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Cleavies Fish Counter #20
Co-ee fish heads! How’ve you been? Shivering I suppose. Well, I know it sounds a little harsh, but serves you right all you lot for living in that little bit of Britain east of Cornwall; let’s face it, you’re right on the edge of the Steppes there, aren’t you? Down here has been mildly temperate [rather like the people], if a little windy at times [not at all like the people!]. No snow and very little frost or ice at all.
Mind you, my boy George [that’s my boy George, not my ‘Boy George’ by the way], managed to get a little frosticled one day, stacking halibut or bream or skate or whatever in the big freezer of Dennis Knight’s wet fish emporium, and the door shut behind him, and he found that the emergency handle on the inside had, wait for it, frozen up and he was trapped. Could that be a design fault?
A bit like those stainless steel flip-lid teapots that don’t shut properly and spill scalding hot water down your plums, sorry lap, when you try and pour. Or that moulded plastic packaging that scissors and knives are packaged in now, that you have to use, wait for it, scissors or knives to cut into it to get the scissors or knife out. Why would I be buying scissors or a knife if I already had them? Did anyone consider that?
We took the trans-Siberian express out of Exeter St Davids last week, bound for Paddington across the vast tundra and permafrost of central southern England, to go on the One Show. Well, it was so much better than last time, when we all ended up getting mugged by winos in a piss-stinking alley on Shepherd’s Bush Green.
Our newest best mates Matt Baker and Alex Jones were charm itself, and so was Stephen Fry. It’s amazing to me that he chose to go into showbiz at all, when with a name like that you’d have thought he’d naturally have been predisposed to open his own take-away. Same applies to Matt Baker I suppose. I only say these things as I was once a policeman with a PC Nick Crook – having said that I don’t remember him ever nicking anyone. Too much paperwork and all that…
Anyway, after the show, I left the FFs in the middle of a snow shower and went off to join the luckiest girl in North Cornwall at Fishmonger’s Hall, one of the ancient London Guilds. She’d illustrated a children’s book for the lobster hatchery in Padstow, and as a result we’d got an invite to a fundraiser there, and I was bandwaggoning along, whoop whoop!
Well, what a plaice [geddit?] – no huge deep freezers with dodgy handles there my dears. No stench of red herrings or fish guts whatsoever. It’s a fabulous building right next to the Thames at London Bridge, and steeped in history.
Being a bit of a history nerd, I was fascinated to see in a case the dagger owned by the Lord Mayor of London, William Walworth. He was escorting young King Richard 2nd [who turned out to be a bit of a twat if you ask me] at Smithfield during the peasant’s revolt in 1381. Walworth used it to stab Watt Tyler, the leader of the peasants, who had got too close for comfort to young Dickie. Well, I’m blowed if Walworth wasn’t a fishmonger as well as Lord Mayor, and in recognition of his services the fishmongers of London were recognised as the fourth city Guild the following year – a great honour. The fact that he’d single handedly set back the cause of democracy, the rights of man, civil war and revolution in this country by nearly 3 hundred years is neither here nor there apparently…That’s fishmongers for you. I must have a word with boy George.
Still, the dagger was remarkably sharp after nearly 750 years, and sliced through my scallops [the ones on the plate] like a, well, dagger through scallops. The lamb cutlets were no problem either, and I was even able to carve ‘JC luvs CC 4ever’ into the surface of the priceless teak Georgian dining table between courses, and just in time for Valentine’s Day too. She was needless to say very touched. It also doubled up beautifully as a toothpick, proving more than equal to a stubborn slither of Brecon blackface lamb wedged in my right rear filling [in my tooth, that is].
But let no one say we Cornish don’t know how to behave. I put it right back in the case as we left – a lovely little piece of history – still with a tiny bit of lamb on the point. A class act me.
So there we are. Boy George has been driving the fish delivery van around all week like a dog with two tails, or like a fishmonger with a van full of fish anyway, while Lefty has been preparing our pimped out new fish van for part deux of our tour. There will not have been so many rugged, rustic types east of Cornwall since 1381. If you can get to a gig, you’ll truthfully be able to say ‘My god, the peasants are truly revolting’!
Dreckly dears
The Warbling Walrus xx
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Cleavie’s Fish Counter #19
Merry Christmas fish-heads, and a Happy New Year too! I bet you’re wondering why we haven’t got a Christmas song out, aren’t you? So am I, seeing as I wrote one last year and we’ve recorded it, along with a couple of Cornish carols, and it sounds good to me. Then, it would do, wouldn’t it? It’s called ‘The stars of the New Year Turning’, and is meant to fill us all with hope and optimism in these dodgy times….
