The other day I was waiting for a pizza in one of those places that blur into those other places where you wait for pizzas when a scrawny man with dubious hair almost pushed me across the well-trodden floor and started yelling at the girl behind the counter.
"I ordered sausage on this pizza. Can't you see there's no sausage?"
He pulled savagely at the box, almost sending the pizza flying to the floor.
The girl made the mistake of telling him she thought she had just seen a piece of sausage.
The man pulled himself up by his narrow shoulders and let her have it with both barrels, figuratively speaking. The girl hastily told him she would order another.
The man was sighing and muttering. "And how long is that going to take?"
The girl disappeared from sight at which point the man started pulling out his receipt and muttering to a bedraggled woman by his side that he'd been ripped off and would never come to this f... place again.
The exchange reminded me of the fact America seems to be rather angry right now for no real reason. Disgruntled workers shoot up their offices, people occupy federal buildings and Uber drivers commit mass murder in between picking up fares.
The great news is we finally have something we can do about it. There's a guy with a great shot at being President who can sort out all of these problems with a few swift punches to the face. Or a great big wall. It's quite awesome really. JFK taught us it helped to be handsome to be President, Reagan to be charming and Barack Obama to be an inspirational speaker. In contrast, Donald Trump looks like an oversized duck fresh out of a nuclear reactor and isn't so subtle about wanting to up shred the Constitution.
When Trump becomes President, we won't just be able to get angry with the girl in the nameless pizza place. We'll have the right to punch her in the face, and probably get a commendation if she's Islamic or Mexican along with a luxury waterboarding break at Trump Towers. Way to go America.
If like me you recall wedding days with a mixture of disbelief and affirmation that this was indeed the first step on a very slippery slope filled with arguments about unwashed dishes, you might not want to look too closely at the following picture.
The year is 2016 and the wedding took place in the Syrian city of Homs. Four long years ago in February 2012, the Syrian army surrounded and laid siege to Homs. trapping 3,000 civilians and 4,000 rebels inside. Homs has been an urban wasteland for four years. This is an image of Homs before the civil war set against a contemporary one.
It's hard to comprehend the scale of horror that is modern-day Syria. Suffice to say what appeared to be a popular uprising against the dictator Assad, quickly became the most terrible war of the millennium.
The most troubling aspect of this war is there is no silver lining. Back in 1939 at least it was easy to separate the good guys from the bad guys. Although war brutalizes all round, you don't need to be a history buff to realize the regime that tried to wipe a race off the face of the earth was clearly on the dark side.
In Syria, it's hard to draw any lines. The West initially supported a rag tag of rebels, some of them too closely affiliated to Al Quaeda for comfort. Then part of the rebellion morphed into the evil that is ISIS. Meanwhile, the Assad regime has continued to kill and torture and drop chemical weapons on its own people. Today with the support of the Russians, there's some kind of bloody endgame in sight, as the Assad regime looks poised to capture what's left of Aleppo. Our Western ideals seem terribly inadequate as the dictator reasserts his power. And the scary thing is it's not the worst possible outcome. The Syrian conflict has again highlighted the deadly schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims - represented collectively by America's favorite Middle Eastern country Saudi Arabia and Iran, two regimes that arbitrarily execute their citizens and impose a wide range of Medieval punishments. In many ways little has changed since the brutal Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s that left about 1.5 million people dead in a World War One style stalemate.
The brutality of the war in Syria has reminded us that we need every 'feelgood' Kodak moment we can find. The 21st Century doesn't feel like a place for diplomacy. Right now Vladimir Putin is 3-0 up against Obama and intolerance is on the march. We need all the love we can find; even in the most inhospitable of places.
Chain restaurants more than anything else, characterize the American experience for me. That sinking feeling of being hungry after a long road trip and pulling off the Interstate only to find the sole place open is some nasty Applebee's that smells of child vomit is a curiously American thing.
You quickly learn the chains that are safe and the ones that are no go zones. Panera Bread and Subway, for example, can be fine and even healthy. Chick Fil A is probably not so healthy but at least it doesn't feel like walking into a the set of Fort Apache, The Bronx.. Hardees in the bad side of town, most Burger Kings and many KFC's are the wrong side of ick. I would add Waffle House to this list, having scrupulously made sure to never venture into one for nine years. I finally relented last year but am placing Waffle House again on the no-go list.
This is partly due to the appearance of a naked woman in a Waffle House near Atlanta. You might think this would be a reason to lump waffle house in the Penera Bread category. If so you might not have seen the mugshot.
