Warrillow - that's an interesting name......

It is rather inevitable that with my surname, I am regularly asked: “That’s an unusual name, where does it come from?”

 And believe me, I’ve tried to find out. Even before ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ became a hit on the nation’s television screens and even before censuses stretching back to the 1870s could be easily searched on a computer screen, I was looking for my ancestors.

 I’ve trawled through ancient records books and newspaper files in libraries as far apart as Worcester and West Yorkshire; I’ve spoken to my few remaining elderly relatives; I’ve stood in graveyards in Bewdley and Dewsbury looking for signs on gravestones. And I’ve come up with........... precisely nothing.

 Watching ‘WDYTYA?’ drives me to distraction because the celebrities featured obviously have teams of archivists and researchers searching through the records before the programme is even commissioned. I, as the only son of an only son, have just me to do the research.

 And as the years go on and I become ever more aware that, as the childless only son of an only son, the Warrillow line will expire when I do, I become ever more determined to find some answers.

 So here’s where we stand at the moment. My father, whose 76th birthday on May 18 2012 coincides with the writing of this post (Happy birthday, Dad!) lives pleasantly and healthily in retirement in southern Spain.

 The death of his father is my first memory of the loss of a close family member. My grandfather spent all his working life in a carpet factory in Kidderminster, in the days when the industry provided employment for almost all the working-class men of that Worcestershire town.

 He retired in 1972 and like so many men of his ilk, even today, had no clue what to do with himself when going to work in the factory didn’t dominate his life.

 I still remember the telephone ringing early one Saturday morning in 1973 and waking me up, before my dad rushed out of our house to where his father lived, less than a mile or so away.

 I don’t remember my great-grandfather - and that’s where the problems start. Albert Warrillow appears to have been born in 1872 and died in 1963, a year before I was born. If you follow the obvious trail through websites such as ancestry.co.uk, it leads you back to a family who lived in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent in the 1830s. Yet family stories put the Warrillows in the 1870s in West Yorkshire, somewhere around Heckmondwike or Batley. It seems that they moved from there to Kidderminster, following the carpetmaking or woollen trades from the White Rose county.

 And I can find nothing in the records to support this. It seems that my great-grandfather was married twice, following the tragic early death of his first wife; when asked about it by my father when I was still a toddler, his second wife appears to have refused to say anything. These things were not talked about in Victorian England.

 So here is where the brick wall starts to be constructed. I have found records which suggest that Albert Warrillow was either born in or placed into a workhouse; I can’t find anything to confirm that. I have a piece of paper which purports to be Albert’s marriage certificate; where his father’s signature should be, there is a simple ‘X’

 This, of course, is not wholly surprising because many working-class people in these times were barely able to read and write - but it is of no use to those of us trying to trace the family history!

Now, I may have a name for Albert’s second wife but if you key that into the 1911 census records, it brings up roughly a dozen possible answers. The researchers and genealogists on ‘WDYTYA’ may have time to sort through them all in search of the right one; as a freelance journalist trying to keep the financial wolf from the door and the bills paid, I don’t.

 So I guess this post is aimed at those of you out there who have done this and succeeded. Is there a right and a wrong way to go about it? In the internet age, is it still necessary to spend hours in libraries and local records offices trawling through ancient documents?

 Of course, I don’t expect to find the answer in five minutes; I would just like to know that I’m going about it the right way - and that my dad and I can discover it before it’s too late.

How to lend a hand to British Naturism

Regular readers will have noted that there hasn’t been much activity here in recent weeks. Having initially started with the good intention of blogging at least once a week, it has slipped back since the New Year to being once a fortnight and this is my first post in almost three weeks.

 Shameful.

 Of course, blogs aren’t like newspapers, which have to come out on a particular day; that’s one of the good things about 21st-century technology but something which those of us weaned on daily press deadlines have to get used to.

 With blogs, you say something when you have something interesting to say and have time to say it.

 This hiatus hasn’t been due to a lack of ideas - my life is so full of interesting stuff these days that I could think of six different subjects a week - but rather a lack of time. I’m pleased to say that while my business career isn’t exactly booming, there seem to be enough things going on to keep me busy and, crucially, to keep financial despair at bay.

