Punk's (not) Dead.

A colleague recently bemoaned the lack of flair demonstrated by today’s youth.
We were looking out of the office window watching a group of lads sauntering past four floors below.
“Look at them, they think they’re it but they’re all in uniform” he said, preparing a mental inventory, “baseball caps, white trainers, track suit trousers, jackets printed with graffiti tags, pasty faces, nothing to do, nowhere to go, scrawling crap on the walls that nobody wants to read, it’s like dogs marking their territory, where’s the individuality? They all look the same.”
I didn’t want to ruin the moment by pointing out that here we were both wearing identikit suits, both working in an office that could be like any other office anywhere, both paid to scribe stuff that no one wants to read, obsessed about getting our bylines on pages like dogs marking their territories.
Where, indeed, is the individuality?
“When I was a kid I was a punk” he announced, in the same slightly unconvincing way people who ache to be hip claim to have once been a member of the Dug Out, the influential Bristol nite-spot with room for 300 and an apparent membership of 64 million.
“Really?” I’m impressed, “a punk? How old are you?”
“41”
“So, you were an 11 year old punk?”
“Yeah” sheepish grin “alright. Truth be told I always rather preferred Leo Sayer. But I had the spirit of punk later on, I wanted to be different, not like them” he points out of the window, to a crisp packet blowing along an otherwise empty street and turns to find I’ve gone back to my desk to assert my individuality by quietly panicking about .
It’s thirty years since punk first exploded, like a big sneeze, snottily into the living rooms and onto the suburban street corners of middle England.
Many will assert that it started in London, or even New York, they’ll cite Malcolm Mclaren, his shop Let It Rock. How he was Fagin to a legion of surly, disaffected youths whom he taught to pick the pockets of rock and roll and joyously fleece the music industry and the record buyers alike.
This is true. But not, I think, the full story. Because everywhere else Punk was something that just happened. It was an umbrella term for a scene that was as different in Manchester as it was in Glasgow, Bristol as it was in Wootten-under-Edge.
I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but my eldest sister was an early convert.
One minute it was that blisteringly hot summer of 1976, I was seven with an unruly mop of ginger hair (like McLaren) and with my granny, who we lived with, looking forward to the next year’s silver jubilee celebrations (like McLaren, just not in the same way).
She was tall and pretty in garish Bri-nylon, who when she wasn’t reading was dreaming of the drummer of Flintlock.
The next minute it seemed to have been raining for a month and a lot of boys, one of them, Adam, with pink hair, were pogo-ing around her bedroom declaring that there was “no future” and looked at me as if they’d just stepped in me.
Bri-nylon was dispatched for mo-hair and spray on tartan trews. Flintlock - over whose bubblegum pop stylings a big sister and gawky little brother had just weeks earlier bonded - were fired and upgraded to the more devastating sonic firepower of the Sex Pistols. Everything was different.
When my sister was out, probably hanging on a corner terrorising first world war veterans with her ripped stockings, I’d be in her room hogging the record player.
While I quickly gained a working knowledge, even a liking, for Wire, X-Ray Spex, The Clash and, of course, The ‘Pistols, as their 45s piled up on top of Flintlock, Leo Sayer and Middle Of The Road (Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep - still a classic) I didn’t really ‘get’ them. I hit a wall of Edwardian silence when I asked my Granny what an Orgasm Addict was. I found out the answer for myself when I hit puberty. That’s another post.
I still have the record. It’s got my sisters name on it, written with big looped joined up letters that only adolescent girls can do. The full stop is replaced with a love heart. Hardly the signature of a threat to society as we knew it.
In general, I found punk then to be utterly confusing. Which was, I realise now, sort of the point of a movement that set so much store in pointlessness. To be a punk was to not be like you. That was enough.
But all that self-righteous, humourless indignation at the world was also highly amusing for a seven year old. And, it turned out, his step dad.
Once a punk ‘face’ came to our house. He sported a full Mohican, with spikes of hair rumoured to have been dipped in Super-Glue, a studded leather jacket, bondage trousers and a chain that linked his left nostril to his right ear lobe.
When he walked down the path there was a race between my sister and my step dad to answer the door. To her horror, she was last and could only bear agonising witness to the following exchange. My old man gave the punk icon the once over. He pointed to his facial decoration. “If I pull that, will you flush?”.
Reactionary git, they would have thought. But two decades earlier he was sharpening his button down collars in readiness for weekends at the legendary Eel Pie Island and The Crawdaddy club, a sweaty South West London hole and both the Capital’s equivalents/challenges to the Cavern, that outraged with their habit of booking the hairiest, loudest and lewdest r&b acts of the early 60’s, the Yardbirds, The Who, The Pretty Things, The Birds (not to be confused with those dyslexic hippies from the States), and The ‘Stones.
What goes around, etc.
Those lads at the top of the post don’t represent a failure on punk‘s part to make us all individuals. Teenagers today are not any less relevant or rebellious or even revolutionary. They might look the same but in their heads they’re just not us. And that’s enough.

