Paul Malpas

In June 1996 the IRA did most people in Manchester a bit of a favour.  They detonated a bomb, the biggest in peace time history, on Corporation Street, near to the junction with Market Street.  The bomb caused that much damage, it advanced the development of Manchester city centre by about 30 years, leaving us with a city centre today that anybody would be proud of.

The damage was so great in relation to the infrastructure that most buildings within a few hundred yards had either to be demolished or had to have fundamental demolition to large parts of its structure.  This led the movers and shakers to think that while we are doing this we might as well do that as well.  Insurance and investment money came pouring in from all angles and kept the construction industry in business for many a year.  No wonder that although the authorities knew who the culprits were they did not have them arrested.  Had they not done Manchester and the North of England a great service?

The only building within the bomb’s vicinity that did not get demolished was the Royal Exchange, a massive Victorian monolith which had experienced Hitler’s bombs in 1940 and stood to tell the tale.  It was formerly the heartbeat of the textile industry which conducted world wide trade within its porticos, but was now offices, shopping centre and avant-garde theatre.  We, as demolition contractors, were lucky enough to win the contract for the complete internal demolition and clean up of this building and so we embarked on two years of hard, busy and lucrative work.

Back at home my fifth child, Paddy Jo or on formal occasions Patricia Josephine, with one eye on her fast approaching second level education, was expressing a wish to learn to play the piano.  She was just over eight years old when the bomb inadvertently did her a favour and well into her tenth year by the time the favour was realised.

The Royal Exchange, as I have explained, was high, deep and massive.  Nine floors above the ground, four floors below and all sat on a footprint of 60,000sq. ft.  As each floor was handed over by loss adjustors and insurance men, we moved in and cleared everything back to structure.  Hard and difficult work in the confined spaces in which we were asked to work.  We literally shifted several thousand tonnes of debris in our time there.

Some time in late 1997 we were given the undercroft to clear.  The undercroft was the lowest floor of four basement floors, accessed by street traffic from a vehicle lift situated on its southern elevation, opposite Half Moon Street.  It was a warren of storerooms and service equipment rooms housing heating and ventilating and electrical equipment.  The tenants of these storerooms and there was several dozen of them had been permitted entry and had taken out what was considered valuable.  Any item they could not remove because of its size had to be bubble-wrapped and it was part of our responsibility to recover the said bubble-wrapped items and place same onto the tenants’ transport.  Everything not bubble-wrapped had to be removed to tip.

One day in the first week of this operation, we were given the keys to a long tunnel-like room, full of point of sale advertising boards for a shop upstairs that had once sold cosmetics and beauty products.  Struggling through this dusty and out of date paraphenalia and right at the end of the tunnel was a piano with no bubble-wrap around it.  I called the Project Manager on the radio, pointed out the instument to him and asked him the obvious question.  He turned to our job description and said “if it is not double-wrapped, tip it”  Although Paddy Jo did not know it then, her constant pleadings had been answered.

Within an hour of our meeting, the not bubble-wrapped piano was on the back of one of our pick-ups and making its way to our house in Heaton Moor.  With a little effort, four of us lifted it off the pick-up and safely installed it in our front room.  Helen set to work with damp cloths and polish and when I returned that evening there was this wonderfully manufactured upright piano dressed in the most beautifully coloured walnut cladding, a most desirable object.

A piano tuner was called and enquiries made for a piano teacher.  Within 24 hours we had both.  The piano tuner said it was a great example of a horizontally strung piano dating to about the 1870-1880 period.  The piano teacher said Paddy was approaching her lessons with great enthusiasm.  All our hopes and dreams were answered.

