Well, all things being equal and everything hopefully having gone to plan Christmas will be no more than a memory, a plastic tub of leftover turkey curry, and a couple of frozen turkey rissoles in the freezer. That’s it! All gone!
We’ve had enough ‘Goodwill to all Mankind’, let’s get back to reality and the important stuff. Stuff like the horse trams and the state of the prom. And why life will never be the same again if we get rid of the 125cc TT.
Now there’s obviously some really important stuff going on in the world that we should be worrying about. The ‘soon to be sworn in’ president-elect of the USA, Mr Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world, the man with his finger poised over the nuclear destruction button, has just announced the appointment of retired General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis as his defence secretary.
The clue is in the name.
And another teeny weeny little worry regarding Mr Trump and names. I trust that if he gets a phone call from a UK foreign secretary called Boris he will remember that his christian name does sound slightly Slavic.
But let me tell you a story. In 1965, or thereabouts, we moved to Greeba into what was to become our family home for many years. It was a ‘two up, two down’ stone built cottage with an outside toilet and a tin bath that we shared once a week (with each other, not with the neighbours).
The cottage came with a small field of about half an acre and was conveniently situated about 200 yards from the local pub, the Hawthorn. In those days country pubs were busy places and the Hawthorn was no exception with regular customers coming from far and wide. It transpired that ‘mine hosts’ at the Hawthorn, were a pleasant Yorkshire couple who went by the names of Ernie and Hilda Wright. They were also newcomers to the village, having arrived only a couple of months before us.
We soon became firm friends, and that friendship was to last for many years until the Grim Reaper, as is his wont, eventually called last orders.
Anyway, after several years in the Hawthorn, which was a Castletown Brewery pub, Ernie and Hilda were offered the tenancy of a very well known pub in Peel, which at that time was owned by the other big name in the Manx pub industry, Okell’s Brewery.
The offer must have been too good to turn down. So they moved to Peel where they lived and worked for many years until retirement.
This little tale that I am about to relate happened early one Sunday morning. The phone rang and rang until Ernie eventually gave in, dragged himself out of bed and answered the call. The caller, who spoke with an American accent, asked to speak to a Mr Somebody or other.
It obviously was a wrong number.
After the third call a by now very disgruntled and wide awake Peel publican had eventually convinced his wrong number caller, who was actually in Chicago, that he, Ernie, was definitely not in New York.
In reply to the question ‘Well if you are not “so and so” in New York, who are you?’
He had replied in an equally abrupt manner, ‘I am Ernie Wright, and this is the White House.’
As an aside, I am a collector of coincidences and strange happenings and this is a sad little episode in the life of Ernie and Hilda Wright. They only had one child, a son who was called Barry. Barry Wright was a pleasant young man, a non-smoking, non-drinking fitness fanatic. When his parents moved to the Isle of Man, he had stayed in the UK and was soon to be married to his fiancee Brenda.
He was out for a run and dropped dead. I was in the White House when the phone call came.
Some years later, Brenda did get married. To Barry White.