Peel In Radio Times This Week

[Tom Roche]

Well here's this in case anyone missed it. A friend was kind enough to scan it in...

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Peel In Radio Times This Week




          Do do tell us, John," he said, "all about
          your involvement with Abba." (I have
          had none - trust me on this.) It was the
          last day of our QE2 cruise back across
          the Atlantic with a horde of RT readers -
          some of whom had taken me to task for describing
          them as "a mob" in an earlier column - along with
          celebrity RT contributors and editorial team members.
          It was my turn to be quizzed by the cruise director,
          in front of passengers, on the stage of the Queen's
          Room. The director had already asked me if l still
          appeared on The Archers, with an aside that he must
          remember to start watching it again, and I was
          reluctant to disappoint him a second time. Delia
          Smith, Alan Hansen and Barry Norman had all been
          through a similar process with minimum bruising,
          although Barry had been addressed at least once as
          Norman and had to endure being called Norman
          Norman by the rest of us for the following 24 hours.
              Sheila and I had arrived in New York by air a
           week earlier, your correspondent, never an
          enthusiastic flyer, having been tranquillized into
          fly mode by wantonly exceeding the dosage
          prescribed an the box. Sheila had not been in the
          USA before, I hadn't been there for more than 30
          years, and our expectations were, to be frank, low.
          Wasn't New York dirty and violent, and its residents
          rude and unfriendly? Hadn't everyone said so?
              In the event, of course, we had had a miraculously
          good time, doing the obvious things like the
          Empire State Building and Macy's and Broadway
          and Grand Central Station and taking far too many
          photographs of the Chrysler Building, possibly the
          most beautiful man-made object on earth We'd
          stood on a crowded intersection a block off the
          East River and watched the Fourth Of July fireworks
          - open-mouthed doesn't come close - ate and
          drank in Mexican and Indian restaurants and Irish
          bars, and spent an evening at Birdland celebrating
          the venue's importance in the history of music
          before discovering that it was actually the third
          room to be called Birdland and Charlie Parker
          had never played then at all.
              To compensate for this we had walked 45 blocks
          to Greenwich Village to meet the singer Laura
          Cantrell and her husband, see the house where
          Charlie Parker had lived and seek sanctuary from
          the oppressive heat in a couple of neighborhood
          bars; one apparently the last bar in the city to
          admit women, the other by reputation a former
          speakeasy. The second of these had a Liverpool FC
          graffito in the gents. Scousers here, Scousers
          there, Scousers every . . . well,
          you know how it goes. Sheila
          had even ordered eggs-over-
          easy for breakfast as though
          it was the most normal thing
          in the world.

              The city was pretty much spotless and decorated
          with dozens of brightly painted plastic cows - we
          have photographs of these, too - the people were
          funny and friendly enough that for the first time I
          thought I could understand why John Lennon and
          loads of other Europeans had wanted to live in New
          Yark.  D'ya knew, I think I feel a song coming on. I'm
          already trying to work out when we can return to do
          the things we had no time far, like walking in Central
          Park doing some serious record shopping.
              But now we were on the QE2 and in mid-Atlantic
           and eating a minimum of three enormous meals a
            day. When it became time for me to talk that talk
            for the readers gathered in the bar called, rather
            affectedly, the Yacht Club, I tried to persuade them
            that when we had came on board I had been a
            svelte 11St and not the fat little guy they saw before
            them. I think some of them sorta believed me, too
               We saw a lot of some of the readers, too little of
          others, and we left the ship in Southamptan rather
          wishing same of them lived within striking
          distance. The nice man with the white beard from
          York, far example, and the couple whose daughter
          had got married while they were or board.
                During daylight hours we had walked the deck,
          watched films that we could discuss with Barry
          over drinks, resisted the temptation to learn
          tap-dancing or how to fold table napkins, thought
          about swimming but never swam, wondered how
          we were going to break it to friends that Delia was
          really nice despite her Norwich City connections,
          and ate. After nightfall we did more eating, talked
          incessantly about football, had more drinks, and
          sat in the Yacht Club attaching mental speech
          bubbles to our fellow guests as they came into the
          room to stand uncertainly at the top of the steps.
          "what would these people say if they knew a
          former Latvian Minister of Overseas
          Development was among them?" for example.
          Well, it seemed funny at the time.
                Yesterday, Sheila and I went to our local
          supermarket. The woman on the checkout didn't
          speak a word other than to announce the final
          total We looked at each other, thought about the
          room-cleaners at the Waldorf-Astoria and the way
          they spoke to us each morning as though they had
          known us for years, about the staff at Tiffany's who
          involved us in a matey manner in some sort of
          largely incomprehensible running gag, about
          Julian and Laurence and the others in the
          Britannia Restaurant on the QE2 whom we had
          come to like so much that we felt genuinely sad eon
          saying goodbye to them, and laughed. Welcome
          home, Sheila, I said. -