Jennifer Mary Nicholson, 37, of Marietta, is reported to have stripped off naked, thrown plates around and punched a woman in the face, breaking her nose, at the Waffle House. Her mugshot looks a bit more Jack Nicholson in The Shining than anything else.
This story emerged just days after another strange tale at a Waffle House. Two Waffle House employees in Arkansas had been using cooking utensils to style their hair - as one does - and even dipping hair in boiling water. One customer complained after consuming a particularly hairy waffle. All credit goes to the alert customer who noticed the difference in Arkansas.
In New Mexico, a male customer became so angry when his server told him the restaurant's pies were not available because they were frozen, he pulled a knife on her. Fast food rage is nothing new as anyone familiar with the infamous McNuggets freak out in Ohio by a woman who was denied McNuggets will realize. Here's a good reason not to feed your kids with McNuggets folks...this woman is marginally more nuts than anyone I have dated.
Clearly there is something in those cardboardy pieces of meat reclaimed from old chicken bones that causes freakery. In Florida, a woman dialled 911 three times when McDonalds ran out of chicken nuggets.
Meanwhile, back at Waffle House, management in North Carolina made themselves popular in the news by denying a waitress a $1,000 tip she was given.
All of this makes for a good argument to re-familiarize ourselves with our stoves really...
I'm rather annoyed, not to mention saddened, that cancer has claimed the life of David Bowie. Cancer is an everyday killer but David Bowie was extraordinary. Losing David Bowie is bad enough but to cancer - really. He could at least have gone in a befitting way, lie falling to earth from a space station, or dying in grand rock n' roll fashion.
As Bowie was breathing his last I was having a recurring convo with the significant other about how we are all going to die of cancer due to man's wanton destruction of the earth. I have tried to disagree but I'm starting to get depressed about it now.
Almost every week someone from my formative years passes away but I certainly wasn't ready for Bowie and, judging by the outpouring of grief on Facebook, nobody else was either.
During my somewhat angst-ridden teen years, Bowie was a constant, albeit ever-changing presence that reminded us we could be a hero just for one day and if we didn't like our personality we could change it up. Or at least do something really weird with our hair. And so it proved that day when the neighborhood bully - ominously called Smith - came round to smack up some of my friends. With the soundtrack of Bowie's Scary Monsters ringing in my ears, I stepped onto my neighbor's lawn and found a new strength that allowed me to catch him with a right hook to his jaw that led him to beat a rereat. Bowie saved me from the everyday grind, from the Smith and the Joneses - all rather ironic as he was born David Jones.
All of this reminds me of the obscure movie Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence in which Bowie is a soldier in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp. He is haunted by his fatal failure to stand up to the bullying of his kid brother, with fatal consequences, and decides to make a stand against the Japanese guards. Bowie is left to die in a pit in the soaring sun. It's great family viewing for a Sunday afternoon.
As we get older, we change and so too did Bowie. The androgynous Ziggy Stardust character of the past - that reminds me a bit of scary aunts from my childhood - was cast aside and in the 1980s, Bowie because a slick stylish icon with blond hair, that was representative of the rampant consumerism of the decade. Later he became one of the first artists to embrace the Internet.
In his last incarnation as Lazarus, Bowie seems to be writing his own epitaph and singing and making a video of his demise. His life is as powerful a chronicle of the human condition in its own way as Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man. In an age of intolerance and ISIS, Bowie is a reminder that we can be who we want to be.
In the end Bowie remained an enigma, which is more than we can say about the ever growing scourge of cancer. We are not all doomed, but sometimes we can feel that way. A survey out last month, found cancer rates were under control in the western world but rising in the developing world as people afford more cars and cigarettes. The incidence of cancer is predicted to rise 57 percent in the next 20 years, although one reason for this is that more people will be living longer, long enough to contract cancer in their golden years, an era Bowie never made it to sadly.
So let's breathe a big sigh of relief now that the most overrated night of the year, New Year's Eve, is over.
I can't remember when I first felt the pressure to have fun on New Year's Eve, but I think it was at an early age. We were at my gran's house in Scotland and there was an odd smell of whisky pervading the place not to mention laughter and party voices. This felt all wrong - my folks didn't do parties but if you are in Scotland there's a real pressure to party. We were shooed back into our rooms and from an early age, I recall the feeling of missing out on something.
The reason Scotland is the New Year's Eve capital of the world dates back more than 400 years. The Protestant Reformation from the end of the 17th Century cast Christmas as Popish and instead encouraged parties on New Year's Eve with its tradition of Pagan Hogmanay celebrations.
