DON’T talk to me about kiss-and-tell! And don’t even think of mentioning the sneaks who go behind your back and ‘tell all’ to the newspapers for money.

This biter has been bit . . . I have been turned over by a past master!

For sixteen years I nursed a secret. Not dark, but deeply and ruinously embarrassing. All the time I consoled myself with the thought that by keeping shtum I was protecting a family from prying eyes and vicious tongues.

Until . . . THUMP! The Sunday papers landed on the doormat outside my hotel room. It was my poor wife who picked them up, saw the headline and thrust the topmost paper towards me, speechless with shock.

“Oh my God,” I wailed. The words swam before my eyes: “Prescott – My Secret Battle with Bulimia”.

It wasn’t so much the headline that made me want to throw up just as he once did: like I say, I’d known about the Deputy Prime Minister’s eating disorder ever since he told me the gory details (over dinner!) shortly after I became editor of the Mirror in 1992. Now here he was, invading his own privacy by dangling a tasteless titbit in front of the readers to promote the newspaper serialisation of his soon-to-be published autobiography.

No, what really got my goat was how Prezza smugly recalled his first visit for treatment: “The waiting room was full of young women, I was the only man there. I felt a right twerp. Luckily none of them shopped me to the press.”

I could hardly contain my fury. A journalist robbed of The Big Story by a victim who does his own mudslinging . . . it’s indecent, almost unheard of! And what would that jury of my peers, those mocking men and women of Fleet Street make of it (I was staying with two hundred of them in Glasgow for a big media wedding at the weekend)?

Little point in claiming that I had obeyed the guidelines laid down by the Press Complaints Commission over a person’s privacy in health matters. Or that there was no overriding public interest involved. Nor even that I considered the conversation to have been private.

Sure enough, next morning’s Daily Telegraph claimed on its front page that I had “suppressed” the story when, in fact, I simply hadn’t told a soul. Interviewed on radio later that morning, one listener who didn’t much care for John Prescott attacked me for not revealing the politician’s health problem.

Dear reader, while Prezza goes off to bank his book royalties I am left to draw about me the shroud of my tattered integrity against the chill moral of this sorry tale:

You’re damned when you do but you’re dumb if you don’t.
 

MY WIFE goes off with Other Men at the weekends. It’s an arrangement we have learned to live with.

’Er Outdoors takes to the hills with the booted and backpacked Berwick Ramblers (all right, half of them are women) leaving Me Indoors with my computer and half-a-dozen deadlines to meet.

One of her gallant escorts on those day-long expeditions up Cheviot and over Kielder is our friend Griggsy, long retired from education but a world traveller, raconteur and environmentalist who still extracts the maximum pleasure from life.

Walking is David Griggs’s passion and he has produced a masterly collection of eight wonderful walks which range between one and eight miles long, criss-crossing Griggsy’s beloved parish of Ellingham and all of them suspiciously using as their start and finish points the pleasant Pack Horse Inn.

Bound in a sturdy volume and illustrated with maps, photos, historical notes and numerous wildlife observations, ‘Walking from Ellingham’ is a little masterpiece, terrific value for a fiver, and will be available from Mine Host at the Pack Horse from this evening onwards.

Published: The Journal, Newcastle   April 25, 2008

LONDON is another world. To start with, the capital is currently a whole scarf and overcoat warmer than Godzone-on-Tweed.

   More than climate, too: fellow hacks at the British Press Awards ‘do’ were wrapped only in their own parochial metro-politics, convinced that all of Britain was as fascinated as they are by the coming mayoral contest between Ken, Boris and The Other Chap.

   My reasons for being in The Smoke were twofold: as a BPA judge I was in town to carouse with the night’s Big Winner (the Sun) and commiserate with the Big Loser (the Mirror) on their respective shares of the spoils. And as a former editor and broadcaster I was down to take part in LBC Radio’s “Quiz the Candidates” show.

