Tales of the Country: Living it up with the test card circle

Londoners may think that their city is the cultural centre of the universe, and Mancunians that theirs is, but those two cities played second and third fiddle to Leominster last weekend as the small Herefordshire market town played host, for the 14th time, to the annual get-together of the Test Card Circle.

That, of course, is an organisation that celebrates great television test-card transmissions of our time. It has 216 members, each of whom pays £22 a year, in return for which he – the membership is largely male – receives four TCC magazines a year and is entitled to attend the spring convention at the Royal Oak Hotel in Leominster. This year's highlights included – and I quote from the official programme – a session called "Saturday Night Almost Live!", featuring "something for everyone, with BBC and ITA music from the days of Test Card C right through to the Ceefax era", and "Back to School": "relive your childhood with those ITV Schools Intervals."

I read about the intriguing event in last week's Hereford Times and confess, shamefacedly, that at first I thought it an April Fool's spoof. A couple of days before the conventioneers were due to arrive, in fact, I wandered into the Royal Oak with the same sense of foreboding that a building-site apprentice might have on being dispatched to buy a tin of tartan paint: reasonably certain that I had been duped but not quite certain enough not to ask.

Happily, the receptionist at the Royal Oak assured me that the Hereford Times story was entirely genuine, and that the Test Card Circle has indeed been taking over the hotel for one weekend a year since 1990. So, on Friday evening, I dropped by again and saw, gathered on the pavement outside the hotel, chatting animatedly and clutching pictures of test cards, a memorably motley group of people, one or two slightly hunch-backed and several slightly boss-eyed, with, as my wife's late grandmother used to put it, in the South Yorkshire vernacular, "one eye in t'pot; t'other up t'chimney".

I hope they will forgive me for that impolite observation; they were also engagingly warm and eager to share their passion with me. His enthusiasm endearingly unrestrained by the slightest suspicion that I might find such a level of devotion to the test card in any way weird, Malcolm O'Neill, the convention's organiser, carefully explained how excited he had been, in the early 1960s, to find that the music accompanying the BBC test card was not commercially available. "It was forbidden fruit, if you like," he said, adding that on Sunday 9 October 1969, the BBC2 tape was played, seemingly by accident, on BBC1. "There are quite a few mysteries," he said.

I told O'Neill that the only test card I could visualise was the one with the girl and her toy clown playing noughts and crosses. He smiled indulgently, as might a kindly art historian on learning that a rookie student could, of all Leonardo da Vinci's work, identify only the "Mona Lisa". That test card was last transmitted at 4-5am on a Saturday in October 2002, he said. The girl's name was Carol Hersee, and she was the daughter of George Hersee, a BBC sound-engineer. She is now in her mid-forties and, when last he heard, was a theatrical costumier on Miss Saigon. She has been invited to the Royal Oak as guest of honour at a TCC convention, but has declined. I can say with authority that she has missed a treat, as well as an education.

Green revolution

Since I came to live in the country, I have found myself in any number of situations previously unimaginable. Saying, "Sorry, darling," to a hen, on accidentally disturbing her mid-lay. Standing in a field with a quivering heap of frogspawn in my hand. And, last Friday, listing alarmingly in a Land Rover Discovery, half-way up a Welsh mountain, while entertaining the possibility that I might at that moment be getting close to the convergence of the cross-hairs of an angry farmer's rifle.

When I wrote several columns ago that I had been invited by my new friend James to go off-roading, I received a disapproving e-mail from a reader, who said that he felt betrayed by my willingness to join the hordes of waxed-jacketed "toffs churning up the countryside in their four-wheel drives".

But it was not off-roading; it was green-laning, which, apparently, is a different kettle of fish altogether and, in fact, is fiercely defended by green-laners as being very much to the benefit of the countryside. Moreover, James is not a toff; nor is Chris, his neighbour, who goes green-laning three or four times a week and knows the leafy back doubles of the Welsh Marches at least as well as any London cabbie knows the gyratory systems of south London.

I had never met Chris, but it's funny how quickly you get to know a guy when your head is resting against his shoulder at 45 degrees in a thicket. While doing something clever with the Discovery's two gearsticks, Chris explained what green-laning is all about. Most of the green lanes we would be negotiating, he said, were around 4,000 years old, ancient highways that would be impenetrable even by foot but for people such as him. And green-laning is ecologically sound: seeds are picked up in tyre treads and spread around.

Unfortunately, he added, green-laning is much misunderstood. He has been shot at and had rocks hurled through his car windows; and, indeed, as we reversed up a Radnorshire mudslide, a woman shot out of a nearby cottage and yelled something that I couldn't quite make out over the engine noise, though I'm almost certain it wasn't, "Welcome to Wales – come back any time!"

A gentle soul, yet possessed of an ayatollah-like zeal when it comes to green-laning, Chris sometimes stops in the face of such opposition and tries to proselytise. He says that he has about a 50 per cent conversion rate, that once he explains the historical and ecological value of what he does, people are often won over. All the same, if he'd managed to get a cup of tea out of that Welsh woman, I would have recommended him for a major diplomatic role in the post-conflict reconstruction of Iraq.

You know the drill

My dentist's surgery occupies a beautiful Georgian town house in Ludlow, and although I am no keener on going to the dentist's now than when I was seven – before my appointment the other day, I went to have a look at the misericords in the town's parish church, St Laurence's, just to spot a few faces glummer than my own – there is something soothing about staring up at an 18th-century ceiling rose and magnificent cornicing. All dental surgeries should have them.