Monthly Archives: September 2010

Kissing Hitler (and everyone else)

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Ok, ok, so it may not have been his finest hour. But for many of us of a certain age The Persuaders was our first real glimpse of the man that was Tony Curtis. The Boston Strangler out over-acting Simon Templar. Harry Houdini out safari-suiting James Bond. Whatta guy! Only then did we start to realise what we’d been missing. So this was who our mums had been swooning over for all those years, and this was the piece of manhood for which the young ladies of Hollywood had been gagging since the late 1940s.

Women (and no doubt some men) all over the world swooned as he wielded rope and handcuffs as the Strangler and Houdini, wore next to nothing in The Vikings and Spartacus and even melted when he wore a faux Herman Goering number in The Great Race. In Some Like it Hot he gave a wonderful Cary Grant impersonation and made for a pretty decent woman. If he’d been a young actor today he’d be labeled as both a gay icon and a smouldering gift to womankind. The one about who both your girlfriend and her slightly iffy brother would go to bed and thrash themselves to within an inch of their lives. One scene in Spartacus , when Curtis sensuously bathes Laurence Olivier, had to be removed from the original released edit for fear of multiple spontaneous combustions all over the US in movie theatres.

For every classic he starred in he also made a stinker. But by the time The Persuaders came into my life it dawned on me I’d probably missed his best bits, something which couldn’t been said of a legion of Hollywood starlets. Tony liked a bird, and the birds liked him. He’d go onto marry six times, underlining his reputation of a master swordsman, but he most famously had failed to bag the one that everyone wanted- Marilyn. He’s famously quoted as describing kissing Monroe in Some Like it Hot as akin to “Kissing Hitler”. Poor sod. Presumably Janet Leigh gave better lip service to him (perhaps more of a Himmler) as they married and produced Jamie Leigh Curtis, who years later would be, incredibly, at the centre of another gossip-led sexuality debate. (Anyone who’s seen the bedroom scene in True Lies could surely be in no doubt.)

“What’s the secret to a long and happy life? Young women’s saliva!” Tony Curtis

As his movie career waned Curtis took up art, for want of a better word, but never let anything get in the way of beautiful young women and magnificent wigs (some of his syrups would have done Phil Spector proud). But we shouldn’t dwell on the last rather sad few years of this once talented and likeable man, trying vainly to relive his youth and hold back the inevitable passage of time. Nor should we feel anything but mild envy for the life he led. Making 85 as he did is testament to the fact that you really can have your cake and eat it too.

I like to think of him running up and down those oars as that one-handed viking, or wearing a frock and playing the sax for Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators.

And let us not forget who first stood up to defend Spartacus. I’m Spartacus! (and so is my wife).

“I wouldn’t be seen dead with a woman old enough to be my wife.” Tony Curtis

Time Gentlemen Please

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Autumn. Conkers. Squirrels. Cold snaps. Crisp mornings, chilly nights. Leaves falling off, evening closing in, windscreens frosting up. Harvest festivals, the bringing in of the sheaves. It’s a time of change. It’s the end of the season: time to pack away the pads and the bats, put the snorkel back in the loft, the Speedos (still unworn) in the bottom drawer. It’s the start of the season: out with the gumshield, buy a new tube of the liniment, dust off the woolly hat, eek out the hipflask. The ground takes a stud, the grass no longer grazes your knees, you can see your breath as you gasp for it by the corner flag.

Things to look forward to: The Ryder Cup; The Ashes Series; the first M&S Christmas advert; the smell of a hot radiator; Trick or Treat. Things to dread: Charlton in a relegation six-pointer; the new season of The Apprentice; Strictly Come Dancing; The Labour Party conference and Guy Fawkes Night (if that’s not repeating myself).

By way of a change, and in a vain attempt to redeem themselves in my eyes, The BBC weather bureau accurately predicted the end of the summer. They said the last day would be Wednesday and, sure enough Wednesday it was. It was gorgeous. As it happened three of us took to the golf course and we couldn’t have picked a more splendid day to waggle our mashie niblicks around in the open air.

