Where books can open our eyes to the world

I think I know a fair bit about coping with physical health problems. I was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus, two nasty and related conditions which are less common than they used to be but which still mean paralysis and physical deformity for plenty of children born with them.

 When I was born in the 1960s, they were often fatal and I count myself incredibly lucky that of all the children with spina bifida whom I knew when I was growing up, I was the only one to be able to walk unaided.

  In my more morbid moments, then, I feel fortunate to be here at all, never mind to have reached an age when I am closer to retirement than university.

 But once a month I’m reminded that my problems, which still raise their ugly heads and give me a nasty nip on occasions, are as nothing compared to those suffered by some. 

 Once a month, I am honoured to attend my local library’s Talking Book Group. Talking books, that is to say books read aloud and transferred on to CD, cassette, Kindle and an increasing variety of specialist machines, are not just for able-bodied people facing long train journeys or looking for something to listen to while our other half is engrossed in the soaps; no, they are an essential tool for those suffering from varying degrees of blindness and who wish to keep their brains as active as possible.

 To say that some of the people I meet at this group are awe-inspiring is to do no justice to that word. There is the lady in her mid-80s who lost her sight over 30 years ago yet is determined to live life to its’ very fullest. She’s not too keen on ‘blood and guts’ murder stories but enjoys most other genres and will happily express the strongest of views during our monthly dissections of the books we’ve read since our last meeting.

 Then, there’s the lady who has been suffering degenerative eye problems since her teens and now, as a grandmother, can see almost nothing other than shadows. Yet to hear this lady talk of her life is to realise that those of us who are relatively healthy should stand in awe of those who, every day, defy physical disability.

 And there is the man who fights as hard as anyone against intransigent local authorities for the rights of the disabled. He loves ‘blood and guts’ novels and can listen to more of them in a month than most sighted people read in a year.

I joined this group several years ago, when I was working evening shifts and realised that there were only so many post-midnight radio phone-in programmes one could listen to on the journey home. I found that talking books kept the brain alive after a long shift and kept the mind alert for prowling police cars armed with breathalyser kits and mobile speed cameras. 

 There are others among our group who suffer from different forms of disability than blindness and to spend an hour once a month with them all is to be reminded of the indomitable nature of the human spirit.

 Yet talking books are expensive, often costing up to £35 a copy; With local authority libraries always under pressure to cut costs, the range of books available is limited and becoming more so.

 We aren’t yet at a point where Talking Book groups are being axed but local authorities across the country must surely have considered it. At a time when ‘proper’ literature seems to be fighting an ever-increasing battle to get noticed, surely we can’t allow that - especially when these groups are such a lifeline for people who desperately need them.

My clean little secret

My wife mustn’t see this column. Given that she doesn’t know how to turn on the computer, this may not be too difficult but I’m going to put something into the blogosphere which she isn’t going to like; there may be consequences at Warrillow Towers.

 My female readers, on the other hand, do seem to approve; when I posted a Facebook status on this subject at the weekend, I had five keen admirers within a couple of hours.

 The response didn’t exactly amount to offers of much-needed paid work, but you never know...even the biggest businesses have to start somewhere.

 What am I rambling on about? Well......(takes deep breath....) I quite like doing housework.

 There you are, I’ve said it. Mrs W will be appalled, dismayed, outraged. Ever since a certain well-known media conglomerate decided, in December 2009, that it could do without my journalistic skills, she has hoped that I would become a full-time house-husband.

 As she still commutes to work every morning, she has hoped that I would spend my days filling the washing machine with baskets-full of dirty clothing, hanging clean clothes out on the line, doing the ironing, vacuuming, cooking; generally making sure that Warrillow Towers is spotless when she gets home at night.

 Sadly, it hasn’t worked out like that. There are features to be sourced, reports to be written, contributors to be chased for copy, work opportunities to be pursued; in short, a living to be made.

