And another thing…

AS A FITTING end to the festive season, I’ve just enjoyed something of a family reunion. And it’s all thanks to Twitter.

A few months ago, I began receiving messages through Twitter from one @Porky999, who turned out to be my wee cousin, Steven. Steven is the elder son of my Aunt Nan, my dad’s baby sister. Now, for various complicated family-type reasons, I haven’t actually seen Steven since we were both young children. That’s a very long time. So to find myself “chatting” to him over Twitter was an unexpected and enjoyable experience. My dad and sister, neither of whom are on Twitter, started asking me how Steven was doing, even though I hadn’t physically spoken to him in more than 30 years.

Steven had been asking after my dad, and I had suggested he should visit him next time he’s in Scotland (he’s now living in Burnley). And shortly before Christmas, I was DMd by Porky999 to inform me that, sure enough, he intended to pay Dad a visit and would I be there too?

And today I was. It was fantastic to meet up again after all these years, and my dad was clearly chuffed that Steven and his lovely wife Margarita (and their two beautiful young daughters, of whose existence I was unaware until today!) had made the effort to visit. Steven’s turned into a lovely bloke who is utterly, utterly unrecognisable from my childhood memories (as I’m sure I am too).

The point of all this being that, whatever criticism people have of Twitter, this is one event – a very real rather than virtual one – that wouldn’t have happened without it.

I’m just sayin’…

I’VE PROMISED to go cold turkey (geddit?) on my laptop today and tomorrow, so blogging will be light.

In the meantime, to every reader who has stuck with this blog for however long, thank you, and I hope you and your loved ones have a very merry and peaceful Christmas.

RONNIE, who started his primary education this year, will be appearing in his class’s nativity play soon.

He will not be playing Joseph. “Good!” said I to his mother. “Rubbish part. The best part is the innkeeper.”

“How so, oh wise husband of mine?” said Carolyn (okay, that’s not exactly what she said, but you get my drift).

So why does the innkeeper play such an important part in the whole First Christmas broo-haha?

Well, remember that part where the Imperial Star Destoyer captures the rebel blockade runner in its tractor beam at the very start of Episode IV? And then the droids escaped to the surface of Tatooine with the Death Star tapes in the escape pod? Well, remember the Imperial gunner who almost shoots the pod down? And then he doesn’t because “there are no life forms on board”?

Well that bloke is recognised among theologians Star Wars fans everywhere as the most crucial, pivotal character in the whole original trilogy. If he had followed his orignal instinct and blown the escape pod to bits, then the droids wouldn’t have made it to Tatooine or into the ownership of Luke Skywalker. Obi-Wan would have stayed in retirement, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru wouldn’t have been slaughtered by storm troopers and Princess Leia’s execution aboard the Death Star would have gone ahead as scheduled. The Death Star’s fatal weakness would not have been uncovered and would not have been destroyed, so, eventually, would have destroyed the Rebel Alliance.

All because that gunner opened fire on the escape pod. Which he didn’t.

“Are you drunk?”

So, anyway, back to Bethlehem 2000 years ago. The innkeeper could easily have gone that extra mile for his last-minute customers, Mary and Joseph. He could have found a room somewhere. Or he could have sent them packing with a warning not to use his stable or else he’ll get the centurions onto them. Where would the Nativity have been then?

Shepherds are rarely allowed into hotel lobbies, for a start. The Wise Men (the number of whom is not specified in Scripture) would have been hard pressed to track down the actual room number. So no Frankincense, gold or myrrh – and no tradition of prezzies at this time of year!!

Theologically speaking, the Lord being born in a manger provided a powerful message about the humility of His beginnings; a Travelodge doesn’t quite have the same impact.

So, to sum up: the innkeeper’s the part you want to go for, son.

“He’s playing a king,” said Carolyn. “And I fell asleep during Star Wars.”

Right.

♫ "... and a Happy New Year!" ♫

NEWS that Sarah Brown’s Twitter account was accidentally accessed by her young son brought back memories of this series of Twits from earlier this year…

IN OLDEN days I used to enjoy taking my young son (now 18) to look at the Christmas lights in Glasgow’s George Square.