A couple of weeks later I received a message from the Project Manager asking me to come up to his office.  I entered and there sat a very irate looking matronly figure, who turned out to be the one-time manageress of the previously mentioned beauty parlour.  “Where is my piano, I did not think I had to bubble-wrap it” she squawked.  It seems, to ease the tensions of the day that rapidly build up in beauty emporia, madame used to visit her dungeoned piano and knock hell out of the ivories until her stress levels decreased.  The Project Manager winked at me and enquired as to where we had stored it.  I was nonplussed for a second but thought for the sake of everybody, I had better be straight.  I explained to the rapidly quietening lady that we had to remove it from its position  in order to keep the work moving but we realised that it had value to someone and that we had it in safe storage at our depot.  I received a delivery address but no thanks and the following day Paddy Jo was heart broken, the lady was happy and the piano teacher was out of work.  However the Project Manager was very pleased at the way he had been extricated from a very tricky situation.  But I had a problem how to placate my darling Paddy Jo and how to keep the piano teacher in business.

Longsight, in Manchester, where I spent my formative first 20 years, is a market for anything.  If you want it, Longsight has got it.  Within hours of me sending out distress signals I was informed of this piano showroom situated in an old mill in Hamilton Road, where I used to play as a kid, climbing its sheer vertical sides and generally doing anything that was just one step from death.  This showroom specialised in refurbished pianos and it was from there, having handed over a pocketful of spondulicks, Paddy’s refurbished Walberg piano was delivered next day.  Paddy and the piano teacher happy, me teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Paddy grateful to her splendid father, attacked the piano with all the vim, vigour and verve she could muster and 18 months later won the Music Scholarship to St. Bede’s College, in Whalley Range, my old alma mater. This Scholarship payed 50% of the fees during her stay at College.  With about £3,000 of a saving a year over her seven years at school that piano owed me nothing.  Paddy continued learning and finished up passing her Grade 8 examination which is as good as the normal piano player wants.  Mrs Rosamund Meehan, Deputy head of the school and Head of Music considered Paddy to be an excellent musician  That piano, the mahogany one, mentioned in my blog posting of 13 January 2012 entitled A Man With A Van, after crossing the Irish Sea the other day is hopefully going to earn some other deserving kid’s parents a few quid as well but it is all down to that beautifully clad walnut piano that we borrowed from that lovely lady.

As a follow up to yesterday’s blog posting, I want to pursue this idea of changing your first name halfway through your life.  By pursuing this thought it might help me to understand and start to like people I have no particular regard for and it might also help me to understand myself a little better and help me to get to grips with my reactionary self.
I am going to take as my example Baroness Scotland, the lady I clumsily tried to make sense of yesterday.  I am using Baroness Scotland because I have no regard for her present self but I could easily use any number of men or women who pick up a new Christian name in middle life.  Sir and Lord are very popular.  I want to stress that by picking Baroness Scotland that this is not a gender or even an ethnic thing, it is just purely a christian name thing.
Ever since Patricia Janet Scotland learnt to cry, the tenth child of 12 children born to her parents in that pretty little house on that beautiful island of Dominica in the West Indies, she started to answer to her family name of Paddy, or if discipline had to be meted out Miss Patricia Janet.  She was fond of these two names, they had a certain cachet, as she made her way through several schools and colleges before being called to the Bar at the tender age of 22 years old in 1977 and then still luxuriating in the name of Patricia Janet she became Queen’s Counsel at the ridiculously early age of 36.  She was doing well, really well, so I do not understand why having done so well with her parentally given names of Patricia Janet, she should wish in 1997 at the age of 42 to change her name to Baroness.
It is a stupid masculine sounding name, hard and rough and no way matched her petite, girlie nature and physique.  All I can think is that she was not happy with her feminine side to decide on lumpy Baroness, but she was 42, as I said and on the cusp of middle age and she did what so many English people did and still do, she changed her name.
Now I am a rough as arseholes, straight talking, hard living, son of a gun and having learnt my trade over a great number of years, nobody in this world would have the nerve to call me a fay Sir or Lord, let alone myself.  I was born Paul and I will stay Paul but that is not to say other people, from time to time, have called me different names behind my back in the past.  It was their choice not mine.
So there we have it, the nice warm feminine, bubbly Patricia Janet at the age of 42 changed herself and almost her sex into this hard , knobbly and damaging Baroness.  It was at this point I started to dislike her.  I had followed her passage through Walthamstow School for Girls (strange for a good Catholic girl, but obviously they do not cater for good Catholics down there in London like they do in my stabling ground of Manchester), Mid-Essex Technical College, Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, the University of London and Middle Temple and I was pleased with the fact that our Paddy was going places and then in 1997, full stop.  She became a waspish, supercilious, ladder climbing Baroness and that put an end to my love.
It is some years now since I last indulged in my fantasies with Patricia Janet and I wonder sometimes how she has got on with spiky Baroness, I doubt that she has still got that wondrous, loving, happy self of her early life and I bet that she is really that dumpy, miserable, knife sharpening, hard Baroness I have imagined.
So I would like to throw this idea out to the floor and ask all her confreres and all you lawyers out there who think they know me and there must be plenty who do because just like Baroness I also have previous and I must have met plenty of you in different courts of law up and down the land in the last 66 years.  Do you know the girl?  When you all meet up at your late Friday afternoon soirees, do you come across her?  Is she half as nice as she used to be when I was first attracted?  Or has she suffered, has she deteriorated since that mind bending moment in 1997 when she decided to veil herself in this puritanical persona and call herself Baroness.
So please report back you importers of forked tongues, cast off your cloying, brotherly, natural instincts and tell me the truth, tell it as it is for once in your smarmy, elusive, inveracitic lives.  Am I to remain forlorn or is there a glimmer of hope.