 So the dream of turning me into a full-time house-husband hasn’t happened and probably never will, with the result that a percentage of our weekend time has to be spent getting the house into good order before she goes back to work on Monday morning.

 And that’s the bit that I will tentatively admit to ‘quite’ liking. 

 Let’s say, before we get into this, that I can’t iron. Some men will say it’s the only part of housework that they get on with but I’ve never got the hang of it. I’ve tried, but the incident where I accidentally left a hot iron on the ironing board and almost burnt the house down has probably put the skids under it for good.

 I’m quite nifty with a vacuum cleaner, though; I can get right up to the floorboards and behind the settee and I do know how to move the beds to vacuum up the collected dust and cat hair (an essential skill in a house containing a very large long-haired cat).

 I can polish furniture, as well. I don’t just polish around ornaments, I move them, while I’m fully conversant with the 14 different sorts of dusters on the market these days.

 I thoroughly enjoy using the steam mop on our tiled kitchen and bathroom floors; pouring the boiling water into the machine and then mopping energetically as the machine offers up a satisfactory hissing sound.

 All these things I can do in the manner of a proper husband. Mrs W and I regularly differ as to the frequency with which they have to be done, but I can and do play my part when the time comes.

 After 20 years of marriage, we have housework worked out into the kind of game plan that would impress Sir Alex Ferguson. I know the bits that I can help with; there are areas of the field into which I wouldn’t dare to stray, for fear of getting the hairdryer treatment.

 But the end result is usually success.

 Warrillow Towers is never going to look like Buckingham Palace; as Arsene Wenger might bemoan, we don’t have the budget to bring in the big cleaners to achieve that. But we do what we can with the resources available and the sense of teamwork which results from a good session of housework is one of the things which should be at the bedrock of a good marriage.

 Before I get assailed by angry parents I will, of course, say that the residents of Warrillow Towers are a husband and wife and a large cat. Things may be entirely different if we had two trouble-making children to contend with. But we are where we are and, unlike some men, I can admit that housework doesn’t fill me with dread. You can even do it in your natural state and, as keen naturists, we often have - after all, why get clothes covered in sweat, dust and furniture polish?

 So there we are....my vacuuming secret is out. I shall await the consequences.

Statistical heaven - all for 3p per page

For many cricket-lovers, the best day of the year is when Wisden thuds on to the bookshelves.

 Quite a few football experts feel the same way about the Playfair Football Annual. 

 Me? I get the same feeling about Phil Steele’s American Football preview magazines.

 It’s a fair bet that you haven’t heard of Mr Steele. He’s a 46-year-old award-winning sportswriter, whose Cleveland-based company produces annual preview magazines for the top two levels of college football, as well as the professional National Football League.

 Each magazine averages roughly 250-300 A3 pages so that when they land on your doormat, as the two college previews did at Warrillow Towers this morning, you know about it.

 Phil Steele magazines are not for the casual fan. If you’re the kind of supporter who tunes in once a year for the TV coverage of the Super Bowl and thinks Joe Montana is still the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, forget it.

 Even if you see NFL coverage as a useful add-on to your Sky Sports subscription, this may not be for you.

 But if you want schedules, results going back six years, offensive and defensive individual team statistics, lists of potential NFL draft picks, pages of analysis of every offensive and defensive unit of every one of the 300-plus colleges in the Football Bowl Subdivision and Football Championship Subdivision (don’t ask......) plus the 32 NFL teams, this is for you.

 There is so much information here that a fair bit of it isn’t even in English, or even American English. To get everything he wants to say into those 300-plus pages, Mr Steele has to resort to abbreviating some of the more obvious words and football phrases; so much so, in fact, that the list of abbreviations covers half of an A3 page.

 As you’d expect, then, the layout isn’t pretty. But if you want to know who was the second-leading tackler in the 2010 season for the Jacksonville State Gamecocks of the Ohio Valley Conference, you’ll find it here (on page 135 of the FCS magazine).

