Paul Daniels by Paul Daniels Page A

same now, we as a Council had to borrow the money to build anything, whether it was a swimming baths or council houses. Then the money we borrowed had to be repaid over a very long period of years, adding millions in interest rates. I could not for the life of me see why we couldn’t levy a rate that would enable us to save up for a few years to build public amenities and that would have been a lot cheaper than the current system. Their argument was that you could not levy a ‘rate for something in the future as a ratepayer might die and not benefit’. As it was, we had ratepayers paying for buildings that had long been pulled down, so what was the difference?
    By now I was 17 and living two lives. Since the non-excitement of the first kiss I had practised a bit more and, of course, I was filled with the knowledge of my dad’s sex manual. In the Co-op Chemists on Lorne Terrace there was a blonde goddess (well, she was to me) called Jean Pagel and I used to go in there as often as I could. The cheapest things to buy were Horlicks tablets at nine pence a packet and I bought them by the hundreds. Eventually we dated and spent many a happy hour rolling about on her front room sofa. Nothing serious happened, damn it, only kissing and fumbling but I raged with passion. Meanwhile, from the Methodist Youth Club I had moved into the pulpit. On Sundays I was a lay preacher, the rest of the week I was a young man raging with lust. Things are different nowadays, of course – I am no longer a lay preacher!
    To be honest, I wasn’t a lay preacher for very long anyway. I had run the service in most of the chapels on the local circuit. It was a bit like working in the clubs and theatres later; you could do the same ‘act’ in front of the different congregations and then you would have to come up with a new ‘script’ for the next tour. My main problem came in my own chapel and from my sense of observation. There was one lady who never came into church in time for the start of the service. She was always about five minutes late and the other women in the congregation would then all be whispering about her new hat. Imagine, a new hat every week. So when it became my turn to run the service in the chapel I didn’t start the service. With the brashness of youth I announced that we would all sit quietly as the lady would be waiting in the foyer of the chapel and when she arrived we would admire the hat and then get on with the real reason we were supposed to be there, worshipping and thanking God. When the woman did come in, she was livid. As she was the wife of a church elder I more or less got the sack. Neither did they like my idea of not doing the service in theorder it had been done for years. My idea was that if you didn’t know what was coming next you might pay more attention to the words. It’s funny that it was the old people who objected and the young people who liked the improvisations.
    In my mid-teens, Dad and I would sit up at night after he came home from work and just chat. We would discuss life and the universe and, naturally, put the world to rights. Motorways were under discussion; these new wonder roads that would allow everyone to travel easily great distances with no delays. Yeah, right! Dad had an idea that has stayed with me – at the same time as they were building the motorways, they should put large tubes alongside them, possibly underground, maybe two to three feet in diameter. These tubes would join all the major cities of the UK and belong to the Post Office. Inside the tubes there would be, for want of a better word, torpedoes. In London, a torpedo for, say, Leeds would be filled with post and loaded into the tube. The tube at that end sloped downwards slightly and as the torpedo went in it would activate a sensor switch that activated an electro-magnet. The head of the torpedo would be magnetic and it would be pulled, aided initially by gravity, towards the