Great snoring

TODAY’S column takes a rather restless route, but principally via Southport.

We’d stayed there a few weeks ago for Leo Osborn’s installation as President of the Methodist Conference, mentioned that the hotel was the Crown Plaza, on the promenade.

It prompted a note from Dr Ian Taylor in Aycliffe Village, recalling his own night at that four-star hotel.

He wishes to protest about the plumbing, and in particular wash the basins.

They are indeed curious, great pudding bowl things effectively perched on the worktop and not sunk (as it were) into it. Dr Taylor puts it more strongly – “they lacked practicality, which I will remember for ever.

“The short ladies were not impressed by the basins’ height above sea level and the chaps all hit their heads on the single, hard, unmovable tap.”

Coming clean, the good doctor certainly has a point – but that’s where coincidence kicks in.

LAST Wednesday’s Times had a story about the Crown Plaza in Leeds where, whatever the bathroom arrangements, they’ve appointed “snore monitors”.

Particularly they operate on the two floors which are “quiet zones”, where light sleepers can ask to be accommodated.

“My role is to ensure there are no offensive noises coming from any of the rooms,” says snore monitor Laura Simpson, a little ambiguously.

“If I walk past a room that’s noisy, I will give them a polite knock and ask them to curtail their snoring.”

Sounds all right, of course, but it may be very much easier said than done.

ABOUT 45 per cent of adults are said occasionally to snore, rather more men than women. About a quarter do so incorrigibly.

Snoring is reckoned the third most common reason for seeking divorce, after financial problems and infidelity.

The average person snores at between 60-90 decibels; a chain saw whines at 100 decibels.

Neither alcohol nor obesity helps.

Lying on your back is sitting up and begging for trouble; it gets worse after the age of 65. More than 300 cures are registered at the US Patent Office. Most are said to be useless.

Winston Churchill, it’s said, snored so loudly that the protests of the Marine officers who travelled with him could still be heard above the cacophony (and echoed into the unsleeping columns of the popular press.) The late Princess Diana was also on record as elbowing her husband in the ribs in an attempt to get a decent night’s kip, though there may have been more than two people in that particular bed.

Jonathan Ashman, millionaire partner of television weather girl Sian Lloyd, underwent a surprise surgical procedure while she was on holiday in an apparently successful bid to cure his problem and her nightmare.

“Most of his snores begin by sounding like an electric lawn mower on full power then switch to a passable imitation of a jumbo jet taking off,” she told the Daily Mail last year.

Deprived of their conjugal rights – that is to say, a decent night’s shuteye – up to 89 per cent of women are said to have slept in a separate room.

The weather girl never countenanced it.

“Even if he sounded like a fleet of jumbo jets, it wouldn’t seem right,”

she said.

There’s usually a gender divide, though. Most women whose partners snore will react like the late princess; most men in a similar position will lie on their side and think of England.

OUR boys, when small, had a rather sad little bedtime book about an engine that ran away. It was based upon Great Snoring and Little Snoring, which – though we didn’t know it at the time – are villages in Norfolk.

Whatever the volume, it never failed to get them off to sleep.

THE next story down in last Wednesday’s Times was about Archie Andrews making a comeback in the end-of-the-pier show at Cromer, a delightful place not far from Great Snoring. Archie, for the benefit of younger readers, was a ventriloquist’s dummy – even those who never heard it remember that he had a radio show. Peter Brough, his handler, died in 1999, Archie’s now partnered by Shaun Hewlett. “I’m thrilled, Archie less so,” said Hewlett. “Until last week he was enjoying a tranquil retirement in France.” Like all the best people, Archie is said to be 64.

THE Times wasn’t alone, of course, in reporting Ms Rebekah Brooks’s 90-minute appearance before the House of Commons Media, Culture and Sport select committee but – like everyone else – failed to acknowledge one of the lady’s more egregious errors.

Her responses, she said, had been limited by the ongoing criminal investigation.

“When I am free from legal constraints, I hope you will invite me back so that I can answer in a more fulsome way.”

This is a Gadfly perennial. “Fulsome”, says Chambers, means cloying, nauseous or disgustingly fawning – not the near-opposite. Word meanings may mutate, they may not be stood upside down.

John Whittingdale, the committee chairman, said they would be very happy to accept her offer, at which point Ms Brooks bowed, fulsomely or otherwise, and left.

DIFFERENT letter, different subject, Ian Taylor recalls that about 30 years ago he took it upon himself to visit every pub in County Durham. “There were about 750 of them. It took some time.”

Among them was the Bay Horse, in Bishop Auckland, said to be the county’s oldest. Dr Taylor does not remember it fondly.

Last week’s column recalled that, in the 1960s, Keith Belton played piano at the Bay Horse for £1 a night despite strict Methodist upbringing.

It reminded Harold Watson, now in Darlington, of growing up in the Methodist Boys’ Brigade, in South Shields – he still has the Scripture Union honours certification for his dissertation on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Sometimes even good Boys’ Brigade members fall by the wayside, however, which is why Harold and a bunch of fellow 16-year-olds tried to sneak into one of Shields’s many pubs and were taken aback to discover that three of the company’s officers were in there before them.

Jettisoning the BB hymn about the anchor holding in the straits of fear, they beat a hasty and undignified retreat.

STILL in Bishop Auckland, last week’s column pondered the strength of Stan Laurel’s links with the town where, briefly, he was a school boarder as a 12-year-old.

Local historian John Land suggests that in infancy, when his father was manager of the Theatre Royal in Bishop, Stan didn’t live in the town at all.

He was baptised by a Methodist minister in Ulverston, where his grandparents lived and either baptised or, more likely, received into St Peter’s at Bishop Auckland four years later. Thereafter, says John, He went straight back to Ulverston where he stayed until the family moved to North Shields.

…and finally, John Briggs in Darlington, perhaps still tossing and turning things over in his mind, wonders if we know what you call a dinosaur that makes loud noises while sleeping – a bronto-snor-us.

More, with luck, next week. For the moment, time for bed.