‘And we’ll all be all right
When we walk home tonight,
The fires deep in our hearts burning.
If you want to survive
Keep your passions alive,
Be the stars of the New Year turning….’
There, that’s cheered you up already, hasn’t it?
So what are you all doing pre-christmas? Carol singing? I hope you don’t come to the Port Gaverne hotel Friday evening, or the Golden Lion on Christmas Eve, because we’ll be in there carolling and shantying together probably, with loads of other locals, and we wouldn’t want you to join in and bugger it all up. Maybe you could just listen from outside? The windows are generally open for you to hear, and if it’s freezing with a blizzard blowing in on a North Easterly and you’ve got icicles hanging off your nether regions, and you’re being attacked by polar bears or wolverines or the like, we could pass you out a ginger beer and bag of crisps.
We love our own carols, fish-heads. One in particular we regard as the Port Isaac carol, ‘Hark the Glad Sound’. That’s a good old hellfire, brimstone and eternal damnation number that is…
‘…The gates of brass before him burst,
The iron fetters yield!’
Good old Methodists, just like the Taliban only without the bonhomie and goodwill and wicked sense of fun. The best thing about it is that no one else knows it, so they can’t join in at all!
We always had problems with people joining in with ‘While Shepherds Watched’, however we put paid to that by doing it to the tune of Lyngham, which is hugely popular in Cornwall. Imagine how disappointed I was to discover that Thomas Jarman, the composer of Lyngham, was in fact from Northamptonshire. Still, it by far and away the most rattlin!!! version of the carol.
And just who was it wot rote ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithfull’? It is a fabulous carol I know, but what on earth possessed him to think up the line ‘…Lo, he abhors not the virgin’s womb’ ? What’s that all about? I’m surprised some rapper hasn’t ‘sampled it’ [pinched it in other words] – ‘…Yo, he abhors not the virgin’s womb etc etc’!
I think, for me certainly, therein lies the appeal of carols. They take you right back to your childhood, when you could change the words to give the lyric a naughty, silly little twist. You know, ‘Noel, Noel’ becomes ‘Oh hell, Oh hell..’, ‘Most highly favoured lady’ becomes ‘Most highly flavoured lady’, and ‘While shepherds watched their flocks’ became ‘While shepherds washed their…’, oh never mind. These little tweaks, seemingly inaudible to teachers and choirmasters, gave us little moments of fun through those interminable rehearsals for nativity plays.
And then some of us graduated on to doing complete sets of lyrics for traditional Christmas songs. I remember fondly my exquisitely filthy version of The Twelve Days of Christmas, the cleanest bit of which was where three French hens became three French tarts. Ahh, Christmas. The warm glow of nostalgia. My nuts roasting by an open fire and all that…
Talking of Nat King Cole, I’ve had a little tweak to the Christmas classic, ‘The little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot.’ I do hope you like it.
‘I’m the little boy that Santa Claus forgot,
And heaven knows, I didn’t want a lot.
I left a note for Santa for an X- Box and a gun,
I was so disappointed when the old bugger didn’t come.
Now I play out on the street with all those lucky boys,
Then wander home alone to last year’s broken toys.
I’d like to stampede all his reindeer,
But then I know he’d never come here,
To the little boy that Santa Claus forgot.
I recall one Christmas eve when Santa came to town,
With Dancer, Prancer, Rudolph and the sleigh.
I left a glass of sherry, and a carrot for the deer,
Then hid behind the sofa, for Santa to appear.
Yes, I hid there all night long and all through Christmas day,
Boxing day too…the old bugger never came.
I’d light a bonfire up my chimney,
But I haven’t got it in me,
Cos I’m the little boy that Santa Claus forgot.
It’s not as horrid as my original re-write, but you see he might just read it, and then I really would be the little boy that Santa Claus forgot, wouldn’t I?
A very Happy Christmas and New Year to all fish-heads everywhere!!!!
Dreckly dears xx
Cleavies Fish Counter #18
Fish-heads! Hello dears. Just got back from tripping the light fantastic….or did the light fantastic trip us? Who knows or indeed cares now; we’re back in dear old P.I.. What an absolutely fabulous and memorable time we’ve had, and thanks to all you lovers of high culture for coming to see us – we were overwhelmed and a not a little touched by your response to the shows.
