Yes, he would have been 80 on Friday. Where did the time go? It doesn't seem five minutes since I first heard the Beatles on Radio Luxembourg in late 1962. I can vividly remember the announcer saying - here they are John, Paul, Geo....and then being drowned out by hordes of screaming girls!
It is hard to believe that today would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday. Equally hard to believe that it is 40 years since he was murdered. And yet he still has a powerful, almost megnetic attraction to the point where the TV companies have devoted one channel exclusively to him and his music and probably stories both true and false about his life:
There are a lot of people who hate Lennon with a passion (see the reaction of left wing 'activists' to the song Revolution for example) and there a lot of people who 'worship' him, fans who often become besotted with everything about him and his music.
Both sides are wrong of course because the extreme reaction on both sides comes from those who have never met the man. You need to meet a person and spend time in their company to even begin to understand another person. Of the two opposing viewpoints, it is the besotted fans who present the more disturbing picture. It was a dedicated fan who murdered him and I have included below a video of Cesare 'Curt' Claudio, a fan who turned up on Lennon's doorstep hoping for who knows what but in reality he was unable to explain why he was there. Clearly a troubled young man but it illustrates the dark side of fame.
In time, all of the above will fade into the past but the music will endure and that is the important thing.
Cesare Curtis 'Curt' Claudio was a confused, vulnerable, shell-shocked Vietnam veteran (? - see link) who turned up on John's doorstep in Ascot in May 1971 and is featured in the 'Gimme Some Truth' documentary. He was convinced that John was sending him messages in his lyrics that were asking him personally to come and meet him. John and he spoke outside, and then John invited Claudio into the kitchen to have something to eat, after which he went on his way. http://www.meetthebeatlesforreal.com/2019/04/claudio.html
By way of conclusion it is worth watching this again.It is a brief interview from june 1968, recorded in the National Theatre in London. It was true then and is currently, in 2020, being shown still to be true, unfortunately.
When I left school I got a job ‘in the print’, a loose term for a job with a union card that meant that at a certain age I was privy to the best paid trade in the country. 'Trade' is a bit of a euphemism as anyone with a union card had the opportunity to work in Fleet Street having been given a permit, to join the extremely bloated workforce and do very little, sometimes nothing and earn in one night what many worked two weeks or more for. It couldn’t go on and the stranglehold the unions had over the printing presses was finally blunted and then to all intents expunged by first Eddie Shah and the Rupert Murdoch. I got out before the collapse as there was no future I could see and so it transpired.
A rare picture of the newspaper trains that left London for all points north to drop the daily papers at stations for the wholesalers to collect.
I mention that because during that period, and it was a fascinating one, I had access to all the national papers on a daily basis and many magazines as well. I became adept at scanning them - the Sun took all of fifteen minutes to actually read! But even the others I could absorb in double quick time.
The difference then was there was a distinct difference in the way the different titles came across with the news: investigative reporting was normal and apart from a couple of red tops who had tits at the top of the agenda, all had something to say on the matters of the day.
For me the ‘Thunderer’ was hard work to get through and I favoured the Telegraph as the go-to newspaper with the added attraction that it had the best sports reports of any paper by far. The broadsheets still had influential proprietors with famous family names going back decades and a newspaper was a valuable asset to own. Even the editors had status: many were household names, as were many columnists.
It has to be remembered that at that time, the early Sixties, the circulation of these news sheets was considerable, not quite the pre war numbers as television was beginning to eat into circulation numbers, but the Daily Mirror still had the proud boast of the highest daily readership in the world at 10 million emblazoned under its title. Those figures were the zenith and since then the slide has been continuous. London had then, it must be remembered, three evening papers: the Standard, News and Star; now there is only one and it is a free sheet. The evening papers started to run quite early in the day and had several editions with a stop press for the latest news and share prices.
Fleet Street at night when fully working was an amazing sight with the presses worth admission for a view on their own, and of course all the papers apart from a couple were located in the Street of Shame.
Interior of the Daily Express building in Fleet Street
A pre-war front page from the Daily Herald who along with Reynolds News, the News Chronicle and others have long since stopped publishing.
