The Wonder Of Woolies

When I was young there were only a few shops that I would willingly go to; at best I was indifferent about the majority of stores I was dragged to by either or both of my parents. The exceptions were WH Smith,  the Apex Libraries, and Woolworths. WH Smith needs little introduction, and it was there I would peruse the paperbacks and the stationery, making the odd purchase here and there when my meagre resources allowed. Apex Libraries was an independent bookseller in Romford's Quadrant Arcade and is likely the shop referenced in Ian Dury's song, Razzle In My Pocket. Apex Libraries had a different range of books compared with Smith's, I can remember there were paperback compilations of Batman comic strips that were not to be seen anywhere else, and apparently, they also stocked magazines that catered for niche interests which the more mainstream booksellers, like WH Smith, did not. 

I distinctly remember owning a copy of this.

For almost everything but books, however it was Woolworths that drew me in time and again. 

The last Woolworths store in the UK closed its doors for the final time in 2009, and there are still times when I feel its absence. Woolworths - or Woolies as we all knew it  -was one of those shops that was nice to just wander around, even if you didn't buy anything. Too many people doing that might well have been part of its downfall. Woolies didn't specialise in anything - again that might have been part of their problem - but you could buy almost anything there, from sweets (the almost legendary Pick 'n' Mix section was, for many people, good enough reason alone to visit Woolies) to televisions, from clothes to garden furniture.

It was at Christmas that Woolworths really came into its own, especially if you were buying for children, as its range of toys and games was almost unmatchable other than in speciality toyshops. One year, it must be about fifteen years ago now, Val and I went Christmas shopping at Lakeside and spent most of our time, and a large proportion of our festive budget, in Woolworths, buying presents for our children. Our children are now grown up, but I guarantee that if Woolworths were still going, a good number of their presents would still come from there, come Christmas.

Woolworths, Collier Row, shortly before it closed.

The Woolworths store in Collier Row, just ten minutes walk from my childhood home, was somewhere I visited regularly. School supplies - boring, but essential - were frequent purchases, with notebooks ('rough books' as they were known at my school), pens, pencils, rulers, protractors and compasses all being sourced there. 

Many of these were bought for school.

Then there were things to play with or more specifically, one thing that I played with a great deal, the famous Wembley Trophy Football. I used to spend hours kicking a ball around our back garden. We lived in a block of flats when I was young, it had a large communal garden with the back wall of a block of garages at one end, against which I would habitually kick the ball. While this was great fun, it did have a detrimental effect on the structural integrity of the plastic footballs, which inevitably would puncture, truncating my game and meaning that I had to abandon playing football until such time as I had saved up enough pocket money to buy a new one.

Apart from footballs, I would regularly purchase scrapbooks from Woolies. I was actually quite surprised when re-reading Fred Eyre's wonderful book, Kicked Into Touch, recently when the author said that when he embarked on his football career and wanted a scrapbook to keep his press cuttings, he had to search high and low in Manchester's stationers before finding one. Why, I wondered, did he not go straight to Woolies? I'm sure they must have had a branch in Manchester. 

My first scrapbook was purchased, from Woolies, in 1968 for a school project. The Olympic Games in Mexico was the subject, and my class was tasked with producing a scrapbook about the event, which I did assiduously. I think that I must have enlisted the help of my parents' work colleagues to supply me with daily newspapers to collect cuttings, as I won a prize, not so much for the quality of my work, but for what my teacher described as "the sheer volume" of it!

The year of the Mexico games was also the year I started going to watch my local football team (see Romford 1, Manchester United 0) and I started keeping scrapbooks. Over the years I collected almost every press cutting about Romford FC from our local newspapers, namely the Romford Recorder, the Romford Times (later, Express), and the Romford Observer, which was a bit of a latecomer on the scene, but had the novelty of including colour pictures. Occasionally there were small features to be found in the national press. I had an extensive collection of scrapbooks covering the ten years that I supported the football club until they folded in 1978, but at some point thereafter, with there seeming to be little or no point in keeping them anymore, I threw them all out. Now, with the football club having been resurrected in 1992, I dearly wish I had kept them.

