Hell Is A City

I watched Hell Is A City, a 1960 black and white crime drama starring Stanley Baker and shot in Manchester, on Talking Pictures TV yesterday afternoon (I'd seen clips from it before, but never the whole film).

As part of the British New Wave, the film marks a shift away from the cosiness of Dixon of Dock Green and Gideon of the Yard towards a grittier Northern realism, exemplified by another police procedural, Z Cars, set in a fictional Lancashire new town based on Kirkby, which began in 1962. Stanley Baker does a good job at playing the tough Inspector, although his Mancunian accent veers back once or twice to that of his native South Wales, as does Donald Pleasance as on-course bookmaker Gus (echoes there of the famous Manchester bookie Gus Demmy, whose off-course betting operation would become legal in 1961), who is targetted in a bungled street robbery en route to a race meeting at Doncaster and the body of his clerk dumped on the moors between Manchester and Sheffield, scene of much darker crimes a few years later. Doris Speed makes a cameo appearance as a starchy hospital nurse not unlike her more famous role as Coronation Street landlady Annie Walker.

There are lots of still recognisable locations in and around the city centre to spot, including Piccadilly Gardens, Central Station and Strangeways Prison, but the pub which the police and criminals frequent - with its bottled beer, separate rooms, and waiters in the better ones, superintended by a landlord played by George Cooper (who would go on to appear in Z Cars) - disappeared with the rest of that area when the Arndale Centre was built.

Christmas Comes But Once A Beer

In the run-up to another quieter than normal Christmas because of Covid, I picked up a box of seasonal beers from local bar and bottle shop Heaton Hops, a few of which I hadn't drunk before in either cask or bottled form.

Anchor Our Special Ale 

San Francisco's Anchor Brewery release a different version of this strong ale every festive season and it's got a Christmas cake spicy fruitiness that feels very appropriate amidst the tinsel and holly.

Gordon Xmas

A Scotch ale relocated to Belgium by famed importer John Martin, this reddish brown beer has a candy fruitiness that reminded me of a Burton ale, especially the recreated Fuller's XX. Definitely my favourite of all the beers in the box.

Harvey's Imperial Extra Double Stout

Based on the strong dark beer bottled and exported from London to the Russian Empire via the Baltic by Albert Le Coq in the nineteenth century, and later produced at the Tartu brewery in what is now Estonia that still bears his name, this jet black stout has a leathery aroma with a hint of dates and a vinous taste not unlike that of Robinson's Old Tom.

Books of the Year

I don't seem to have read quite as many books this year as I normally do, averaging about one a month, although some of them were quite lengthy I suppose.

Between the Woods and the Water/The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I started the year where I had finished the last, on a bridge across the Danube between Slovakia and Hungary, following a young Patrick Leigh Fermor on his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople through interwar Central Europe, and then onto Greece and the monasteries of Mount Athos.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

I first saw the film of this years ago, and finally got round to reading the novel it's based on.

The West Pier/Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse/Unknown Assailant by Patrick Hamilton

The final novels by one of my favourite writers, published in the early to mid fifties before his decline and death from alcoholism, about a psychopathic conman moving around southern England between the wars.

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

Another TV adaptation I watched years ago where I finally got round to reading the novel it's based on. I especially enjoyed the description of the countryside around the Malvern Hills where it's set.

Oliver Twist/A Tale of Two Cities/Barnaby Rudge/Nicholas Nickleby/The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Or How I Completed My Reading of the Works of Mister Charles Dickens, Including His Final, and Unfinished, Novel.

A Shabby Genteel Story by William Makepeace Thackeray

Another unfinished novel, about the characters inhabiting a run down boarding house in the seaside resort of Margate one winter in the 1830s.

Hotel Blues

As flights to the United States began again this morning, the news reached me, via a roundup email from Jazz North West, that one of midtown Manhattan's most historic hotels, the Pennsylvania on Seventh Avenue, which closed at the start of the Covid pandemic last year, is to remain shut and will eventually be demolished. The Pennsylvania, opposite Penn Station and close to Madison Square Garden, was not only a venue for live jazz in the forties, but also saw its phone number become a swing standard.

On my first trip to the United States in 2002 - a baseball tour by coach along the East Coast from Baltimore to Boston, with stops in Philadelphia, New York City and the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown in upstate New York - we stayed at another of midtown Manhattan's iconic hotels, the Edison on 47th Street, whose ballroom also hosted live music in the big band era, and drank in the bar where Luca Brasi met his end in The Godfather.