No accounting for taste…
Of course, were it not for the luxurious diva treatment afforded to top international superstars like us these days, the whole experience could be quite unpleasantly debilitating. The Hovelodges [or whatever they’re called] that we stayed in were rather resonant of a serf’s hut constructed of mud, cow dung and twigs from the reign of Widdlebert the Incontinent [the heir to Piddlebert the Incompetent]. Seemingly, all that was missing was bubonic plague and the occasional horde of marauding norsemen intent on rape and pillage….oh, and starvation. We had plenty to eat, as you’ll see.
To be honest, once we’d made ourselves at home by smashing the huts, sorry rooms, up a bit, they became home from home really. The fact that we’ve had no complaints about the state the rooms were left in tells you all you want to know….
And as for the lear jet, sorry stretch limo, sorry luxury tour coach, sorry…fish van. Oh my god. Has anyone seen the ‘I’m a celebrity’ gig with the contestant’s head in a glass box full of blowflies? Believe me, that’s nothing compared to the fish van.
It seems that a particularly sexually active couple of blowflies have been having it away behind the door and window seals, and laid enough eggs to provide the world’s spider population with copious snacks for the next fifty years. The only problem being that the fish van doesn’t have any spiders in it, only us.
Add together the unseasonably warm late November, and the combined body heat of ten FFs, and you have that peculiar zoological phenomenon, the mobile blowfly hatchery. At precisely 11.07 am daily when the temperature was apparently at it’s optimum, the little bastards, sorry big bastards, would start to emerge and lazily, dopily, dozily bump from one FF’s head to another, in our ears, in our eyes, up our nose, up our…oh never mind, I’m sure you can guess. And they were so massive. I’d swear one was bigger than a rook!
Now you always hear complaints from the rock and roll fraternity about all the hanging about and the travelling between gigs. Well, maybe they should all invest in fly blown fish vans. From the emergence of the first on day one, somewhere outside Bridgewater [you know, of Simon and Garfunkel fame – ‘Trouble Over Bridgewater’ remember that?], until the journey from Salisbury to Bristol on day three, we had found a new way of passing the long, tedious hours.
Rather than the usual needlework and embroidery, and in-depth investigation into the origins of the capstan shanty, and philosophical discourses on the role of the enlightenment in the French Revolution, we killed flies.
We progressed from primitive swatting methods, using rolled up bits of cardboard and newspaper, to more advanced fly destruction techniques. Sam pulled over at a DIY shop and equipped us with some spray left over from the Gulf War and some builder’s face masks. Sadly, these did not protect the eyes. How Lefty still managed to drive the fish van blind I have no idea. He did it by pure instinct, like Tommy at the pinball machine. That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure drives a mean fish van…
And then came the ultimate swatter, shaped like a mini tennis racket only with an electric charge, one only had to squash the unfortunate bluebottle against the window and crank up the voltage, and watch as the sparks flew and the smoke and stench of sizzled fly flesh drifted up our nostrils. My, how the hours flew by.
By the end of the journey, the fish van was like a fly cemetery. It was flymageddon. There were so many dead flies that we were tempted to give up our blossoming careers in entertainment, and turn instead to opening an organic Eccles cake and Garibaldi factory.
Anyway, fish-heads, we’ve decided to invest in a new fish van for next year – we reasoned that it’ll save money on flights if we get invited to the US or Australia. In the meantime, anyone interested in an old fish van, two hundred thousand plus miles on the clock, seats as soft as church pews, and with the unmistakable malodour of sizzled flies, stale farts and of course fish lingering imperceptibly within, give Lefty a shout. He’ll get back to you shortly….
Dreckly dears xx
Cleavies Fish Counter #17
Hey! Fish-heads, where have you been my dears? What do you mean, where have I been? In therapy, obviously. Celebrity has it’s casualties, fish-heads, and all the global adulation [well deserved though it is!] has driven me and the boys back to our old lives for a period of respite. The brothers have been crabbing about the price of bait and lobsters and diesel and the Spanish and their bleddy great trawlers, Leftie’s been up at 3.30 every morning for an early start in the milking parlours of North Cornwall [or so he says], Trev and the Johney Mac are building as if there’s a housing shortage, Pete’s old farting about in the garden [he’s 78 you know – did I mention that?], Bill’s been churning out pots [playing golf according to Leftie], and I’ve been baking pasties with mother.
What better therapy for a Cornish boy? I love to cook, but had never even attempted to make pastry, let alone to bake a pasty. So I said to mother, who lives just up the hill from me [next to John Mac and next but one from Jeremy in fact], how do you fancy teaching your dear little boy how to make pasties?
I’ve got to say that it was one of the nicest things I’ve ever done. Mother and I have been spending Wednesday mornings together deep in conversation about nothing in particular, you know family stuff and village stuff and matters of extreme global importance as well, whilst slicing potatoes, onions and swede, cutting up skirt beef into tiny pieces, and trying out various pastry mixtures [not bought ones!]. It’s brilliant.