The Manchester building of the Daily Express, an even better exterior than the London one
All gone now and even the wonderful art deco Daily Express building serves another purpose; the digital age has destroyed that centre of the world of news.
The dead tree press still has a role to play but a much diminished one. If it were not for the digital age and the ability of computers to set out newspapers and the ability to use joint out of town printing works many would have gone to the wall before now. Some are on the edge anyway: the Guardian, which back in the day was a decent newspaper, is eating through its not inconsiderable reserves and asks for donations - that is not a long term model for survival; the Express, once a right of centre paper, is now owned by Mirror Group as consolidation was the only hope for survival; and so it goes on.
I stopped reading the Telegraph some years ago as they slowly but surely got rid of their writers and correspondents. The final nail in the coffin for me was when they were found out to have invented sports columnists and were using outside reports with fictitious names as the writers.
I occasionally get the Times, and even that one-time representative of all that was good about this country, a publication revered around the world, is a shadow of former times; the business section which is now half of the paper is more interesting than the news section.
Television has not escaped the turning to dross of things that were once good. I can openly say I remember the time when Channel 4 news was worth watching; now it is a platform for the sneering Jon Snow to castigate anyone and everything not of the Left.
Programs like Panorama were intelligent, informative and largely without bias; no more. We are inclined to read into the bias of the BBC more than we should but it is undoubtedly there and for the State broadcaster that is totally unacceptable in news reporting: the blanking of cultural issues (as they call them), the incessant reporting of any minor infringement of items, statements from the likes of Trump, as opposed to anything on the Left; the incessant war against Brexit... An independent source targeted the Today program in the six months following the Referendum and found that something like 80% of all the people they had on the program to discuss Brexit were 'remainers'; that again is simply not acceptable; imposing their views by the way they present them is simply not on, but what else do we have?
Well, the rise of Twitter was a salvation to a degree, but that and similar platforms have become a battle ground rather than a debating area. The split that now exists in our nation is magnified online, and further the people who run these online platforms are now themselves taking sides and banning people who have done very little wrong other than go against what seems to be the editorial line of the owners.
We see before us now the results of all this bias and selective reporting: a government that cannot put a foot right at the moment, and gives out conflicting data and directions, has hardly a question of note put to them. A decent press and media would have asked the obvious by now but no, they are as muddled as the government, and in the meantime, almost unnoticed by the majority, the country is going down the pan fast.
A good example was in a small piece at the back of the paper in the business section a few day ago: a think tank for financial ‘experts’ has suggested that negative interest rates could be a good thing. This is not the first time this has been voiced, but the bit underneath that suggests it would create a £25 billion black hole in pension funds should be a prominent article, as it affects so many with already plundered private pensions; but no, such details are to be, as Private Eye used to say (when that was worth reading) 'continued on page 94.'
As the late News of the World used say on its header, ’All human life is here.’ It was then; not so much today, only a very selected version.
Tatiana Kabanova is a singer and actress born in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy in 1957. Apart from that there is next to nothing about her on the internet. I have no idea who she is but she sounds like a reincanation of Edith Piaf.
The following information is a Google translation of part of the description beneath one of the videos:
"In 1993, Tatiana turns to the "golden fund" of chanson - works from the repertoire of A. Severny, V. Krestovsky, Br. Pearl. She records her first songs of this style with the orchestra at the Leningrad Documentary Film Studio. It was these recordings that were first presented on the “Night Taxi” program on Radio Chanson."
Here we are in Week 40, the first of the 2020/2021 winter flu season. After all we’ve been through so far, there are still revisionists downplaying the threat of coronavirus, so let’s review the situation.
The first UK cases where coronavirus was mentioned on the death certificate occurred in Week 11 (ending Friday, 13th March). This week’s data (as usual, a fortnight in arrears) bring us up to Week 38 (18 September).
