Harry Pearson (1)Besprekingen

I've been following Harry Pearson ever since his first book, The Far Corner, which was all about non-League football (a subject I have no interest in) in North-East England. For my money, he is consistently one of the funniest writers in the English language. This book just strengthens that reputation.

It is an account of his arm's length love affair with the Second World War and military matters in general. That love affair is expressed through the medium of a) British war comics, b) plastic model kits (mainly Airfix) and c) table-top wargaming. In amongst the anecdotes from his two childhoods - the one he had as a boy and the one he is now living through as an adult (allegedly) - he inserts a lot of social history of 1950s and 1960s Britain, plus a lot of history of the model soldier business.

World War 2 was the defining event for my father and others of his generation. It was reflected in the popular culture of comics, books, tv shows and films for possibly the following twenty years or more. Pearson maps this out and shows how it turned his generation, the "baby boomers" of the 1950s and 60s, into a generation obsessed with military modelling of some sort or another, I am of that generation; and I remember my junior school friends all being equally obsessed with modelling aircraft, tanks and ships. Pearson has written an account of all our childhoods that is both funny and true.

The same goes for his portrait of the wargaming community. The characters he illustrates are typical to most specialist interests and many readers will be able to identify the personalities and fill in their own selection of names known to them. I particularly identified with the final line of his acknowledgements, where he names all the people he's traded miniature figures with or faced across a wargames table, ending with "...several dozen blokes named Dave."

Thoroughly enjoyable journey around the northern leagues in cricket. Lots of cameos and stories of great cricketers...

Harry Pearson writes very well about soccer and people, and he's extremely funny. Here he travels to various lower league matches in northeast England during the 1993/4 season. Not being overly familiar with English non-league football I took the time to look up some of the people and places he talks about. I did discover there are thousands of teams in England in various leagues, both professional and amateur. I still don't understand it all.

Pearson conjures up some real characters. The shop owner who free-associates until he can turn every conversation to Len Shackleton is a favorite.

Pearson can flat out write. A gem: "Goalkeepers never admit to their mistakes. If it wasn't for their athletic abilities most of them would have gone into politics."

A section about Seaham Red Star's Paul Walker is some of the best writing in the book, or anywhere.

And the index is worth reading itself. One entry:
Bugger, Fat
libidinous effect on aquatic mammals of, 145

A wonderful football/soccer book about some teams and names you may not be familiar with.½

Learie Constantine is a significant figure in West Indian and English history; an incredibly talented cricketer who played in the West Indies' inaugural Test (taking the West Indies first ever Test wicket), gaining the admiration of the world's leading cricketers, before becoming a legend in the north of England, playing in the leagues (the first black professional cricketer), qualifying as a barrister, elected to the inaugural Trinidad and Tobago parliament, appointed a senior minister in the government and appointed a Baron, the first black person to sit in the House of Lords.

Harry Pearson is a fine author who has been able to inject humour into his previous award-winning cricket books, so I looked forward to "Connie" as an example of quality cricket writing. Sadly, it comes across as the usual cricket writing, full of fulsome praise for the cricketer, with too many pages of "he hit a splendid 44" and not enough of what made the man behind the cricketer.

I warmed to "Connie" as I neared the final chapter or two but Pearson deals with Constantine's election to Trinidad & Tobago parliament and his important ministerial role in a page and his high commissioner to the UK and his baronetcy in another page. Surely Pearson could have devoted a few more pages to this part of Constantine's life.½

Harry Pearson started as an author that I would laugh out loud at but has eased into the type of author I would occasionally smile at. “The Trundlers” is the latest I’ve read by Pearson and, amidst the cricket trivia there are the odd somewhat humorous line. Of course, if you’re considering reading “Trundlers” you’re here for the cricket rather than the chance of some mildly humorous references.

“The Trundlers” is a history of the medium pacer who can land the ball just short of a length and swing the ball a bit for hours at a time. We cover all the great military medium pacers from Lumpy Stevens to the good Dr himself and onwards through Lohmann and Tate to big Maxie Walker, Derek Pringle, Ewen Chatfield and Vanburn Holder. An entertaining enough entry into the vast body of cricket literature.

Thoroughly enjoyable look at football in the north-east. Harry went to a whole host of matches during the 1993-94 season and this is his tale with lots of other memories.

An excellent introduction to Belgium, this is told in a funny and affectionate way with lots of quirky details and amusing anecdotes about visits to the country as well as lots of history and cultural and social information. It definitely made our trip to Belgium better and I enjoyed this book.

Harry Pearson's later books (and "Slipless in Settle" is one of those) aren't the ribticklers that his earlier books, such "A Tall Man in a Low Land", are but "Slipless ..." is still worth casting an eye over.

The fact that the subject matter is cricket also helped keep me interested throughout. Pearson attends a number of league matches throughout the north, including the Lancashire League, the most well known of all cricketing leagues, and reminisces about the great players of the past who played in the northern leagues. Pearson drops the odd piece of trivia about cricketers and before you know it, you've finished the book.

This is my favourite Harry Pearson tome; it's laugh out loud, as opposed to the odd smile one gets in later Pearson endeavours, and it's about mad Belgians, rather than soccer or war games.