It was something of a tradition for us and for many families. The famous square, on a cold, clear winter evening looked beautiful. Christmas lights, by definition, are rarely tasteful, but Glasgow did it well. In the run-up to Christmas, there really was a great atmosphere in that oddly peaceful setting.

No longer.

Narnia was not as the children remembered it

A few years ago we took Ronnie and Reggie along, expecting to experience the same festive spirit as in the past. Not a chance. Now there’s a carousel, a helter skelter, burger vans, temporary toilets, and all the litter you can eat. And noise. Lots and lots of noise.

That was the last time we took the boys to George Square to see the lights, and we won’t be taking them back. Which is a real pity, and I’m sad that a part of Glasgow’s childhood has been sacrificed to the demands of  modern commercialism. Do people really need to have their senses assaulted 24 hours a day like this? Are we really so desperately in need of being entertained by flashing lights and noise wherever we go? Is it really so unfair to expect families to take a quiet stroll through the square and to enjoy the simple pleasures of Christmas lights?

Apparently it is. Well, bah, humbug! to that.

CAROLYN took the boys into McDonald’s at Victoria railway station Street this afternoon, just after I’d left her to make my way to the Commons.

She bought them a strawberry shake each and handed over a ten pound note.

“We don’t take foreign money,” said the man behind the counter.

“It’s a Scottish ten pound note,” replied Carolyn.

“We don’t take foreign money,” restated the moron.

“Get me your manager,” said Carolyn, and he duly sloped off to speak with one of his supervisors, who directed him to someone else who was obviously more senior.

Then he returned and, without uttering a word of apology or acknowledgment that he had got it wrong, took the tenner and completed the transaction.

I thought this kind of stupidity had disappeared in the seventies – depressing to see it rear its arrogant, ignorant head again in the 21st century.

A Scottish tenner yesterday

BACK to school… er, I mean Parliament on Monday. A relief, no doubt, for journalists whose sources will again be gathered together in a relatively compact space instead of dispersed across the globe.

For me and, no doubt, others, resumption of Westminster- based duties won’t be such an unalloyed blessing. During the recess you get used to sleeping in your own bed and seeing your family every day (“What?! You get to see your families?! And this is what you get paid eleven-figure sums of public money for?! Pigs at the trough. that’s what it is! And what about the referendum on the Lisbon treaty, etc…”)

And although my constituency office is a bit small, it’s actually much larger than my House of Commons one, and the company’s better (I am the sole resident of my Commons office). On the plus side, almost all my closest friends in the past eight years have been fellow MPs and I’m looking forward to catching up.

As for catching up on any gossip, I discovered long ago that Westminster is nowhere near the best place to be if you want to hear what’s going on. Most of the time, you’d be far better informed by checking out the rolling scroll of blog headlines at the top of the PoliticsHome site than by being in Westminster. A case in point: in 2002 I was having dinner with friends in The Adjournment, the restaurant in Portcullis House, when I received a pager message from Donald, who works for me in my constituency office. The message read, “Estelle Morris has resigned”.

Also in the restaurant were Robin Cook and Peter Hain. Peter was sitting closer to me and I asked him if he knew about it. He didn’t. So there we were, sitting at the heart of the palace of Westminster, and I found out about a cabinet resignation from someone watching telly 400 miles away.

So if, in the next few weeks, you hear any good gossip, be sure to let me know, eh? Because nobody ever tells us MPs anything.

I CAN still recall my very first day at school. I fell asleep. Start as you mean to go on, say I.

And tomorrow, exactly 40 years later, it’s young Ronnie’s turn to start Primary One. There will be tears and tantrums in the Harris household, no doubt. But only from Carolyn. Ronnie will be fine, I’m sure.

Still, it’s a big deal for any family. My oldest boy left school this summer and is applying for college. And now our wee boy, who only arrived with us five minutes ago, is trying on his new school uniform and complaining that his shoes don’t fit properly.

I feel very, very old.

I SPENT almost the whole of this evening in the Accident and Emergency Department: Ronnie had been complaining about an earache all day and as the first doses of ibuprofen and paracetamol wore off, the pain returned with a vengeance. He was in real distress. Why does this kind of thing only happen on Sundays?