Modern Ghost Woe

My friends Burley, Palmer and Gunn and I recently invented a family- friendly game that combines our two greatest interests, pizza and the paranormal.

Taking the gist of the original spirit-medium's tool, the Ouija board, we've added a taste of Italian cuisine and called it The Lou-iji Board.

We've already scripted the advert which we intend to be five times more annoying than the classic MB Games ad for Operation - you remember, the one with the architecturally coiffured mum whose dubbed- over voice asks: "Can I have a go?"

Our ad is even better. It goes like this: A 1980s open-plan front room. Four children dressed in bad clothes are crouched around a pizza-shaped Ouija board. They have their fingers on an upturned glass which seems to float magically around the board, over an alphabet of shaped cardboard pizza toppings such as anchovies and peppers.

A mother, in mourning dress, but grinning inanely nonetheless, overlooks the game.

As does the spirit of Lou-iji, a spectral Italian chef, who rises, with the aid of terrible 1980s video effects, through the centre of the board. To the tune of Joe Dolce's Shud Up A Ya Face, he sings:

"What's-a matter you?

"HEY!

"Lost your dear Papa?

"HEY!

"Need to change da will?

"HEY!

"Contacta da dead!

A cod Italian voiceover announces: "Lou-iji board! It's-a da great new occult game from NB Games for all-a da family."

Then a group of smiling ghosts, one of them headless, enter the room through the walls and join the grinning kids. Kid One asks: "What's it like on the other side - are there really fields full of lollypops?" All the ghosts nod eagerly in the affirmative.

Kid Two wants to know if puppies "grow on trees in the afterlife". Again the ghosts cheerily nod.

Now mum wants in on the action. Waving her husband's last will and testament, which has some questionable entries clearly circled in red pen, she asks, with a giggle: "Can I have a go?"

Everybody makes a mock tut and laughs. The cod Italian voiceover announces, "Lou-IJI board. It'll keepa da spirits up!"

A blink-or-you'll-miss-it subtitle flashes on the screen, reading: "Not suitable for the under-threes or the recently bereaved."

The fact that we've already written the advert before launching the product might suggest to you that we don't have faith in the Lou-iji board. Far from it. There's just one technical hitch to smooth out before we unleash the other world on the living public. We don't know how to turn it off.

Product testing started well. We had originally intended that the board be made of dough that the players shaped and baked themselves. This turned out to be unimaginably boring to undertake so instead we took a photograph of a large Domino's pizza, cut it out and stuck it to some cardboard.

Using a marker pen we drew the numbers 0-9 and the letters A-Z around the pizza.

After pouring ourselves a mood-setting pint of Chianti each we sat down around the board and proceeded to knock up any passing members of the spirit world. Imagine our surprise when, after an hour's play, the room was packed with ghosts.

Among the spooks vying for space on the sofa were Florence Nightingale, Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakir, Van Gogh, Matisse and Andy Warhol, Sasha Distel, the entire Light Brigade (of charging fame) two men claiming to be Dick Turpin, Lady Jane Grey, Brunel, Satan the great dark lord of the underworld, Rod Hull (but not Emu) and, somewhat surprisingly, TV presenter Phillip Schofield.

With so many dead historical figures - with the possible exception of Schofield - in one place, you'd imagine a fabulous party to simply burst into life - if you'll excuse the pun. But being dead isn't all it's cracked up to be. Whoever said you shouldn't meet your heroes, especially if they're dead, was right and the whole affair was somewhat miserable.

We couldn't think of any interesting questions to ask. Sasha Distel refused to comment on whether he was bullied at school for having a girl's name, Van Gough tiresomely pretended to be deaf and when we asked Rod Hull if in retrospect he'd would have considered cable TV he stormed out in a huff. Well, we thought it was funny.

A week or so later we still can't get rid of the ghosts. It's like Truly Madly Deeply at my house, only without some blubbering thesp playing the cello.

Biggie and Tupac insist on catching the bus to work with me and make obscene rhymes about local transport providers First.

When I got home last night Satan had eaten the batteries of the TV remote control and Van Gogh had stencilled a sunflower border all around my living room, which is so mid-90s I could've cried.