A little technical pointer or two should any of you decide to try this at home…
Firstly, please don’t even attempt to bake a pasty anywhere outside the county border. It is bound to taste disgusting and could even poison you or explode. This rule only applies to the Cornish pasty, and is not applicable to Yorkshire puddings, Welsh cakes or Lancashire hotpot, which can apparently all be made anywhere [according to Delia].
Secondly, you must slice your vegetable ingredients. Diced ones can tumble out of the pasty and can fall scalding hot onto your lap. Be especially careful if you are eating one on a naturist beach somewhere…
Finally, always use the most delicious and accordingly least healthy ingredients that you can find. We’re talking one third lard in the pastry mix here, and lashings of butter in the pasty itself, and plenty of seasoning especially salt. The heavier and more discomforted you feel after eating the pasty, the better it would have been. Come on, let’s block up those arteries!
Anyone transgressing these laws can expect an early morning knock on the door from the PIPPs [Port Isaac Pasty Police], that is to say mother and her mates, and I don’t give much for your chances if they find you guilty of baking a ‘nasty pasty’. You’ve been warned…
Just like the way our singing has almost become secondary to the whole social thing on Friday evenings on the Platt, so the pasties are but a delicious by-product of our mornings together. This week we’re doing yeast and saffron buns, and we will be discussing the Italian debt crisis and the demise of Mr Berlusconni, the tormented genius of Van Gogh, whether that other famous Dutchman Dick Van Dyke was in fact really a cockney, and evidencing whether Offa’s Dyke was a dark ages earthwork constructed to keep out the marauding Welsh, or in fact the King of Mercia’s first wife with whom he was incompatible for obvious reasons. Oh, and the price of fish of course….
On tour next week fish-heads! Looking forward to seeing all the girls from Redland College in Bristol on Friday week….well, I say girls, you know what I mean. I’m sure you’re all still drop dead gorgeous 35 years on. Just like me in fact. The years have been nothing but kind, haven’t they? Can’t wait!!
Dreckly dears xx
Cleavie’s Fish Counter #16
It’s been a while fish-heads – how’s tricks? The boys and me have been winding down a bit, finished on the Platt for another year, just the America’s Cup gig on the Hoe at Plymouth to go on Sunday. Looking forward to that and then a break until the tour, end November.
So I thought like any real fish counter, I may close for a few weeks and give the place a good old clean out and hose down, and try and get rid of the all pervading stink of fish, which is really a metaphor for clearing out my head and trying to get some writing and rehearsing and stuff done.
So before I pull down the shutters for a bit, I thought I’d leave you with a little rhyme what I wrote a little while ago, and if anyone can set it to music please let us know…
The Ship’s Biscuit.
A cabin boy, with vertigo nervy
And fruitless, scared to death of scurvy,
Abseiled from his topsail gantry,
Resolved to raid the ship’s cook’s pantry.
There marooned upon the shelf,
Crumbling lonesome, quite by itself,
An unprepossessing, dry ship’s biscuit.
Mad hunger drove the boy to risk it.
For cabin boys, fed the least
Of all the crew, this was a feast.
But within that morsel, lurking evil
Rear Admiral Sir Reginald Weevil,
Who, from said biscuit, poked his head
In tricorn hat; so fill with dread
Ye cabin boys, for biscuit hogging
Is sure to earn a damn good flogging.
Dreckly dears xx
Cleavie’s Fish Counter #15
Fish–heads, welcome to the fish counter, and I mean you are bleddy welcome to the fish counter this week. It’s not as if I haven’t anything better to do after all, as it’s August Bank holiday week and Port Isaac is completely overrun with tourists who have clearly never read the Sunday Times, and their 4 x 4s and dogs and kids, and we’re all run off our legs and going mental…
This is except Nigel, of course, who apparently employs more staff than the rest of the FFs put together [what a bag of scallops!].
Not only is it impossible to drive through the narrows of the village, it’s almost impossible to even walk through it without treading on unwary snot-nosed children with ice creams or bumping into old ladies with blue rinses and handbags full of sugar sachets and butter pats and mini pots of jam they’ve liberated from cafes ‘just in case’ [that’s what the war did to them, waste not and all that!].
Anyway, as you can probably tell, I’ve got augustitus, and the only anti-serum is septembritis taken in liberal measure.