 But Mrs W and I have just spent the weekend at an event which I couldn’t fail to blog about - the first-ever British Naturism National Convention.

 Held at the picturesque Ilam Hall, a National Trust property right on the Staffordshire-Derbyshire border and high in the Peak District, NatConv was a conference and training weekend for everyone involved in the naturist community – clubs and swims, regions and individual members. 

 BN hoped that members would see it as inspiration to ‘do something’ with their interest in naturism, rather than just lying on a beach or jumping into a pool.

 Despite having around 11,000 members and putting on events all year round including extravaganzas such as Nudefest and the Alton Towers weekend, BN has a full-time staff of precisely zero.

 There are three ladies based in Head Office in Northampton, who do all the administrative work on a jobshare basis; there is general secretary Tracey Major, who oversees them and there are three paid consultants including commercial manager/marketing supremo Andrew Welch and yours truly as editor of the BN magazine.

 A lot of members think Andrew and I are paid employees whereas in fact, we are on annual contracts and have other work outside BN.

 Given that, how do we put on events such as AT, Nudefest, Great British Skinny Dip, Natconv and all the swims, saunas and ‘Big Days Out’ programme, as well as do all the promotional, marketing and campaigning work for the cause of making naturism ever more   acceptable?

 We do so with the sterling help of a small band of volunteer members, who give up their time to devote some effort to a particular little part of each project. That group is difficult to quantify, because people like to help out with things going on in their area, so that someone living in the south-west may put a lot of effort into Nudefest in Cornwall, but may not even attend our Blackpool weekend.

 So we are always in need of more willing help and NatConv was a weekend of talks, workshops and practical sessions designed to broaden the number of members equipped to help make a difference to naturism in the UK.

 The sessions included looking at how we sell naturism to the media, getting the best out of BN’s regional and club structure, a look at the progress being made on BN’s rolling three-year plan to improve the organisation and so on.

 It sounds quite intense but the 80 members who attended between Friday afternoon and noon on Sunday thoroughly enjoyed the weekend and all said they came away inspired to do their bit for naturism in 2012.

 That’s crucial; it’s a mantra of ours that although the age profile of BN members is not exactly teenage and the organisation could always do with more money (why not leave us £50 in your will?), BN wouldn’t die through old age or lack of cash, rather a lack of hands to help put on the growing list of events that help improve our revenue streams.

 Our growing band of Young British Naturists members (for the 18-30s) is really helping to spark some positive things, but more members mean more hands, more brains, more ideas... 

 If my ramblings encourage you to try naturism this summer (yes, we will have summer eventually!), why not join BN and get involved? It costs less than £1 a week for a couple, you could meet some fabulous people, visit some great events (Nudefest 2012, our week at Newperran in Cornwall, is just five weeks away)...and enjoy the special experience which is naturism.

 You could be helping keep BN alive for the next generation of naturists.

Dominic Littlewood, Dr Feelgood - and Alan Sugar

What’s the answer when you have a string of ideas for a blog post and not one of them is fully-formed? Steal an idea from one of my favourite columnists, Bob Crampton in The Times on Saturday and merge them all into one.

 So..... why did the lady who took my blood test yesterday fail to find more than a thimble-ful and thus have to resort to the other arm (and twice the pain) when Mrs W, a trained children’s phlebotomist, found the middle of the vein instantly when I told her what had happened? 

 Why did I take my eye off the online order form for a split second, so that a dress Mrs W has bought online from a well-known High Street chain will be delivered to a house ten doors down - and why is the occupier of that house on holiday for a week during Easter?

 How do I explain to Mrs W why I put my hand up when a friend was looking for someone to take 14 years’ worth of CAMRA’s monthly What’s Brewing magazine off his hands? And why have I stored them on the top shelf of my wardrobe, convincing myself that at some point in the next millennium, I will get round to reading them?