I've been in touch with the local priest and he says as soon as he sorts out the mess caused by some local kid who's been doling out fish sandwiches and walking on Henleaze Lake, he'll pop round.

In the meantime, he advised, why not pass the time with my unwelcome guests by inviting them to play a nice board game.

Novel White Lies

A third of British adults have lied about reading a book to appear more intelligent and one in 10 men will pretend to have read certain books in order to impress members of the opposite sex, according to a new survey of 4,000 readers by the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council (MLA).

The findings (you can read them all in the news section here ) are PR guff working some reverse psychology riff to tempt people into libraries, but there are some tasty nuggets to chew on and spit out; 15 per cent of readers lie about the books they have read to new colleagues, one in 10 of 19 to 21-year-olds will trip up when quizzed about a book they have claimed to, but haven't, read. That kind of thing.

Almost half of respondents said that reading classic titles like War and Peace, Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice makes you appear more intelligent. What I was most surprised about was that five per cent said they lied about their reading habits to their employers. Just five per cent, surely some mistake?

Leading someone up the garden path is all very well if you want a roll in a flower bed, but if it's for your career's sake, getting your foot in the door at the top of the path calls for some really creative fibbing. And not just about the unbroken spines of the "classics" on your bookcase.

Employers know that a fair percentage of CVs arrive with a modicum of embellishment. It's not condoned but it's almost expected of applicants.

And depending on how much you want the job, can you really be blamed for a semi-innocent typo that transforms your grade three French CSE result to a masters degree in French literature? Is it really so objectionable to lie barefaced that you count opera, theatre, fell-walking and bringing to justice Nazi war criminals among your favourite hobbies, if you think that you could really benefit the company you're applying for?

I'm no captain of industry but I think that, yes, actually, it's probably not safe for anyone to lie about their qualifications. Or at the very least, it depends.

If, for instance, you want to work on the milk floats for United Dairies I say knock yourself out. Don't forget to mention you've read War & Peace so many times you've actually been approached to write the sequel, Peace & Then A Lot Of Little Wars. They won't care; as long as you can whistle tunelessly, the milk round's yours.

If, on the other hand, you have, say, political ambitions you really should try and be honest because the moment you garnish your credentials - you put Oxford University instead of the local Higher Education college, say, or you boast of a glittering early start in political analysis when in actual fact you did work experience on an obscure weekly rag and made the tea between copying press releases about the nation's reading habits - is the moment somebody cries, "Actually...."

But in politics that shout often comes too late, or is buried. Or both. You can trace the path of career-before-principals politicians by following the trail of exaggerations they leave in their wake. Often they are incredulous when exposed as phoney, usually because their wide-eyed duplicity is so convincing they believe it themselves. They'll also have a whole team of equally careerist sycophants feeding them plate after plate of deceit, boiled and fried in the juices of their own self interest. So the wheel turns.

Because it can be hard to stop a lie from spiralling out of control. Announcing that you admire Dostoyovski when your bookshelves say J K Rowling is one thing. But sex up your CV to get a foot on the bottom rung of the political ladder and see how quickly and casually you'll find yourself in front of your peers swearing blind that you have "concrete", "irrefutable" and "God-given" evidence that Iraq is harbouring enough weapons of mass destruction to blow this world into the next.

I can't claim to be living it up on the moral highground here, a lie's a lie whatever its scale and I've employed a few to gain employment.

The CV that got me my first staff writing job stated boldly that I was a "lifelong Bristol Rovers fan" after I received a tip-off that the then editor held a season ticket for the Pirates.

To measure my knowledge of football, more specifically Bristol Rovers (and this is despite the fact that I have lived in North Bristol all my life and, not only that, but in the shadow of not one but two of Rovers' three home grounds) you would need the kind of equipment reserved for scientists investigating really tiny, miniscule, little things that nobody else should really concern themselves with. Put it this way, I'm no expert.

"Gary Penrice" who was then a mustachioed player with the Gas, "is practically a god, don't you think?"

I knowingly without knowing announced to the interview panel, praying they wouldn't ask me why I thought that was even thinkable.

Naturally I got the job. Nothing to do with whether I could write stories, all to do with spinning a yarn.

I was found out. Eventually. I'd got pretty good at avoiding any serious debate about Rovers and would study the back page of the Evening Post on a Monday, which I could rely on for about four sentences worth of bluff if I was in a particularly tight conversational spot.