My pal, Big H, is a member of the local golf club, Blackheath, and kindly invited Shaun and I to play a round with him. Blackheath is the world’s oldest golf club, which was fitting as I played it like the world’s oldest golfer. To be fair, my first half-dozen holes were decent enough for one who hadn’t picked up a club for over seven years. However, the effort of whacking a little ball around a few miles of parkland soon took it’s toll on these old bones and by the 10th I was sweating audibly, my feet were quite literally bleeding and I was screaming for my mum long before I limped up the 18th.

I have spent many a year explaining (mainly to women and Americans) how tiring and taxing on the body a game of cricket can be, but imagine the look of incredulation on The Incumbent’s face when she saw me the following day, looking as if I’d been run over my a truck. It’s an age thing, you see, and no matter that 80 year old men happily play four games of golf-a-week without so much as a stiff back, or that there are 50 year old cricketers leading their club’s averages, my body has decided to call time early on my chosen sporting careers. I’m not in the Autumn of my cricketing or golfing life, more like the New Year’s Eve party of it- somewhere between the “can I put your coat up in the bedroom” and the “Auld Lang Syne” of it.

The previous weekend I’d had to cry off the last cricket match of the season, citing knee and ankle failure. It was a depressing decision to have to make, knowing it’d be the best part of seven months before my next one. But I was in so much pain it seemed the sensible thing to do. When later the chance to play golf came along I couldn’t resist digging out my 30 year-old golf shoes (the style of which attracted much derision and mirth from my playing partners) and borrowing a set of clubs.

As nice as they are, it was more than my pals could manage to conceal their amazement at my lack-of-fitness. I dunno why: I’ve never been fit. But the rapidity of my decent into a pool of moaning sweat had them fearing for my wellbeing. Dare I play again ? Will I be asked ? If I do play, will the paramedics be on stand-by? Or do I give it up as a bad job, wait until the 2011 cricket season begins and believe that somehow my body will repair itself in time for me to take an active part ?

There have been discussions (albeit a wee bit one-sided) on trying to get fit. Swimming has been muted. Someone actually mentioned joining the gym. Someone else even suggested dance classes. I glazed over like Homer Simpson at a school play. My mate Johnny Mac (he who has just run from John O Groats to Lands End) even said to me over a pint the other night that “everyone want’s to stay fit, don’t they?” He could tell from my expression he may as well as offered me a half-pint.

So I am seriously considering giving it all up. I’ve had a decent run, after all, and maybe it’s time to stand aside and yet youth flourish ? On most summer Saturdays, by the time I strap on the knee-supports, apply the Ralgex and pop half a dozen pain-killers the game’s already started. If I can’t meander around a short-ish, flat-ish golf course without squealing like a stuck pig maybe it’s time to look for other ways to participate in sport ?

I know how to cut up a half-time orange, fill up the tea-urn or run the bath for the lads while they’re out on the field of play. If pushed, I could be the linesman or touch-judge, as long as the players don’t run too fast. At a push I’d drive the team bus. I could umpire, though don’t ask me to caddy (those golf bags are heavy). There are many, much older than me who will scoff and scorn me for being such a lardy wimp, people who keep themselves in reasonable shape and whose weekends still entail pulling on the boots or the plus-fours, polishing off their bowls or even donning singlet and trotting off for a brisk 10-mile run.

But it just sounds too much like hard work to me. Pass me that shooting stick and hand me the program. I’ll queue up for the Bovril, I’ll happily prepare the picnic basket. Let me join the 100 Club and if you’re short I’ll even mark out the pitch, put out the flags or help out behind the bar. I love the game, I adore the competition, I am never happier than when I walk onto the first tee, or take a shiny red cricket ball on my hand or (back in the days of yore) jog out onto the field and stare down my opposite number. I’d always rather lose 22-21 than win 40-nil. But now it hurts. A lot.

It hurts more than it ever did. It starts hurting sooner and it hurts for longer. Sometimes it even hurts before the match starts. So as I sit here, three days since I peeled off those painful, painful golf shoes and I’m still feeling the pain, it’s now surely time to say “time’s up” My cricket captain never reads this rubbish so I’ll have to write and tell him. I’ve announced my retirement to him before and he ignores me, but this time I mean it. Honest. Having not donned golfing troos for the best part of a decade, my pals won’t exactly mourn my passing.