 Why are Tamworth stumbling towards the finishing line of the Blue Square Premier season - and who decided that the Telford away game, abandoned in a monsoon on Bank Holiday Monday, would be replayed next Tuesday, when I will be in Northampton all day at a British Naturism marketing committee meeting and unable to get to Shropshire in time?

 Why have Facebook unilaterally changed the design of my page without telling me? And yes, I know I get a valuable social networking resource for nothing, so why am I complaining?

Dominic Littlewood - why?

Why did I stay up until silly o’clock on Sunday night watching the play-off of the US Masters and drinking red wine and whisky?

 Why aren’t Dr Feelgood, Ian Dury and the Blockheads and Wilko Johnson more widely acknowledged as musical geniuses?

  Why did my Easter weekend pass by in a haze of furniture polish, carpet dust and cat hairs?

   Why has it taken 25 years for one of my local pubs to wake up to the fact that it needs to advertise its wares outside the village and try to attract custom from the ‘posh’ side of Tamworth?

  Why have I allowed my briefcase to accumulate two years of ‘stuff’ which is undoubtedly important, but which I never read and probably ought to throw out?

  When am I going to complete the aforementioned throwing-out?

 How proud am I at having filled an A3 sheet of paper with ‘things to do’ this week and almost having completed the job by 9.30pm on Wednesday?

 Why, after 20 years, do I still not have a plan for making sure I read the Saturday and Sunday Times by midnight on Sunday - assuming, of course, that I have already thrown all the advertising nonsense, as well as the property and motoring sections, in the bin?

 And talking of the Sunday Times, why haven’t I shared with more people A.A Gill’s fantastic description of Alan Sugar in last weekend’s paper? For those of you who don’t know Gill, he writes the restaurant reviews in the Style section. Unrepentantly London-centric, he can spend 800 words discussing anything but the restaurant before approving of/condemning it in the final few paragraphs.

Last weekend, he was talking about a restaurant in Essex into which the supremo of The Apprentice has put some money; in the course of which he offered up this. “Alan Sugar, a man who looks like an angry testicle....”

 As several people have said since, they will never again be able to watch The Apprentice with a straight face.

Doing the consumer a dis-service

Customer service. A simple term, defined by that unbeatable and all-encompassing fount of knowledge, Wikipedia, as “a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.”

 For anyone in business, it shouldn’t be a difficult concept to grasp. Someone is sufficiently keen on what you are selling to want to give you money for it, whether it be sandwiches, lawnmowers, pints of beer or a new suit. Therefore, it is your job to send the customer away happy with their purchase and feeling good about the transaction.

 Why is it, then, that rather too many British businesses haven’t the slightest idea of what constitutes good customer service? Why is it that in rather too many shops, the staff are too busy deconstructing last Saturday’s Britain’s Got Talent to help my wife look for a blue cotton top in the sale in a size ten? 

 Why can I spend ten minutes wandering around a store which is attempting to sell good-quality outdoor clothing without the proprietor even bothering to ask if she can help me?

Why does a well-known national pub chain (a clue - there seems to be one in every town) appear to have got where it is today by a) seemingly not bothering to employ staff at all in some of its pubs? b) failing to train the staff it has in order that they know what a decent pint of real ale looks, smells and tastes like?

 And why do some famous tourist attractions send you from pillar to post to buy a ticket, then shut down at 4pm on a glorious spring day in mid-March - when there is at least another two hours’ worth of good daylight available and willing customers queueing to hand over their cash?

 This latter incident happened to me on a day trip to Liverpool last week. Mrs W was with me by the banks of the Mersey, hoping to ferry ‘cross it (as you do...) as the highlight of an excellent day. Various different members of staff pointed us in various different directions for the ticket office, so that we spent a good 20 minutes wandering up and down the Docks until we finally were able to attempt to buy a (very reasonably-priced) ticket.

 At which point we discovered that we had just watched the last ferry of the day pull away from the dockside some five minutes earlier - it was just after 3pm.

 We consoled ourselves with an excellent 45-minute open-top bus tour of the city. Yet when we got off, after the tour had finished, we found several people hoping to join the next bus only to be told by the driver: “Sorry, that’s it for the day.”