There were some traditions on New Year's Eve such as cleaning the house and sorting out your debts that - let's face it - don't sound lie a shovel load of fun, There's also a Scottish traditional called "first footing" in which the first foot in the door of your house in the New Year should be male and dark. This was a throwback to the days of the Vikings when blond strangers meant trouble - and more specifically raping family members and pillaging. As such, you were meant to bring black gifts such as coal, black bun and Donald Trump's heart, although whisky is more regularly brought these days.
A lot of dark, cold northern places have some interesting ceremonies such as rolling barrels of tar and throwing torches which sound rather more interesting to check out than what New Year's Eve has become for the rest of the world.
When I was a teenager, the pressure to have fun on New Year's Eve grew exponentially. We would wander the bleak streets of suburban Gloucester looking for parties to be thrown out of. We were an odd group of comprehensive school misfits, but probably not much weirder and more acne ridden than most of the other teens who wandered the streets on New Year's Eve looking for action. On occasions, we would take the bus to the city center where the pubs were busting at their seams, and the streets were full of people fighting or urinating against walls. Brits don't need an excuse to get drunk, so when you give them one, the results can be truly frightening. New Year's Eve also conferred on adolescents the pressure to end up in a drunken embrace with members of the opposite sex.
This New Year's Eve a photograph taken in Manchester went viral when its pseudo-likeness to a classical painting was remarked on.
On one particularly bleak New Year's Eve, I found myself at a party in a draughty bowling alley. There was very little to do other than tonsil familiarization with a girl called Lynne for the best part of two hours. We later arranged a date that was a walk around her high school. Without the help of super strength lager, we were hapless. We said three words to each other and never saw each other again.
Perhaps I had one fun New Year's Eve, but I am not sure. The New Year's Eve in Edinburgh was something to boast about because it was Edinburgh but it involved freezing temperatures and beer being thrown on my head as well as waking up on someone's floor at 5 a.m.
There was another New Year's Eve stranded at a party in London with a former partner who went off the rails and was yelling at nonexistent taxi drivers. There was the Millennium at the Millennium Dome party in London which was something else to boast about, even if the champagne ran out too early and we were left stranded at a railway station waiting for trains that never came. Typically, New Years ends up resembling some refugee crisis not long after the countdown.
My experience of New Year's Eve in America has been something a bit less hardcore and dangerous than in England, but there is a real obsession with dropping things - be it glittery balls, giant crab pots or whatever. It's a rather inadequate way to end a year because these things aren't even dropped properly. If you knew a giant, steel ball was going to be dropped into a crowd, at least, it would engender some excitement. Instead, these objects are gently lowered by a crane. Perhaps being gently let down is a good metaphor for the year ahead.
Don't get me wrong - New Year's Eve last night in Virginia Beach wasn't the worst one I have had. It wasn't cold or wet, and the music and fireworks were fine. It was better than some of those New Years when I have just gone meekly to bed at 10, not even staying up to watch the lameness that is New Year's Eve TV.
And the worst New Year's I have had? I have racked my brains back through the catalogue of domestic disputes, nonexistent taxis, packed pubs and restaurants and boorish revellers and came up with the New Year's Eve when I was working on the cops beat of a newspaper in Hampton Roads. I had already checked out a couple of shooting scenes where overambitious revelers in the hood 'accidentally' shot neighbors.
Then I heard about a serious accident on the scanner. I went out to the side of the road and waited behind the incident tape and the mangled wreckage to watch a body being brought out and put down on the highway with a blanket over it. After what seemed like an age at the cold margins of the highway, the police press officer came over to me to give me an incident report. Suddenly fireworks went off and we heard the strains of Auld Lang Syne from a house across the six-lane wasteland of concrete, the shuttered up park and the mass of skeletal power lines. "Happy New Year," we said to each other weakly before I jotted down the details of the deceased.
The need for a happy place is probably underestimated in modern society where we are always on the go. Psychologist Dave would highly recommend you take the time to ask yourself where is your happy place. Go ahead and write it down on a piece of paper. If you can't think of a place go for a long walk. There's probably a reason why I'm not a psychologist.
My son's happy place is clearly being on his new Christmas bike. I'm not sure if it's my happy place as he's now bugging me to go out on it every five minutes. Of course, this is where adults are a lot more complex than kids. If he told me he wasn't interested in it, it would get me down but it's also a drag to trail him around the apartment complex 10 times a day, making sure he doesn't crash and burn into parked cars.
