The As It Happens Files (5 page)
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Authors: Mary Lou Finlay
As It Happens
probably gets more questions about
The Shepherd
than any other single thing on the show.
Who wrote it? Will it be on this Christmas? Where can I buy a CD?
(Answers: British author and journalist Frederick Forsyth; it’s on
As It Happens
every Christmas Eve; and the CD is now available from CBC gift stores.) A close runner-up would be
Reading, as in
Where did that Reading thing originate? Why do you keep making those references to Reading?
The “Reading thing” goes something like this: whenever we have a particularly silly story from England—an interview, say, with a woman whose fondness for garden gnomes has led her to establish a gnome sanctuary—Barbara Budd will
extro
it by saying something like:
Ann Atkins is the founder and keeper of the Garden Gnome Reserve, and we reached her in Abbots Bickington. That is
240
kilometres west of Reading, and from the Garden Sanctuary it would take
720,000
garden gnomes, lined up hat to hat, to reach dear Reading.
In other words, Reading is the centre of the universe, and the story’s distance from the centre is calculated using a distinctive system of measurement.
There are a couple of explanations as to how this silliness got started. One version is that one day, after interviewing someone in Reading, Al Maitland said, helpfully, “Reading is 30 miles west of London.” A few minutes later, there was a story from London, and Alan said, “[Jane Doe] spoke to us from London … which is 30 miles east of Reading.” It’s the sort of thing Al would have done.
Former AIH producer George Somerwill, however, says his is the true version. He’d been working on the show for only about a week, he says, when he booked one of those wacky English people—a “tongue-in-cheek story” is how he puts it—who happened to be somewhere in Berkshire, not all that far from where George himself used to live and not far from Reading.
We recorded the item about ten minutes past five, and it was slotted early in the programme, so I had only a few
minutes to cut it, top-and-tail it and write the green—in those days, we wrote our scripts on five-part green paper. When I came to the
extro,
I wrote: “John So-and-So spoke to us from … [whatever-the-village-was]
.”
Then I thought, No one will know where that is.
So I added,
“which is nine miles from Reading.” And that’s what Al read on the air.
Somerwill, in his innocence, assumed that this would make everything clear. He was set straight a moment later, when the show’s producer, Bob Campbell, exploded out of the studio, roaring, “WHERE THE HELL IS READING?”
Everyone found this quite funny, so from then on, whenever anyone had a nutty story from England, he would cite its distance from Reading and, well, we’ve just never stopped. Somerwill, who now works for the United Nations in Liberia, says people still come up to him and say, “Hey, aren’t you the guy who used to work on
As It Happens?
Started that Reading thing?”
I rather imagine it was producer George Jamieson who started measuring the distance in supine gnomes and the like; it’s the sort of thing
he
would do.
In any event, the Reading references drive one poor soul right around the bend and straight to his phone. We call him the Reading Man.
“You stupid,
stupid
people” is the way his message usually starts. “When are you going to stop these
stupid
references to Reading. It’s so STUPID!”
And of course, the answer to the Reading Man’s question is: never. Our producers are a sick and twisted lot, I’m afraid; the more abuse they get from the Reading Man, the more determined they are never to stop this admittedly childish habit.
They get such a kick out of it that they decided, one day, to see if they couldn’t find a similar reference point in the U.S. I think the idea arose just after we’d talked to the nice man from Menomonie, Wisconsin, about the sudden disappearance of his moose. Moose stories always remind me of that scene in the TV show
Murphy Brown
where Murphy, played by Candice Bergen, is dismissing a rumour that she might be replaced by a reporter from Canada. “Canada!” she snorts. “What do Canadians know about news? MOOSE LOST,
MOOSE FOUND. MORE SNOW.”
Anyway … the lost moose. It was made of fibreglass, about seven feet tall and six feet long, Terry Tilleson told us, and had been fastened to the front door of the local Moose Lodge right under the security light—only it wasn’t there any longer. Not only that, it was the second time the moose had gone AWOL, so someone in Menomonie had a thing for that particular ungulate. We were sorry about his missing moose, of course, but at the same time, we were quite taken with the name Menomonie, and since it
was
a moose and all that had taken us there, we wondered if Menomonie might not be the right place to anoint as our American Reading.
Senior producer Marie Clark decided to put the question to our audience. They could nominate alternatives to Menomonie if they wished, and then we’d have one of those totally spurious web elections to determine the winner. In the end, it came down to four places: Peoria, Illinois; Normal, Illinois; Peculiar, Missouri; and Menomonie. Producer Max Paris did the counting, and on June 25, 2002, Barbara Budd proclaimed Menomonie the new official centre of the wacky universe in the U.S., with 41 percent of the vote. Luckily for her, it’s easier to pronounce than it is to spell.
But you know, Menomonie never caught on quite the way Reading did, much to the Reading Man’s sorrow, no doubt.
We might have fought harder for Menomonie if we’d known then what I’ve since learned. While trying to nail down the correct spelling of the place, I found that the beautiful
city
of Menomonie (population fifteen thousand) is located partially within the
town
of Menomonie in Dunn County, northwest Wisconsin—NOT to be confused (though it’s bound to be, isn’t it?) with Menomonee Falls, which is incorporated as a
village
and contains thirty-two thousand people, in north
east
Wisconsin, although it’s north
west
of Milwaukee. Wherever and whatever it is, Menomonie sounds like our kind of place.
Don’t ask me if they ever found their moose; I don’t know. One thing I should add, though, is that in September 2000, I had my own Big Cabbage moment: Barbara Everingham in Wasilla, Alaska, told me about winning a local Big Cabbage contest with a specimen that weighed 105.6 pounds (47.9 kilos for the metric crowd). I was surprised that they could grow such big vegetables in the short growing season they had, but she reminded me that they also had sun 24 hours a day during the summer.