 It was just after 4pm. 

 All of these are examples of how too many British businesses won’t go the extra mile to market themselves to bring in more customers, or create the right impression so that the customers they do have will come back.

 I’ve recently learnt of an organisation which devotes itself to providing training in customer service for retailers. I’m sure they do a great job and a campaign with which I am involved is hoping to use their services in the near future.

 But surely all of the above should be second nature to anyone running a retail business. As a freelance journalist, I know that if no-one knows I exist, then no-one is going to offer me work (which is part of the reason I write this blog). I also know that if I get the chance to work for someone, I have to do it to the best of my ability in the hope that they will remember me in the future.

 Yet too many retailers in the UK don’t seem to get it; it’s too easy to blame the economic downturn and the fact that ‘nobody’s got any money’ for the ills of their business.

 I’m sure businesses in other countries don’t adopt this attitude; they realise that the consumer is king and if people are keeping what money they have in their wallets, you have to work that little bit harder to prise those wallets open.

 Until retail businesses who are supposed to be a major driver of our economy understand that, Government tinkering with tax rates will not make one jot of difference.

A nose for news - and those who want to snuff it out

When I was a young news reporter on the Tamworth Herald in the late-1980s, our first job every morning was ‘police calls.’

 As we were a weekly newspaper with no urgent deadlines and our office was a five-minute stroll from the local police station, one of us would arrive at the station at 9.15 every morning and the duty sergeant would painstakingly take us through the incident book from the previous 24 hours.

 Much of it was mundane; minor house break-ins, car thefts and so on. But almost every day, there was at least one story which would result in what journalists call a ‘page lead’ - a story good enough to be the main story on a page in the newspaper.

 Often, it was a major robbery - of a post office, a shop and so on. Perhaps it would be the details of a court case which we had been previously prevented from reporting for legal reasons.

 Whatever it was, we would race back to the office and tell our news editor - a fearsome boss, but a brilliant journalist of a kind which is now all but extinct. He would take in all the details, know instantly the facts which we had missed but needed to find out - and then tell us not to come back into the office until we had the story in full.

 Even I, who was so good at ‘door-knocking’ that I retreated to an office-based job after less than four years in the trade, would do it willingly.

 Quite often, if the story was really good, the news editor - I’ll call him ‘JB’ because that’s what we called him - had a way of finding out any details which his reporters had been unable to unearth. In the days before smoking indoors was banned, he would reach into his jacket pocket, pull out a packet of 20, put a cigarette in his mouth with one hand (and light it at the same time), pick up the phone with the other hand and put in a call to the local police station. 

 Ninety-nine times out of 100, within seconds he would be talking to anyone from the duty sergeant upwards and would have the details. Because they all knew ‘JB’. It was his job to know them and it was their job to know him; it was his job to get the story and it was their job to make sure that the public whom they served knew what was going on in their town in terms of crime.

 And then, one day, after I had left the news reporters’ world for the milder climes of the sports desk, someone invented the police press officer.

 The press officer became the fount of all knowledge; often based miles away - in the Herald’s case, more than 30 miles away in Stafford - they decided what was news and what they would tell you. There were no more personal visits, the reporter was simply another voice at the end of a phone. 

 It was authority’s way of stopping journalists from uncovering the awkward, the unpleasant, the mildly embarrassing. And as staff cuts took an ever greater toll on newspapers, who no longer had the manpower to devote to chasing good crime stories, it did the job.

 Now, of course, press officers are everywhere; every football and rugby club worth its salt has one. Their job (and I acknowledge here that I have a number of friends who are football club press officers) is to tell the story as the club want it told; to be, if you will, a sporting version of the political spin doctor; to regulate access to players and backroom staff who would, less than 15 years ago, meet journalists after hours in the local pub and give them tips for stories.

 I mention all this because I have been listening this week with increasing irritation to the Leveson inquiry getting het up about ‘journalists bypassing the press offices and talking to police officers,’ in pursuit of a good story. 

 As someone has said to me today: ‘most of the police press offices were pretty clueless and didn’t actually know anything.’

