That’s Leif

Last week’s column told the doubtless apocryphal story of the Viking warrior who discovered that he’d been away fighting for so long that his name had been left off the electoral register.

The council official was duly apologetic. Clearly, he said, he’d taken Leif off his census.

Even more than most, Mrs Laura Madsen in Durham found it hard to see the joke. She’s been married for 60 years to a Dane called Leif but the name, says Laura, is pronounced as in “Life.”

Leif Madsen was but a schoolboy when Denmark was invaded by the Germans. After 1945, though our own boys were being demobilised, Danes were encouraged to join up.

“He wanted to see the world,” says Laura.

All that explains why he joined the Duke of Wellingtons, spent a year in India, returned to base at Brancepeth and was spending a few days at Dryburn Hospital in Durham – where Laura was a secretary – when their eyes met. He’s now 84, she’s 80.

“He doesn’t have an accent at all, but he still hears all the silly jokes about Leif and death,” says Laura.

Perhaps it explains why all his Durham mates call him Les. As probably they say in Copenhagen, that’s Leif.

CHIEFLY associated with Ms Esther Rantzen, That’s Life was the television programme of the suggestively-shaped vegetables – see under Wheatley Hill Old Scouts’ Hut – of odd odes and of the bloke who played Amazing Grace on his forklift truck.

It ran to 442 shows between 1973 and 1994, usually recorded an hour before transmission.

Insofar as Ms Rantzen is concerned, however, the Echo has rather left readers gasping for more. On December 5 last year we reported that, not least to promote her parliamentary candidacy in Luton South – an independent, though it should really have been the greens party – she was planning an attempt on the world Brussels sprout eating record.

Some accounts supposed the record to be 43 in a minute, others a mere 31; none doubted the poor thing’s unpopularity. To no great surprise, the sprout has been voted Britain’s least popular vegetable.

“I have long championed the underdog and I am very pleased to champion the underdog vegetable,”

she said at the time.

Though you’d have thought that the newsdesk might have got wind of it, we never did say how Esther went on.

Sadly, she got her teeth into just five, forced in the last few seconds to “eject” a few extra that she’d tried somehow to accommodate in her mouth. Ms Rantzen has now recovered; leif goes on.

SADLY, the internet appears only to offer one Brussels sprout joke, and that’s the one about the difference between a Brussels sprout and a bogey. Kids won’t eat Brussels sprouts.

MICHAEL Foot’s death last week recalled the one time that I met him, in May 1996 in his distinctly working class office at The Tribune.

Darlington were playing Plymouth Argyle – Quakers lost, inevitably – in a play-off final at Wembley.

Foot – another potential green party candidate; football folk will understand – was Plymouth’s No 1 fan.

That night, he was to attend a fund-raising auction for the left-wing weekly at which an autographed copy of Peter Mandelson’s new book The Blair Revolution came under the hammer.

Neither Blair nor Mandelson was universally popular. Neither had signed the book, though Tribunite MPs had.

“Trash and codswallop from the devil-made man,” wrote Brian Sedgemore.

“Remember what happened to Rasputin,” wrote Tony Banks.

Rah-rah Rasputin (lover of the Russian queen) was assassinated in 1917.

Tony Blair became Prime Minister and a hugely wealthy man. Peter Mandelson is ennobled, widely regarded as deputy PM and will receive yet further preferment in Hartlepool tomorrow.

Whatever happened to Brian Sedgemore?

THE return after seeing Michael Foot was by hideously overcrowded train, most of the passengers seemingly drunk.

Last week I travelled south again, even the vestibules overflowing – only the train operator changes.

The guard announced that the service was heavily laden, recalling splendid lines from the Book of Common Prayer: “Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.”

Sadly, it doesn’t apply to East Coast. The train was so full, the buffet trolley couldn’t budge an inch.

PRE and not so easy, the little campaign against the Japanese knotweed-spread of that pestilent prefix attracts little sympathy – though Ian Andrew in Lanchester concedes that “pre-booking”

is a nonsense. “Either you book or you don’t.”

Ian has also consulted his son, a doctor, about pre-existing conditions and thus attempts a diagnosis. “Joe Bloggs goes into hospital for a routine operation but during preliminary investigations it’s discovered he has a heart condition which prevents the operation being undertaken. It’s never been a problem, so no one has picked up on it.”

A pre-existing condition, or a myocardial infarction waiting to happen?

Eric Gendle, not to be beaten – and good on him – discovers “pre-existing condition” in the Oxford Dictionary of 1599, which suggests that it’s existed for 400 years. Whether it has pre-existed is, of course, something else entirely.

STILL folk travel Apostrophe Avenue.

Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland liked the sound of the Pied Piper Pest Control Company but was alarmed to see on the side of its van that it was effective against “Rats and mice, wasps and bee’s, cockroaches and flea’s.”

GORDON Best has been reading a brochure – “Summertime on the Rhine and Moselle Valley” – from Spennymoorbased Gardiners Tours.

The itinerary sounds fine, he concedes, until they get to day five in Remagen – “best known for the film A Bridge Too Far”.

Gardiners appear to have their bridges crossed. The Bridge at Remagen was a film about an American operation in Germany; A Bridge Too Far featured British attempts to capture a bridge at Arnhem, in the Netherlands.

“Someone,” says Gordon, “appears to have got their history a bit mixed up.”

…so finally, and in the hope of losing nothing in the translation, a line from our clerical correspondent about Tate’s Watch Company of Massachusetts which, in the 1800s, decided to diversify.

Since they already made the cases for watches, they used them to hold compasses. The compasses, alas, was far less reliable, so that travellers often ended up in Canada or Mexico rather than in California.

Hence, of course, the well known aphorism: “He who has a Tate’s is lost.”

Unless pronounced extinct, the column returns next week.

Still attached

DAVID Carter – Manxman by birth, now in Middlesbrough – picked up on the column a couple of weeks back about a mistaken map for flights into the Isle of Man. (It didn’t include Butterknowle International, either.) He’s still very fond of the old place. “These days when you fly into Ronaldsway, the pilot asks that watches be adjusted to 1952.”

David also urges visitors never to refer to England – or anywhere else – as the mainland. “You’re on the mainland when you’re on the Isle of Man.”