I can always meet them in the bar after. I’ll be snuggled up in front of Strictly, awaiting Sports Personality of the Year. Anyone fancy a game of crib?

The Sole Man

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Bought a pair of shoes once. Doc Martens. Lovely they were. Then after five days the sole of one came away from the upper, under the arch. Less than happy, I popped them into a bag and walked up to the shop from where I bought them in pursuit of a replacement pair or at least a refund.

The shop wasn’t one of those swish, poncy, boutique affairs, full of little girls selling slingbacks to old ladies, but more of an emporium: a functional, no-frills sort of place which sold what my old man would call “working” shoes and clothes. No women were anywhere to be seen. I was one of the few therein not wearing overalls.

There was a bloke who I presumed to be the guvnor arranging a display of shoelaces as I approached the counter.
“Hello mate,” says I to Mr Shopkeeper “I bought these shoes here last week and, look, this one’s split at the seam,”
The bloke took my shoe in his hands, holding it at the heel and toe. He looked at it for a second, noticing the split down the side, then flexed it, looked at me inquisitively before returning his attention to my right size 9. He turned the shoe over, then flexed it again while studying the sole. Then he looked up at me again to deliver his verdict.

“You’ve been bending your feet”
” ‘scuse me?” I spluttered.
“You’ve been bending your feet when you walk” he repeated, without a glint of irony.
“Well how do you walk around, then?” I demanded to know. I walked round in a circle, lifting my knees as if I were wearing flippers. Demonstration over, I returned to meet the shoe expert eye-to-eye.

“You got any that can cope with a spot of foot-bending, then?” I enquired. But he was not playing my game. He again picked up my purchase and continued his flexing routine.
“I can have a go at mending it.” he offered ” I reckon a hot knife should do it.”
“Have a go with a hot knife ???” I retorted, incredulously “These are brand new, mate. They cost me 30 quid. Each !”

He clearly didn’t get it. We argued the toss over whether the fault lay with the manufacturer or some physical deformity that I had been, up to then, blissfully unaware of. I wasn’t in the mood.
“You know the phrase ‘the customer’s always right’ ? Well I’m him ! ”

I could tell he was doing me the biggest of favours when he opened the till to refund my money. I half-thought he might offer me the money back on just one, as only one shoe had split. We hurrumphed at each other as I left the establishment, £60 back in my wallet but two shoes worse off.

The shop is, amazingly, still in business and by all accounts thriving. I walk past it every now and then, remembering not to bend my feet as I do so.

.

Who Are Ya ?

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Took my youngest daughter Kate to play football for her new team on Sunday. Great to get back into the swing of it. A new season, a new team-mates, new coaches and new competitive dads to stand next to on the touchline. Her, sorry our, team won 3-0, with Bealing junior putting in a solid performance at centre-back. Several hefty clearances with the boot, powerful headers into touch were accompanied by two crunching (but completely fair in my eyes) tackles, which led to two free-kicks being awarded against her.

Afterwards the coach congratulated her for her overall game, and said that although her didn’t mind the odd free-kick, warned her “not to get a reputation”. That’s my girl. In the car later I told her that a reputation was exactly what she should strive for, especially one of a tough, uncompromising defender.

Returning home in the guise of contented dad, I let myself dream of my daughter eventually becoming the next Norman Hunter, Roy Keane or Graeme Souness, albeit of the womens’ game. One girl in the U18s had already secured 3 England caps, so Kate had just 3 years to perfect her tackling and heading, perhaps turning herself into a Lampard-esque attacking midfielder (just hopefully with fewer hair products). Oh football isn’t such a bad game after all.

Then I started browsing the sports pages…

An assistant coach of Togo’s national football team has been suspended for three years after he took a group of imposters masquerading as the national side to play a match in Bahrain. Last week, Togo’s sports federation said it had no knowledge of a friendly that took place between a team representing itself as Togo’s national side and Bahrain on September 7.

Bahrain had been surprised by the ease of their 3-0 victory in Riffa on September 7, coach Josef Hickersberger describing it as “boring” and their opponents as unfit. “They were not fit enough to play 90 minutes; the match was very boring. “Basically it was not good for us because we wanted to get information about the strength of our team, especially playing with many of our professionals.” (Yahoo News)

Seems that they’re not the only ones pretending to be someone they’re not…

Paris Saint-Germain goalkeeper Apoula Edel has been interviewed by police over claims he lied about his age and identity.

