A second chance – that’s what I was being given when, having skirted death during that first round of Covid, I left hospital just over a year ago. I was, I was told, only half way there. It would take twelve more months before my body got back to near where it had been before… Continue reading…
I learned the real meaning of gold fever when I was 13 – although in my case the fever was silver and came in the shape of 33 Roman coins dug out of the bed of a small stream on a West Lancashire farm. A chance remark by a friend of my sister that a hoard… Continue reading…
I learned the real meaning of gold fever when I was 13 – although in my case the fever was silver and came in the shape of 33 Roman coins dug out of the bed of a small stream on a West Lancashire farm. A chance remark by a friend of my sister’s about a hoard of… Continue reading…
We got conned a couple of weeks ago – as, according to Action Fraud, were 504,489 other people during the past 13 months. That’s right. Nearly half a million people in the UK have had money stolen from them in little over a year by gangs of fraudsters – to the tune of £1.26 billion… Continue reading…
The Beatles were hardly a happy band of musical brothers when they assembled before film cameras shortly after ten in Twickenham Film Studios on the morning of January 2, 1969. It was too early in the day for John and George, too cold as well, and it was only ten weeks since they’d finished their… Continue reading…
When the Everly Brothers had their first hits in the late 50s they were both barely more than boys, and the sound of those two late adolescents harmonising about sorrow, pain and the hurts of teenage love, was imprinted on the memories of a generation. So when I finally met them after a London concert I… Continue reading…
They looked like a couple of teenage Mississippi riverboat gamblers, thin as blades with their white shirts, black waistcoats and luxuriant hair. But when they picked up those black guitars, stood head to head close to the microphone and sang, a generation of budding schoolboy musicians pricked up its collective ears and listened. They were… Continue reading…
If John Lennon hadn’t become a rock star he might instead have made a very good stand-up comic. Get him talking and off he would go into a funny, self-knocking soliloquy, in which he was often the butt of his own jokes. ‘I’m either a performing flea or a crutch for the world’s social lepers,’… Continue reading…
What Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Lord Hailsham, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon, Roger Vadim, Michael Caine, Leonard Cheshire, Paul Raymond, Eric Morecambe, Mick Jagger, Terry Wogan, Elvis Presley, Dennis Hopper, David Attenborough, Tony Benn, Charlie Watts, Enoch Powell, Marc Bolan and Jimmy Savile (and many more) told me… There are many good and honourable reasons for… Continue reading…
