(Written to mark International Stuttering Awareness Day – October 22 Do you stammer? If you do, you’re among one per cent of the world’s population, and Tuesday is your big day. Because October 22 is International Stuttering Awareness Day – to give its’ American title. And whether we describe ourselves as stammerers or stutterers, having… Continue reading…
My Cure For Stammering
My Cure For Stammering International Stuttering Awareness Day (October 22) Ray Connolly Do you stammer? If you do, you’re among one per cent of the world’s population, and Tuesday is your big day. Because October 22 is International Stuttering Awareness Day – to give its’ American title. And whether we describe ourselves as stammerers or… Continue reading…
A piano playing singer in a hospital…
As they say, he had me at Wichita Lineman. With an hour to kill I sat and listened as a pianist, who could sing, entertained in the reception area of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital with songs by Jimmy Webb, Lennon and McCartney, Fats Domino, Stevie Wonder, Queen and many others. He was brilliant, a… Continue reading…
The Vinyl Countdown
Daily Express 20.8.2024 The trouble with technology is that our present so quickly swallows our past. I didn’t mind so much when digital photography made our family photograph albums look like medieval relics, because we could always copy our old pictures and leave them to our descendants. But albums? That’s different. That really is personal.… Continue reading…
The Making of That’ll Be the Day and Stardust – Daily Mail, 28.2.23
No-one sets out to write a film that half a century later is considered a cult movie. But I did, by accident, when, in 1972, I wrote a film called That’ll Be The Day. Then I watched it go from being a story about a sixth form boy, his first sex in a holiday camp,… Continue reading…
Devoted – BBC Radio 4 (23.3.21)
Devoted Writer Ray Connolly spent six months in hospital fighting Covid 19. This is the story of how he survived. Starring Philip Jackson and Alison Steadman. Continue reading…
A Second Chance – The Moment That Changed My Life (an edited version of this article appeared in The Guardian – November 17, 2021)
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…
John, Me and the Lancashire Treasure (Sunday Times, April 1980)
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…
John, Me and the Lancashire Treasure (Sunday Times, April 1980) From Born At The Right Time by Ray Connolly
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…
My Back Pages (An edited version of this article appeared in The Oldie, December. 2021)
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…