Carolyn stayed with Reggie while Ronnie and I made our way to the hospital. Fortunately, his pain was starting to subside by the time the doctor managed to see him: the pressure from a build-up of fluid behind his eardrum finally caused it to split. They gave the wee soul some antibiotics and more pain relief, but by the time we got back home — a good five hours after we had left — he was in fine form. And very hungry. He’s now sound asleep, thank goodness.

Regular ear infections have always been part of his short life. The latest one was probably caused by a visit to the swimming pool, but it usually takes far less than that to kick one off.

Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been mentioning the boys on this blog recently. This is because Carolyn feels that regular references to Ronnie and Reggie make them a target for public criticism and comment in the same way that I am.

However, she’s asked me to post this in order to make an appeal: does anyone out there have any top tips on how to protect kids from regular ear infections? Or suggestions of alternative treatment to antibiotics?

Thank you for your time.

SQUONK.

Just one, unusual, unfamiliar word: Squonk.

It was the title of the first track on the first side of a double album that belonged to my older brother, Kenny, and which had sat, unnoticed by me, for the last three years next to the record player in the livingroom of my family home. The album was called Seconds Out. The artist: Genesis.

It was spring 1980 and I was only familiar with the band through their recent chart hit, “Turn It On Again”, which I liked but to which I hadn’t paid much attention. Having listened to an almost exclusive diet of ELO for the past two years, my best friend Brem and I had jointly decided it was time to broaden our musical horizons. For reasons I’m still unsure about, we opted for Genesis. Or, more accurately, we pencilled in a listening of Seconds Out at some point in the undetermined near future.

Then one day I got bored with whatever 16-year-olds get bored doing, and decided to give big brother’s album an initial listen to. It was a live album, so I was prepared for the content to be a little rough-edged, perhaps a little indistinct next to the sound of the cheering crowds. But the crowds at this particular concert didn’t seem to be making much noise at all: all I could hear was a polite murmuring of what I assumed was a largely reverential audience. Then the sound of two drumsticks rhythmically hitting each other. And suddenly we were there, in “Squonk”. It felt like a sublime wave of sound washing over me. Was this really live? It was a clean, sharp, professional sound. This was music being produced, not by pop stars, or even by rock stars. This was music performed by musicians.

Then the singer (afterwards identified as a bloke called Phil Collins, who had apparently been the drummer until a couple of years earlier when the band’s better-known front man, Peter Gabriel left) began to sing. I don’t know what it was, but something in that voice, coupled with the structure and texture of the song itself, got me hook, line and sinker. When I started sharing this new musical wonder with my group of friends, they displayed, almost to a boy, a similar level of enthusiasm. For a while we even toyed with the idea that the lyrics of  ”Squonk” weren’t even in English, since at first we could hardly make out a recogniseable word. Over time, and after many, many repeated playings, we could work out just enough words and phrases (“Mirror, mirror on the wall…” was one) to convince us that Collins was actually speaking our language, but it was only when another boy at school heard of our new-found interest and genrously wrote out the full lyrics on the back of my geography jotter.

We became familair with the rest of the tracks on Seconds Out: the breathtaking genius of “The Carpet Crawl”, the beautiful poetry of “Firth of Fifth”, the baffling keyboards instrumental in “Robbery, Assault and Battery” and, of course, the astonishing accomplishment of the 22-minutes-long “Supper’s Ready”, which occupied the entire length of the third side of the album.

And this is where one new-found passion overlaped another one, because at about the same time I first listened to Genesis, I also became a born-again Christian. The lyrics of “Supper’s Ready”, particularly in its closing stages, describe the return of Christ to a war-strewn Earth, and my fellow Christian Genesis fans and I would enthusiastically discuss the spiritual significance of this in between Bible study sessions and devouring any and every other Genesis track we could find. I remember an earnest conversation I had with a boy of about my age at the Christian rock festival, Greenbelt, later that summer — not (on that occasion) about which version of the Bible we preferred or speculation about the End Times in the book of Revelations, but about whether we preferred Collins or Gabriel as lead singer. We both agreed Collins.

Brem always seemed to have more money than the rest of us at that time so he led the way in buying up the Genesis back catalogue. First was A Trick of the Tail, chosen, I think, because it had the largest number of tracks which were duplicated live on Seconds Out. To be honest, i remember being a little disappointed at the plodding, lifeless feeling of the studio version of “Squonk” and “Robery Assault and Battery” when compared to their live versions. But there was so much other, previously undiscovered gold on that album that we were, temporarily, at least, sated. 