Quite frankly, I blame Doc Martin for the extra hordes of people. It has nothing to do with the Fisherman’s Friends whatsoever, even the 3000 people who came on Friday evening and pretended that they’d come to listen to us sing. Look, we’re not stupid [well all right, some of us are quite stupid], we saw you looking over our heads gawping at the Doc’s surgery and Bert’s Restaurant, and hoping to catch a glimpse of Mr Clunes. Well you had to put up with Clooneyesque JB instead!
Certainly, the accepted route through the UK for most Australians now seems to be London – Stratford Upon Avon – Port Isaac, but now it seems that the programme has been aired on public TV in the US, and it is proving equally popular over there. That’s a worry, coach loads of over-earnest Burberry clad yanks trying to trace a direct line of ancestry to fictional TV characters with dodgy pan-westcountry Long John Silver accents.
‘Hi, my folks came over stateside in the Mayflower. My name is Dupree Beauregard Martin the 23rd, and ironically [although being American, I don’t get irony of course] I’m a doctor, and I’m trying to find the Martin family….’ Oh my god, what a nightmare scenario that’ll be.
So this week, fish-heads, comes the launch of our book ‘Sailing at Eight Bells’, whatever that is. I’ll have to ask one of the jolly Jack Tars in our naughty nautical ranks. The burning question is – what will it be? Will it be wildly hilarious, or just mildly diverting? Tragic, or merely a little melancholy? A reference book for fish-heads with a transitory and healthy interest in the subject, or an encyclopaedia for obsessive stalker types who want to get right inside us? May we expect crime or fiction, drama or romance? Bodice ripper or underpant creaser? Kiss and tell, or scratch and sniff? Chick lit or fish lit?
Whatever, going by my preferred adage of ‘always judge a book by it’s cover’, it’s pretty good, and made our photo shoot 18 months ago seem worthwhile, as we’re all posing with smouldering gothic menace on the front.
I always stick to that adage because of my own books about Gully. That is Gully the Mischievous and Wicked Cornish Seagull in case I haven’t subliminally plugged him before [only £6.95 per signed copy…]. The fact is, forget the storyline and content [which are all equally good obviously], and title [there are 6 in case you were interested, set of three for £17.95 – oh there I go again], the best seller is by far the blue one.
To be fair, it is a nice shade of blue. Sadly, the purple book [Gully Celebrity Chef], which is probably the best story, is the least popular colour and it follows therefore the slowest seller. This is just like our two first albums, ‘The FFs – Suck ’Em and Sea’, and the cleverly titled sequel ‘Another Mouthful from the FFs’. The former sells three times as many copies because the sleeve is in colour. Musically [if I may use that term with the FFs] they are much the same…challenged, shall we say?
At least the FFs didn’t have any problems with finding a publisher. When I’d first completed writing and illustrating Gully [only £6.95…!], I proudly sent the stories and artwork off to agents and publishers galore. What I got back was ‘We like the pictures, but not the story;’ or ‘We like the stories, but not the pictures.’ Most dispiriting. When I finally got a ‘We love the stories and the illustrations are divine…’ it was accompanied with a ‘…but we don’t think there’s a market for them.’
That’s what you get when you have to deal with people who used to get bullied at school. It just makes me regret that I wasn’t more of a bully back then, as that might have made the frustration all the more worthwhile.
So fish-heads, here we are spending our entire weekend, the busiest of the year, signing books with a collective glad heart ready for the launch on Thursday, which will be brilliant. At least it keeps us out of those streets!
Dreckly dears xx
Cleavies Fish Counter #14
All right fish-heads? Ever wish you had the chance to be a Sun headline writer for the day? Monday was my day in my dreams. I can see it now – that pic with ‘Cameron Gets Crabs!’ emblazoned underneath.
He didn’t get them from Jeremy or Julian though [not that they’re at all angry or bitter about that]. No, obviously he got them in that shop behind him in the photo, which belongs to another fisherman in Port Isaac; a rival crab Baron.
But it just goes to show that even with all that security, you can’t be too careful, can you? Do you think that Gadaffi planted them, a sort of biological warfare? Bring the infidel to his knees with crustaceans? And they’re buggers to get rid of apparently….the Camerons that is, not the crabs. They’ve been coming here for years now, and we just can’t seem to get shot of them! Any ideas fish-heads?
Call me Dave was chatting to a couple of the boys when he came earlier this year, down on the Platt. It’s a mark of our new found notoriety I suppose that someone was heard to remark ‘Here, who’s that over there talking to the Fisherman’s Friends. He looks vaguely familiar…’
Anyway fish-heads, nice to make contact midweek for a change. Not a full sized blog this one, more of a ‘blogette’, rather like a baguette is a small, nasty French lady, as opposed to the full sized variety.