My pedantic and simple blog postings have not been in vain.  See posting of 17th March 2011 entitled Baroness Scotland, Another PR Cock Up and my posting of 30th July entitled  The Catholic Church Gone Mad.  Find them and read them before you read this article.
Well we have had news over the weekend, reported in The Times on Saturday that Baroness Scotland QC has resigned from her position of Chair of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission of England and Wales (NCSC).  Whether this is good news or bad depends on how you look at her.  According to informed opinion Baroness Scotland reached her level in society by being an ethnic woman in an era of New Labour Ascendency.
According to the newspapers over the last few years, Scotland, the last Attorney General under Gordon Brown’s lack-lustre government, was under great pressure for supposedly thieving £170,000 in parliamentary expenses that she was not entitled to and being fined £5,000 for employing a Tongan housekeeper who did not have the necessary work papers to seek employment in this country under legislation she, Scotland, had steered through Parliament.  But being an ethnic woman under George Brown, she came through the scandals with flying colours to show how powerful New Labour’s philosophy is on ethnicity.
You could say her resignation was good news because you do not need an idiot like her in such an important position.  She proved herself an idiot in her only public utterance in her position as Chair, saying that priests are paedophiles because they are lonely.  Bring them home and give them a cup of tea or take them to a football match and then they will forget their paedophilic tendencies.  You could also say her resignation is bad news because this position of Chair is being lessened by the fact that she has resigned after only ten months in office.
Her resignation is mounted on the NCSC website as follows. “It is with much regret that the Right Honourable, the Baroness Scotland of Asthill QC has decided to tender her resignation as Chair of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission of England and Wales.  Increasing pressures in other areas of her work have resulted in this decision.  The Baroness is encouraged by the continuing commitment of the Catholic Church and members of the NCSC in their work to improve the safeguarding of children and adults at risk, and also their work with survivor organisations.  She wishes the new Chair every success”.
What a pitiful excuse for her resignation which looks as though it was immediate, leaving no time for a newcomer to be installed.  She was appointed in early March 2011 and only attended one official meeting of the of the NCSC, which was on the 14th June 2011 in London.  She did not attend the September meeting and her resignation is from the 31st December 2011.  With interviews for her successor scheduled for February 2012, this position of Chair is being fundamentally demeaned.  After attending one meeting in her 10 month stint, it is obvious the position is not onerous and surely she could have stayed on until this new person was found.
No, her leaving is much more complicated than “increasing pressures in other areas of her work” and could be for one of the following reasons:-
1.)        She was caught with her hand in the till.  Her recent form shows she has a tendency towards this type of legerdemain.  It has been explained to me that this position carried with it a stipend of £190,000 per annum.  She is not the type of woman to cut this wedge off voluntarily.
2.)        Possibly she has found these social workers, bishops and monsignors that pack the committee of the NSCS are as slippery as hell and she can see the Indians coming over the hill and does not want to get involved in the obvious fall out and a £190,000 dive is worth taking to save her name from further black marks.
3.)        She has been involved in further financial scandals that the Church did not want to be implicated in.
4.)        She felt guilty in that she was taking this stipend and not actually doing anything
In my eyes 1 or 3 are the favourites and the NSCS guilty of employing such a mistake decided to do something right and immediate for a change and accept the ridicule of a rudderless ship.
One conference she did attend was in her early days in charge in Rome on 30th May to 5th June 2011, she was there for the first day certainly, I do not know about the rest.  The conference was quaintly called the Anglophone Safeguarding Conference, which was hosted by the Bishops, Religious and the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission of England and Wales and of course they decided to hold it in Rome as Rome is nice in June.  50 delegates attended from 20 English speaking countries and they included clergy, religious and safeguarding staff.  Scotland was asked to give the opening address and in this address  she said she knew of all the political and financial problems that the world was facing with politicians holding important international conferences on an almost daily basis.  However none of these conferences compare in importance to this one in Rome.  According to her it was the most important conference to be convened in 2011.  One minute her role is earth-shatteringly important, the next minute who gives a damn.
If nothing else this incident tends one to look at the profligacy of these safeguarders.  Why,  when as Englishmen you host a conference for English speaking people, do you have it in Rome, surely Birmingham would be cheaper?  Who pays for this profligacy?  Obviously the answer is those who contribute to the plate collections of a Sunday morning.
So to sum up what we seem to have, to quote my previous titles is either another cock up or the Catholic Church descending further into madness.  However although I am not claiming all the credit, last month Barry O’Sullivan, safeguarding man in the Salford Diocese, bit the dust and this month the out of her depth and tree Scotland has done the same.  Call it a coincidence if you like.