But not for long. Brem soon brought us Selling England By The Pound (which remains my all-time favourite album by anyone, not just Genesis), Foxtrot, Trespass, Wind and Wuthering and Nursery Cryme. It was while listening to this last one in the bedroom of a friend one night that I got quite a surprise. One track, “Harold the Barrell”, was immediately familiar, even though it had never been a single and the album itself was nearly a decade old. It’s still a brilliant song, by the way, despite its age. Turned out that my brother, Kenny, the owner of the Seconds Out album, had been well into Genesis when they first appeared on the scene and had played Nursery Cryme many times in my presence without my being overtly aware of it. Even today Kenny gets exasperated that his wee brother is still into a band that he stopped listening to more than 30 years ago.

We quickly apprised ourselves of the history of the band, and started to distinguish between Gabriel and Collins era Genesis. Camps supporting each sub-genre inevitably emerged, though we were all careful to make clear that our loyalties lay with the band rather than with a specific singer. Duke, the 1980 album from which “Turn It On Again” was taken was duly bought (by Brem) and appreciated. The summer of 1980, filled as it was by music, religion and exams, remains for me, and I’m sure many of my friends from that time, one of the best times of our young lives.

By the time the band’s 1981 album, Abacab, was released, our small band of close friends had kind of mushroomed into a significantly larger gang with wider and differing musical tastes. Nevertheless, the release of Abacab was a big event. We felt at the time that it wasn’t up to the standard we’d come to expect from Collins, Rutherford and Banks, but that didn’t dissuade us from wanting to see them live when they played at the Ingleston Market, Edinburgh, the following year to promote their latest live album, Three Sides Live. There was no way we were going to be left at home for want of tickets to that particular event, so one Sunday evening at about 10.00 pm, I arrived outside the Apollo theatre in Glasgow (from where the tickets for the Edinburgh show were being sold) in the company of two friends. There we spent the night, camped out on sleeping bags near the front of the queue (yes, even at ten at night, there were other Genesis fans even more dedicated to the cause).

There were three of us because the number of tickets each person could buy was limited to four. And when the box office opened we managed to buy a total of 12 tickets — each one for the front row! 

The date of the concert, Saturday 25 September 1982, drew near and our minds turned to the question of how we were actually going to get to the Ingleston Market, which is not served by a train station. Another friend, Colin, casually informed us that he would be able to borrow his mother’s new Austin Princess car, and those of us who hadn’t yet made travel arrangements were duly grateful. We waited at Brem’s house on the big day for Colin to turn up. And turn up he did, but not in his mother’s car. Whether she had changed her mind about the wisdom of letting a 17-year-old drive her expensive new car, or she had never given permission in the first place, we never found out. But Colin, bless him, rather than letting his friends down, had paid 80 quid at the last minute for a car whose make, shape and age were a complete mystery to us. I have never since heard of a make called a “Moscovitch”…

It was old, white and square. I could imagine its original owner being a party apparatchik somewhere in Soviet Georgia and being admired by the locals for being privileged enough to travel in such style. But in 1982 Ayrshire it looked like a death trap. And so it almost proved, but what did we care? We had front row tickets to see Genesis and we weren’t going to let little things like the absence of insurance, tax, an MOT, a spare tyre and a less-than-robust infrastructure stop us from fulfilling our destiny.

In fact, it went at a remarkable speed once we got it onto the M8. We must have been hitting 70 when the tyre blew, almost exactly half way between Glasgow and Edinburgh. I will never know how Colin, who had possessed a full licence for only a very few weeks, managed to maintain control of that wreck of a car as it skidded inelegantly into the hard shoulder with shredded rubber hanging from its rear offside wheel. Nervously checking our watches, we exited the vehicle and checked the damage. The tyre was no longer there in any form that might have justified the term “tyre”. And the spare? Oh, there was a spare after all. It was just a pity that it didn’t have any air in it.

Membership of any motoring organisation was simply not a consideration to teenagers in those days, and maybe not even now. Defeat was not an option; the very idea of giving up and going home without seeing our heroes perform didn’t occur for even a moment. Even it was impossible to make it there, we were still going to make it, somehow.