FYI, the Big Cabbage world record holder is Bernard Lavery, formerly of Llanharry, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Wales, who grew a plant that weighed 124 pounds in 1989. In the account he posted on the Internet, Dr. Lavery says it would have weighed more but the movers kept losing pieces of it as they were hauling it to Alton Towers, 210 miles away, where the Worldwide Giant Vegetable Championships were being held that year.
So all in all, it was a disastrous harvest. Although I broke the world record, I should have chalked up one of at least
150
lb. The huge cabbage ended up in a sorry state, with thousands of visitors poking at it over the four days that it was on exhibition. At the end of the show, I gave bits and pieces of it away as souvenirs to whoever wanted it.
This cabbage abuse seems to have soured Dr. Lavery on growing big vegetables. According to his posting, he subsequently went to work for Sheik Zayed in Abu Dhabi and then settled in Sutton St. Edmund in Lincolnshire, England, where he grows “a few pumpkins and sunflowers for the children.”
As of this writing, Barb Everingham’s cabbage still holds the state record in Alaska—and she didn’t feed it anything special.
Tim and Colin and Julie and Yulya
Radio that takes hot air to new heights
I
t’s May 2004, and Canadian adventurer Colin Angus is telling us about a little trip he’s planning to make from Vancouver to Moscow with his friend Tim Harvey.
CA: We’re going to be leaving from Vancouver up to Fairbanks; that’s
3,600
kilometres on the bikes. It’s going to be an interesting trip but fairly straightforward; it’s your typical sort of highway biking. And then from Fairbanks, we’ll continue down the Yukon River in a rowboat for about
1,800
kilometres to the Bering Sea and then we’ll cross the Bering Sea in a rowboat, which is about a
400
-kilometre crossing, and then follow the Siberian coastline in our boat until a town called Anadyr. Then we hop onto our skis and we ski for about
800
K and then back onto our bikes again.
ML: It all sounds challenging to me—what is going to be the most challenging part, do you think?
CA: I think the toughest part is going to be our travel in Siberia. Often people think the Bering Sea crossing is going to be the toughest, and it sounds intimidating, but we’ve really prepared for that. It’s actually fairly calm in August when we do the crossing. But Siberia itself—it’s very remote and it’s cold. We’re going through there in
the middle of winter, and the average temperature is minus
50
in January. That’s the average; Winnipeg, by comparison, is minus
20
, so …
ML: That’s not good.
CA: No, no. We’ve spent a lot of time preparing for this section, too. It’s all about having the routines in place and making sure that your equipment isn’t going to break down on you, because you can’t really take your gloves off and repair it.
ML: How much food are you taking? How long is it going to take you, first of all—the whole trip?
CA: The duration of the trip is going to be approximately
11
months. We’ve dropped off caches of food all the way up to Fairbanks for the cycling leg, and then we’re going to be carrying almost
4
months of provisions in our rowboat. The boat is packed: it’s got all our gear for Siberia and enough food to take us right into the heart of Siberia, and that’s pretty much when our own rations end. We’re using freeze-dried food; it’s approximately
1.2
kilograms per day per person, which is about five thousand calories, which is a lot of energy, but it’s necessary when you’re trudging through the cold conditions.
Once we get to Irkutsk, which is where our food’s going to run out, we’ll have to start using local supplies, but it’s a lot more difficult using local provisions, because it’s things like potatoes and meat, which, when it’s minus
50
out, it’s pretty hard to chop the potatoes up, so we’ll have to do as much prep as we can before we embark from the cities or towns we purchase the food from.
ML: You’ve made some extraordinary journeys in the past. Did you canoe down rivers in Russia before?
CA: Yeah. Our most recent river journey was a descent of the Yenisey River, which flows through Mongolia and Siberia. The thing I like about rivers is that they offer you a unique view of the land. It’s almost like an inanimate guide taking you along, showing you all sorts of aspects of the land you’re going through, and this, in some ways, has some similarities—we are descending a river, but it’s almost like a whole bunch of expeditions thrown together.
ML: And Tim? Has he had some experience with this kind of adventure?
CA: Tim’s spent a lot of time in boats and kayaking. I mean, he hasn’t done any extended adventures exactly like this; the most recent trip he was on was working as a photojournalist in Central America. The most important thing, though, is to have the right kind of attitude and spirit, which Tim definitely has: it’s a combination of being tough, being able to endure the hardships that are definitely going to be encountered, but also having a passion for the outdoors, a love for the environment around you.…
Why did they want to do this? Colin said it was to save the planet—to encourage people to mount their bikes and leave their cars at home in order to reduce greenhouse gases and slow down global warming. But I think they may be addicted to adventure. I mean, other people sell raffle tickets or write pamphlets to save the planet; they’re not skiing across Siberia. Since Colin and Tim’s trip was sponsored in part by a satellite phone company, it was not going to be hard to contact them along the way, and we thought it would be interesting to stay in touch, but we had no idea how interesting the trip would get.
Before they even got out of British Columbia, forest fires forced them off the road, so they bought a canoe to carry them northward. Getting across the Bering Sea in an 18-foot rowboat also proved to be more challenging than Colin had anticipated, as wind and stormy weather kept blowing them in the wrong direction and threatening to cast them into water that was cold enough, Tim said, to bring on “an ice-cream headache in your hand” if you trolled it overboard for a moment.
This is definitely my kind of story. I’m the original armchair traveller; I love adventures, provided they’re someone else’s. I love talking to people like Tim and Colin and reading books like Joe Simpson’s
Touching the Void,
which is an account of a harrowing adventure Simpson and his friend Simon Yates underwent in 1985.
