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Oliver Cross: Cheque blank
THIS week I received a cheque for two hundred and forty three pounds and 12 pence, and instead of mustering some enthusiasm I could only reflect gloomily that fortune is a fickle mistress.
I have no idea what the payment is for, even though the accompanying letter includes a section headed "What is this payment for?" which starts "We recently reorganised our CGNH and CULAC with-profits funds", at which point my brain clouded over and I decided not to go any further because I've always been told that you should never look a gift horse in the mouth, which I've never done, never having met a gift horse.
But I suppose this was what the surprise cheque from Aviva – which used to be called Norwich Union but discarded it's old, stuffy image so it could sound like a bus company – was. It was certainly completely unearned; all I must have done is open some sort of Aviva account while I wasn't looking and then got lucky on the CGNH and CULAC fronts.
I do remember getting a letter from Aviva months ago saying that all I had to do was tick and sign the 'Yes' box, post the letter back in a pre-paid envelope and they would give me some money.
Of course, I've heard that sort of thing before and it usually means that to release the money I have to give away all my banking details and make a small payment to the Interdenominational Bnak of Nigeria pcl (sic).
But this time it all turned out to be on the level and above board, which isn't the sort of behaviour you expect from the financial services sector.
My little windfall reminded me of the time when many building societies (except mine, dammit) were demutualising and bribing members with large amounts to give away their rights, so that for a few years every flight to sunny places was packed with paid-off building society investors, and conservatory and double glazing firms grew fat.
Of course, as one of the unlucky ones who never managed to capitalise on Thatcherite deregulation and greed, I warned that it would all end in tears.
Collapse
Which it ultimately did, with the collapse, decades later, of the world financial system but I can't find much happiness in being more right than the demutualisation and privatisation cashers-in because they've still got their holiday apartments on the Costa Del Sol and I haven't.
But that, to get back to the beginning, is not why I've concluded that fortune is a fickle mistress. That came about because, following the receipt my mother's legacy, I've suddenly become solvent; not in any position to buy a holiday apartment but not in such straits that 243 is likely to save me from the workhouse.
So after decades of tutting about money going to money and wondering whether the world couldn't be arranged more fairly, I find myself, for the first time ever, gift-horsed with money which I don't immediately need. Curse you, Aviva.
I love Gracie
MY new heroine is Gracie Fields, the music hall performer who became one of the highest-paid film actresses in the world and then (which is how I remember her) a star turn of black-and-white TV variety shows.
On Monday BBC4 achieved its highest-ever viewing figures with Gracie, in which Jane Horrocks attempted to recreate Gracie's wartime career.
This wouldn't have surprised the real Gracie at all because she didn't become a global superstar by accident and although she could play the gormless ex-mill girl very well, she was a very knowing, sophisticated and ambitious performer. Top of the ratings is exactly where she would have expected to be.
Gracie was followed on BBC4 by a documentary, Amazing Gracie: The Gracie Fields Story, which showed the canyon-wide gap between a very talented actress, Jane Horrocks, and a people's genius.
We saw clips of her in her early years on the boards; not glamorous and with an excess of energy which made her look fidgety and awkward until she started singing and silenced all the music hall drunks with a voice (which Jane Horrocks couldn't reproduce) which worked by entering the audience's heads through their spines.
And if that failed, she had a lifetime of stagecraft to fall back on. Rod Hudd, in the Amazing Gracie, told of how, well past her prime, she played the Batley Variety Club and found out all the old favourites, her sure-fire hits, were not going down at all well.
So after going into a huddle with her musical director, she launched into the current Number One hit, Mary Hopkins' Those Were The Days – particularly suitable for Gracie, who, in the music hall tradition, was best at narrative songs ('Once upon a time there was a tavern...'). Naturally the audience were soon forming a queue to eat out of her hand..
Another extraordinary aspect of Gracie Fields' performances was the way (like Fats Waller) she made fun of her own songs, particularly Sally, Pride of our Ally, which was obviously written for a man but which, by sheer force of personality, she made her own, while acknowledging in winks and asides that the situation was inherently ludicrous.
So as well as being, by any standards, one of the greatest stars of her century, Our Gracie was also a pre post-modernist. Praise her.
Walls don't come tumbling down
Talking of home improvements (which we were, somewhere on this page), I vaguely remember a time, maybe in the late 1970s or early 1980 when the inexplicable phenomenon of wall tie mania took hold of the country.
The roads were jammed with white vans labelled 'Wall tie replacement specialists' and your heart sank every time there was a knock at the door because it was most likely to be a wall tie salesman asking whether you realised your house was about to fall down around your ears.
Metal wall ties, an essential part of the fabric of cavity walls, were said to be decaying at an alarming rate, so that unless something was done the whole country would very soon look like Beirut did at the time, which was very worrying.
I couldn't join in the mania because, having young children to feed, we couldn't afford new wall ties. So imagine our relief when we realised, as if after a bombardment, that things had suddenly gone quiet – the vans and salespeople had turned their attention to other things and the house was still standing.
There are still respectable wall tie replacement firms, because wall ties still need replacing, but all that wall tie mania and anxiety has gone; file it under 'Millennium bug' or 'Diana's death, reaction to' or even 'Jedward' as examples of Britain going rather mad.
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Weather for Leeds
Saturday 26 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 8 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
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Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
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