Mayor’s tale

He’s not going to let that stop him.

THE hubbub’s such when the mayor answers his mobile that I ask him if he’s in the pub. “It’s a lunchtime drop-in club,”

says Mike Findley. “Pubs aren’t much good to me, I can’t hold a glass.” The mayor has motor neurone disease.

Insidious and incurable, it’s the progressive neurological disorder that killed David Niven, Don Revie and the singer Heinz, who went into orbit with the Tornadoes.

Though celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking has endured MND for 40 years, one of an estimated 5,000 sufferers in Britain, it is typically said to be fatal within two to five years of diagnosis. Many die within a year, mostly men between 50-70; three die every day.

Mike Findley was diagnosed after several months of having been treated for arthritis. It was 1pm on Friday, June 17, 2005, he indelibly recalls. “I think I just said ‘Oh right’, I’d never really thought about it being MND.

“My wife didn’t take it too well. I think she understood better what was coming.

“I’m lucky, really, mine isn’t the two to five-year MND, it’s the five to ten-year. I’m glad I can say that, it’s been four years already.”

It’s extraordinary how many times during a 70-minute mayor’s parlour conversation that he describes himself as lucky or talks of those who inspire him, and how often he laughs out loud.

Every October he goes back into hospital to become a guinea pig for medical students. “It’s the month they get around to neurology,” he says. “I’m very much into research.

It might help someone else.”

The conversation turns also to Middlesbrough FC, his adopted team after the formative Fulham. Can they escape relegation? “Of course they can,” says Councillor Findley, “I’m one of those people who believes in never giving up.”

The Mayor of Redcar and Cleveland is 64, a remarkable man immensely proud of his civic office.

One of the things that’s annoyed him a little bit during his tenure, he says, is that he can no longer clap his hands.

“Especially among the youngsters, there’s just been so much to applaud.”

HE was born and raised in Tooting, south London, worked as a postman, met his Teesside-born wife, Judith, on holiday – “Malaga, I think” – and in January 1978 moved with her to Marskeby- the-Sea, between Redcar and Saltburn.

“It was one of the worst winters ever,” he recalls. “I remember my first day working in Redcar, snow up to my knees and wondering what on earth I’d let myself in for.

“That’s why I like Easter. It’s when I began to realise that this was really a very nice place, after all.”

He was elected a full-time North- East official of the communication workers’ union, became a councillor in 2003 after leaving the Labour Party because it dropped Clause Four – “the social conscience thing,”

he succinctly explains, and though his home’s long been on Teesside, his accent remains decidedly, darned, Tooting.

He helped form a Post Office social club – “the atmosphere’s so much better if you’re not just going from work to home all the time” – was a founder of the Cleveland Pensioners’ Association, 4,000-strong when he stepped aside, for ten years organised monthly entertainment for the elderly.

He retired in 1999, underwent three knee operations, still further immersed himself in community work. He helped enlighten Marske’s now-annual Christmas festival, campaigned for the CCTV cameras which significantly have reduced crime.

The first sign of a serious health problem, he supposes, came in September 2004. “My arm just seemed to go weak when I was shaving. Whatever it was, MND never crossed my mind.

“I’ve always been a positive person.

I said that if it was going to be two to five years, I was going to enjoy that time.”

The nerves in his shoulders, arms and hands are now seriously affected, his arms useless above the waist.

Apart from that, he says, he feels fine. His arms hang awkwardly when he walks, he can’t walk far at all – “People don’t understand how much upper body strength you need to walk” – he drinks his tea through a straw.

“I’ve developed my own way of doing things when I shower,” he says.

“If you saw a video, you’d laugh your head off. You sometimes get down times, of course, but you get down times when you’re as fit as a lop.”

The mayor also gives a talk called Living with Motor Neurone Disease.

“I try to make that light hearted, too.”

HIS desk’s at the head of the handsome mayor’s parlour – which, no offence, should probably read the mayor’s handsome parlour – in Eston, beneath the Cleveland Hills.

Behind him hang photograph’s of some of the borough’s freemen – former MP Mo Mowlam, para-Olympian Tanni Grey-Thomspon, footballers George Hardwick and Wilf Mannion, local historian Vera Robinson and Norman Evans, who’s raised thousands for charity by busking.

When he hands over the chains of office in May, Coun Findley will himself have raised thousands for four charities, including the Willie Madden MND Fund in memory of the former Middlesbrough footballer and manager, who died from the disease.

Last year, 125 people walked along the beach from Redcar to Saltburn to raise money for the fund. “I love that beach, one of the best in Britain, but I can’t walk it any more,” says Coun Findley, with no shred of self-pity.

As mayor he’s been wholly active, from taking the salute when the Yorkshire Regiment was given the freedom of the borough to meeting Prince Andrew at the opening of Redcar College.

That morning there’d been a visit from Home Office minister Alan Campbell, in the evening there was another charity concert. Soon there’ll be another citizenship ceremony.

“I really enjoy those. I tell them that we’ve still got the industry, but we also have the beach, the countryside, the heritage. It’s a wonderful borough in which to live. I suppose I’m a masochist, but I even enjoy chairing council meetings, even when they get a bit boisterous.”

