The Special One
They say what goes around comes around.
It certainly did last night, as a couple of years after he was sacked by Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, Jose Mourinho returned to triumph. Not a bad result for a man, who used to be ridiculed as Booby Robson’s translator. Perhaps, he learned a lot from the master.
Of the four major clubs of the past few years in England, Chelsea and Liverpool are the ones that seem to be showing the strain. Could it be because they are the two who’ve tried to buy success more than Arsenal and Manchester United? Or could it be that Chelsea are the two clubs with smaller stadia and hence a reduced cash flow?
We’ve not seen the last of Chelsea this season, but I’d be putting my money elsewhere if I was a betting man.
Nowhere Boy
I went to see the film, Nowhere Boy last night. It is all about John Lennon growing up and was well worth seeing.
Whether Sam Taylor-Wood intended it I don’t know, but I found it an almost claustrophobic film as it was mainly set inside. Only in a few cases were Liverpool’s magnificent buildings and parks shown. Having been in Liverpool just a few years after the period of the film and visited several times lately, there are still a lot of places that have hardly changed since Lennon was growing up. I would have used these settings more.
But it is only a matter of personal taste and the fact that I knew Liverpool at that time and Taylor-Wood did not, as she is too young.
I wasn’t too sure where Lennon was actually brought up, but after looking it up, I found it was within walking distance of our first marital home at Rosehill Court in Woolton. Quarry Bank High School which gave the name to the Quarrymen, the forerunners of the Beatles, where he was educated is now Calderstones School. That wasn’t too far away either. But in those days of 1969, you knew the Beatles were good, but didn’t want to doorstep where they had lived.
I often think I owe a lot to Lennon, the Beatles and Liverpool. I wonder what would have happened to me, if I had gone to say Nottingham, Exeter, Southampton or even Cambridge Universities. I may not have acquired my robust attitude and could have wandered into research, which may have suited me, but then I don’t suffer fools gladly and there are many of them serving time in Universities waiting for their pension. I certainly wouldn’t have acquired my wife, who put up with me for over forty years.
I hope though that I wouldn’t have ended up a nowhere boy. But I know that I could have! Luckily I was rescued by Liverpool and my late wife.
Perhaps, I am frightened of ending up sad and lonely for the rest of my life.
Students will be Students
When I was at Liverpool University, I had a friend on my course called Alvin John Slasser, who was known as Shaun. He was an experienced climber and climbed everything in site, including the giant crane that was being used to build the Catholic Cathedral.
So when I heard on the news this morning that students had put Santa hats on Kings College chapel I was amused. It was just students following the tradition of Shaun and others. It would appear though that the college authorities are not amused.
The article in the Telegraph also notes this student prank.
In 1958 a group of Cambridge engineering students hoisted an Austin Seven onto the roof of the Senate House at night and left it balancing there.
A few years after this happened, I remember them showing how they did this on the legendary Tonight program with Cliff Michelmore. On the previous night they’d hoisted beams to make a crane and then the car with its back axle removed was lifted, followed by the axle.
I sometimes wonder what happened to the students who did that stunt.
I got a lot of that wrong, when I originally wrote it. The full tale is here.
Sadly, Shaun, my friend at Liverpool University died when abseiling down a rock face in Snowdonia.
Life can be cruel.
Brown Uses the D-Word
As I drove back home today, I was listening to Prudence’s speech to businessmen.
He then used the D-word – dynamism. I can remember Peter Ryrie using that many times as he tried to dominate student politics in the 1960s at Liverpool University.
I laughed, as we all used to mock Peter for the word.
Sadly though, I’ve found that Peter died in 2007.
Liverpool and Meccano
There are various events, cities, techniques, toys, people and just plain things that has shaped my life.
If I take events, there would be the first Sputnik, Sharpeville, the assassination of President Kennedy, England winning the World Cup in 1966, man landing on the moon for the first time, the Six Day War, the suicide of Jan Palach, the Falklands War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and many others. Perhaps one that will mean more to me in a few years time, was being in Trafalgar Square, when London won the Olympics for 2012.
I will be proud of the London Olympics because London is my city. I was born there and when I’m sad, lonely or just plain bored, I make to the most fabulous city in the world. The London Olympics may be a failure because of circumstances, good or bad, but London will do its best. And that will be better than most, as when you throw London into turmoil, Londoners respond in a unique way. Why unique? Because Londoners are the biggest mongrel race in the world and they can draw from experiences like no other.
I met my wife in Liverpool at the University.
For that and other reasons, to me Liverpool will always be my second city, just as it is the second city of the UK. Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham may make this claim, but they are lightweights compared to the city of the Beatles. I sometimes ponder how life would be different without the Beatles and it may be a bold claim to say that without them the UK might have been some insignificant island off mainland Europe. But those four did give England and Great Britain a new pride, that had been lacking since the end of the Second World War. I still play their songs virtually every day.