Were I just starting to support a football team now, I doubt very much whether I would bother starting a scrapbook, especially for Romford, since local newspapers coverage of local sport has changed immeasurably over the last fifty years, and largely not for the better. Back in the 1960s, the Romford Recorder had match reports, features, previews and photographs galore of local football, but today the coverage is meagre. This week's edition has just four pages covering all the local teams, and a good deal of that is about the nearest Premier League side, West Ham United, which is syndicated in the Recorder group's newspapers that cover East London. The paper pretty much gave up including formal match reports years ago; a scrapbook of cuttings about Romford FC from its pages would be quite thin these days. That is an inevitable consequence of the changes to the way we consume news these days, not just sports news, but all news. 

Still going, but the Romford Recorder is but a shadow of the paper I remember from my youth.

In 1968, the local paper was an invaluable source of news; many is the time I would have to wait till the Recorder came out on a Friday to learn of Romford's result from a game they had played on a Tuesday; not so now. And the Recorder was legendary for its classified section, with pages and pages devoted to car adverts, job adverts, and estate agents' listings, yet more areas of our life where the internet has taken over from the print media as our primary source.

No doubt there are stationers up and down the country that sell scrapbooks, but even if I saw the point in buying one now, getting it from anywhere other than Woolworths just wouldn't seem right.  That was the wonder of Woolies.

And Then Came Mogg

The Roman Empire, the reign of Henry VIII, and the two World Wars of the 20th Century. Periods of history that have long intrigued and inspired historians and academics, novelists and playwrights. In Britain, if nowhere else, the 1939-45 conflict continues to affect our language, and dare I say, our relationship with the rest of Europe. The Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, the D-Day Landings and the Blitz spirit all get used as metaphors for football matches, the weather, and increasingly, Brexit. I imagine that in time, Brexit itself - from the day that David Cameron announced the referendum in 2015 to whenever Britain leaves the EU - will become a subject and a period that academics will revisit and about which they will write scholarly tomes analysing its causes and effects. And no doubt, there will plenty of fiction that uses Brexit as its premise.

If Brexit were a work of fiction I believe that many readers would describe the characters on the British side of the story as too farfetched[1]. There is Nigel Farage, the privately educated former commodities trader who is unable to get elected to any Parliament other than the one he professes to despise, a self-styled 'man of the people' who rails against a political elite of which, having been an MEP since 1999, he is a long-established part. Real-life Farage is very much a Marmite figure, and audiences would be equally ambivalent about a fictional version. Good guy, or a bad guy? You could make the case for either.

Next up, the New York-born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. One can imagine an editor, on reading a first draft, demanding that 'de Pfeffel' go as it is an implausible name - ludicrous even - albeit it is a real one, with roots in Germany, and from which family Johnson is descended. Johnson has cultivated the persona of an amiable buffoon over the years, which would be all very well if it cloaked a razor-sharp intellect and a proven track record of success, but having been sacked from The Times for making up a quote, he admitted that when working for The Daily Telegraph in Brussels he invented negative stories about the EU. As Mayor of London, he spent over £50million on a bridge that got no further than the design stage, bought three unusable water cannons that were scrapped at a loss of £300,000 and introduced an updated and much-derided Routemaster bus to London's streets. He may talk a good game, but his failures speak even louder.[2]

And then comes Mogg. Jacob Rees-Mogg is beyond parody, impossible to lampoon. Here is a man who dresses like an extra from a Victorian melodrama, peppers his speech with Latin, and who has been dubbed "the Honourable Member for the 18th century." Rees-Mogg has been described as "the stupid kind of Tory’s idea of what a clever kind of Tory ought to sound like." Superficially, he appears an intellectual, a man of gravitas, although how much of this is mere affectation is moot. His recent book, The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain  has been described as "12 turgid essays" and "mindless incoherent drivel." It is perhaps the only book I have seen reviewed on Amazon where there are more one-star reviews than all the others put together. He is, by all accounts, a learned student of parliamentary history, which will no doubt be of value in the coming weeks and months as the byzantine rules of engagement in parliamentary debate and procedure take on great importance in how Brexit is implemented, but of little practical value in helping the populace deal with the fall-out from it.

Rees-Mogg's recent appointment as Leader of the House of Commons coincided with his issuing a set of rules on style to be used by his staff. Were I working in his office I fear that I would frequently fall foul of his rules vis a vis banned words and phrases as most feature in my normal vocabulary. How, for example, he expects his staff to refer to the Equal Opportunity Act of 2010 when 'equal' is one of his banned words, I cannot imagine. I can, however, understand why 'lot' and 'very' may be irritants, these can be lazy variants substituted for specific, but perhaps unknown, amounts or quantities. 