There was a small housing estate on the other side of the motorway. Perhaps we could find a Good Samaritan who might be persuaded to come to our rescue with a car tyre pump? Without even considering what we would do if the tyre, when inflated, turned out to be incapable of being inflated, Brem and I ran across both carriageways (yes, I know, don’t remind me) and climbed a fence into the estate. Even if I hadn’t been a Christian at the time, I would have had to seriously consider the case for His existence pretty shortly, because the very first door we went to turned out to be the home of a retired owner of… a motor garage. He took pity on us, even though he was half way through his dinner, and took us in his car out to the motorway to rejoin our stranded travelling companions. We watched with bated breath as he attached an electronic pump to our spare tyre. Would the chilling sounds of loud hissing sound the death knell of our young hopes and the onset of five broken hearts?

The tyre stayed up! Okay, it had absolutely no tread to speak of, but it was still up. Handing our rescuer a generous tip of three quid, we set off Ingleston-wards. Our only stop between then and the venue car park was to pick up two hitchhikers on their way to the same event. We put them in the boot, and they were grateful. All Genesis fans together.

What can I say about the gig itself? I remember enjoying it tremendously from our front row vantage point, but to be honest, I can’t remember much about it. I know they played “Supper’s Ready”, which was the highlight of the night, and I remember someone nicked my programme, but that’s about it. Of course, I remember bits of the journey home. We didn’t much care if we never made the full return journey; the important thing was that we had made it there in the first place.

Exactly a week later I was in Milton Keynes.

Peter Gabriel had got himself into some financial difficulty by organising the World of Music and Dance, or Womad, earlier that year. It had been praised by the critics but had made a tremendous loss. His former colleagues in Genesis generously offered to bail him out by playing a one-off reunion concert with him. Genesis would be back, for one night only, with Gabriel at the front and Collins back behind the drums (except that, technically, it wasn’t “Genesis”; for copyright reasons I’ve been unable to fathom, they were retitled “Six of the Best”).

An inevitable feature at any Genesis concert was the old hippies wearing Gabriel-era Genesis t-shirts who had little time for anything after The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and who only wanted the band to perform stuff from The Lamb and earlier albums. They would perhaps tolerate stuff from the last two albums on which Steve Hackett played — A Trick of the Tail and Wind and Wuthering — but only at a pinch. I’ve always enjoyed music from either era (technically there are three eras of Genesis music: Gabriel (1970-1975), Collins/Hackett (1976-1977) and Collins (1978 – present) but the dividing lines are there just as surely as they are in political parties.

So the Gabriel reunion on Saturday 2 October 1982 was a godsend for the hippie diehards. The support that day included Talk Talk, the Blues Band and John Martyn. By the time Jonathan King arrived on stage to introduce the band he claims credit for discovering (he was satisfyingly booed), every one of us was soaked to the skin, for the heavy rain hadn’t stopped even for a second all day. It was a depressingly miserable context for such a iconic event, and there’s no doubt it spoiled it for everyone. Gabriel was carried on stage in a coffin. As he emerged, recreating the theatrical style for which he had been famous during his time with Genesis, he broke into “Back in NYC”. 

It was probably a cracking concert, but as I say, the rain pouring down my face made it difficult to see, and I was not particularly near the stage. During the encore, “The Knife”, Steve Hackett joined his former band colleagues on stage, to howls of aproval. But if he was available, why didn’t he play the whole set? They could just as easily have been called “Seven of the Best”.

It was a fantastic experience to see Gabriel sing some of his old standards, but afterwards I felt a bit cheated: I would have liked to hear him sing some of the band’s more recent compositions, made famous by Collins. That would really have pissed off the hippies!

Soaked to the skin, wetter than I had ever been in my life, I trudged back onto the bus and had to endure a long overnight schlep back to Glasgow, followed by a second leg bus journey down to Beith.

