Stiff competition

READERS must please understand if today’s column appears a little breathless, but I have been getting rather excited over the Bad Sex awards.

It is not, of course, the sort of thing that would normally be laid before Gadfly readers, but until Monday night there was a good chance that another Shildon lad would win it.

Strictly it is the Bad Sex in Fiction award, hatched by Auberon Waugh, promoted these past 17 years by the Literary Review and described by The Observer as “one of the best known, but least sought-after awards in the country”.

This year’s shortlist included Tony Blair’s sidekick Alastair Campbell for extracts from his novel Maya, Jonathan Franzen – the favourite – for reasons it would be indelicate to explain, and someone who’d written a book called Mr Peanut.

Up there, too, was professor and poet Craig Raine. He was the Shildon runner – Knobser’s lad, Charlie’s nephew – though, to be fair, he doesn’t get home much.

The Observer, rather unkindly, described Mr Raine as a Martian. Other publications seem to take unusual pleasure in supposing the competition to be stiff.

The winner, announced in London on Monday evening – no doubt coincidentally at the In and Out Club – was second-time novelist Rowan Somerville for his book The Shape of Her.

The novel includes the line: “She released his hair from her fingers and flipped onto her belly like a fish flipping itself.” That’s bad.

Poor Craig Raine appeared hardly to get a mention. What else do you expect from people who probably think that bad sex is what nutty slack comes in?

SPEAKING of bad sex, which still doesn’t seem quite right, the Sunday Times is growing obsessive about 25-year-old Keith Macdonald from Washington, Tyne and Wear.

“Feckless father raises tally to 14,” said last weekend’s front page headline, the 14 – here and on the way – allegedly by ten different mothers. One’s expecting twins.

The Sunday Times clearly has little time for the gentleman, not least because he is on benefits because of a “bad back”. The quote marks are theirs. “Mr McDonald,” it says, “spends most of his time drinking and playing computer games.” Are they quite sure about that?

IT’S the little things that chiefly attract Gadfly readers, of course, and this should not be deemed a reference to Mr Peanut.

The debate over whether “magistrates’ court” – a style favoured on the court building at Bishop Auckland and, almost always, by The Northern Echo – properly should have an apostrophe continues to divide opinion.

Jon Smith, a former chief sub-editor hereabouts, not only disagrees with our present style – “the court doesn’t belong to magistrates, it’s a court of magistrates” – but cites influential allies like McNae’s Essential Law (“the journalists’ bible”) and both The Times and Guardian style books.

“The same argument could apply to dogs home, unless you’re talking about a kennel,” says Jon. “You wouldn’t talk about an antiques’ shop, would you?”

In St Cuthbert’s church in Darlington on a snowy Sunday evening, however, I’m approached by a lady whose friend’s a retired English lecturer at Durham University.

“He says it’s a link word and thus definitely needs an apostrophe,” she says.

The jury’s out; the case continues.

TWO days earlier, I’m at All Saints church in Hartburn, Stockton, addressing a fraternal outfit called the Stockton Brethren, which fast approaches it centenary.

Though there’s no constitution – “no nowt,” says someone, colloquially – the Brethren’s intention remains social, educational and charitable.

For almost 100 years they’ve also been strictly men only, though women number among the entertainers.

I’m approached, at any rate, by a gentleman on the subject of mares tail – or horsetail, some say – that other pesky little blighter which threatened to run amok in last week’s column. The answer’s ammonium sulphamate, he says. Resistance withers in its path.

In the same connection, there’s an email from Eric Gendle in Middlesbrough agreeing that it’s not mares tail that plagues footpaths and the like, but horsetail.

“You are far from unique in this confusion,” says Eric. It’s a comfort, of course.

DAVID Walsh, now nursing his bus pass, has an even greater worry. He’s long accustomed to policemen looking young, even (he says) to the chief constable being but a bairn.

What’s really spooking David, from Skelton, is the discovery of a black hole that’s only half his age.

The youngest ever found, it’s reckoned a remnant of SN1979, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from earth.

“I suppose,” says David, “that being just 30 years old in its local time frame means that it has to be looking to settle down with an astral partner in some kind of galactic Barratt home and looking at the performance of primary schools in its galactic cluster.”

More disconcerting yet is that they can find a black hole 50 million light years away while some of us, almost every morning, struggle to find our spectacles.

MOSTLY, inevitably, folk have been writing about the weather. John Heslop from Durham took his daughter and her family aboard a Santa Special on the snowy Tanfield Railway, was delighted to find the old boy in good fettle, but wonders if he still gets paid if he can’t make it through the blizzard.

“I expect there’s a claus in his contract,”

adds John.

George Alberts, former manager of the Millburngate shopping centre in Durham, writes in some dudgeon from Thailand, where now he lives.

“What’s happened to the little country I left? I read that buses can’t get from Chester-le-Street to Durham and that only four inches of snow has stopped Stokesley, Great Ayton and Broughton.

“I’m in a third world country and we don’t have gritters or first-class roads, but we get on with it.”

What Thailand probably also doesn’t have, of course, is two feet of snow.

THEN there’s an email from Brian Harrison in Chester-le- Street, hoping that he may be the first to wish a merry Christmas – not quite, that was about six weeks ago – and attaching a rather splendid image of the swans (“and their friends”) at Riverside Park in Chester-le-Street. See main picture...

“They probably find the snow much warmer than the freezing water,” says Brian – and the picture may be the most cheering thing in today’s column.

… so finally, Mr Michael Hardy – another Shildon lad, and strictly for the birds – pulls up in his 4x4 as I’m yomping to the bus stop on Monday morning. He and his pals are going beating for the grouse shoot on yon side of the snow-clad village.

Advised that they appear to be fond of a treat, Mr Hardy reckons that they’ll still be in the pub by noon. The invitation to join them – if you can’t beat ’em – is, somewhat reluctantly, declined.

Unbeatable, nonetheless, the column returns next week.

■ SPEAKING of Shildon lads – though not, of course, of the other thing – last week’s column recalled the late John Hunter, the flamboyant (and delightful) hairdresser, travel agent and racehorse owner who styled himself John Hunter of the North.

It has elicited an appreciative email from his grandson, another John Hunter. “Great to hear he’s still remembered,” he says.

Beneath his signature is the line “Director, Rothschild – London.” John Hunter of the South seems to be doing pretty well for himself, an’ all.