At one time my late wife shared a flat near the Meccano factory in Liverpool.
I had a very large Meccano set, which was very much part of my life until about sixteen when I sold it, because I needed the money. I’d while away the time in my bedroom, building all sorts of machines. Later when I worked for ICI, we’d use bits of Meccano to make instruments work. Do engineers still do that?
So it was with pride and a lot of sadness that I watched James May’s Toy Stories about Meccano. He built a Meccano bridge over the extension to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. I cried as it was set in my university, the university where I met my wife and was about my favourite toy.
Life is a powerful mixture of emotions.
Leader of the Pack
I had never heard of Ellie Greenwich, but I have heard many of her songs, like Leader of the Pack, Do Wah Diddy Diddy, Kentucky Woman, Chapel of Love and River Deep, Mountain High, to name just a few.
Sadly she has died of a heart attack.
Her songs though gave me a lot of pleasure.
I particularly remember seeing Manfred Mann singing Do Wah Diddy Diddy at Liverpool University.
Thanks for all the memories.
Status Quo at Newmarket
I went to Newmarket Races last night and after racing Status Quo performed.
Status Quo at Newmarket
They were very good. Strangely they are not a band that I’ve followed, which was probably because I was at Liverpool University in the 1960s and tended to follow the bands I’d seen there.
It was interesting to note that Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt got together in 1967. That means that they have been a partnership longer than I was married to my late wife, who I met coincidentally early in the same year.
It’s almost sad for me!
Celebrities
The case of Steven Gerrard is in all the newspapers at the moment. It raises a lot of issues, including the case of celebrities behaving properly.
After all, we’ve had a lot lately, who have got into trouble. Read something like Popbitch and you’ll get all the dirt on many who have overstepped the mark.
I go racing a lot, mainly at Newmarket. You see quite a few people there, who are in the news and they are rarely bothered and I’ve never seen anyone behaving less than impeccably. So perhaps, what happens occasionally and gets in the papers is just an aberration.
One tale I remember, is when we were flying to Greece I think and Susan Hampshire was on the plane. It must have been some time in the 1980s and the plane only had one class. She just said hello to everyone, signed a few autographs and just was extremely pleasant. We all left that plane, saying that she such a nice lady. I’ve had a soft spot for her ever since.
It must have been about 1973 or so, when I travelled to Middlesborough on a train. I had breakfast on the train and sat in a set of four seats in the dining car, with two gentlemen from Evans, who ran the shops for larger ladies, and their guest, Janet Webb. If you remember her from her closing the Morecambe and Wise Show, you will remember that she wasn’t a small lady. She entertained the whole carriage. What a trouper!
I also shared a similar four going to Liverpool on a train with two railway engineers and Virginia Wadeat about the same time. I think she was tired as she slept most of the way. Or was it that we talked about trains all the way up! If I remember, she got off at Crewe to take the train to the tournament at Hoylake. How lives have changed for tennis players since.
These are just three instances, where celebrities have enlightened the everyday lives of others. I could add more.
Is It Art?
There was a discussion as to whether some of the high-profile art in the UK recently, like Anthony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth, is actually art. Perhaps, it is, but perhaps it is not.
In the 1960s, the Engineering Department at Liverpool University bought a set of modern prints. Some wag put a beautifully typed and framed note beside one, which said “We would have liked to buy a painting by this artist, but unfortunately we could afford it. So he was gracious enough to sell us the rag on which he wiped his brushes.”
Seriously though, I went to the University recently to see the Stuart Sutcliffe retrospective. I don’t like modern art generally, but when it is good like some Warhol, I relate to it. Now, the Sutcliffe paintings showed a certain talent. I wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t died at 22.
How I Met My Wife
My wife and I were together for forty years before she died in 2007. I say together, as we were effectively living together for a year before we married in 1968.
How we met was unusual, but before I say how, it is worth adding a little bit of interesting history to this note. At the time, along with many of the other students at Liverpool University, I filled in the forms from Operation Match, which was one of the first computer dating agencies.
Two Harvard students — Jeff Tarr and Vaughan Morrill — came up with the idea for Operation Match, a computer dating service, in the mid-1960’s. But they had some help from a Cornell dropout named Douglas Ginsburg.
Did it work? No! I got some names, but I don’t think I ever even met any of them.
In my second year at the University, I shared one of the world’s worst flats with three other students in Princes Avenue in Liverpool 8. Upstairs lived Mike Davidson, who was the Entertainments Secretary of the Students Union. He was trying to get more students to go to Guild Ball and had the idea of running his own Operation Match.
When I heard of this, I asked if I could have first pick!
And that is how I met my wife.
Interestingly, Douglas Ginsburg seems to have dropped in and is now a senior judge in the United States.
The Anonymous Widower 