Sadly, one small oversight, (how was I to know Bristol Rovers had moved to Bath - I mean, does that make sense to anyone?) saw my web of deceit come crashing down. Luckily, by this time, I was indispensable to the magazine, namely because in three years I hadn't asked for a pay rise and, secondly, because I told them I was indispensable and nobody suspected me of being stupid enough to fundamentally lie to them twice. But I didn't see the love in my editor's eyes for a long time after that. And even then he wouldn't let me use his pristinely-kept Rovers' mug when all the other cups were dirty.

Four Murders

For no particular reason other than it's bloody cold, here are four Bristol murder stories.....



John Horwood was convicted of the murder of Eliza Balsum in 1821, although the case was on shaky ground from the start. Horwood, from Bristol, had been romantically pursuing Balsum, from Kingswood, for some months. When she finally put a stop to his advances he threw a stone at her in frustration.
She was bruised by the incident but otherwise, it seemed, unharmed. But two days later, and after walking from Kingswood, she reported to the Bristol Infirmary feeling unsteady on her feet. She was treated for a head wound but died within days. The surgeon Richard Smith inspected her body and found an abscess. The fact that this was more likely to have been caused by a dirty bandage applied in the hospital was not considered and Horwood was arrested and charged with her murder.
Horwood enjoyed the distinction of being the first prisoner to be hanged at the new Cumberland Road gaol (the original was burnt down during the Bristol Riots). The moment he was pronounced dead, Horwood’s body was commandeered by Richard Smith, the surgeon who accused him of the crime. Smith dissected the body during a public medical lecture.
Smith had Horwood’s body skinned and tanned. After it was given a further chemical treatment in Bedminster, what was left of Horwood was dispatched to a bookbinders in Essex who used it to bind a book, written by Smith, about the Horwood case. The book remains in the city archive and the gruesome tome is made available to the public by appointment.


As if inspired by the pages of a crime novel, the murderer of cinema manager RN Parrington “Jacko” Jackson, in 1950 waited in the packed cinema for the exact moment a shot was fired in the Ronald Coleman thriller The Light That Failed, before he empty a barrel into the ill fated impressario.
Despite a huge police investigation Jacko’s murder remained a mystery until fairly recently. His killer was never brought to justice.
There appeared to be no motive for the killing.
Just moments previously Jackson had been laughing and joking with the restaurant staff and had just returned from the box office with the takings from the day.
But none of that £800 had been stolen.
The police had just one tip off. An anonymous caller said the man they should be looking for was clean shaven, aged 30-35, about five feet seven inches tall, of medium-build with dark hair and a ruddy complexion. He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie and had been sitting in the balcony lounge reading a newspaper.
Inquiries ranged across the whole country - even to America, where a GI was questioned - but no arrests were made. The murder weapon - a Colt 45 revolver - had been found in a water tank in the city. Then the trail went cold.
In the mid 70s the case was reopened when a homeless man called Fred Jesser contacted the Evening Post with his theory that ‘Jacko’ was whacked by a jealous boyfriend.
It was a theory not without substance. ‘Jacko’, apparently, was a suave smoothie who had a reputation as a ‘ladies man’.
But in the 1990s a death bed confession appeared to close the case for good.
The killer was named as Billy "The Fish" Fisher, a petty crook who had travelled with his accomplice, Duckey Leonard, from South Wales with the sole intention of robbing the cinema. They panicked when Parrington Jackson walked in and "The Fish" shot him twice.
Fisher's son, Jeff Fisher, told police that his father had confessed to the killing and that he believed that he may have murdered more than once.

William Hay, who killed his 17 year old boyfriend and buried his dismembered body in the docks, was gaoled for life at Bristol Crown Court in July 1978.
Hay had denied murdering Keith Whalen saying that the act was manslaughter after he had been provoked. The jury did not accept his plea.
Hay took Whelans body in a tin trunk to a lonely spot near Severn Beach after stabbing his lover to death in his flat on Luccombe Hill in Redland.
Hay initially tried to dispose of the body by burning it, but it wouldn’t catch and he left it. The next day Hay returned with a saw and set about removing Keith’s head and left leg. Hay then loaded the body into his car and returned to Bristol. At Cumberland Basin he dug a shallow grave and placed the body in it.