Dreckly dears xx
Cleavies Fish Counter #13
Hello Fish-heads, how’s the price of fish today with you? John Brown’s got plenty of punters for mackerel fishing, the lobster boats are all out, cod’s come down, turbot’s up, pollack’s still cheapish, and the luckiest girl in North Cornwall and I had a half pint of prawns each at the Port Gaverne hotel last night, with mayonnaise and a fresh baked bread roll [is this sounding like one of them tweets?], and my middle boy George says that the punters in the fish cellars are driving him and all the other jowders [fishmongers] up the bleddy harbour wall.
Two prizes awarded so far – number one, most fatuous remark –‘Omigod, it stinks of fish in here!’ Please remember that this is a fish shop full of fishmongers selling all sorts of fish in a fish cellar in the middle of a fishing village.
Number two, most ridiculous question – ‘Are the green lipped New Zealand mussels caught locally?’ – No, of course not, they’re caught in Padstow you twat…oh I’m sorry, I mustn’t be like it, but it’s August right? And open season on those who perhaps are not the sharpest fish knives in the drawer.
Dear old, craggy old, cantankerous old grizzled Port Isaac fisherman Mark Townsend had a magnificent armoury of snidey ripostes to standard ‘tourismo stupidos.’ In particular, the ghastly, grating question that is always accompanied by the sympathetic smile – ‘Have you been here all your life?’, was always met by one of two replies, each guaranteed to bring an end to any hopes of a conversation with a real local. Either the acerbic ‘No, I was over there yesterday…’ with a nod to the other side of the road, or the more fatalistic ‘Not yet I hope.’ Maybe it was dear old Mark who that tosser from the Sunday Times bumped into….oh, enough…
Anyway fish-heads, celebrity is beginning to take it’s toll. I’ve not been asked to open anything yet [well, only my wallet, and clearly that’s as likely as Trev singing a cheerful song], but I have been asked to be after dinner speaker at two Rotarian evenings, and to hold forth for the St Minver old people’s morning.
So I had to make a little spiel about my exciting past couple of years with the FFs, and then on my writing and illustration and series of kid’s books that I first published when I was a mere stripling youth of 45. It’s always nice to give these things a little title, and after much thought and modest introspection, I decided to call the piece ‘The Late Flowering of My Artistic Genius by Jon Cleave aged 52.’ What do you think?
Where did it all begin? Well fish-heads, I have to tell you that I’ve been thwarted at every turn, but because I’m a spoilt, ego-centric, everyone else is wrong and I’m right only child [apparently], the glorious, magnificent late blossoming has occurred…
So I’ll tell you about the singing part of it. As a little boy I loved it, and sang to my mum and dad and aunts and uncles and grans and granfers. And in primary school – fantastic! We would sing ‘The Drunken Sailor’, ‘Westerlin’ Home’, and ‘The Skye Boat Song’. But then…
Then came Mrs Tyler, as our new music teacher and nasty old witch to boot [I won’t use her real name, she’s long gone now and it might offend the Taylor family…] and she used to take the school choir, which consisted of the entire school, to the Wadebridge Music Festival every year. At eight, my mate George Lyford [who later sneaked back in] and I, and Teresa Ann Tregaskis, were all chucked out of the choir for being ‘growlers.’
Growlers eh? Are you looking down now, you poison-sac poker-backed, bitter as the gall turkey-necked, never-been-kissed wizened old hag? Discarded on the musical scrap heap at eight? Eight! Really, I never sung again until I was over thirty [yeah, yeah, all right Lefty, it’s a pity I ever did...whatever]. Seriously fish-heads, consider what pleasure would have been denied to millions were it not for my selfless determination….
To be fair to her, and as you can probably read between the lines I don’t really want to be, she was right in the case of Teresa Ann, who did sound as if she was possessed by a chorale of tone deaf screaming banshees intent on drowning out low flying aircraft. But she too was only eight. What of Teresa Ann now, though? If Mrs Taylor’s, sorry Tyler’s, judgement was anything to go by she’ll be top diva at the opening night at La Scala. And if you’re reading this celestial blog and scowling down at us from above, stick that in your cauldron and boil it!
And what happened to dear old George, who incidentally had the best train set ever? I never blamed him for sneaking back into the school choir. You see, whereas I took the growler bit to heart, George joined the church choir on Sundays, and found that he could sing really well and loved it, and when the following year it was time for the music festival he stood in line and sang like a bird and no-one remembered that he’d been cast out….except Teresa Ann and me.
