To St Ives in Cornwall for a summer break in which I was made to feel like a criminal for two weeks. We’d been to St Ives lots of times and had always found the locals warm and welcoming. Not this time.
The week before our arrival, a Scottish family had gone on a crime spree, spending counterfeit Scottish £20 notes in bars, shops and restaurants all over the town.
Consequently, police had warned local businesses to be on their guard for Scottish holidaymakers who looked a bit dodgy, and to check all Scottish banknotes for fakes.
With a wallet full of RBS twenties, a thick Dundonian accent and a face only a mother could love, I was in trouble.
I tried to be charming. I joshed and flirted. I tried my full-beam megawatt smile. It was no use. In every shop and every bar I was treated like Fred West.
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The minute I opened my mouth the person behind the till narrowed their eyes. If I had been wearing a mask and a hooped jumper, while carrying a sack marked “swag”, I could not have been treated with more suspicion.
There was only one thing to do — put my RBS twenties away and get some blameless Bank of England notes from a cash machine.
At the nearest ATM, I put in my card and punched the buttons. All would be well now, I told myself. The machine gave me back my card and I positioned my hand, as you do, next to the banknote dispenser.
Then, a phut, a whirr, a flicker of lights and the ATM died. It had ceased to be. It was an ex-ATM.
Aw naw.
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Eventually, the machine stuttered back into life and a Windows XP welcome screen appeared, followed by the scrolling code of a start-up routine.
Of cash, there was no sign.
So, now I am in dispute with a high street bank which says its records show no sign of an anomaly. And for my next visit to Cornwall I am practising a Dick Van Dyke cockney geezer accent.
Love a duck, mate.
Shirty about ironing
While we were on holiday, my in-laws did some cat-sitting for us, and my mother-in-law ironed all my shirts. All of them. Even the ones I don’t like to be ironed.
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This is a disaster. It is a truth universally acknowledged that slightly crumpled shirts are the most appropriate casual wear for slightly crumpled men.
Neatness and creases are all very well but with casual wear for gents d’un certain âge it makes them look as if they have been dressed by their mother. Or their mother-in-law.
When I looked in the wardrobe I was like that Disney dwarf who, after Snow White has thoroughly cleaned the woodland cottage, looks inside his coffee cup and laments: “Sugar’s gone.”
A classy turn of phrase
As I might have mentioned before the holidays, one of the books I packed for lazy days on the beach was Bernard MacLaverty’s first novel for 16 years, Midwinter Break.
I’ve known Bernard for 35 years and a finer man you will travel far to meet. He was writer-in-residence at Aberdeen University while I was an English undergraduate there in the early 1980s, and I was a member of the creative writing group he ran with grace, humour and gentleness.
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We students were spoilt, if truth be told. The previous year the writer-in-residence had been William McIlvanney. He and Bernard made a huge impression on those of us who came under their wing. Quite a few of that group of students went on to write for a living.
Midwinter Break, in which an elderly Glasgow couple on a weekend in Amsterdam come to a reckoning of their life together, has MacLaverty’s trademark clarity and some tremendous turns of phrase.
How about this: “The canal water darkened here and there under the wind, like a finger across suede.”