The "C" Word

On the way home from school the other day, Britney (Not her real name) informed me that her teacher was now allowing her to use the “C” word in class.

I nearly crashed the car.

Once I had regained control and my seatbelt had released itself, I cleared my throat and asked Britney if she could clarify exactly what she meant.

“We’re allowed to say Christmas now it’s past bonfire night.” she replied.

Once we arrived home and I had poured a gin and tonic and blown into a paper bag for several minutes, I looked online to see if there was any clue as to when John Lewis would be releasing their Christmas Advert. This is because in my eyes, this marks the beginning of the official festive build up. I knew it had to be in the near future because it was November and that very morning the cat had been doing his best to emulate last year’s offering by doing his wall of death routine on Britney’s trampoline.

I found that John Lewis had released a teaser for their advert but no-one was keen to actually accept it was real after being fooled in 2016 by an A Level Student and a piece of his CGI coursework. But as luck would have it the release of the advert was imminent and I watched it via a link on Twitter the very next morning.

And I cannot believe what the Marketing Mischief Makers at John Lewis have done. If you have been in hibernation or not in receipt of a television, you can watch the advert here. And if you can’t be bothered to click on the link, basically the advert features a 7 year old boy called Joe and a monster under his bed called Moz.

Since the beginning of time parents, grandparents and baby sitters have reassured children that there are no such thing as monsters under the bed and yet John Lewis and his mad, money grabbing marketing team have rubbished this story in their 2 minute 10 second Christmas advert. So there you go children, there is in fact an enormous monster hidden under your bed in amongst all of the dirty laundry and random toys that you have hidden there. But don’t be alarmed because he will fart, make you laugh hysterically and stay up all night with you playing all the games that your big sister wont; and thus make getting a haircut that is straight at the back a bit more tricky the next day.

And where on earth are Joe’s parents while their son is playing on the Scalextric at 1am with a monster from under his bed? As a Mum, my ears are so finely tuned to any extra curricular bedtime activities that after 8pm I can hear the tap of a finger on an iPad when I am 20 metres away. If I listen carefully, I can hear a Monster High Doll having her shoes changed and I have an app on my phone that alerts me if a torch has been switched on under a duvet. The only reason that Joe’s Mum wouldn’t be able to hear an enormous monster giving her son a piggy back ride across his bedroom is if she’d taken a handful of Tramadol and washed it down with a Magnum of Merlot.

I suppose at least the John Lewis Mum can thank Moz the Monster for finding the lost sock under the bed that must have been pissing her off for weeks. Where do the odd socks go?  Well now you know, they’re all stuck on the monster that’s hiding under your child’s bed. I must ask the one under Britney’s bed to roll around a bit when he’s going to sleep as it would save having to hoover under it. I could even rent him out to my friends once I’d used 4 entire rolls of parcel tape getting the fluff off him.

And while Joe’s Mum is clearly unconscious after 7.30pm, I don’t believe for one second that Joe’s Dad would stand on the touchline and watch the opposition thundering towards his sleeping goalie of a son without screaming a torrent of advice/abuse/encouragement. Perhaps that’s why he’s on the touchline – perhaps all of the other parents have been banned from attending the games.

On the up side, Joe’s spelling is tremendous for a 7 year old who was probably taught to spell phonetically. If you’d asked a 7 year old Britney to write a sign for her bedroom door asking monsters to keep out she would have written “monsturs nott alowed.” My personal favourite from her 7 year old CV was the word “tuna” which was spelt “choona”. But anyway, I digress.

Moz the monster is extremely dextrous with his enormous hands and even manages to play Battleships (£12 from John Lewis by the way) with Joe. But for some reason this dexterity does not extend to the wrapping of a Christmas present for Joe and the package looks as though someone with 1 arm has attempted to wrap a live hedgehog with wrapping paper from the 1940s. And what parent in their right mind would allow some random present that just appeared from no-where, looking as though it had been wrapped by a hyper-active 2 year old, underneath their tree on Christmas morning? When you discovered that it was a night light that was going to keep your child awake all night counting the stars on their bedroom ceiling and when they switch if off a 7 foot tall farting monster appears, you might be a bit concerned as to its origin.