Ageing (dis)tastefully

I've just picked up online a cheap secondhand copy of Vintage Beer by Patrick Dawson. 

The book includes includes the basics of conditioning beer for months, or even years, at home, from the right environment in which to store it (ideally a deep cellar, but failing that somewhere cool and dark where sunlight or rising temperatures aren't going to affect the taste of your beers) and the beer styles that age best (high in alcohol, dark and bottle-conditioned, so strong ales, imperial stouts, Belgian lambics and sour brown ales). 

The author concedes that, after a revelatory moment sipping a three year old bottle of Duvel, his first attempts at ageing were a disaster, and that many beers still taste best fresh, including IPAs (although Worthington's White Shield is noticeably different at varying stages of its development and, as David Hughes says in his book A Bottle of Guinness, Please, any bottle-conditioned beer is going to undergo changes over time, both good and bad - that natural variability is part of the experience). He also notes that other beers will never taste right until a few years in the cellar have knocked the rough edges off them, citing Thomas Hardy's strong ale (having only drunk it young, I concur).

My main problem with ageing bottled beers - whether Fuller's Imperial Stout or Vintage Ale, Courage Russian Imperial Stout, White Shield or Duvel - is that having bought them I invariably want to drink them, and the longest I've managed to keep my hands off them is a few months before Christmas and New Year, when I've raided my stash until the cupboard is bare (I suppose I need to misplace one and then find it a decade later). The other thing is that, as with fine wine, you really need a century or so to bring out some of the deeper flavours in these beers.

Labour's Lost Love

In the nine o'clock slot filled for the past few weeks by a history of the Premier League BBC2 last night broadcast the first episode of a new series about another modernising project created in the early to mid nineties with the self-proclaimed aim of moving away from a traditionally working-class base and image to attract more middle-class supporters, Blair and Brown: the New Labour Revolution.

The programme highlighted the differing personal backgrounds of the two men, prefiguring the personal rivalry and policy conflicts that would come to define their relationship in government, but conceded that there was very little that divided them in their overall politics. Indeed, beyond the polling and presentational skills of the press and PR officers hired by New Labour, and a centrist message consciously modelled on that of the US Democrats, it found it hard to identify Blair with any real interest in politics except a vague progressivism picked up as a student at Oxford in the early to mid seventies (where he admitted he was more interested in playing in a rock band than the industrial and social tumult of that decade) and later from his liberal barrister wife. Unlike Brown, who worked his way up through the ranks of the Scottish Labour establishment, he seems to have almost accidentally entered politics through a network of legal acquaintances, before discovering an eagerness to become first a MP and then party leader (you can easily imagine him having been elected as the leader of any of the three mainstream political parties).

In outlining the period before the creation of New Labour, the programme threw up a number of what ifs: what if Neil Kinnock had won the 1992 General Election? What if John Smith had led the party into the 1997 campaign? What if Brown had stood against Blair for the leadership after the death of his friend and mentor Smith? All unknowable of course, but we do in a sense seem to be back where we started in the eighties, with a soft left leader ousting a more radical, but electorally unpopular, one before turning sharply to the right, while apparently unable to land a punch on a Tory government with a large majority despite its mainfest failings.

A Plaque for the Printers

I popped to the Printers Arms in Cheadle between rain showers this afternoon for the unveiling of a Blue Plaque marking the spot where my local CAMRA branch was formed in 1974. It was the first time I'd been to the pub, and my first CAMRA event for eighteen months.

The South Manchester branch formed there forty-seven years ago covered a huge area south of the city, extending from Warrington in the west to Macclesfield in the east, before being broken up into smaller ones over the next few years, including Stockport and South Manchester which I'm now a member of, although there are still some anomalies resulting from historical local government boundaries and the ad hoc way in which it was done (despite its name, the current branch doesn't include the whole of either Stockport or south Manchester).

The Printers Arms is described in the 1976 Good Beer Guide as "A thriving old pub" (that's the entire entry by the way: more expansive write-ups in the GBG of what to expect when visiting somewhere new were still some years off). It still is an old-looking pub, at least externally, but has been modernised inside to create a large, airy space around a central bar, and a conservatory added to the rear, leading to a triangular beer garden.

The Robinson's Unicorn bitter was in decent form and it was good to see some of my fellow local CAMRA members again after a year and a half. Founder member Neil Kellett unveiled the plaque alongside his brother Alan, who was the secretary of Cheadle Constituency Labour Party when I joined it in the late eighties.