 Mr Steele and his 28 statisticians spend 365 days a year compiling this information (yes, there are college and NFL games on Christmas and/or New Years’ Day). Yet the finished magazines are astoundingly cheap. It cost me £32.94 to get all three shipped to Tamworth from Cleveland. At just under 1,000 pages of information, that’s a tad over 3p per page; considerably cheaper than Wisden.

 So why American football? Why am I so in love with a sport which is essentially straightforward, but which most of the world finds completely incomprehensible?

 My interest (you may call it an obsession) goes back to my schooldays and a chemistry teacher called Dr Ken Thomas. He had studied in the US in the 1960s and came back determined to spread the gospel of this terrific sport he had seen. 

 It was Ken who hounded ITV into showing brief highlights of the Super Bowl on World of Sport in the mid-70s. It was Ken who advised Channel 4 when they first broadcast the NFL in the early-1980s. It was Ken who wrote the first British guidebook to the sport, the nattily-titled A Guide to American Football (available now on Amazon for, er, 1p).

 And it was Ken who decided that the best way to get us interested in his subject was to show us American Football videos in our lunchbreaks after chemistry lessons.

 You’d be surprised how many young fans turned up. 

 Ken was the only teacher about whom I can say that I got an O-Level in his subject purely  because of his enthusiasm and drive.

 I remember him for that; but every time I look at a Phil Steele magazine, I remember him for something which has brought far greater enjoyment to my life than chemistry ever did.

 Go to www.philsteele.com for more information about Phil's magazines and to order copies. 

Bagpipes, blues and bright sunshine

When you tell people you’re going to a music festival at a naturist club, some people can’t resist the obvious: “They haven’t got any G-strings on their guitars, then?” inquired a former work colleague.

 Actually, they had; the three-day Merryhill Music Festival, held at the hugely popular and high-quality Merryhill Naturist Club just outside Norwich, features the finest local bands from the Norfolk area - and while the audience is made up of Merryhill members and hundreds of naturist visitors from around the country, the bands are resolutely clothed (or textile, as we say in naturist circles).

 Last weekend’s event was a corker. The sun, so notable by its’ absence throughout much of this summer, put in an appearance on all three days and by the time the festival hit its’ peak, late on Sunday afternoon, the temperature was in the 80s, the swimming pool was packed, the sunbathing lawns were crammed and the marquee where the bands played was full of the good vibe that only music can bring. Oh....and Mrs W and I were nicely sunburnt. 

 This was the tenth staging of an event which is the brainchild of Alan and Sylvia Avery and Jenny Thurston, the owners of Merryhill. From tentative beginnings, it has now become a mainstay of the British summer naturist calendar, with caravan and tent pitches booked out months in advance.

 The names of the bands won’t mean much to my readers but let’s just say that with 1960s and 70s tribute bands on the Friday and Saturday evenings (along with a fancy dress party theme to the audience on both nights), the atmosphere was never less than lively.

 Saturday afternoon, though, was a particular highlight. The action kicked off with a performance by the City of Norwich Pipe Band, one of whose musicians is a Merryhill member; it was quite a sight to see 16 men in kilts, sporrans and full Scottish musical uniform marching across the park playing traditional bagpipe music in front of hundreds of naturists. At first, they got a tentative reception but after two more sets punctuated the afternoon, ending with a storming rendition of Scotland the Brave, they were resoundingly cheered out of the marquee.

 Ska and blues were the remaining ingredients of a wonderful afternoon. There can be nothing better than lying in the sun, bottle of cider in hand, listening to some storming music - a big cheer to ska boys Monkey Spanner and the Paul Tinkler Blues Band for their efforts.

 This was our first visit to the Merryhill Music Festival but we’ll definitely be going back. Merryhill’s clothes-optional ethos means first-time visitors don’t have to jump in at the deep end, as it were, while there is enough going on as well as the music to keep people entertained even if the weather doesn’t play its’ part. 

 See you there in 2012?