In total, the excess of deaths from all causes over the previous 5-year average for the same period is 53,663 so far. Deaths where Covid-19 was referenced total 52,056 so apparently it was a factor (not the only one, but surely contributory) in 97% of the bulge. Maybe doctors don’t deliberately misdiagnose causes of death, after all.
Minimisers compare the scale of CV-19 deaths with the big killers: ischaemic heart disease, cancer and dementia/Alzheimer’s; but these are already included in the orange line above. A different yardstick might be UK civilian deaths in World War Two: 70,000 over six years then, versus 52,000 in only six months now, with indications of a second wave starting across Europe - cases rather than deaths, but we’ll soon see whether there is a significant uptick in mortality. Like influenza, with which it has similarities, Covid-19 may spread more easily in cooler, damper weather.
Can we agree that a) Covid is real, b) it is more contagious than flu and c) it is more lethal than flu? We are under attack, from germs rather than Germans this time. What are our options?
1. Do nothing
2. Lock down and close off the whole country
3. Work out a packet of measures to save lives while sustaining the economy as best we can
1. Some point to Sweden as an exemplar of splendid inaction, but they are comparing apples and oranges. Sweden has a population density of 59/square mile as opposed to the UK’s 725; and (I suggest) the cool Swedes are more cleanly, less back-slappy and not so rebellious against their authorities’ detailed guidelines (yes, they have them) even though they hide their heads in the sand on other issues: in Malmö, for example, I would be more worried about stray bullets.
Here in Britain, what would have been the result of standing back and letting the disease rip? We are developing an understanding of who is more vulnerable, and it’s not good news that 28.7% of us are clinically obese, and nearly 4 million are diabetic; as regards the age factor, we have some 1.8 million people aged 85 and over. Just how ruthless are we prepared to be – shall we simply cull the old, fat and sick? Maybe Monty Python was prescient (clip Bloggerbanned but use link!):
2. We can’t copy Tonga, either. Tonga declared a state of emergency on March 20th that will last until at least March next year; inbound international flights are banned to foreigners, and thousands of Tongans have been stranded abroad since the declaration, with the first repatriations starting only in August, from New Zealand. Consequently, to date, there have been no coronavirus cases in Tonga; this is a very good thing, since 69% of Tongans are obese and 18% diabetic – letting in the virus could lead to a lethal scouring like the flu-related ones we have long accepted (or ignored) in our British ‘care’ homes.
Inevitably, the lockout has a financial implication, but (e.g.) the money Pacific Islanders send home annually from seasonal work in Australia (A$8,000 each – around three years’ worth of on-island earnings) helps keep the pot boiling. As an aside, we need to look at the bigger picture of global relations: the Chinese are lending money around the world (Tonga asked them for debt restructuring in July) and the West should think about increasing foreign aid to Pacific nations in terms of enlightened self-interest.
However, the UK simply cannot follow Tonga’s suit: we are an open, trading nation that imports half our food. The virus has found out our economic vulnerability and, to quote Chinua Achebe in a different context, it ‘has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.’ It’s going to cost us to keep going.
The current emergency has highlighted once again the need to address the huge, arbitrary power of the office of the Prime Minister and the Privy Council (did Blair teach us nothing?) – otherwise all that Dunning’s 1780 motion to curtail the power of King George has achieved is to move tyranny down one step to the Executive, as Lord Cormack has recently observed.
There is certainly scope for revising our strategies; and especially the means by which they are enforced, as our editor (at The Conservative Woman) personally witnessed a few days ago in the bully-boy tactics of the police against middle-class softies. It’s not just the Germans who go crazy when given a uniform and powers – remember the special needs teacher Blair Peach’s death at the hands of the SPG? We don’t do fascism half as efficiently as our Continental cousins used to; we British are more amenable to being led than ordered about; we need persuasive leadership, and a vigilant and loyal Opposition; a Parliament, in fact.
For Something Happened, and may well happen again, and Something Must Be Done, but wisely, and with every effort to gain our voluntary support.
Watching yet again Alistair Sim’s wonderful version of Ebenezer Scrooge and his miserly callousness made me reflect on people I have known with tendencies to be of the 'short arms, deep pockets' variety.
