Once before, dear blog reader, this blogger grandly announced that - due to certain changes in his life at that time - you would likely be seeing a lot less of From The North in the immediate future; only for that situation to change within a couple of days. Over the weekend, this blogger explained - at some length - that recent-health-related circumstances had made him consider the future of From The North and that, for at least a short while, From The North was closing its doors and locking up. However, with chilling accuracy, it seems, this blogger noted 'From The North may well be back ... this blogger had made a tentative decision that this blog had more-or-less run its course on more than one occasion in the past only to have an Al Pacino-in-The Godfather Part III moment and get pulled back in again.'
You know, dear blog reader, when you write something and think 'yeah, that'll never happen'? However, this blogger simply couldn't leave From The North entirely behind without one further outpouring of thoughts. Firstly, the - quite superb - return of From The North favourite Peaky Blinders to the BBC on Sunday evening and, in particular, a couple of paragraphs from Stuart Jeffries' Grunaid Morning Star review – Tommy Shelby's Back Where We Want Him To Be: In All Kinds Of Trouble which deserve to be highlighted; 'I've mentioned Tommy Shelby's peerless silhouette, but you could cite Arthur Shelby who, even when off-his-nut on opiates, is quite the dandy, or Michael Shelby, who, though in Stateside chokey, wears collar and tie under his prison duds. Instead of Birmingham's customary civic self-laceration, writer Steven Knight has given the city swagger. I doff my cap.'
'More swaggering yet is Anya Taylor-Joy as Michael's spouse Gina,' he continued. 'There's a moment in this series opener in which Joy Division's 'Disorder' starts up on the soundtrack like a beautiful anachronism and she sashays down a corridor, heels clacking in time to Hooky's bassline. Moments later, we see her busting jazz moves to a dance band on the radiogram, with the same aplomb she gave us when cutting a rug to Cilla Black in Last Night In Soho. What we are witnessing here is the succession of the title of Peaky's Queen of Swagger from Helen McCrory's Aunt Polly to Taylor-Joy. McCrory's untimely death last year created a problem for Steven Knight. How do you write out the family matriarch? Here, Aunt Polly's corpse lies inside a burning Gypsy caravan while the Shelby men stand hatless. It's Birmingham's equivalent of a Viking funeral and, given her Romany blood, what Polly would have wanted.' As Stuart concludes: 'The show that has become, balti curries notwithstanding, Birmingham's leading export product. Given that the city's most distinctive contributions to world culture (Black Sabbath, Steel Pulse, Cadbury chocolate, HP sauce and Jack Grealish's calves) have broken up or sold themselves to foreign capital, every right-thinking Brummie is behind the looming Peaky movie that will, fingers crossed, prolong the franchise.'
Secondly, a necessarily reminder that, even if Keith Telly Topping survives his current brush with horrible mortality - and, indeed, even if the world manages to survive its currently brush with The Butcher Of Grozny deciding to flex his groin in public and play chicken with Kyiv, we still might not have much of a world worth this blog being around to comment upon if an IPCC report warning of the 'irreversible' impacts of global warming is to be believed (and, let's face it, why wouldn't it be? No, hang on, don't answer that - they are some ruddy strange people out there).
However the final words in this - temporary - From The North revival must, necessarily and deservedly, go to a member of Keith Telly Topping's family. In October 1966, the first record by The Be-Atles (a popular beat combo of the 1960s, you might've heard of them) which was ever bought for this blogger - for this third birthday - was bought by this blogger's brother's then sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Maureen. (This blogger still has it, if you're interested, in its original mint-green Parlophone sleeve. It's been played quite a few times, since 1966, though, so it's hardly in mint condition.)
Five years later, Maureen became this blogger's beloved sister-and-law and although she still, to this day, sometimes regards Keith Telly Topping as 'that little horror', she has, over the subsequent fifty years, become one of this blogger's best friends, most trusted confidantes and the person with the least time and patience for this blogger's occasional vainglorious, high-falutin' schemes and pretentious twaddle. She tells it like it is, dear blog reader. She was the first person Keith Telly Topping called from hospital on Monday and was his regular contact during the following few bizarre days, calming his less lucid moments and always happy to share a joke and lighten some really dark moments. After Keith Telly Topping got out of The Joint, Maureen spent time and money on Saturday and Sunday, making sure this blogger was fed, watered and comfortable (providing perishables, some necessary new bedding for The Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House pit and a completely cush new pair of slippers and a dressing gown for this blogger to replace his existing, somewhat threadbare examples). She did this selflessly and without being asked to, because she - like her husband and their two children, this blogger's nephew and niece - they are good people who value family and friendship. This blogger never says it anywhere near enough but he's going to say it now, in public. Our Maureen is a properly remarkable woman; a kind and considerate woman and, not for nothing, still the babe she was in 1970 during a Telly Topping family holiday on the Isle Of Wight.
The kindness of strangers, dear blog reader, is frequently commented upon and is, indeed, a jolly good thing. The kindness of family is less widely noted. But is, if anything, even more a thing of beauty.
Anyway, dear blog reader, as mentioned in the last From The North update, this blogger will be spending much of the next few weeks with his feet up in the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House, trying to get himself better with occasional visits to the local medical centre to be stabbed in the arm with B-12 (the first of those is tomorrow). So, From The North is unlikely to be updated again any time soon; unless something genuinely world-shattering occurs (and, as we discovered when that was last said, back in 2019, that's a very dangerous thing to threaten). We now return you to a reflective period of - self-enforced and, in many ways, blissful - silence. Stay well, everyone, life's easier that way. Seriously.