Edel’s former coach and agent Nicolas Philibert, who claims that he is owed 30,000 euros by the player, is reported to have accused the 24-year-old of actually being a 29-year-old named Ambroise Beyamena. French magazine Le 10 Sport had published documents accusing the Cameroon-born Armenia international of lying about his age and identity, documents handed to the authorities by Philibert.

Philibert claims he coached Edel in Cameroon, lending him money and helping him move to Armenia, and that he is actually Benyamena. (Eurosport)

From imposters to would-be assassins…

A Turkish professional football match was suspended after the manager of one of the teams was stabbed on the touchline by his own brother. Mersin Idmanyurdu boss Yuksel Yesilova was watching his side play at Samsunspor in a first division (second tier) match on Monday when the incident happened.

Forty minutes into the match Yesilova’s older brother, Murat, jumped out of the crowd and attacked his brother, stabbing him six times in the stomach and hip. The match was immediately suspended and Yesilova was rushed to hospital. His injuries were ruled not to be life-threatening, and he was released from hospital on Tuesday. (Eurosport)

Meanwhile over in Honduras….

An angry Honduran goalkeeper shot at a journalist with an air gun at the weekend over criticism in the sports daily Diez.

In an act reminiscent of an incident involving Diego Maradona in 1994, Motagua goalkeeper Donaldo Morales shot at reporter Saul Carranza with an air gun over criticism of his performances in the sports daily Diez.

Carranza was interviewing midfielder Jorge Claros after a practice at the Estadio Nacional in Tegucigalpa when Morales appeared with a gun and shot at them, hitting the reporter twice and the player once, according to a weekend report in Diez. The paper said that Morales later asked Carranza to forgive him but the reporter refused. (Reuters)

Yes, it’s a lovely game, yer soccer. As happy as I am with the crowd chanting “Kate Bealing bites yer legs”, I’d rather she didn’t have to learn the art of manangercide. I wonder if I can persuade her to take up rugby instead ? I could go down the joke-shop for some blood-capsules. Or I could get her a fake Pakistani passport so she could ply her trade as a seam-bowler (there are likely to be one or two vacancies coming up). Or snooker ? Horse racing ? Boxing seems to be a straight-up sport. Motor-racing anyone ?

A Foreign Visitor

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Fears that his arrival would be greeted with apathy were allayed last night when literally some people turned out in London to greet His Holiness Trevor the Last on his In-a-State visit to Britain. His huge mass was celebrated as crowds waited for him to turn several bottles of wine into water. Prayers were said for the tragic loss of his dress sense. Later today the Plastered Parisian Pontiff is expected to make a public apology for years of liver-abuse.

A Short History of Just about Nothing

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I suppose it happens to each of us from time to time, and this week I started making tentative enquiries as to who or what my ancestors were. I know what triggered it:- a cable channel has been running back-to-back every one of the BBC’s many episodes of Who Do You Think You Are ?, a show where celebrities and the like are taken through a long, often tortuous journey back in time to trace their family trees.

Among the nuggets the show threw up was that Mayor Boris Johnson’s predecessors ruled most of Europe (shock), many of Stephen Fry’s family were jews butchered by the Nazis (v upsetting for him and for the viewer) and Ainsley Harriot’s great, great something or other was a white bloke running a plantation in the West Indies, raping the slave girls wherever he went (knocked a dirty great hole in Ainsley that one, poor sod).

It got me thinking, and that hasn’t happened for a while. I realised that I knew next to sod all about my family. I had known well all four of my grandparents. Both granddads were in the forces -that’s one of them, my mum’s dad Bill- at the top of this page, about to go off to the far east- and the other, Bryan, was a sailor (I have the sea in my blood and if you look carefully you can see where it gets in). But I know little or nothing of their fathers, or their fathers’ fathers. Or their fathers’ fathers’ fathers (ok, Stan don’t labour the point).