I cannot give reasons for this what is a very apparent affliction in some people as I am not a psychiatrist, it is only that there is no apparent pattern in why people behave like that and we have all met them.
This is in no way a reflection on people who are down on their luck and have to reign in their spending to suit the occasion, we have mostly all had experience of that at some time in our lives; no. this is about those unexplained traits people show when it comes to actually parting with the green stuff or the ‘laughing lettuce’ as an old friend once called it.
Just sometimes you can see why previous experiences influence this reluctance to part with the aforesaid moolah: people brought up in poor households often find it difficult in later life to change when the circumstances they live under change for the good, it is as if it is engrained in them from those years of little to continue life in that vein even when there is no longer a need to do so.
But how does that explain the child, and I have a cousin who was and is exactly like this, who would have a bag of sweets in his pocket, leave the room to put one in his mouth and return, never ever offering anyone else one, something he has retained all his life despite being never anywhere near penury at any time, never a round of drinks, nothing but collecting items for his own presumed pleasure to be locked away somewhere; the vulture when a family member dies, I am sure we can all relate to those.
The there is the one in a group who never buys a round in the pub on a Sunday morning, or any other time come to that, who will as it approaches his turn find a timely excuse to leave or make a prolonged visit to the toilet, always long enough for everyone else to say sod it waiting and get another round; or the friend who would take a drink but not reciprocate, saying he only had one so was not buying a round as he doesn’t drink despite taking that first one purchased by someone else - you have to have some brass neck to do that but again I know someone who did exactly that and on more than one occasion.
Life would be extremely boring if we were all the same, it is the differences that make the world the interesting place it is, yet there is no doubt that some traits or more than a little puzzling and on occasions annoying to put it mildly.
The ones above all that interest me are the ones that have no real reason for this miserly conduct. I had a neighbour who was also a friend. He sold out a car retailing business after an offer he couldn’t refuse was made; until that time he spent money, had a Rolls Royce, liked clubbing in town, even sponsored a boxer and promoted him.
He wasn’t married but had a long time girlfriend who contracted cancer and died; before she died they married. At that time he lived in a big house with six acres of grounds and part was a mini industrial estate bringing in more income, so he was not what you call short of a bob or two, yet that moment apparently changed his whole view on life despite no obvious reason for the change.
He became obsessed with having what he called a 'result' with everything he bought, spent a lot of time polishing an old wedding car he used to hire out in the belief it was worth a lot more than it was (this from a successful car dealer), drove around a Ford Escort that had seen better days and took great delight in telling me where I could buy socks like his at only a pound for three pairs although that is exactly what they looked; he even put in a nonsense offer for my house when a sale fell through, saying he thought he was doing me a favour. He was totally obsessed with not spending money despite being a millionaire.
After remarrying he and his wife went on honeymoon. The house they were in when we were neighbours was up for sale and had been for some time because he insisted it was worth more than anyone who valued it, and had no viewers, but as luck would have it while away a buyer made an offer as it reminded them of the house they currently lived in and he would be near the football team he supported; my neighbour cut short his honeymoon to come back and seal the deal. There was no need but that instinct meant he couldn’t help himself; he has never changed, but why did he become like that in the first place?
The late J Paul Getty was renowned for his miserly stunts; that was not so much because he was a miser but rather a show of power over people, e.g. the pay phone in the hall for his guests at Sutton Place in Surrey. I also know for a fact that a typical stunt would be to arrange a business lunch, invite those guests who would inevitably be wanting some of his money for projects and then get up before the final dish and simply disappear, leaving the ‘guests to pay.’ Would any complain? Of course not! How do I know this? Simple: a friend at the time actually attended one of these lunches.
He is often slammed as being a miserly jerk, but that comes mainly from people who wanted something from him and didn’t get it, though in his latter days distinguishing life from art was not easy as reports of his appearance in crumpled suits and the rumours that he washed his own underwear started to filter through. Perhaps the life part took over from the acting; so many stories that have been embellished over the years make it difficult to sort the truth.