I have had two very difficult problems solved recently by a man with a van showing that there is a job for everyone in this world especially those willing to work and spot a niche in the market.

This last Christmas I was in Manchester visiting relations, in fact visiting my grandchildren and future grandchild.  We all went over, my wife, my youngest son, our dog and myself.  We took the mindlessly boring journey across the Irish Sea and the long car ride from Holyhead into Manchester.  I was doing the same journey 40 years ago in roughly the same time.  Nothing has improved in all that time, in fact some things have worsened.  Whereas 40 years ago you were served creamy Guiness out of a hatch, these days with vastly superior service features the Guiness tastes a little like washing up water.  Gone it seems never to return is the HSS fast ferry, whisking you over the waves in something less than two hours or the sedate and civilised overnight cruise to 12  Quays at Birkenhead.

One of the days over Christmas, my eldest grandchild, a strapping seven year old boy, approached me and said that he would like to come back to Ireland with us so that he could play our piano: which got me thinking and asking.  I asked my daughter, the young chap’s mother, who said he was always asking about the piano, but decent pianos are hard got and quite expensive.  I thought of our piano, bought at a cost years ago for my youngest daughter and which does not owe me a penny after she won a music scholarship to my old alma mater, St. Bede’s College in Manchester,  which saved me oodles of cash over her seven year stay, in reduced fees.  In fact this part of the story is worth a blog on its own and I will try to write it over the next few days.

However youngest daughter flew the nest years ago and is revelling in pastures new on the east side of Ireland.  I will here give her a little plug.  If you want discount in Dublin, she is your lady.  They call her Miss 20% due to the many contacts she has in the retail trade in the Fair City.

So having flown the nest, the piano, constructed of quality polished mahogony, has been stood in my study gathering dust and used as a shelf for my many files and papers.  Helen, my wife of many years, as good as she is at most things, is no master of the ivories.  The poor thing (the piano that is) is now redundant and that ain’t what it was lovingly built for by the family firm of Waldberg of Berlin in the early 1930s.