But we didn’t say anything. We growlers, past and present, have to stick together. I still see him from time to time and a thoroughly nice man he is too, and when our middle boy was born I remembered all this, and it made me want to give him that good old name. And do you know what fish-heads? My George loves to sing as well, as he’s packing in the fish down in the fish cellars…gangsta rap mostly….
Now there’s a cultural fusion to be proud of!
Port Isaac meets the East side projects…
Dreckly motherf****rz xx
Cleavies Fish Counter #12
Mornin’ fish-heads, avast there and belay and splice the mainbrace and all that; how’s things?
We had a good evening at Falmouth on Thursday. Nice town Falmouth, a real, proper place, always something going on and we always enjoy it down there. We did a gig with a brilliant band, Crowns, who rocked the Pavilions up before we came on and spoiled the evening for them. They are a young and talented, lithe and good looking trendy bunch of chaps and we naturally felt that we had much in common with them….apart from the fact that musically they are very gifted of course.
It’s all kicking off in Falmouth at the mo – Brad Pitt’s down there making some kind of zombie movie by the docks. Apparently they needed 500 locals as extras to play zombies; dare I ask if there was any prob finding them? It’s just that up here in Port Isaac [the tinseltown of Cornwall], when they did the re-make of Deliverance they also needed a load of local extras, around about 200, to play slightly deranged, inbred simpletons…
No problem and no make up or wardrobe required either!
So anyway, fish-heads, we weren’t in the least overawed by the prospect of bumping into his Bradness, especially with the Clooneyesque John Brown glamming up our ranks. Anyway, it took me back to early last year when our alleged story hit the national headlines, and for one day we got the sort of attention that the Bradster [and his missus Edna or whatever she’s called] get every day.
Our manager, the Supreme Leader, had told us to be out on the Platt for 6.30ish so that local BBC could do a quick interview and have us sing one of our jolly little numbers for them, and we’d all be done and dusted by 8.30am at the latest. Well, it turned out to be a bad [that is to say, sparse] news day. We were also in all the national and local papers, you remember the sort of headline, ‘Fishermen Net £1million Record Deal!’.
Well for starters, lets break down that sentence shall we? Fishermen? Hmm, all right, three are, and two are ex. Net? Yes, all right, we get it, net. Record deal? Yep, there is a record deal. £1million? Now I don’t know about you, but isn’t it sod’s law that the £1million bit is the only part of the sentence without a grain of truth in it? Why couldn’t it have been the net bit that wasn’t true?
Anyway, fish-heads, I’m beginning to sound embittered and entwisted and that’ll never do, unless it’s about the Sunday bastard Times. So I was rambling on about the brief local TV interview, which soon developed into a media frenzy when the national stations realised that there really was no other news at all that day. They descended seemingly from all directions, vans everywhere, dishes pointing skywards, you couldn’t turn around without some sound engineer poking his furry boom microphone up your jacksie, and doing a phone interview and singing ‘Haul Away Joe’ at the same time, and managing to retain our oh so charming rustic, wildly rugged personas and youthful good looks [what will we done when they begin to fade?] Jesus, we were still there with Sky TV News at 4.30 pm. It was amazing.
Like a drug, we were hungry for it to carry on into the evening now, live on the 6 o’clock news, and maybe even the 10 o’clock. We hung around, waiting for more. Then – it happened. There was some real news. A little boy who had been kidnapped in Pakistan had been released and was being flown back to the UK, and was about to land at Heathrow, right on the evening news bulletin. Suddenly, we were old news, discarded, swallowed up and spat out by the media monster.
Look, I’m not saying that the boy was courting publicity, right? But couldn’t they have held him for just a couple more hours, so we could have had all day on the box? It was all going so well, but of course there’s always some selfish bugger who’ll spoil things for you, isn’t there? I’m afraid that’s the world that we now inhabit fish-heads, at the mercy of the media and the whims of kidnappers….
And then there was this Friday on the same Platt, only this time with a couple of thousand people come to see us, and how good were they to stay and listen in the heavy, totally unforecasted rain. Now is it me, or does the met office with it’s multi million pound super computer constantly get the sodding forecast wrong? I checked the met office web site out at 3pm, even putting our postcode in, and was greeted with a partly cloudy, partly sunny picture, with no rain, maybe a little mist after ten o’clock. At seven as we were setting up, it unleashed a deluge of biblical proportions on us and all the punters.
