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I love the colour green but I detest the emotion of envy. Whoever decided to link the two must have been thinking of a bilious, pea soup sort of green; that is the unpleasant imagery that concurs with the evil feeling in my stomach when I am overcome with envy.
It grabbed me yesterday, a steely hand sharply twisting and knotting my intestines, as I looked at the BBC news website. The Baftas report included a picture of someone I used to know, someone I had trained with, someone I used to share a lift to shorthand classes with, someone who had just won a Bafta for their journalistic endeavours.
It doesn’t have to be an awards ceremony: switch on the local TV news, and there is another one I trained with. See the reporter on the celluloid version of Calendar Girls? Her too. That TV continuity announcer? I worked with her; the Radio 1 newsreader? Ditto.
Then there is the woman I went to university with, the one that was on the edge of my circle and is now a big noise in regional BBC programming. The one that was invited to our house Christmas dinner out of pity, then sat prodding her nut-cutlet while treating us to a graphic description of how turkeys were slaughtered. Once, she visited a newsroom where I worked; I kept my head down, but noticed the elfin crop and pale blue eye makeup hadn’t changed since 1988.
I no longer beat myself up with thoughts of “that could’ve been me”. Now, I know why it isn’t: I am not terribly good at pushing myself forward in a professional capacity and I like to have a life outside of work.
But, like the Murphy’s, I’m not bitter. The boil is lanced ... for now.
I like to tell people I went to school at Hogwarts. It’s not actually very far from the truth – my Latin room was but a stone’s throw from the cinematic version. Sometimes, my mind wandering from Caecilius or Pliny, I would gaze through the glass and see a Roman soldier walking up the road. I’d blink and shake my head, then reality would return. Obviously, someone was filming at the castle again.
I met my first famous person standing in front of the castle. At the time, I had no idea who Brian Blessed was. To me, he was great bear of a man wearing a crown. I knew who Rowan Atkinson was, though; I’d seen him on Not the Nine O’ Clock News. The filming of The Black Adder added further texture to my first term at high school.
The following summer, it was the turn of Robin of Sherwood. Michael Praed gave me his autograph: he wrote like a girl. But that was the only girlie thing about him; he made my teenage hormones quite giddy. Shortly afterwards, he decamped to Dynasty and I knew I’d been in the presence of greatness.
Northumberland’s castles have starred in numerous films and TV dramas. Alnwick also made an appearance in Disney’s The Spaceman and King Arthur when I was small, and more recently, featured in Elizabeth. Bamburgh – my favourite castle – was also a location in Elizabeth.
The county’s cinematic successes are nothing new: when my mum was young, they filmed Beckett at Bamburgh. It starred Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. Elizabeth Taylor was there with Burton and she gave Mum her autograph. Burton, however, refused because he was “busy”. I have never liked the man.
Our Friends in the North was shown when I was living in Norfolk. It made me dreadfully homesick. Daniel Craig played the drunken bum Geordie; unfortunately that means that, tight swimming trunks or not, I can never consider him to be a sex symbol.