The last person to be executed in a Bristol prison was Russell Pascoe at Horfield in 1963. Pascoe was the coconspirator of a botched burglary of a remote farm in Cornwall. Russell, and his accomplice Dennis Whitty, had heard rumours that the reclusive farmer William Rowe hid a fortune amongst the chaotic piles of waste at his farm. Discovered by Rowe as they searched for valuables, Pascoe and Whitty set about the old man with iron bars, they then stabbed him a number of times and slashed his throat. Pascoe was arrested at a roadblock a couple of days after the murder when his answers to a routine set of questions failed to convince the police officer. Whitty was taken by the police soon after and both defendants blamed the other for the murder. Whitty was taken to be hanged at Winchester while Pascoe would see out his last days looking at Gloucester Road through the bars of his cell.
By 1963 support for the abolition of hanging was growing stronger in Britain and protesters gathered outside Horfield as Pascoe prepared for his final trek from cell to gallows.
Tony Benn, then MP for Bristol South-East, told the vigil on the night before the execution: "I think this will be Bristol's last execution. I am sure the death penalty will be abolished." Benn was prescient. Hanging would be abolished for most crimes - it technically applies to treason and regicide - later that year and Pascoe and Whitty would be the two of the last four to hang for their offences. The last two hangings, again involving coconspirators, took place in Liverpool and Manchester in August 1964.
Between 1875 and 1963, Bristol's Horfield Prison hanged 17 people, the eldest of whom was 49, the youngest just 21.

Net Ache

Computer scientist Robert Wilensky once joked at a conference, "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
I’m not sure.
While there’s little original content on the web to rival the Bard - intentionally or randomly - there’s an awful lot of people posting content designed specifically to make a monkey out of you. Hardly Shakespearean, but clever, admittedly.
While the Internet and e-mail are generally really rather good things they’re also a gift to scamsters, grifters and mischief makers.
The web is aptly named when you consider the amount of suckers glued to its sticky strands by the anonymous confidence tricksters who inhabit it. Motivated by a mix of greed and desperation it only takes one person to hand over bank account details for a share in a non existent Nigerian diamond mine to make the millions of badly spelt and grammatically dubious spam e- mails dispatched electronically worth the while.
Everybody who works in an office is familiar with the daily ritual of clearing their e-mail in-boxes of spam mails. Spam is relentless. As fast as new software to quarantine it arrives then new ways to evade the defences are devised by the spammers.
We have a pretty sturdy system in place here at The Post. I call it the spam-bot and its job is to read all of my e-mails before I do, scanning for expletives and profanities. If it finds a virus or anything questionable it blocks the e-mail thus preventing my ambitions to own a part share in a non existent diamond mind.
Despite spam-bot’s best efforts, though, plenty of offensive e-mails get through. I generally ignore the ones from my mother but must admit my interest is tickled by offers of Viagra in bulk, invitations to buy stock in pretend companies and urgent letters from Barclays Bank asking for my account details.
The latter I particularly enjoy since I don’t have an account with Barclays. I like to fill in the forms with completely made up information, using my colleague Tim’s desk phone number as the account number. Then I press send. I like to think about the wannabe criminal masterminds at the other end of the web going, “Hey, look, David Cameron and Jade Goody share a bank account...”
I replied to one Nigerian con artist to correct him on a few punctuation and grammatical errors when he contacted me to ask if I’d like to, “very kindly allow me to put what is nearly £6,000,000 into your account for a holding purpoise so that when I come to collect it I will give you a ten percentage as my kind thank you.”
I told him that while his assumption that I was stupid and greedy was on track, this whole ‘I have to move out of the country etc” schtick was as old as the internet hills now and no one was going to fall for it. “Do try and come up with something more original” I pleaded.
That was that, I thought.
But he replied with a “thank you”. I warmed to him. Later, because we were mates, he offered me a 15% slice of the £6 million he had to get out of the country.
Am I writing this while sipping a cocktail beside the indoor swimming pool of my new £1.5million house in Sneyd Park? No, ‘sigh’, the millions languishing in a West African vault are as real as my up market suburban Bristol address.
See? Nobody’s falling for the internet con thing anymore. So the £1000’s spent annually by companies on securing their systems from time wasting, often virus carrying spam has got to be money well spent.
An in house e-mail we got last week didn’t exactly bear that out.

“ALL DRIVERS - PLEASE READ THIS WARNING
Please be aware of new car-jacking scheme. This is the method now being used please be aware of your vulnerability
Their Method:-
You walk across the car park, unlock your car and get inside. Then you lock all your doors, start the engine and put into gear or reverse. You look into the rear-view mirror and you notice a piece of paper stuck to the middle of the rear window.
So, you put the vehicle in neutral, unlock your doors and jump out of the vehicle to remove that paper. When you reach the back of your vehicle the car-jackers appear out of nowhere, jump into your vehicle and take off!! Your engine was running, you would have left your briefcase etc. in the car and they practically mow you down as they speed off in your vehicle.
BE AWARE OF THIS NEW SCHEME THAT IS NOW BEING USED IN GLASGOW AND MANCHESTER AND IS MAKING ITS WAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY!”

