Mike Priestley: Who's Counting?

It's 40 years since Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens died in a plane crash and a generation of teenagers was plunged into mourning.

It was the tragedy immortalised by Don McLean in American Pie as "the day the music died". Like McLean, I read the "bad news on the doorstep" as a 15-year-old paper lad doing the morning deliveries rather more slowly than usual, reading every word of the various reports in different newspapers by the light of street lamps as I trudged from house to house. It was almost as if I hoped that one of those reports would prove the others wrong and deliver a happy ending after all.

Buddy dead? The Bopper and Richie too? No more Chantilly Lace. No more Donna or La Bamba. But it was the loss of Buddy, the creator of so many superb songs, that caused the biggest shock waves. All that talent, all that potential, so cruelly snuffed out.

To the young, the death of someone who is also young comes as a terrible surprise. Suddenly you feel vulnerable. If it can happen to them, then it can happen to you.

As you grow older, you become at least partly accustomed to your contemporaries dying. It's still a shock, of course. Every time it happens, it forces us to confront out own mortality. But it becomes easier to cope with.

But Buddy was so young, and so were we. That was partly why so many members of that first-ever generation of teenager took it so badly and went around in a state of shock for a while.

Tomorrow's the day for getting out the Buddy Holly albums and playing those songs of his - songs which will take us back 40 years and have stood the test of time rather better than we have.

If you have a dog that you want someone to look after for a few hours from time to time, Bingley reader Mrs W A Williams would like to hear from you.

In fact, Mrs Williams would be interested to hear from other people who, like her, love dogs but for various reasons aren't able to give them the full-time attention and exercise they need.

"The medical profession now recognises the therapeutic effects of animals on patients in hospitals," she writes. "This has become an established service. I would like to see it extended for the benefit of older people who live on their own but are no longer capable of looking after a dog themselves.

"I would love to have a dog visitor. I could also, perhaps, look after a dog while its owner went shopping or needed to be absent for a few hours for any other reason. Is there any organisation I could contact with a view to setting up such a service?"

If there is, or if anyone would like to join Mrs Williams in pressing for a service like this to be set up, or would like to arrange for her to meet their dog, please drop her a line via me and I'll pass your letters on to her.

Geoff Holmes was on the phone from Idle lamenting the fact that the Government has turned down pleas by non-tax-paying pensioners for their dividends from shares (usually building society "windfalls") to be allowed to retain their tax-free status.

Age Concern is equally disappointed on behalf of the 300,000 pensioners who will be affected to the tune of £75 a year on average. Its policy officer Sally West says: "The single state pension is only £64.70 so for a lot of people it's like taking away a week's income."

Dawn Primarolo, the Paymaster General, has suggested that people could sell their shares and put the money into tax-free Isa savings schemes. But as Geoff Holmes points out, there are charges to be paid when you sell shares, and there are Isa charges, too.

So whatever they do, the pensioners are certain to lose one way or another. It's an odd sort of way for a Labour Government to treat some of the most hard-up people in the country, isn't it?

Maybe it thinks that if they have a few thousand invested in shares, they can't be all that hard up. But with people increasingly having to stump up some of their own money for care in their old age, a modest investment to be drawn on in emergencies can hardly be considered a luxury, can it?

I Don't Believe It!

It's been a while since I said it, but here goes.....I DON'T BELIEVE IT! What's prompted this attack of incredulity is a letter from one Mrs Osmira Chick, of Overlook House, Manchester, whose notepaper and handwriting is very similar to that of several other occasional correspondents with unlikely-sounding names.

Is someone taking the mickey out of Mildew? No matter. What Mrs Chick has to grumble about is valid enough, even though her name might not be. She can't stand canned laughter on TV comedies.

"I notice it most on the most unfunny ones like Dinner Ladies, which must be the least funny series ever," she writes. "The audience bray like jack-asses at every utterance. If someone came on and read out a shopping list or recited the dates of the kings and queens of England, they would still cackle like demented witches."

I can't agree with you entirely about Dinner Ladies, Osmira. It's a bit of a disappointment, but there have been plenty less funny than that. I do agree with you about canned laughter, though. It's ridiculous to have pretend audiences guffawing away all the time like they do.

The only way people would laugh like that at someone saying "Hello" or "Can you speak up?" or "Where's my raincoat?" is if they were not the full shilling or if someone was holding a gun to their head and saying "Laugh or else".

Mind you, those sitcoms where they do away with laughter entirely are almost as bad. Comedy needs an audience, doesn't it? You don't just laugh at the words and antics of the actors. You laugh along with each other. It's a group thing.

Somehow it doesn't work out quite right when there's just Mrs Mildew and me sitting in front of the telly with our mugs of cocoa.

The grumbles about the way the English language is getting mangled rumble on. Latest on to the Moan Throne is J Lewis Nicholl, of Wrose, who has a go at me for starting a paragraph with "And".

"This is a conjunction," he writes. "It shouldn't be used to start a sentence, let alone a paragraph."

Point taken, Mr Nichol. But you can start a sentence with a conjunction nowadays, you know, even though strictly speaking it isn't grammatically correct. When we were at school it was strictly forbidden, but usage changes. I've checked with my old sparring partner Mike Priestley, and he admits that he does it all the time. And if he can, then so can I.

I do share Mr Nicholl's moan about tautology, though. He quotes a sentence from one of the T&A's recent Letters to the Editor in which the writer used "too", "and" and "also" in the same sentence when any one of those three would have done the job. "It's a form of padding," says Mr Nichol, and I agree.

You know, I never realised when I took on this column that it would develop into a sort of master-class in the use of English. Doesn't life take some funny turns?

If you have a gripe about anything, drop a line to me, Hector Mildew, c/o Newsroom, T&A, Hall Ings, Bradford BD1 1JR, email me or leave any messages for me with Mike Priestley on (44) 0 1274 729511.

Yours Expectantly,

Hector Mildew

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