So met office, try looking at the sky or hang up some seaweed or check if all the cows are sitting down or something, and if you’re uncertain about how it’s going to be, why don’t you say you’re for example only 50% certain of the coming conditions, or 25% or whatever, that way we can all gauge our al fresco activities accordingly like grown ups and not be led up the garden path by your bumblingly incompetent thicko computer. Really! Stop doing it! It just gives the Sunday Times more reasons to be horrid about Port Isaac, ‘I went there once and couldn’t see any Cornish people, only second home owners, and it rained there while it was sunny everywhere else blah blah blah…’
Apart from that…
Dreckly dears xx
Cleavies Fish Counter #11
Oh, hello fish-heads. Sorry if you’ve been underblogged this past week; it’s because I’ve been overtired [or do I mean overcidered?]. If you’ve ever been overtired [or overcidered], you’ll know exactly how impossible it is to even attempt the most perfunctory requirements of life. I must admit to having been overtired/cidered before, on three occasions, each time at the Cambridge Folk Festival.
In fact, three years in a row at the Spicy Cider stall. At the Spicy Cider stall where the flashing-eyed swirling gypsy ladies are oh so very welcoming and charming and accommodating. At the Spicy Cider stall where the ambience is ‘ooh arr ooh arr get off my land’ Somerset meets ‘je ne sais pas’ Brittany. At the Spicy Cider stall where they also serve Calvados, which would be a lovely name for a Basque town where they all still wear those really big berets, and is certainly a nice sounding name for a drink, and indeed as it is an apple brandy it should go down like nectar. And does…
So, ciderchosis with calvadistic complications. Overtired my ass!
Can’t believe the crowds back here in Port Isaac though. Some two and a half to three thousand we reckon; do you think that might be a record for the most number of sophisticated music lovers in one location at one time? I think collection wise this week we passed twenty grand since Whitsun, which is in all respects very gratifying.
And, fish-heads, what a lovely surprise for me this week. We were collecting for the Brandon Trust, which is a charity that basically enables adults with learning difficulties to live and integrate and work in the wide community, and as such for example supports nearly 120 people here in Cornwall alone. I was keen to support such a charity, as when I’d finished my degree back in 1982, I went to work in an old style ‘mental’ hospital at Purdown in Bristol.
With two other men, Tim and Bill, who had also just graduated, and Richard a charge nurse, we set about ‘converting’ the hospital farm [Elms Farm, which since Victorian times had supplied the hospital with food, while the hospital supplied it with labour] into a market garden. We used to have ten to fifteen residents sent down daily to help, and it was the best job I ever had. Happy days. And the boys who used to come and work with us were the most memorable bunch of people it’s ever been my privilege to know.
During the mid 1980s the hospital gradually closed down and all those residents were put out into the community and, at least it seemed at the time, left to fend very much for themselves
So when I started talking to the guys from the Brandon Trust who were collecting on Friday night, and recounting the names of all those I’d worked with, I was thrilled to know that not only did they know most of the individuals in question, but that the Brandon Trust is supporting many of them through it’s good work. And, and this is the icing on the cake, the Elms scheme that we had started 30 years ago is now run by the Brandon Trust, and is going from strength to strength.
And that, fish-heads, is better than any cider…
What is nice at the moment is the amount of people who strangely seem to want to have their photos taken with us, and we do our best to smile and look engaging, even though it’s hard to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and that when I smile I look a bit like Jack Nickolson axing his way through the bathroom door in ‘The Shining’ –‘Heeeere’s Johnnie!!’
It’s not like we’re inexperienced at this game now, not since our photoshoot for the album cover last year, when we all had to get reefer-jacketed up and affect wildly rugged rocky north coast glares for the lens. The effect was splendidly gothic we thought. The only disappointing aspect was that of all of us, it was probably the three fishermen who looked least like fishermen. We could have left them out I suppose, and got some proper models in.
Can you imaging the outcry? ‘John, Jeremy and Julian, could you stand aside please? Thanks a lot, get over there out of sight, there’s dears. Now, Felix, you suck your cheeks in and wear those crevettes around your neck and stand by the lobster pot and try and look hard. Hugo, stop pouting like a …pouting, and cuddle the cuttle fish luvee would you, oh and Crispin. Cripsin, put down your mirror and put on the monkfish medallion, love. With feeling. Give me that jolly rogering look!’
No job for a man is it?
Anyway, I think there were some silk purses, more down to Steve the photographer’s skills than the raw material he had to work with, I have to say. I like the one on Port Gaverne beach, with the big threatening sky. So if anyone out there is looking for untamed, overcidered, fish-slippery, barnacle-bottomed Cornish supermodels, look no further. Unlike Hugo and Felix and his poncey mates, we’re cheap…..and very nasty. And we hope that comes Shining through!
Dreckly fish-heads xx