Since this was sent from on high from our transport division (the very same message was doing the rounds in a few other Bristol companies, so they weren’t alone in the sucker stakes) there was clearly cause for concern. Certainly it sounded convincing.
But wait a minute, isn’t car-jacking an opportunist crime? Would a car jacker really loiter in a car park with a pack of Post-It notes? Um...no.
But in the interests of being a proper journalist, I checked. I called the news desks of the Manchester Evening News and The Glasgow Herald. Were those fair cities being plagued by stationery packing criminal masterminds? “Er... no” said Manchester, “um..I’ve never..I don’t...is this a serious question?” asked Glasgow. Strathclyde Police were sniffy to but confirmed that no such crime had ever been reported. Manchester’s police authority concurred, but much more pleasantly, so I think I know where I’d like to be car jacked in future.
Paste a snatch of the e-mail into Google and you’ll find the message intended to make our lives just that little bit darker, while pretending to make us safer, is, in fact, spam, a net-age version of a chain letter. Of American origin, it’s been around since 1997, at least. Finally, with some details changed to scare a British audience, it fetched up here. Indeed Strathclyde Police took it seriously when it was passed to them as ‘intelligence’ two years ago, admitted a press officer there, which perhaps explains their curt response to the subject.
Nonsense or not, it had the desired affect, anyone reading it becomes paranoid. I don’t drive myself, but even I checked the back of my coat for pieces of paper just in case someone was lying in wait to mac-jack me when I left for home.
It was sent out in our office with the best of intentions. But it goes to show, however hip to 21st living you think you are, there’s someone, somewhere online who knows your weak spot.

Ginger Whinge

They’re the breed everyone loves to hate. Stand easy you pit bull type terriers, you’re not out of the dog house but you’re way down on the list, I’m talking red-heads.
Yes, copper-tops, carrot tops, Duracell heads, strawberry and Titian blondes, gingers (to rhyme with kingers) call them what you will, and you’ve a thousand different options, they’ve been feared, revered but mainly mocked for millennia.
While the ginger inflicted have had their moments - stand up Boudicca, the Tudors, Churchill and, um, Robin Cook - they’ve also included Judas, Cromwell and Lizzie Borden the axe murderess among the ranks, which has hardly helped the cause.
To anyone not sporting a shock of red the very word ginger conjures up images of wild, Celtic temperaments, indeed, most natural redheads in this country can traces their genes back to Britain and Ireland’s earliest settlers some 40 to 50,000 years ago.
The largest percentage of red heads remains in Ireland and Western Scotland while Wales and Cornwall boast a sizeable ginger contingent.
As the British gene pool turned into a reservoir so gingerness spread itself thin, to the point that natural red heads became something of a rarity. There’s safety in numbers and there's safety in merging in with herd. Those of a ginger persuasion have neither luxury. They stick out and everyone lets you know it.
My name is Cris Warren and I have been ginger for 37 years.
Last summer I was sat outside a cafe with my then six month old daughter in my arms feeding her a bottle. A family was sat a couple of tables over and the teenage daughter observing my red bearded self, commented, perhaps louder than she had intended, “he looks like an orangutan.”Her father made a “shushing” noise. He needn’t have. With apologies to orangutans, who are of course apes, I couldn’t have given a monkey’s. In fact, I didn’t even look up (although I did note when they left, that she possessed a face resembling a bucket with a dent in it and a backside so huge only someone in severe denial or a degree in irony would think to encase it in pink Velcro track suit trousers).
It’s water off a ginger crested duck’s back for me. I don’t think a month has gone by in my entire life when some wag, be they complete strangers, work colleagues or lifelong friends, hasn’t felt fit not to make some comment or reference to the colour of my hair.
Sometimes these are complementary, sometimes surprisingly rude, most of the time they’re good natured barbs meant as terms of endearment, yet on any level all of them cite my distinguishing feature and my character as being somehow one and the same.
Never mind my drop dead good looks, huge intellect, generosity and general out and out gorgeousness. Or even my saint like modesty. The fact that I have red hair seems to act as a visual cue for some people to make snap judgements about my temperament, my lineage and my choice of sun block.
My hair is their licence to take the mick.
As a kid it used to get to me. Not any more, I simply don’t care. My skin might be fair and start to burn if I so much as look at a holiday brochure, but it’s also thick. I’ve heard every ginger dig and diss going, and now they just bounce off my expressionless face.
I don’t know why some people dislike red-heads or even like red heads yet idly make reference to Duracell and carrot tops (have they not noticed how the top of a carrot is actually, like, green?) and what not whenever the topic of gingerness crops up.
I’ve heard arguments that while the trembling majority always love a whipping boy, in this PC age, there’s precious few minorities left you can legally take a verbal pop at as a cover for their own insecurities.
Perhaps there’s some truth in that.
Here’s an example.
Following months of snide remarks and cat calls, all centred on the colour of her hair, the stunningly pretty, articulate and funny 13 year old, ginger headed daughter of a friend of mine has decided enough is enough and has dyed her hair brown, surely the dullest, most inconspicuous colour on the spectrum. Which, of course, was her reasoning.
I sympathise with her. Mainly with the fact that her contemporaries are such pathetic sheep that challenged with a classmate who stands out from the flock, their response is to bully and cajole until she becomes ‘one of them’.
By the time she’s in her late teens I’m confident that she’ll embrace her gingerness - certainly there’ll be many, many young men who will want to - and not have to rely on the approval of her classmates to live her own life.
In the meantime she’s keeping her head down and hoping the insults will go away as long as her roots remain covered.
What’s especially interesting about her story is the hypothesis it throws up, because her half sister, who goes to a different school, is mixed race. If she had come home and asked her parents for permission to bleach her skin because of the trouble her colouring was causing her what sort of uproarious reaction do you think there would be?
Of course, you’re on dodgy ground if you equate the half-witted comments of some towards ginger hair with those of racists and bigots. But, in the same breath surely prejudice is prejudice in whatever shade it manifests itself and I like to think I wouldn’t ever dignify discrimination by acknowledging it.
When my daughter was born the number one question I was asked was a loaded, “is she...um..y’know, ginger?”. “No” I found myself quite unashamedly replying, “sort of sandy, strawberry blonde...”