I also had a very rich client who shall remain nameless who started to serve half bottles of wine at dinners with business people in case consuming whole bottles would cloud his actions. Was that sensible or just mean? It’s a rarefied world there at the top; mind you it was Château Lafite - I saw the empties.
I now have another neighbour who openly admits he is tight; again his parents struggled when he was young and he blames this as the reason. In his case though it is like a dual personality disorder: he cannot say no to his family and even friends have been helped financially, yet he buys a £40k car after years of running around in bangers but gets the bus into town because he won't pay the multi-storey parking fees. His excuse is that he has a bus pass, but even when he does take the car in he stops short, parks in a side road and gets the bus the rest of the way.
Again, his lovely old house - it was the village pub - doesn't have a piece of furniture that was not picked up in sale or handed down from deceased family members; and new clothes? - don’t be silly. Amazing how someone can switch from philanthropy to refusing to part with money when buying for themselves; everything has to be a 'result' - where have I heard that before?
The wearing of the same old clothes is a recurring theme among the stingy it appears, as is the use of cheap supermarkets even if it means visiting several to get the whole shop and travelling miles to do it. If they tell me Aldi do a very cheap coq au vin but I have to travel 10 miles to get each way, it is not being thrifty, but that 'less' sign goes a long way to expunge any common sense.
In the same way, being shown a packet of white rolls for 45p that look like 45p rolls does not inspire me to make the trip: they could be like the ones below and probably are. We stayed in an hotel on Lake Como years ago where the rolls were indeed as pictured. We were friendly with a German couple who also had noticed these empty rolls and we waited for the surprised looks as new guests would put a knife through one for the first time to see their reaction. We never complained as the reactions were worth putting up with the air rolls during the stay; it should have been on Candid Camera.
The funniest story regarding miserly conduct was not about someone I knew but a neighbour of my oldest friend in Australia. The Australians use their sprinklers liberally in hot summers to save the grass from dying; in this particularly hot summer a neighbour told him he was not paying for the extra water, they have a fixed fee and you then pay above a certain usage, and tso he turned off the sprinklers. What then happened was that the ground shrank and the newly added extension to his bungalow started to part company with the house; as my friend said, you don’t turn off the sprinklers if you use them on a regular basis as those sort of problems are not unknown there, and he added ‘He always was a tight bastard’; Karma indeed.
We all have within us a bit of this reticence to spend. It shows in different way. It’s a bit like getting insurance quotes that leave out the extras you always need; one becomes very reluctant to pay for the extras and some people won't on principle. Naturally we look for the cheapest option only to discover it is inferior and then moan; we eschew certain brands and retailers believing the same (they are too expensive) then buy rubbish that has to be replaced far too early in its claimed life span and again moan about it. That is not meanness though, that is greed: 'something for nothing / BOGOF.'
Every now and again though you are surprised by the Scrooge effect. Some time ago, someone I knew well used to get by mistake two copies of a trade mag that interested me so he said he would mail the spare one to me, which he did. After several months it stopped arriving; when I spoke to him again I asked what had happened. He replied, 'I used to write your name over mine [I hadn’t noticed] and reposted it, they must have noticed and stopped sending the mag,' and then he said he wasn’t going to put a stamp on it - this from someone in business I spent thousands with. Sometimes these tight bastards can’t help themselves.
Still Christmas is coming, with the usual suspects who have declared they won't be sending cards any more and give to charity instead: a lie, of course, because they are too mean to send a card once a year. Now they will now be getting the same treatment from me after years of resisting the temptation to copy them: we can all be Scrooges when we want to.
The Wikipedia entry for 'Girl Power' asserts that it began in the 1990s and is associated with female vocal groups of that decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_power
Sorry to disappoint you, editors and compilers at Wiki, but the golden age of musical girl power was long before that: The 1950s and the 1960s were undoubtedly the high point of popular music's 'girl groups' with more than a few solo artists added for good measure.
Keep the NT but abolish the finger-wagging rubbish. I offer a list below for you to print out and keep, either to tick off your visits or as a hit list for arson, vandalism etc.
