I was woken up by a bleeping mobile…and with a headache. The latter was the wine the night before; the former a text alert generated by an e-mail from Heidi offering me first refusal on her car for £150. I was sorely tempted but at 0730 I texted back ‘Thanks but no thanks.’ I get offered these good little runners every couple of months nowadays. I am always tempted but then I do the arithmetic and figure out how many taxi rides, hire cars and train journeys I can buy for £250 per month.
A figure in the Daily Mail the other week put the costs of running a car at £550 per month. But stripped of the £150 depreciation, £50 parking and £50 finance which don’t really apply to me their £255 per month was pretty much what I work on…£90 on petrol, £60 on insurance, £60 on maintenance and repairs, £30 for breakdown recovery and £15 for car tax.
This compares pretty closely with the £190 per month my daughter’s car had cost me in Wales where I paid £85 for two months of tax & insurance, spent £150 on fuel and forked out £150 on repairs but had no breakdown recovery. Yet without my own car it is going to be expensive moving my stuff into store up in Cambridge. So I might yet say ‘yes’ if she hasn’t sold the car by the time I want to move my stuff.
Linda Smith has died of cancer three years after first being diagnosed. Even those, like myself, who only knew her as a voice on BBC Radio 4 will feel we have lost a wonderful and brilliant friend. She was funny partly because she oozed and overflowed with compassion for the downtrodden and the ordinary man and woman in the street. But also because far from bearing no one any malice she had plenty of malice for the soulless corporate world of which she was proud to be an enemy and which she lampooned shamelessly week after week in programmes like Just A Minute, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue and The News Quiz.
Linda will be remembered for her charm, her wit, her destruction of pomposity and her subdued but burning English rage. She represented everything that is great in the British female character. Brought up in Erith on the south bank of the Thames not too far from Gravesend and within cycling distance of where I was brought up in Eltham, Linda once got herself into hot water by remarking that 'the town isn't twinned with anywhere...but it does have a suicide pact with Dagenham'. Her defence was vintage Linda Smith. When her comment attracted the wrath of the local paper she pointed out that the same paper ran a competition the following week to come up with the best name for the new Erith leisure centre which was won by the entry 'The Erith Leisure Centre'.
Then there were her wonderfully elliptical lindasmithian references...this one for instance to to the Elgin Marbles saga. When the captain of Greece's soccer team was presented with the tournament trophy after winning the Euro 2004 final, Linda was in there like a flash. 'We'll have that in the British Museum by the end of the week claiming its ours!'
Linda was one of the few women to conquer the world of stand-up comedy imported into British clubs and universities from the States as a new male- and Jewish-dominated genre...with just a wee touch of Scotch-Irish...in the early 1980s. When a student yelled, 'Show us yer tits', she retorted sweetly, 'Ah, is it time for a breast feed'...to the humiliated student.
And then there was her attitude to authority. Like her friend and fellow panelist Jeremy Harding she understood the power of the jester. The best way to undermine authority is to render it ridiculous. When many people were refusing to pay the poll tax, the Labour Party would not back them, so Linda described the Labour Party Campaign as being 'Pay the poll tax...but while you're doing so...ooh!...you give that clerk SUCH a look'.
I had finished in town by midday and returned to the boat to do a job I have been promising myself I would do for almost two years. I patched up the holes at the back of the stove. It had never quite seemed worth it as I was always either about to sell the boat or replace the caravan stove that has served me so well. I used some gray goo that I last remember using forty years ago to mend a hole in the exhaust of my Austin A35 van. It seems to have done the trick so I will be buying another tin to finish the job. It will be nice to have a stove that doesn’t fill the cabin with smoke and threaten to burn the boat down.
A nice surprise in the evening when Heidi looked in and stayed chatting for two hours before her feet got cold and nature did her calling. There is a toilet on the boat which works fine for a bachelor but is not something I would wish upon a lady. As for the cold floor…the rest of the boat is toasty and warm…I wear a pair of Swedish clogs or some fluffy slippers onboard the boat…with two pairs of socks on cold days. Heidi had been busy over the past week raising money for her project in Lwala from the local Rotary and Lions Club people. One of the fundraisers produced £1600 although only a quarter will find its way into her project.
A final anecdote. Linda Smith was wonderfully playful with the other guests on those comedy shows the BBC allowed onto Radio 4 between 6.30 and 7 each weekday evening. Typical was the remark she once made when Alan Coren was looking puzzled., 'It's all right, Alan,' she said endearingly, 'the nurse will be round this afternoon. No she HASN'T been stealing your flowers.’