 Which is why any good journalist, from ‘JB’ to Neil Wallis, Graham Dudman and Fergus Shanahan, would ignore them and go to the proper coppers.

One more thing.... on occasion, ‘JB’ would meet the senior coppers on our patch and have a drink and a meal with them. I don’t know for sure, but it’s not inconceivable that at Christmas, a bottle of something warming and Scottish may have changed hands.

 Is that corruption? Is police officers telling journalists something the public ought to know but which their bosses would rather keep quiet ‘leaking’?

 Many years ago, I heard this definition of a good news story: ‘Something which someone, somewhere, would rather the public didn’t find out about.’

 I do hope someone acquaints Mr Justice Leveson with that. 

Muffy and me - a cat's tale

Whenever I am asked whether I miss office life, I always say that I don’t miss the office, I miss the people.

 I’ve spent two years and two months running my own business out of the spare bedroom at Warrillow Towers. I’ve looked at renting an office, or at least a desk in one, but it’s not easy to find and what space is available is expensive for what you get.

 There’s almost nothing in Tamworth so when someone for whom I have done some PR work offered me a desk in an office just over 20 miles away in Solihull, I decided to take a look.

 The office was good, the desk five times bigger than the one on which my computer rests as I craft this post; but weekly travel and parking costs would almost double the amount I was spending on the desk. So, it was back to the drawing board and this tiny desk.

 At least I know I’m not alone; the topic of working from home cropped up at a networking event this week and one of my fellow delegates, a solicitor, revealed that his daily companion was the family dog.

 Mine is the family cat, Muffin. A giant half-Maine Coon, who is 2ft 6ins long from nose to tail when sprawled across the bed behind my desk, he came to Warrillow Towers on the rebound, as it were.

 In the autumn of 2007, Mrs W and I lost our much-loved cat, Kylie; You can tell how old she was (roughly 18) because she was named after the Aussie pop moppet when she was still starring in Neighbours in about 1989. I was living the bachelor life in a dismal one-bedroom flat when she (the cat, not the Aussie..) came into my life.

 It was around this time of year - I recall I was watching a Five Nations rugby match on television. I had the front door open, as I often did in the hope that someone, anyone, would visit and break the dreariness of my weekend existence.

 I was in the kitchen making a cup of coffee when I heard a plaintive ‘miaow’ behind me. My visitor was a tiny little brown-and-white tabby. She belonged to my neighbour who was, to be frank, a bit of a reprobate. She hopped on to my bed, made herself comfortable - and was still in my life almost two decades later.

 Not long after, the reprobate was evicted for not paying his rent and left her behind.

Muffy ponders his next move on
 the chessboard - clearly an intelligent cat! 

 Mrs W (then Miss G) and I had been seeing each other for about 18 months at the time and, as committed animal lovers, were determined that the cat would not be left alone. I took her in to my bedsit, we took her to the vet, had her checked over and she soon became part of the family, moving in with us when we married in July 1990.

 She had quite a life, getting stuck in the roof of the half-built apartment block next to our flat, regularly vanishing into the yard of the Co-Op dairy down the road, losing the sight in one eye after a disagreement with a car, yet still being lively and active well into her second decade.

 When she went to the vets in autumn 2007 for a routine procedure and never came home, we were devastated. We thought we would cope but the winter of 2007-8 was just too quiet at Warrillow Towers so, in the following spring, we decided to look for another cat.

 A workmate of Mrs W’s worked voluntarily for a cat-rehoming charity and quickly came up with Muffin. His owner lived 12 miles away and was having to give him up due to an allergy to cats. We visited one night and fell in love with him.

 We like to think he fell in love with us; we call him the noisiest cat on the planet for his boisterous ‘miaow’ and a yelp which often sounds more like a dog’s bark than a cat expressing his feelings. 

 He’s not supposed to lie on the bed behind me as I work; Mrs W gets irritated by all the cat hair on the duvet cover. So I keep the ‘office’ door open and cast regular glances to my right as he snores on his bed on the landing. But I’m always alive to the sound of him stirring himself awake, stretching those giant limbs as he yawns himself into life, comes and rubs against my leg and then leaps onto the bed.  