   I’m still not sure which event left me with the bigger headache. The Park Lane Grosvenor was awash with Piper Heidsieck (currently the editors’ champagne of choice) while LBC’s unfortunate listeners were drowned in a sea of schmaltz and schmooze, always the politicians’ preference.

   Talking of politicos, David Cameron was keynote speaker at the Press Awards, traditionally a notoriously difficult audience to control (I know, I’ve tried!) and I was encouraged to hear him describe the blue track-suited Chinese who so  rudely pushed and shoved the Olympic flame through London as “goons”.

   The knowledge that Our Dave ‘digs’ the Dalai Lama will have done nothing to endear him to Beijing.

OLD BOB, my reserve domino partner, is an incorrigible smoker and we lose him between games when he retires to light a ‘reviver’ and glow in the rain and wind and darkness.

WORD travels fast when you accidentally demolish the greenhouse. Not surprising, really: the noise of shattering panes as I plunged backwards through the glass was enough to wake the dead.
I’d been doing really well until it happened. “Close the greenhouse vent, water the lettuce, sweet peas, beans and broccoli seedlings and be sure to cover them with a fleece against overnight frost,” ‘Er Outdoors had commanded before heading off to Morocco to trek the Atlas Mountains with fellow Berwick Ramblers.
We’re enthusiastic gardeners of the organic variety, you see. Now that the threat of wind farms has receded the local agriculturals are planning to turn to the next best cash crop: biofuels.
As well as starving the already deprived Third World and providing an abundance of biodiesel with which Chelsea Tractor drivers can pollute even more of the planet, it stands to reason that more fields of waving oilseed means fewer fields of anything remotely nutritious in the way of food.
So we’re growing our own…at least, we were until I tripped over the greenhouse doorstep and – quite literally – brought the house down. And, as I said, news travels fast.
“Any injuries?” my domino partner Robbie phoned to ask. “Bad enough to keep you away from the doms on Sunday?”
I swear his wishful world clouded over when I assured him that not a single major artery had been severed and that I would be at his side, luckless as ever, this weekend.
WHY, I heard some young sprig ask on radio the other day, should local buses be made free across the nation to sixty-year-olds?
I’ll tell you why, mate. It’s ‘cos we baby boomers are becoming the majority age group, that’s why.
The Yuppies (young, upwardly mobile) and the Dinks (dual income, no kids) have had their day. Now we over-60s have a group name that at least sounds like an acronym, even if it isn’t: we are Twirlies.
Twirlies? Sure. You get on a bus five minutes before the rush hour is over, show your pensioner pass and the driver says: “Too early…”
TALKING of buses, the Coastliner bus service in North Yorkshire has just issued a free pamphlet to passengers with such helpful advice as “When can I travel? The choice is totally yours!” and “When the bus approaches give a clear signal to avoid confusion.” Talk about teaching your granny to suck eggs…
Reminds me of a bottle of posh mineral water I once bought, on the label of which was printed “Serving suggestion: just add ice.”
Truly, a cocktail is born…
I BROKE another duck last weekend. I had never addressed a curling club in my life until I was invited to be guest speaker at the Coldstream Curlers’ annual dinner.
Toon definitely lost out to country THAT night: all the ladies were busy pointing out one of their star players, “…Mrs Nevin, she’s Doctor Harvey’s daughter…” while I was sure her husband’s face was familiar.
“Oh aye,” said a curler, “that’s Pat. He’s a nice guy, too.”
That would be Pat ‘the ex-Chelsea, Hibs, Motherwell and Scottish international footballer’ Nevin then, would it?
Anyway, the only previous contact I had with the curling world was in News York where I worked with a Canadian who was always sneaking off to play despite his rather domineering wife.
“So how do you persuade her to let you out so often?” I once asked. “There’s a limit to the number of times you can promise to paper the kitchen.”
“Simple,” he said. “I turn down the lights, open a bottle of wine and ask if she fancies an early night, or should I just go curling?”
“And it works?” I asked.
“Sure,” said my curling pal. “She turns on the TV and says ‘Don’t forget to take a warm sweater!’ ”