Lidl rocks.

Budget food and booze stuffs from Lidl you shouldn't think too hard about but once you do:

Dates: You've all heard of the Three Kings and their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, but what about the fourth king, the one who turned up with dates? Exactly. Dates are the Christmas version of the pumpkin at Halloween. They're everywhere you look for a month and nobody eats them. And with dates it's even trickier to hollow them out to put a candle in. They sell the all year round here.

Edible Chocolate Body Paint ( with body brush): In theory, edible chocolate body paint has much erotic potential. In practice though it's about as erotic as a bucket. The instructions tell you to warm the satisfyingly gloopy sauce, and "apply a thick coat". They probably mean of the sauce, don't put on a thick winter coat, it's not very erotic and you'll never get the stains out. Having painted chocolate onto your partner you're then supposed to "let nature take its course". Needless to say your brown goo-covered partner will look as if nature has taken its course and they will never be able to look at a Mars Bar again without a tear appearing in their eye.

Cans of wine: You can drink this in bed without risk of corkscrew-related injuries.

Advocaat: Nobody really knows what the hell this yellow stuff is but the moment you turn 70 you begin to crave it. It's made of egg yolk and alcohol.There's an interesting omelette opportunity somewhere.

Irish Meadow - cream and whiskey liquor: Yes, it's a copyright defying Baileys rip-off. But it's much cheaper and you don't have to endure those rubbish adverts full of yuppies miming and licking their lips in time to a trip-hop tune.

Pina Colada-style cocktail: Note the inclusion of the word "style". Coco Chanel pointed out that you can't buy style, but at £1.29 a bottle of this stuff we think we can finally prove her wrong.

1999 Vintage Cava: I carried out a blindfold taste test to determine whether anyone really could tell the difference between a Champagne and a Cava. They couldn't. The fact that the testees were all from a local primary school may have muddied the results but it's not an exact science.

Salt-based snacks with the labels in German: Mmmm, salt-based snacks.

Avruga cod roe: As disgusting as caviar (note the cheeky name. Avruga - say it fast, sounds like Beluga) but £100 cheaper.

Extra expensive extra virgin olive oil: Olive oil is overrated already. Extra virgin olive oil more so. For starters it's not even made out of spare virgins (though at this price you'd expect it to be), it's made out of green bean things. Secondly, how can you be an Extra Virgin? Even Jesus's mum was only a virgin. Good only for putting on view in a prominent place in the kitchen when you want to sell your house.

Ferrero Rocher type rip off chocolates: Only Italy could produce a pretentious chocolate and only a German supermarket could go one better by making their cloned version both prentious AND cheap.