 When my mobile rings, it’s not unusual for the caller to inquire ‘What’s that noise in the background?’ as Muffy (as we now know him) shouts to make himself heard in the conversation.

 It’s not quite the same as having what the Americans call ‘water cooler conversations’ with your colleagues but when I do get up to make a cuppa, Muffy chases me excitedly down the stairs.

 Would I go back to work in a big office environment? Emphatically not, for all sorts of reasons - not the least of which is that I don’t think I would find a company who would let my cat sit behind my desk all day. 

Are you listening, Prime Minister?

Rarely, if ever, does this blog enter the political arena. Almost eight months after I began these musings, I defy anyone who doesn’t know me as a close personal friend to say which way I voted at the 2010 General Election - and then you might still be wrong.

 Although I have a degree in politics, I generally keep my views to myself. Sure, I watch BBC Parliament far more than is healthy, I choose The World At One and PM as my radio listening of choice, but I would no more start a political argument in a pub than order a pint of Carling.

 But the current furore over the Government’s planned reform of the National Health Service has prompted me into putting finger to keyboard.

 I like the NHS; in fact, I owe my life to it. Having been born in 1964 with spina bifida and hydrocephalus and being the only one of three siblings who survived more than a few days with it, I am eternally grateful to the GPs and consultants who pulled me through my early childhood. The shock when it came back to bite me in the rear in the form of epileptic fits which I had not suffered for more than 40 years was crippling, in both a mental and physical sense.

 Over the past few years since the return of my epilepsy, I have spent rather too long in surgery waiting rooms, in consultants’ offices, having blood tests, brain scans and the like. Mrs W has endured similar experiences for different reasons; and we and many like us will tell the politicians arguing over the fate of the NHS that it does not need more competition. It does not need opening up to the free market; all the vast majority of people who use the NHS on an occasional basis want it to do is to work in a joined-up fashion.

 Let me tell you a story. Here is a patient who needs to have three tests done at an eye clinic. The patient is not yet suffering from any condition but has a family history so the NHS, quite rightly, is monitoring the situation every three months. 

 Yet the patient receives three separate appointments for three separate tests on three separate dates and it requires the patience of a saint and numerous telephone calls to persuade the authorities that it would be a good idea to do them all on the same day.

 The patient subsequently books the morning off work and attends a local hospital, only to discover that the clinic is only able to complete two of the three tests and wants the patient to return at a later date for the third - meaning more time off work.

 Cue a full and frank discussion as the patient produces a letter from their GP, confirming that all three tests will be done on the same day. Cue a harrassed receptionist, seeking a way out of the problem.

 A solution is eventually found and the first two tests take place just a few minutes after the appointed time. The patient is then told to go and have a cup of coffee in the restaurant as they have 20 minutes to wait before their appointment with the consultant.

 Duly refreshed, they return to the waiting room at the required time to find precisely three people ahead of them in the queue - and wait a further 90 minutes before being called in to the inner sanctum.

 Harrassed, tired, hungry and needing to get to work 20 miles away lest they let down colleagues, they undergo the test......which takes less than five minutes.

 Completely oblivious to their feelings, the consultant announces that nothing has changed since their last visit, “so I’ll see you in nine months. Goodbye.”

 And the authorities wonder why patients often have a dim view of doctors.

 I wonder how many MPs, the people in whose hands the fate of the NHS lies, have undergone that experience? How many have turned up at A&E at 9pm on a Saturday night, frightened for the health of their 80-year-old mother and still been there at 4.30am on Sunday?

 Politicians can talk until they are blue/red in the face about turning patients into stakeholders, into giving GPs control of their budgets, but all of it is meaningless until they can answer some basic questions. How can a patient arrive at their local hospital and produce a letter of which the consultant seems completely unaware? How can four consultations take 90 minutes? How can some doctors be so astoundingly rude to worried, anxious, patients?

 Until our politicians see the argument from the other side of the desk, all talk of NHS reform is nonsense.