Early sign language




The rude man on this picture was a worker at the Parkgate Iron and Steel Company in Rotherham in 1901 and, though he probably didn't know it, was making the earliest recorded V sign in history.

The still is part of the miraculous Mitchell and Kenyon Collection, which I've raved about in this column before.

The collection is a hoard of of films made by a Lancashire commercial photography firm in the early 20th century and rediscovered and restored in 1995.

Prof Vanessa Toulmin, Director of the National Fairground Archive Sheffield University and my chief source of interesting old pictures, had helped to arrange a Mitchell and Kenyon show which will include music and commentry as well as fresh-as-a-daisy scenes from Northern life. It will be shown at Firth Court, Sheffield University on Tuesday at 6pm.

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Mayors of mystery

In the heat, when things move slowly and in a haze, shimmering sights tend to resolve themselves into dumb-show tableaux.

This means you can't react to scenes that would ordinarily be part of your world because they appear to be distanced and to be moving at a strange pace, like cows seen from a train.

Or indeed synchronised mayors seen on a towpath by the Llangollen Canal ('Nurse, fetch the Factor 15, he's hallucinating!').

There they were, two well-built, grey-haired men in big chains walking in step, shoulders back with joined hands resting behind them on their coccyges (which is the correct plural of coccyx and if you memorise it now you may live to become a Scrabble hero).

The extraordinary thing was that these mayors were dressed in heavy worsted suits while everybody else was in T-shirts and shorts to stop themselves expiring, so it looked as if the mayors were some of art installation, probably involving Gilbert and George, although nobody gave them a glance.

Including me, who likes to keep up.

Frankly it was too hot and if I could have been bothered to study anything, it would have been the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, one of greatest achievements of the Canal Age, which the mayors were hovering on the edge of.

The aqueduct is a 200-year-old cast iron trough, still in daily use, which carries the canal on 18 stone piers at a height of 126ft across the River Dee and was built by Thomas Telford, which, extraordinarily, is also the name of the pub from which we viewed the twin stately mayors and wondered, though not in any fevered way, what they were up to.

We found out later. The mayors were awaiting the result of a Unesco competition to find the Britain's newest World Heritage Site and the aqueduct won. I don't know how the mayors celebrated but I'm pleased for them because I don't like to think that, as shamed losers, they might have felt obliged to drown themselves in the Dee by jumping off the longest and highest aqueduct in Britain with all chains flying.

I'm also pleased because for some years I have been on first-name terms with the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, which, in common with the locals, I call the Ackie, although I don't, as the locals do, call Llangollen just 'Llan' because it seems to me to offer too many possibilities for confusion, particularly in Wales.

Anyway, I've long been happily associated with a talented and entertaining extended family which started off in Wales but has since spread quite a bit. Every year the clan (or Llan as they call it round there) gets together for a Glastonbury-style tribal reunion involving camping in the garden, portable toilets and impro in the acoustic tent.

This all happens in two adjoining, fairly modest houses and gardens owned by two very young (meaning about the same age as me) grandparents, their daughter and son-in-law and twin girls and inhabited, at party time, by more people than you could count unless you could get them to sit down in an orderly fashion for a few minutes.

Which you can't because even unconventional, left-leaning families tend to breed at the same pace as the Windsors, so that if the core of the family is aged around 60, there's sure to be a glut of tiny grandchildren and nephews and nieces barging around in an anarchic, unaccountable fashion.

In this case, some of them were provided with plastic police tunics, and hats so they could walk around truncheoning each other with long balloons, Keystone Cops-style. The little ones appeared to think this was extraordinarily amusing, which was because it was.

And my point is that every time I go to a funeral, everybody says to everybody else that it's been lovely meeting old friends and relatives again and (slightly lowering the voice) that it's a pity we can't do it under 'happier circumstances'.

Well, of course you can, dopes. All you need to do is find a family – which in my case doesn't even have to be your own – willing to hold regular reunions and you will be provided with a wealth of interest as you watch people develop over the years because, as Tolstoy probably said, there's nothing in the world more fascinating then families.

Also, regular reunions would banish all sorts of funeral embarrassments, such as, to give a random example, not recognising your own nephew because you didn't realise he went bald ten years ago.