Tense, Nervous A to Z-ache

Don’t bother looking for the most boring place in Greater Bristol. I’ve found it for you.
It’s grid reference B4 on page 88 of the Bristol and Bath A-Z (2003 edition).
According to the map the square of land, just outside of Stockwood, is almost completely blank. Ok, so Bifield Close, where Stockwood seems to run out of stock and, indeed wood, edges minutely over the B3 border. A couple of thin black lines venture inside the box, but they break off, despondently. What they happen to indicate, the map symbol reference table helpfully omits to mention.
Perhaps it’s the trail of someone who once strayed into the grid and then thought better of it. Either way, it’s a fair guess B3 88 is a part of the Greater Bristol region you can avoid visiting and never once have the slightest niggle that you might have missed something.
Possibly out of pity for this expanse of ennui, the A-Z folk have printed BS14 in the middle.
This might be in case you want to write a letter to it.
Perhaps something along the lines of:
“Dear B3,
anything happened yet?
Any idea what those black lines are.
Me neither.
Or the A-Z.
Love etc. xxx”.
Some might argue that neighbouring nothing spot B4 88 could also rank as Bristol’s most boring square quarter mile.
But look closer and you’ll see that B4 88 has a footpath running through it.
These are the marks of civilisation, B4 88 is the hanging gardens of Babylon and grand central station combined, compared to lonely primordial B3 88, with no one to visit it and no one able to find a route across even if they wanted too.
And I don’t want to.
Thanks A-Z.
I only wish the pocket sized maps could be used to indicate other spots to see or avoid in the city.
Like, say, a yellow un-smiley face over the Bear Pit (1A 68), “£££” over Sneyd Park (3F 55) and an icon of a rabid looking squirrel swinging a big stick over Brandon Hill (D3 67).
The A-Z could go further still and print helpful comments on the map like:
“Park Street, big hill, all the good shops replaced by generic bars”.
Or, “Canygne Square, Clifton: If you have to look it up you can’t afford to live here”.
With this in mind I’ve recently started to research the rudest, most impolite areas of Bristol, mainly to find something else to moan about at work. But I think it could be a valuable addition to the service already provided by the A-Z.
It’s a tricky task though, because, of course, Bristol is one of the rudest cities in the country - worse than Stoke where they at least have a good excuse to be bad tempered.
Although we shouldn’t be, we’re really rather proud of the fact that Bristol has taken impoliteness and turned it into a mission statement.
For example, Real Bristolians - by that I mean those citizens born in Southmead (A3 42) or St Michael’s (E1 67) (or St Brenda’s - 2C 66- if you’re over 30) - like nothing better than to boast of the city as a welcome port and sneer behind the backs of incomers with dreadful estuary accents (the people who actually run the city).
In general the city’s drivers are becoming too eager to mirror London car uses when it comes to driving badly, honking horns and shouting at cyclists, who mount the pavements and shout at pedestrians.
Good service in shops and bars citywide is a lottery at the best of times. And, is it just me or have you noticed how everybody in Bristol swears all the time, too. I heard a middle age man the other day describe his lunch to his wife thus: “This ******* pasty is ******* lush, mind.” She replied, “******* lovely.” They were pensioners practically. What’s going on?
Actually, thinking back on it, it was pretty ******** funny.
But finding the worst concentration of discourteous behaviour in an inch and a bit square is hard, so widespread is the rejection of day to day politeness.
It may take more research but for now I can say that may findings don’t look favourably on F2 67 and E3 67 where Haymarket bleeds into St Augustine’s parade and then the Centre.
In the past few weeks I’ve witnessed and been party to dozens of incidents of low level rudeness. I’ll mannered children mealy mouthing off at their mothers, beggars harassing passers by, people emptying their car ashtrays into the gutter, drunks urinating against walls, cyclists bombing down the pavements.
I caught a bus from here yesterday. It was packed but I notice that one seat at the back is partly unoccupied. I go to sit down. The lone occupant of the seat, a student, has placed his rucksack on the empty place. I have to ask him to move it. With great huffing, tutting and general petulance he moves his bag to allow me to be seated.
At the next stop nearly everyone on the bus gets off. There is now ample opportunity for me to move to a seat of my own. But now I want to make a petty and useless point to the student - the worst kind, too, jeans AND brogues - about seats being for paying passengers, not designer backpacks. And when he wants to get off at College Green I have to get up, and I sigh, barely audibly, under my breath.
There’s something about those two squares on the grid that’s infectious.
Maybe I’m too sensitive to cope any longer with the brash hurly burly of city life. I long to get through the day without incurring the brief wrath of complete strangers. Sometimes I long to escape to where nothing happens.
Thanks to the A-Z, I know just the spot.