The Advert cost £1million and took a year to make. Why did it cost £1million? If they had paid the twins who played Joe in Haribo and Argos vouchers it would have reduced the cost dramatically. You surely can’t have to pay a monster very much as he wouldn’t even have an equity card. If you’d bought him a caravan to live in after the advert was finished I’m sure he would have been delighted. If you had also given him an account at John Lewis so he could buy some toys he would be set for life. Let’s face it, work must be thin on the ground for a monster who hides under beds and keeps children awake.

The set can’t have cost very much and you would think that the barber would have undertaken the role in exchange for the free publicity. If John Lewis had supplied the half time oranges, bought the football club a new set of strips and a couple of goal posts you’d think they would have been okay with letting their team run towards a sleeping goalkeeper for free.

The other costs relating to the marketing, TV slots in ad breaks and in store advertising came to £6million. So for the bargain price of £7million, John Lewis have again launched a cash cow that will generate something in the region of £70million in revenue.

Academy award-winning screenwriter Michel Gondry was called in to make this 2 minute masterpiece and despite his ex-girlfriend telling him that he had big shoes to fill, I think he’s done it wonderfully well. It’s better than a lonely old man sitting on the moon with a telescope or a fox mite-riddled trampoline and it shows the younger fraternity that the monster under the bed is not a bad thing. 10% of the sales of every Moz mug and soft toy will go to Barnardos to support the young carers who have to grow up so quickly to cope with demands of their homelife. I wish each and every one of them, their very own monster under the bed to play with, talk to and cuddle when times are tough.

Battleships, Scalelextric and piggy back rides only before 7pm, obviously.

The Best Place to Live in the Country

Back in 2002 Country Life magazine informed their readers that the Northumberland market town of Alnwick was the best place to live in the UK.

If I’m completely honest, I’m not sure the readers of Country Life would have been greatly interested in this piece of information, because all of the property advertised for sale in Country Life is usually in possession of the term POA; and Alnwick doesn’t have many available properties like that.

Nevertheless, Alnwick with its famous castle was apparently the most fulfilling place to live in our Country and one of the main reasons for that is because the evening rush hour lasts 18 minutes. This could not be further from the truth, but let us not allow this piece of invention to get in the way of a good story.

Alnwick Castle was the home of Hogwarts for the first and second Hazza Potter films and if you visit the Castle now, you can still have a flying lesson. I will point out just for your information, that Alnwick Castle should be reported to Trading Standards for using this terminology. Britney (Not her real name) was left bitterly disappointed when she discovered that her flying lesson consisted of jumping as high as she could in front of a green screen whilst straddling a broomstick.

To put it mildly this was something of an anticlimax for Britney who had obviously been envisaging sailing over the castle ramparts playing Quidditch.

To be fair, Quidditch looks like a fairly dangerous activity and if you were to combine that with the lack of experience shown by a first time flyer, you’re looking at one hell of a dubious risk assessment, so perhaps Alnwick Castle are just erring on the side of caution.

Anyway, shit flying lessons aside, Alnwick Castle has been used as the setting for many a film and TV programme. A great deal of Robin Hood Prince of Thieves was filmed at Alnwick, some scenes for Downtown Abbey were also made there and Rowan Atkinson rode a horse around the Castle in the snow for the first series of Blackadder.

But an article which I found in the Daily Mail (so it must be true) says that Alnwick is “no chocolate-box fantasy of rural living” because “it has all the facilities required for life in the real world”.

I’m no expert, but I would say this is because it is in fact a real place where people actually live and do normal things, such as take their children to school and go to work. I suppose the residents should count themselves extremely fortunate that they only have an 18 minute rush hour to contend with when they are heading home at the end of the working day.

