My Best Cellar

I've been spending my bed ridden, "deep heat" tortured incarceration finishing off, "My Best Cellar" by Wilf Lunn, the somewhat inventive inventor (at least, more intellectually inventive than practically inventive, in my humble opinion) from the Huddersfield area.

If you want this book you can get it from Amazon where you might want to consider a second hand copy for the lower price, or else if you're like me and happen to be a nostalgic twit who remembers, "Vision On," as a child, would like to see some cash go to Wilf's pocket, and have more money than sense, you can get a signed copy from Wilf's Web Site. As the signed copy only costs £9.99 that probably adequately describes how much sense I haven't got. But I digress. On with the review.

Much of this book is set in Wilf's young life and as his parents were both deaf and lived, "Up Nawf," you can be sure that there is no shortage of experience and tale to tell. A good chunk of the hilarity centres around the tricks that a young, over active mind can play on the various situations and instruction that come from experienced adults; people who have perhaps forgotten the kinds of interpretations that growing minds can place on a situation.

Among the many gems of experience is this one, "Apart from saying 'Pardon?' instead of 'Y'What?' or 'Eh?' the only other advice he ever gave me was that the best bit of a beast to eat was the part that did all the work, so don't bother with chicken's brains, go for the legs. Fortunately we never had buck rabbit, I didn't fancy bunny willies."

The book also contains dire warnings such as, when you're delivering a bear its evenings fish and chips, don't forget to knock on the door of its cage before entering; otherwise it might bite you and you'll have a hell of a job explaining to the ambulance service that you're not a crank caller.

"She said it was a 'Meat Safe'. Food was valuable and scarce but to actually have more meat than for just one meal was inconceivable to me. I could understand that if it got about that Auntie had extra meat in the house she could have beef burglars breaking in and so a safe would be necessary. But it didn't look all that safe to me; it didn't even have a lock on the door."

One other piece to whet your appetite, "The wireless was a beautiful veneer floor-standing model. Years later she gave it to us Mam hated it because she couldn't lip-read it so she was completely left out and, for some reason I never fathomed, she called it 'Tincan'. We, of course, didn't have a wireless at home, which put me at somewhat of a disadvantage when my school chums talked about what they'd been listening to. I'd never heard Dick Barton Special Agent. Mick Walsh told me a kid who lived near the actor who played Dick Barton chucked a stone through his window with a paper message wrapped round it. The message was 'SOLVE THIS'."

It goes on from there to describe Wilf's attempts with cat whisker radios and the resultant meeting with one of his girlfriends where he tried to get Radio Luxembourg on her breasts. Well, all that tuning effort should have paid off somehow; shouldn't it?

Wilf's book is slow to get started. For me, it picked up at around page 40, but as it runs for more than 200 pages, there is plenty of material here to get the chuckle muscles working.

The kind of below house room that Wilf lived in will go for £90,000 today in the up and coming areas, or else for that price in a less desirable area you can get the whole house. This kind of realisation can catch you upside the head when it comes home that Wilf is still with us and the houses are still very much a part of our landscape; yet the world he documents in his book seems to be of a time very much distant.