My love affair with Genesis has occasionally developed into an equally unhealthy obsession with Phil Collins’ solo career. I had actually enjoyed the tracks on Abacab and the 3×3 EP in which Genesis, at Collins’ suggestion, had teamed up with the horn section of Earth, Wind and Fire. But when Collins announced he was embarking on a solo project, the cynical view among many Genesis fans was: “Well, maybe he’ll get the whole ’soul’ stuff out of his system and stop inflicting it on the rest of the band”. In fact, Face Value, the first of Collins’ many solo albums, released on 20 February 1981, surprised many music critics and was generally well reviewed, even by those critics whose damning dismissal of every Genesis album since 1978 had probably been written before they’d heard them.

Eighteen months later, just as his second solo album, Hello, I Must Be Going, was released, I was in a bad place: unemployed, no prospect of employment and having just been refused a job as an officer with Strathclyde Police on account of my acne (true story), I went straight from my interview at Police HQ in Pitt Street, Glasgow, to meet a friend, Scott Robertson, who was training for the clergy at the Bible Training Institute. In an act of great kindness which means as much to me today as it did then, he bought me a copy of the new album to cheer me up, even though he was not well off himself. That remains my favourite of all Collins’ solo work.

And then there’s Steve Hackett. A couple of his early albums, recorded at about the same time as Wind and Wuthering and Seconds Out, warrant many listenings. “The Virgin and the Gypsy” from Hackett’s Spectral Mornings album is a haunting and beautiful song featuring prominently on my iPod “My Top rated” playlist. But I never got into Hackett’s solo work in the same way as I did Collins. Similarly with Gabriel, whose early albums obeyed the Star Trek movies rule in reverse: the odd-numbered albums were brilliant, the even-numbered ones… well, not so much. 

I saw both Collins and Gabriel perform (separately, obviously) at the Glasgow Apollo and both were stunning.

I’ve seen Genesis play three times since that Milton Keynes reunion: at Hampden Park in 1987, at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow in 1998 (by which time Collins had left, to be replaced with Ray Wilson. Don’t go there) and, most recently, in 2007 in Paris. Both the 1998 and 2007 tickets were Christmas gifts from Carolyn. She point blank refused to accompany me to the Glasgow concert and figured that if she had to attend a Genesis concert at any time in her life, it might as well be after she’d had at least a day’s shopping in Paris as consolation. Which is fair enough. The concert itself was brilliant, part of their reunion tour. But for me it had an added, vaguely interesting context: Gordon Brown had taken over as Prime Minister on the Wednesday before we left for Paris, and the reshuffle of junior ministers was underway while I was mid-flight between Edinburgh and Charles de Gaulle. On landing, I switched on my phone to receive a text message from Fiona Gordon, GB’s then political secretary and a good friend, saying: “Please call. GB wants to speak to you.”

I returned the call immediately (obviously) to be told he was on the phone to the Spanish prime minister and that he would call me back. Because of the terror alert that first weekend of Gordon’s premiership, it was another three hours before I got the next call. He asked me to stay on as rail minister. “Only for another year or so, then you’re out,” he added. Okay, no, he didn’t, but he might as well have… 

So Carolyn could enjoy her shopping (but not the concert) and I could enjoy the concert (but not the shopping) in a more relaxed frame of mind.

That’s just about it as far as Genesis is concerned. In recent years I’ve started to buy the original vinyl albums that I couldn’t afford when I was a teenager just so I can own the original artwork in all their glory (you just can’t appreciate the CD artwork in the same way) and Carolyn has also treated me to the reissued, remastered 5.1 surround sound versions of the entire back catalogue. The next box set, containing all their live albums, will be on sale just in time for her to buy it for my Christmas.

Even now, Genesis are the band I most often listen to on my iPod. It’s part nostalgia, I’ll admit. Whenever I hear stuff that I first heard in 1980, it brings back fond memories of friends I haven’t seen for a very long time, and occasionally I’ll email one of them or make a phone call to one of them as a result. But it’s also an appreciation of sheer brilliance. 

My last remaining ambition, as far as Genesis are concerned, is to meet them, particularly Collins — not in a scary stalker “I’m your biggest fan, now hold still and stop struggling” sort of way, you understand. But I can’t see how I’ll get the chance. You never know.

So, that’s me got that off my chest. if you’ve read this far, thank you. I hope you didn’t find it too boring. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to pick up my 17-year-old son from the golf course, and on the way, I will listen to the first track on the first side of Seconds Out:

“Like father, like son, not flesh nor fish nor bone, a red rag hangs from an open mouth…”