What's the point in satire when real-life surpasses it?

A requirement to use double spacing after full stops (not fullstops) might have made sense in the days of manual typewriters but has little value today. Few writers of style guides favour a double space; most agree it makes writing look dated - which may be exactly what Rees-Mogg is trying to achieve.

Preferences on style and the use of certain words may be harmless matters of taste, but the rule that imperial measures should be used is somewhat unfathomable. I just checked my fridge and cupboards, and the only item that has an imperial measure is a bottle of milk, where both imperial and metric measures are shown. Will Rees-Mogg's younger staff - to whom some imperial measures may be a complete mystery - be expected to use conversion tables to refer to items measured in solely metric weights, volumes or distances by their imperial equivalents? Imagine the hilarity, not to say contempt, in another government department (for instance the Department for Transport) receiving a missive from Rees-Mogg quoting the price of petrol as being £5.72 per gallon instead of £1.26 per litre. Or why not go the whole hog, revert to pounds, shillings and pence,  and call it £5.14s.5d per gallon?

Britain has long been a country in which imperial and metric measures have caused controversy - remember The Metric Martyrs? - and both systems sit in uneasy juxtaposition. We measure distances in miles, and yards... until we get below three feet, when suddenly everything is metric. We dispense beer and milk in pints, but all other liquids in litres, including petrol, for which we quote fuel consumption in miles per gallon.  Rees- Mogg might be more comfortable in a world of imperial measures, but, like pounds, shillings and pence, it is a bygone age. Except that Britain has actually been going metric since the 1800s, with the introduction in 1849 of the florin (one-tenth of a pound) - the first step towards decimal currency - and  the Weights and Measures (Metric System) Act of 1864, which permitted the use of metric measures for ‘contracts and dealings.’

One of the Metric Martyrs. Personally, I buy bananas by number not weight anyway.

As I have my own quirks and foibles about the English language, it might be a bit rich of me to question Rees-Mogg's rules, except my quirks and foibles apply to me and me alone. It would be beyond arrogant of me to expect other people to conform to them. I agree with David Mitchell, who suggested in an article in The Guardian that Rees-Mogg is entitled to enforce these rules if they apply to letters written in his name, but unreasonable otherwise. Quite how Rees-Mogg would react to letters written by members of the public - or, heaven forbid, other departments within Government - that do not conform to his particular standards would probably be a joy to behold. One imagines - hopefully - that he would regard them as unacceptable and a disappointment and, should they lack double spaces after full stops, very much not fit for purpose.

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[1] Aside from Jean-Claude Juncker, who has on occasion been accused of being drunk in charge of a continent, the EU officials who have been engaged with Brexit seem to be unremarkable in character; staid and bland even.

[2] Even the successful public bike hire scheme in London, sometimes dubbed 'Boris Bikes' was actually the idea of his predecessor, Ken Livingstone.

Mind Your Language

Whenever I go abroad I am conscious of the fact that apart from a few words and phrases, I am completely ignorant of the local language, and therefore totally reliant on the ability of local people to speak English, which they almost universally do. Once, in Portugal, I came across a shop where the staff spoke no English, but somehow completed my purchase of a corkscrew by pointing and indulging in some charades. In Vigo, in northern Spain, I managed to order some drinks from a waiter who spoke only Spanish; fortunately, Coca-Cola is fairly universal, although my mangling of naranja (orange) caused first confusion, and then hilarity when it dawned on him what I actually meant. His subsequent enquiry would have been incomprehensible to me had I not recognised the word 'gas' as in 'con gas' in his reply. Both transactions would have been less painful if I had had a bit more knowledge of the local languages.

I have always justified my lack of foreign language skills - to myself, at least - on the basis that I have no aptitude for languages; that learning French would be of little use in Spain or Cyprus, just as learning German would be equally useless in Italy or Norway; and finally, when everyone else speaks English, where is the need? My lack of aptitude for languages I base on how useless I was at French at school, so useless that I abandoned any pretence of revising for my 'O' Level in the subject in the belief that no matter how hard I worked at it, the best I could hope for would be a poor pass, and to the detriment of other subjects, to boot. As a result, I got the lowest grade of fail in the subject, but later, in my work, I found that a better knowledge of French would have been beneficial. As it was, the rudimentary knowledge I had - little more than a store of common words and phrases - came in more than a little handy when having to deal with overseas banks who habitually sent SWIFT messages in French.[1] These banks were typically from North African countries, like Nigeria and Algeria.  French banks tended to correspond in English, and while English was the norm, there was no reason why banks in French-speaking countries should not use French, as I pointed out one time to someone who had sent a message to a bank saying that we didn't deal with messages in other languages, and asking them to repeat their message in English.