The judging panel for this Best Place to Live in Britain took into consideration the transport links to cities (the bus), traffic congestion (none, aside from that dreadful 18 minute rush hour) and how the contender was expected to develop over the coming years (rapidly I would say, like everywhere else). And do you know what happened after the glossy Country Life published this information? House prices shot through the roof and every property that was small enough to be affordable to local people became a holiday home. This quickly put an end to the “cheap homes” that had been advertised for free throughout the competition.

Country Life editor Clive Aslet said he was not surprised Alnwick had won, although it was not as wealthy as the other towns shortlisted. He added: “Money doesn't necessarily make you happy”. No it certainly doesn’t Mr Aslet, but if you are attempting to get onto the property ladder in your home town, money does assist an awful lot.

The reason that I am dredging up this information, (although it is still fresh in the mind of any Alnwick occupant 15 years on) is because last Saturday I read an article in the Daily Mail (so it must be true) that was entitled: Market towns with England’s cheapest property revealed: North East is the place to go for historic markets and low house prices.

So if you are a home owner in the North East you can rest assured that the value of your property has just doubled and so has the cost of your shopping.

I think we are very lucky with our quality of life here in the North East. We might have to drive a little further to get to a B&Q but we have the added bonus that we can use our broadest Geordie accent should a situation become rather heated. Honestly, nothing cools the flames of an argument like a thunderous roar of “WHEY AYE, PACK IT IN MAN”.

Although this article was published in the daily Mail (so it must be true) the findings regarding these house prices that were quoted were made by Lloyds Bank. Frankly I have no idea why Lloyds Banking Group plc would be making reference to cheap house prices. Oh, and I must mention that there were three adverts for mortgages half way down the page that were most interesting.

So, Ferryhill has the cheapest average house prices in the country at £78,184 and the Daily Wail has most helpfully compared this to the Buckinghamshire market town of Beaconsfield’s average of £1,049,659. They also described Ferryhill as being near Durham, which it is; but it’s even nearer to Spennymoor but this doesn’t sound nearly so glamorous. After all Ferryhill is a former mining town that “suffered some of the socio-economic problems associated with the industry’s decline but in recent years has seen infrastructural improvements and still has its weekly Friday markets”.

Well, that’s good. If you need 10 plastic cigarette lighters for £1, a pint of fluorescent slush puppy, some nettle flavoured cheese and a coaster with a flower on it, get yourself off to Ferryhill on Friday.

I do think that it’s particularly useful to hold a market in a market town, when everyone is at work and I also fail to understand why the status of a town is raised by the fact that it has a market. Back in the day when I was a child and all of this was still fields, the Saturday market was a bustling place where you could buy meat, fruit, vegetables, a hammer and some wheel trims for your car.

Now, because everyone buys from the internet those markets are a thing of the past. In fact some market towns advertise Farmers’ Markets just to let everyone know that they really can purchase meat, cheese, fruit, vegetables and a strange coloured alcoholic beverage made from distilled blackberries. These days I only go to the market to buy Britney a pint of slush puppy that is so iridescent it is sold with a tool for removing small children from the ceiling; and to purchase juice for my vaping implement. The bloke who sells me this liquid crack cocaine for my fake cigarette resembles one of Eddie Stobbart’s lorries. The writing is a bit smudged on his bottles of vaping juice but it is reasonably priced and he adds enough nicotine into it to stop me becoming suicidal by 7.45 each morning.

I did breathe a colossal sigh of relief that nothing north of Durham featured in this “cheap housing in market towns” critique. Aside from Ferryhill the other 9 places on the list were Crook, Stanhope and Saltburn in County Durham, Guisborough and Marsden in Yorkshire, Cartmel in Cumbria, Boston and Immingham in Lincolnshire and Tickhill in Derbyshire.

They had kept this list to the very end of the article for a very important reason. And this is because Lincolnshire, Derbyshire and Cumbria are definitely not in the North East.

If you live in Ferryhill, enjoy your Friday market and the peace while it lasts.

The masses are coming to join you.