Many years ago a bloke called Nigel Bealing (an unknown to my branch of the clan) sent my father a completely unsolicited package which appeared to contain our family tree, or at least the parts he said he’d been able to plot. I’ve no idea where all those documents within that parcel ended up (probably in my dad’s loft) but the only things anyone ever remembers of their contents was a vaguely convincing coat of arms and the fact that we are, apparently, descended from Lord Marmaduke Boleyn, second cousin of Anne Boleyn, she of Henry VIII fame. Boleyn to Bealing in 500 easy years. Hmmm….

Apart from the rather uneasy feeling that there was royalty in my blood (however distant or tenuously linked), the news didn’t really impress me too much, such is the apathy of youth, and I pretty much forgot about it for years after. But as one rapidly approaching his 46th birth anniversary, with the fear of mortality kicking in, and treating myself to a week-long diet of B-listers’ family archives, I decided to my own digging. What would I find? More royalty? Murderers? Artists? Accountants ? (please god, no).

So, having more time on my hands than is decent, I searched for ancestry websites. The start of my long long journey into the past had begun, to become acquainted with all those magnificent old sods whose stories, whose lives and existences I knew nothing at all about. How exciting, I thought. Centuries of Bealings awaited me. Was Anne Boleyn the last of the line to have six fingers? Have we always had small gentetalia? Is my lineage, like Tony Hancock’s “100% Anglo Saxon with just a touch of viking?”. Could it be I’m distantly related to Ainsley Harriot?

First stop: the 1911 census. There he was: My granddad

Apart from the fact that they’d for some reason got his date of birth wrong (he was born in 1900) it was rather pleasing and eerie to see him there in black and white, or black and blue anyway. But apart from that one entry, that’s as much as I got. I don’t know his dad’s name, his DOB or anything really. I could have delved deeper but that would have meant registering and with the site and ‘buying credits’, whatever that meant. My sudden surge of enthusiasm for the past was evaporating like the morning mist on Blackheath common.

No matter. It would wait for another day. It’s taken me 45.9 years to take an interest in old Marmaduke and his descendants so another couple of months won’t do any harm, will it? I logged off and returned to my job-seeking activities. Then tonight, while wading through a whole slew of 911 programs I’d recorded over the weekend I was idly surfing the web when the ancestry bug nibbled me again.

In an act of pure self-indulgence I started Googling the family name. Christ ! There are hundreds of us. Far too many to bother with on a Sunday evening. So I clicked onto Google images to see what I could find there. Here too were many different pictures of Bealings I had no idea existed. There was a John and a Clive. I found a photo of Paul from New Zealand. There was a Crystal Bealing, a black girl from the States and Nicola Bealing, a successful artist from Cornwall. Hundreds of people all with the same silly surname. I suppose if I’d ever joined Facebook I might have found out all of this years ago. But I didn’t. And, just for the record, I won’t.

Feeling reinvigorated, and with plenty of new leads and relatives to keep me busy for the next eon, I was just about to close down my laptop when out of the corner of my eye I spotted a rather odd-looking picture. It was a page from something called Rudy’s List of Archaic Medical Terms.
 It is, as is suggested by the title, a list of of rather old an odd words which the medical profession once used. At least I hope they once used them. There, somewhere between some affliction called Bay Sore and the rather alarmingly sounding Beaver Feaver, was this:

If you’re finding that difficult to read, I shall assist. It reads: Beal – A small inflammatory tumor; a pustule. To gather matter; to swell and come to a head, as a pimple. See Boil a tumor. (Prov. Eng.) [Webster1913].

Ok, ok, very funny, I suppose, if your name happens to be Beal. But I’m not. Clearly. But underneath was a derivation, a useage.

An example from an 1853 mortality schedule from Kentucky:

I repeat: Cause of Death: Bealing in the Throat !

Can you image my disappointment? Here I was hoping to discover that I’m the rightful air to the fortunes of some long-forgotten dynasty who were once the toast of the royal courts of Europe, who owned not only all the tea in China but the cups and saucers too. Instead I find that when my forefathers filled in a mortgage application, the staff at Ye Old Abbey National were sent into fits of giggles on reading a letter from a Mr Pustule. I’d had enough again. Sod the lineage. Shut down Mac.

And I don’t want to go down the route of how one could die of “Bealing in the Throat”, I shall leave that to your dirty smutty little minds. Just move away from the computer and forget you ever read about it. Regular readers of this column should find that easy enough.

And the rest is geography.