While there is a grain of truth that my lack of French is down to down to having no aptitude, it is possibly equally valid to say that it was to do with the culture at my old school, where learning French was quite low on the list of priorities, and, bizarrely, was also seen as a subject for girls rather than boys. Had I studied French harder, and passed an 'O' Level in the subject, it would have helped me much more than Physics, which I passed but have had no use for since; what I actually did learn in that subject was soon forgotten. The little I have retained enables me to answer the odd question on University Challenge, but has no other benefit. But, even if I were fluent in French, or at least could get by, that would be no use other than in French-speaking countries, surely. Except that plenty of people who don't speak English have French as a second language, and who is to say that, having learned French properly, I could not have taken up German or Spanish as well? The argument that learning one language is only of limited help falls down when one considers how many people are not just bilingual, but multilingual. Earlier this year, Val and I went on a cruise along the Norwegian coast. The crew were principally Norwegian, while there were passengers from the USA, Germany, France, and of course Norway and England. And almost without exception, everyone spoke English, while the Norwegians, in particular, were switching seamlessly from English to German to French to Norwegian, and back again, all in one conversation.

Beautiful Bergen. In Norway it seems that almost everyone speaks immaculate English.

In Norway, and many other countries for that matter, learning a foreign language - especially English - is something that children do from an early age. Learning a foreign language is the norm, taken for granted, whereas in England, it seems to be undervalued and in decline. In February this year, the BBC reported that "foreign language learning is at its lowest level in UK secondary schools since the turn of the millennium." 

The number of pupils taking GCSE language courses has fallen by between 30% and 50% in some areas of the country, and according to Mike Hill, principal at Carmel College in St Helens on  Merseyside, schools and pupils see languages as 'high risk' subjects, in which high grades are hard to achieve. A cynic might say that high grades are no more difficult to attain in foreign languages than they have ever been and that perhaps, other subjects have become relatively easier to do well in. The BBC's data is borne out by the fact that, in a table of countries where people aged between 15 and 32 can read and write in another language, the UK scores 32%, while the next lowest - Hungary - registers 71%, and seven countries score over 90%. Demark comes out top on 99%.

Perhaps a lack of interest in learning foreign languages goes hand in hand with greater insularity, except that Britons have no problem with the concept of 'abroad,' as apart from the 18 millions who visited Spain in 2017, some 310,000 UK citizens live there. There are 4.9million UK citizens living abroad, more than any other EU country. Given a reluctance to learn another language and a tendency to not integrate into local communities, UK citizens who have moved abroad seem to me to have done so purely because the weather is better, and merely want to transport their bit of their home country there with them. While I am sure that there are plenty who do integrate into the local community, I'm equally certain that the majority do not.

EU Citizens Living Abroad

Italy 2.9m

Romania 3.4m

Germany 4m

Poland 4.4m

UK 4.9m

Source: Metrocosm/UN Population Division

UK Citizens in the EU:

Italy 70k

Germany 100k

France 190k

Ireland 250K

Spain 310k

Source: Fullfacts.org/UN

The fact that as a nation we Brits are so reluctant to learn the local language when moving abroad is made all the more shameful considering how frequently we criticise immigrants to our own country who fail to integrate or learn English. During his successful campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson said recently that  immigrants into the UK should learn to speak English, because there are “too many parts of the country where it is not the first language”.  And this week Johnson's Home Secretary, Priti Patel pledged that in future, immigrants will only be able to come here if they have "a job offer from an employer registered with the Home Office and if they can speak English.” Chances are that many will speak English as a matter of course; far more than would be the case if we were talking about English workers taking on jobs abroad and speaking the language, for example. Apropos to that, I wonder how many of our newly elected MEPs speak anything but English? 

In Auf Weidersehen Pet, a group of British builders travel to Germany to find work. Ok, it was fiction,
but I don't recall any of the characters learning the local language.

I am probably a bit too long in the tooth to start learning a foreign language, and in any case who knows how often I will go abroad in future, or indeed where? The fact remains, however, that I am now sorry that I didn't give French a bit more attention at school, at the expense of another subject. Physics could have gone for a start.

 

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[1] SWIFT - Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication