an employer, I never minded staff making personal telephone calls, provided they first asked. When they didn’t ask, and I found out, I regarded it as stealing – stealing the cost of the call, and stealing the cost of my time.
When I worked in local government, some cleaners used to nick soap and toilet rolls. They probably saw it as a perk of the job. But in my book that, too, was stealing, pure and simple.
And when I hear that someone has purchased bootleg DVDs, I regard that as dishonest because artists and production companies are deprived of their rightful royalties and profits.
Phone calls, pens, toilet rolls, sneaking out for a fag in company time, buying pirated films and music – it’s a broad canvas. But where does honesty end and dishonesty begin?
Last week, I was in a Derby supermarket, transferring goods from trolley to bag, when I came across a small jar of sauce that I’d missed placing on the conveyor belt.
Eventually I found one of those self-service tills that I don’t like, and persuaded a hovering member of staff to process the extra sale. But it would have been easier to wander out of the store with the sauce (it cost £1.17) claimed as some small recompense for the time, not so long ago, that the same establishment short-changed me to the tune of a tenner.
An impatient queue muttered behind me, and I didn’t want to make a fuss. So I just left my phone number and went away with the promise that they’d call me when they’d checked the till. They never did. Maybe another mistake had balanced matters.
Or perhaps their subsequent silence might have been because, when the truculent sales assistant had examined the £20 notes in her till and barked: “Was there anything written on yours?”, I’d said: “Yes – I promise to pay the bearer.”
Honesty doesn’t always pay. And neither, apparently, does sarcasm.

Those were the days – before self-service was invented

IT was the letter for which I had been waiting. The one from the Department of Work and Pensions, headed: “Claim Your State Pension”. And it looked simple, too. No form to complete. You just rang a number, and away you went. Well, not quite. I should have listened to my mate. His pension is due in September, three months before mine. So he’d already received his letter.
“Don’t waste your time,” he advised, giving a passable impression of that Johnny Knowall character in the Al Read wireless show (apologies to anyone under 50, but the Salford sausage maker turned comedy king was one of my heroes).
“When you ring,” my mate continued, “all you’ll get is a recorded announcement telling you to ring again in two months’ time. And, by the way, when you do ring again in two months’ time – you’ll find that they’ve changed the number.”
“Well,” I said, “that was three months ago. So I think I will ring, like it says. They’ve probably sorted it by now.” And I did. And, of course, they hadn’t.
I also got a recorded announcement telling me to ring again in two months’ time. And no doubt, when I do, I’ll get another recorded message, telling me that they’ve changed the number. Just like my mate predicted.
The reason they gave for me calling back in two months is that they’ve “improved our system”. I wanted to say that it’s not much of an improvement if they’re still sending out letters encouraging would-be pensioners to make pointless telephone calls. But, of course, you never get to speak to a real human being. The DWP don’t want you doing that.
Just like supermarkets don’t want you bothering checkout operators when you can do the job for them. And just like banks don’t want you speaking to a counter clerk when you can pay into a machine instead.
It’s a worrying trend that has been extended even to the NHS. I’ve written here before about the new self-service check-in system, and joked about self-service triage being next. But I never thought I’d see a sign on a surgery door that effectively said: “If you’re ill, go away.”
There it was, though, big and bold, at the height of the swine flu scare. It gave a number to ring, of course. Then a 16-year-old with one hour’s training could diagnose you over the phone. So that probably doesn’t count as self-service, although it must be the next-best thing.
We’ve gone a long way backwards since I lined up with my old granny in the pension queue at Abbey Street post office (that’s gone, along with every other sub-post office within walking distance), inhaling the Sloan’s Liniment and mothballed fox furs of a dozen similar grannies. It was the highlight of her week. And of mine, too, if she bought me a toy.
Those were the days when banks were managed by Mr Mainwaring characters, and staffed by flesh and blood, not machines (nowadays, the only breathing bank staff you’re likely to encounter are those prowling queues, peddling insurance). When shopkeepers were pleased to talk to customers. And when, even at the height of a nationwide polio scare, doctors’ surgeries didn’t put up the barricades.
Of course, you’ll say that I’m just getting old. And you’re right. But grumbling is one of the perks of advancing years. And the sudden realisation that you’ll soon be 65 brings life into sharper focus. Somehow, it’s fulfilling to join in with the chuntering.
Do you know what? I think I’m ready to become a pensioner. Provided I can remember to ring back in two months’ time.

Where is local radio going? Well, it's not going to cricket matches

DERBYSHIRE cricket supporters are upset. They say that BBC Radio Derby’s coverage of their county club has dwindled almost to zero. They’d already complained that the days of ball-by-ball commentary had long gone. Now, according to some fans, even top-of-the-table matches are virtually ignored altogether.
To be honest, I wouldn’t know. I’ve stopped listening to local radio; Classic FM for background, and the Derby Telegraph website for breaking local news – they now cover my daytime needs.
But if county cricket has become another casualty of BBC cuts, then we shouldn’t be surprised. The corporation lost its way years ago. It has long been keener to retain the services of the foul-mouthed Jonathan Ross than it has to support decent radio. Otherwise, it would take even a fraction of Ross’s £6 million annual salary and pump it into local broadcasting.
It used to be different. Back in the 1980s, I had the pleasure to work on a couple of documentary series for Radio Derby. Feedback suggested that they brought a lot of pleasure to many local listeners. They certainly brought me pleasure, not least because writing scripts for Derby at War meant working with two talented producers, Ashley Franklin and Simon Shaw.
The Derby County Story was even more fun. The series started out as a one-off programme, The Day That Derby Won The Cup, which was so well received that Bryan Harris, the recently appointed station manager, straightaway commissioned 13 programmes to mark the club’s centenary. Of course, he had the budget to do it.
I regarded that particular job as a privilege. How many working days involve being paid to meet your boyhood heroes?
It was also a privilege to work with Ashley Franklin again. He was a consummate broadcaster. When the BBC let him go, it was a great loss to local radio in Derby.
Working on that Rams series gave me some amusing memories, not least of the day I struggled to keep two warring dogs apart while trying to record an interview with 1930s Welsh international, Dai Astley, at his Margate home. I managed it – just – with microphone in one hand, the other soothing a German Shepherd that was itching to pounce on the little terrier that shared its home.
There was a similar problem at the Derby home of former goalkeeper Ken Oxford. The Oxfords, a lovely couple, had a pet parrot that squawked throughout the interview. They wouldn’t move it at any price. Even my jacket thrown over the cage failed to quieten it. So when I got back to the office, I threw the tape to Ashley and said: “Best of luck.” Fortunately, his skilful editing resulted in a Polly-free interview.
Raich Carter had the kettle on when I reached his Hull home, and at Poulton-le-Fylde, Peter Doherty ushered me straight into their dining room where a table groaned with food. “Mrs Doherty thought you might be hungry after your journey,” said the great Peter, “ so she’s made you this.”
The problem was that, having arrived in the area early, I’d just treated myself to a large lunch at a Blackpool hotel. I struggled manfully through another three-course meal, recorded the interview. Then didn’t eat again for about two days.
They were great times to be involved in radio. But I don’t think it would now be possible for a local station to produce those sorts of series. In fact, I don't know where BBC local radio is going. Or where its target audience now lies.
I do believe that supporters of Derbyshire cricket can forget about proper match coverage. Regular ball-by-ball commentary won’t be resumed any time soon.