He was also on parade when civic leaders from all over the county gathered in Guisborough for Yorkshire Day. “There was something a bit ironic about me being a Londoner,” he says, darned Tooting once again.

HE’D rather talk about Redcar and Cleveland, is steered a little reluctantly back to what he calls his condition.

“There are people with MND a great deal worse off than I am, people who could die within months.

“What people fail to realise with something like this is that it isn’t always you that suffers most, it’s your family and friends.

“I firmly believe that our cards are marked, that you have to play the cards you’re dealt and sometimes they’re not nice.

“You’re always going to have hurdles and challenges. It’s how you get over them that matters, and I’m lucky because I have so many people thinking about me, praying for me, so many people in my corner. I still want to live life to the best of my ability.

“You can plan for the future, but you have to live for the day. That’s what I’m doing now.”

Cracking good fun

EVERYTHING that it’s cracked up to be, the 26th annual World Egg Jarping Championship – a truly gripping encounter – takes place on Easter Monday.

Still nowhere near its shell-by date, it’s the annual collision of Bigenders and Little-enders, where dabbers take on grabbers and everyone enjoys a dunch break.

“We get entries from all over the globe,” says WEJA chairman and retired ICI executive Roy Simpson, and it’s true that they’ve been known to come from as far afield as Shotton Colliery.

The event’s always at Peterlee Sports and Community Club, formerly the cricket club, in Helford Road. Shotton Colliery must be getting on two miles away.

Competing eggs are collectively boiled the previous evening, locked in a secure place – the cellar, it’s widely believed – and allocated at random.

Rules forbid ringers and stand-ins, run-ups, having one foot off the ground and – worst of all – tampering. They are not believed to extend to puns, not even for those who find it hard to see the yolk.

Though Weejah (to its friends) takes things with scientific seriousness, none – not even the egg-heads – has so far been able to explain why, when irresistible force meets immovable object, only one gets its bonce bashed in.

This year’s event is sponsored by Peterlee Lions Club – winner £75, second £25 – and will raise funds for Macmillan Nurses. Asda are laying on the eggs.

It begins at 8.30pm, all welcome, after which there’ll be refreshments.

It’s an egg supper, of course. MUCH else happens at Easter, of course.

These are just a few of the events which regular correspondents have asked the column to mention.

■ Chester-le-Street Churches Together holds its annual Walk of Witness tomorrow morning, leaving St Cuthbert’s RC church at 11am and walking to the Civic Heart for an 11.30am service.

■ The redoubtable Michael Manuel at Crook Town Football Club has acquired a Newcastle United shirt, signed by the likes of Shearer and Solano. It’ll be auctioned for club funds in the clubhouse tomorrow evening.

■ Saltburn Methodist Church has an Easter Bazaar on Saturday from 10am to 3pm – morning coffee and light lunches, stalls, books, crafts, cakes – and on Easter Monday a coffee morning from 10am.

■ Celebrating its 250th anniversary, the wonderful Newbiggin-in-Teesdale Methodist church – the world’s oldest in continuous use – has an Easter Sunday service at 8.30am, led by the Reverend Keith Pearce. “Always a lovely occasion,” says June Luckhurst.

■ A little later in the month, the good folk of Ingleton – between Darlington and Barnard Castle – plan a St George’s evening on April 25. Entertainment ranges from costumed Elizabethan dances to a Mummers’ Play, from music by the Palatine Waits to songs by George Formby. Perhaps best of all, there’s a steak and ale pie supper – pies from the esteemed Simpson’s of Cockfield. Details from Neville Kirby, 01325- 730324.

BENEATH the headline “Clog on the Tyne” – they liked that one – we wrote on March 19 of the Dancing England Rapper Tournament held the previous weekend in Newcastle.

Rapper’s basically sword dancing – intricate, energetic, hugely enjoyable and not, they insist, to be confused with morris. (“They’re just a load of old gadgees.”).

Among those men of steel were Aubrey O’Brien and Phil Heaton, chairman and secretary of the Sword Dancing Association and reckoned ringers for the Hairy Bikers.

Phil, at last to the point, has been back in touch. “Despite all the beer and bull stuff that Aubrey and I spout, we actually have a purpose in life,” he says.

His immediate purpose I to write a history of rapper in its North-East crucible for the English Folk Song and Dance Society. It’ll mark the centenary in 1911 of the publication of Cecil Sharp’s Sword Dances of Northern England.

“All our beloved sword and rapper dances would have perished without him, deep southerner though he was,” says Phil, a Seaham lad who’s now in the deep south himself.

He’s anxious for any information, images, memories or memorabilia, particularly from mid-Durham pit villages like Murton, Haswell and South Hetton.

The picture shows Murton men, mainly the Lowerson family. Phil, lord of the dance, is at pcheat@btinternet.com

ON the dawn bus to Hawes, the column a couple of weeks back supposed the Skerne to be the longest English river which doesn’t flow into the sea. None has satisfactorily been able to establish that claim, but whatever it is, it’s not the Skerne. Michael Clark, meanwhile, offers the drop-in-the-ocean thought that he’s very glad there wasn’t a fight while we were up there, otherwise we’d have been Hawes de combat. Time to go.