CONTENTS

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EDITORIAL - Ken Clay
BOOKSHOPS – Jim Burns
THREE U.S. ELECTIONS HAIKU – Alexis Lykiard
PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS – Ron Horsefield
EL GRECO  – Mark Ward
THE LAST CLOCKWORK WHIPPET ON THE TYNE  Tom Kelly
MOVING UP -  Ivan de Nemethy
THE LAST MARSUPIAL WOLF – Keith Howden
THIS ACUTE CRUMBLING – Tanner
A FEEL FOR WORDS (7) – David Birtwistle
THE DICK TEST – Keith Howden
BEASTS – Andrew Lee-Hart
IF THE PUMP DON’T WORK, DON’T VANDALISE THE HANDLE… – Andrew Darlington
CRAFTY BEGGARS – Ron Horsefield
FATHERS AND SONS – John Lee
THE PATENT OFFICE. BERN, SWITZERLAND. 1904 - David Birtwistle
THE FIDDLERS ON THE ROOF – Bob Wild
THE REFRIGERATOR –Adam Kluger
THE SOMERSET BOOKBARN – Ron Horsefield

EDITORIAL 

OIK OBSESSIONS 

Perhaps bibliomania is on the way out what with ebooks etc but there are still active bibliomanes (usually old farts) who feel anxious about a rapidly diminishing resource – no, not the rest of their lives – bookshops. We bookend this issue of the Oik with Jim Burns’ opening rhapsody on international book hunting and end it, bathetically, with poor Ron Horsefield’s account of the Somerset Bookbarn, a vast shed housing a million books all one pound each. Ron, to give him credit, is aware of the threatening mania “you’d have to be mad not to check it out” he writes of the Bookbarn “Or, then again, you’d have to be mad to be in here in the first place.” Further hints of lunacy loom in Ron’s account of his philosophical development. He probably thinks JL Austin’s introduction to glider flying (see p 29) is perfectly sane but the expressions on the poor cadets’ faces say it all. Would you want to be flying to Berlin in a Lancaster with this bloke at the controls? 

Another thing which might be on the way out is Blackpool. Now a squalid shithole – the last resort for dossers, druggies and dolites - but back in the 50s it was an oik paradise as our photos confirm. How smartly those oiks dressed back then; trilbies, ties, jackets, proper shoes – no tee-shirts, shell-suits or trainers, no baseball caps with a fake dog-turd on the peak and the legend SHITHEAD – they were togged up fit for Covent Garden or the Wigmore Hall. And indeed, as the Picture Post confirms, oiks were treated back then to recitals of Schubert’s Winterreise on the South Pier sung by Gracie Fields accompanied by Mrs Mills.  

The presiding genius was George Formby; born in Wigan, lived in Warrington (where he is buried alongside his dad) and finally finishing up very rich in Lytham St Annes which, I believe, still has a certain cachet among aspirant oiks. (Prestonians consider it the dog’s bollocks).  A recent TV documentary by Frank Skinner revealed an army of GF admirers who meet up in the Imperial Hotel to play their ukes in unison. Formby was undoubtedly a virtuoso on the instrument (although I’m still searching for a recording of him playing Mozart’s K652) and this, allied to his coruscating double-entendres, justly propelled him to heights of celebrity not repeated till the era of the Beatles. How oiks larfed as he adverted to his little stick of Blackpool rock – a ditty so full of subversive menace that the BBC banned it.  

Another noted amenity was Yates’s Winelodge – burned the ground in 2009 (probably by a Muslim terrorist) it was in it’s heyday a superb melange of the Moulin Rouge and Les Deux Magots. While wit and raconteur Frank Randle entertained his acolytes with his dazzling repartee others of a more plebeian inclination would dance the Hokey Cokey till the floorboards bounced hard enough to eject their cargo of spittle and sawdust into the smoke-filled air – a scene worthy of Lautrec. This is the shangri-la the Crazy Oik seeks to recreate. To those who’ve never made the pilgrimage excitedly seeking the first sight of the Tower from the top deck of a red Lancashire United Transport bus one can only feel…pity.

MARK WARD

      El Greco 

The meals they couldn’t sell usually
ended up on the ‘specials’ board:
from there – the soup.
The seats were tilted forward
so you didn’t linger too long
after your dinner,
and the fruit machine
paid in tokens that could
only be used on the premises.
Yet minor inconveniences aside,
for the price of a cup of tea
there was no better place to hang out.
A meeting place at the end
of the precinct: a forum.
Dates arranged, disputes resolved,
shopping lists ticked off.
People coursed through its aisles,
eddying round prams and trolleys,
crossing junctions in rows of Formica tables.
You could meet a girl; or maybe pick
up a bargain from Fred the Bag
on his round of the pubs and cafes.
It was here I experimented with a purifying
tablet in a vinegar bottle, and was amazed
to see it turn clear as water.

Clear as the memory of how one day
the collective consciousness that
gravitates us towards a particular place,
waived; and I never went back.

George Formby entertains the troops