This masterpiece of musical manufacture would be just the thing for this budding Liberace of a grandchild but how to move it from Roscommon to Manchester without an arm or a leg being involved.  I rang a mate and told him of my problem.  This mate not only rivalled my daughter in the discount stakes in the west of Ireland but as it happened knew a man who did little else but transport pianos and similar sized objects back and forth across the Irish Sea.  I rang this man in Mayo and without batting an eyelid gave me his price which was not at all outrageous.  I accepted and he was knocking on our door at 9.00am the following morning.

Not only was this man an amenable sort, he was a Manchester man to boot.  I had enough credentials immediately.  So with the help of the inevitable Scouser I drafted in for his engineering skills, we huffed and puffed and with a few guttural curses common to our part of Ireland, this massive piece of pre-Nazi musical endeavour was hoisted into the vastness of his little white van, joining another piano that was en-route for Lincoln.  The operation was brought to a rapid conclusion without the need for a funny story but the Scouser had to remind us of the TV advert of years ago where a father and son chimpanzee were manoeuvring a similar instrument up the stairs and the son said to the father “Hey dad, do you now the piano is on my foot” whereupon the father chimpanzee said “No, but if you hum it son, I’ll play it”

So we said goodbye to the amenable Manchester man, his white van, our piano and its Lincoln mate and sure enough it arrived at my daughter’s house in Cheshire at 9.30 this morning, he was then travelling over to Lincoln with a vastly inferior instrument and then onto Kent to pick up a motorbike that was destined for Westport.

I am amazed at the smooth, cheap, easy way the whole operation was handled to a very worthwhile conclusion and I hope to hear many wonderful worthwhile musical interludes in the years to come.

I told you previously that I had two problems, the other being of the dog variety.  I explained how we had brought over our dog, a ten year old Shih Tzu of Tibetan/Chinese extraction, on his winter holiday to Manchester.  Well on Christmas Day, not happy with his lodgings, he bolted.  For five days we searched the highways and byeways and dogshomes to no avail, our oriental sentinel was not to be found.  So with heavy heart, we returned to our adopted home on 29th December, dogless.

On one of the early days into the New Year my daughter was at the local supermarket and she noticed a man tying up his dog outside of the shop, prior to attending to his proposed purchases.  This dog was a Shih Tzu, not ours, but obviously a close enough relation to strike up a conversation.  She told him of our sad story and how we had gone back to Ireland broken hearted.  A chink of light appeared, he had heard of a Shih Tzu being handed in at a kennels not far away.  My daughter, keeping a tight rein on her emotions called in at the said kennels and there was Sushi, our dog, having the time of his life with a pack of his mates.

There was immediate recognition of my daughter by Sushi or enough for the kennel maid to hand over the dog and she would not take a penny for his seven or eight days lodgings, which was really kind of her in these hard pressed times.  My daughter took him home and locked him in the stables until she could solve the problem of returning Sushi to his own little home in the west.

But blow me did he not bolt again and my daughter tearfully relayed the circumstances in a telephone call that evening but just on the off chance she returned to the kennels the following morning to be met by the smiling kennel maid.  Sushi had returned the previous afternoon.  He must have been missing his new friends.  The kind lady said “why don’t you leave him here, he seems to enjoy it, whilst you organise his return”.  Problem solved!

My daughter went home and just out of interest she googled “transporting dogs to Ireland” and there was a man who did nothing else.  Twice a week he transported a load of dogs from Ireland to England and vice versa.  There is a market and a need for everything.  Within days the man was contacted, the dog collected with the kennel maid still refusing money.  The lady said she had fallen in love with Sushi and she did not want him to go.  The man with the van and the dog were  introduced and last night in the middle of the Irish Sea, there was a great celebration with piano heading east and the dog west.

I collected him in Mullingar at 6.30am this morning and Sushi did not want to leave his new home in the Mercedes van.  It looked like the most comfortable bed he had ever had.  I had him home at 8.00am and off he went sniffing out his old mates with obviously a tale to tell and as though he had enjoyed every minute of his adventure.

So I would like you all to raise your glass to the amenable men with vans who churn out a living in these depressing times, looking after the needs of their fellow men and looking after them well.