That the Belgians are mad is not a statement that will ever meet with opposition, so we just get to hear, for example, some of Belgium's odder festivals, such as stilt fighting and throwing pseudo-animals off roofs, the life of writer Georges Simenon, who claimed to have slept with 10,000 women, although one of his wives claimed it was probably closer to 1200, and beer.

When I read "A Tall Man in a Low Land" all those years ago, it made me want to go to Belgium and spend a few weeks aimlessly travelling between breweries. As it turned out, I spent a few days there on the way to an Irish wedding. And I got told off by a Belgian train inspector.½

Harry Pearson, who previously treated us to visits to soccer grounds of northern England and the rural fairs of England, sits himself at the computer and travels the world virtually.

This means we don't get stories about train or plane travel and how bad airline food is, but instead we hear about how bad the internet connection in his rural Northumberland village is. A lot of badly translated website related humour follows, some of it rather amusing, some not so. Whatever the case may be, I was glad Pearson introduced me to the chap known as "Iron Man Wang".½

Reading Pearson's previous tomes (about Belgium, soccer, English country fairs and the like) did not ready me for the discovery that he was a miniature figure war gamer. I never ventured into miniature war gaming as a youngster, probably for the best as I was already geeky enough without this added burden.

Pearson does an admirable job making miniature wargaming, surely one of the least interesting pastimes for spectators, at least somewhat interesting. He discusses the history of miniature wargaming from the 1602 introduction of leaden soldiers into England, Napoleon's wargaming, HG Wells writing on the subject through to his disdain for games like "Dungeons and Dragons", plus his own history in wargaming, as well as the history of the dozens of Daves that appear to populate the wargaming fraternity.

There will be people bored titless by this but not me.

I know sweet FA about soccer and my level of interest in it is even less. So a book about minor league soccer in the northeast of England would not normally go on my "to read" list. Harry Pearson however shows himself to be a raconteur who can make the travails of Bishop Auckland Football Club, the Durham Aged Miners Cup and Hughie Gallacher, to name just a few, interesting.

In addition to good storytelling, "The Far Corner" also led me to keep my UK Ordnance survey maps at hand, as I thumbed through it to find where on earth Axwell Park Colliery Welfare, Esh Winning and Framwellgate Moor and other unlikely named places were. All in pretty much the same place, by Australian standards, I discovered.

Harry Pearson takes on the job of travelling around the north of England, visiting country fairs big and small, great and still great but just in another way.

Pearson has a rambling writing style, jumping around, reciting stories only tangentially connected to the plot. For this topic, his writing style is a great match, and the man's a local so instead of getting the outsider poking fun at the locals, we can happily laugh along with Pearson as he talks about transvestism in young farmers, sexual favours as part of Roman crop-rotation system, and, sadly, the decline of the country fairs; I had never heard of the Stagshaw Bank Fair and the last one was held nearly fifty years before my birth but I think I would have enjoyed it.

Pearson has been in the writing game for some years now and while I've enjoyed all of his books (even those about soccer), there isn't the laugh out loud moments in "Hound Dog Days" that were in earlier Pearson tomes. "Hound Dog Days" is more a book to smile to but there are plenty of smiles to be found here.

The main topic is Pearson's current pet dog, a petit basset griffon Vendeen named "Little Man" ("Manny" for short) but after his introduction the reader barely has time to question what on earth a "Petit basset griffon Vendeen" is (if I had to take a guess, it would have been a small lion with wings, or whatever a griffon is), before veering off into vignettes about other local dogs and their owners in the small Northumbrian village Pearson calls home, his previous dogs, his interactions with the local Women's Institute (thankfully clothed, he notes) and whatever else fills his mind.

Like one of his walks with Manny, "Hound Dog Days" is a ramble through the back lanes, stopping, like Manny, to sniff out a past event, like his judging role in the local show's "Most Unusual Teaspoon" contest. As mentioned, "Hound Dog Days" isn't laugh out loud funny, but it's still a fun read and leaves one looking forward to his next book.

I am not a football fan; but I spent my student days in the North-East of England. At the weekends, I explored some of the odder corners of the region - Blaydon, Spennymoor, Esh Winning, Tow Law, Crook, Quaking Houses, Pity Me, Washington, New York!

Many years later, a Geordie colleague, spotting that I had picked up the local way of referring to the major city in the region as "Newcassel" instead of "Newcastle" lent me this book. He was a football fan; indeed, he was a fan of non-League and obscure football clubs - the only person I've ever known to have a Cowdenbeath FC mug for his tea! So this book was meat and drink to him: to me, it was a step back in time some twenty or thirty years to my time in the North East.

Pearson writes with an eye for detail and an ear for accent, and I was transported. It is a book of raucous and sometimes robust humour, much in line with the area itself.

If things had turned out differently, I might have stayed in the North-East after graduating: but times were hard, we were heading for the "Thatcherzeit", and a depressed area was about to get even more depressed. But I can read this book and again I am in the pit villages of County Durham (so very much like my native Derbyshire), sampling the regional beers (Vaux, Fed Special and McEwans' 80 Shilling) and listening to blokes discussing the fortunes of Blyth Spartans. Proust for Geordies!