Maybe a happy place should be a physical place. Think of that place where you could sit still and be at peace with the world. I recall a villa in Portugal where I could sit on the patio and watch the clouds moving fast over the vineyards. There were white church towers in the distance and the sounds of bells tinkling across the fields. Or there was the sun playing on the roofs of the shining cupola on the church in Positano on the Amalfi Coast. Sadly these are not places we can go back to regularly. In recent months, Newport News Park has been my happy place in that it has been a small slice of wilderness in which I can wander aimlessly shaking my head slowly at the antics of people who believe petty victories are a substitute for life.
I have pulled off the road at all times of the day to walk the trails, sometimes with S but usually alone. I have looked over the marshes as the sun goes down over the reeds and early in the morning. I have walked through the fortifications of the Battle of Lee's Mill where Northern and Southern lives were lost for little gain on April 16, 1862. Even in happy places you can see reminders of the futility of hate. The people who I see are usually in couples or there are families with small kids poking around in the undergrowth. A few decades ago I would have felt self-conscious being alone but those days are long gone. Finding a happy place is all about finding a place where you can be happy in your own skin. We don't always need props. Nature can provide them. Of course, there are other happy places which are not necessarily so beneficial. To name but a few.
1 Cystal meth;
2 Fortified wine;
3 An obsession with Christmas tree ornaments;
4 Listening to Justin Bieber;
5 Believing Donald Trump is the savior of the world.
I was interested to read an article in The Washington Post about how the Elf on the Shelf is really preparing your kids for life in a police state.
At least that's the view of Laura Pinto, a digital technology professor. The article, I'm sure has provoked much ridicule. Who could possibly think the cherubic, rosy-cheeked Elf who shows up in play rooms about now, could be preparing our kids for life as future Edward Snowdens?
Well me for one. Back in the days of happy familydom (cue coughing fit) we enlisted the help of an elf on the shelf, called Stuey, to ensure the kids behaved in the run-up to Christmas. Every time they stepped out of line, we warned them Stuey would rat them to Santa. The news would hit the production line at 1 North Pole and it would shudder to a halt. Santa's permi-frost smile would become a grimace Bundy would be proud of and and Stuey's intelligence would result in the kids being allocated a bucket load of reindeer poo in their stockings.
Make no mistake; Stuey was hardcore. He had an unnerving habit of showing up in the most disconcerting of places, like showers and above the cooker, a blue flame threatening to ignite his rear quarters. The kids would wail at the very sight of Stuey and what his silent and sinister intelligence could mean. He was even equipped with a pencil and an incident report sheet. We thought the Tazer might be going bit far.
To ensure maximum effect, Stuey's entrance was set to the strains of I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me by Rockwell.
Stuey was all watching and all seeing, like the NSA with metal testicles on the back of its truck, a long time before Pinto started warning of the evils of the Elf.
In a recent article she wrote: "It sounds humorous, but hem in their home, it normalizes the idea of surveillance and in the future restrictions on our privacy may be more easily accepted."
You bet. In fact Stuey was so effective we decided not to retire him at Christmas. He would make sudden and dramatic 'guest appearances' throughout the year at times of maximum misbehavior, his elusive smile a thin veneer behind which hatred simmers. To add maximum effect, we'd tell the kids Stuey had been fired by Santa and had all of the passive aggression of a spurned employee.
I'm sorry to say at some point Zara read my previous blog about Stuey and thus discovered he did not move around on his own but required some parental assistance, all of which undermined his power to intimidate. Oh well - Happy Christmas and all that...
You don't forget the first time you see Paris, nor the small thrill of excitement you feel. In my case, it could have been the cold. I had taken an overnight ferry and a slow train in the early hours. I was bleary eyes. Now I was shuttling through the endless periphery of the great city at 6 a.m. watching a pale and cold sunlight rise on the pale blue apartments with their shutters.
Soon we were hanging out at the Gare Montparnasse trying to get to grips with the basics of ordering a coffee under the withering gaze of a waitress who looked like a model and had all the haughtiness of someone who dealt with a long series of brain dead British backpackers all day. In Paris, even the rail stations are architectural wonders but little prepared us for the grandness of the buildings that rose up around us. In Paris, everything appears to be laid out with a view to its composition. Buildings, squares and bridges are carefully laid out to be pleasing from every angle. Even the trees seem to have been designed to throw an impressionistic light on the pavements, as if dappled by the brush of Monet.
Paris is known as the City of Light or "La Ville-Lumierebecause it was one of the first city in the world to pioneer street lighting. Today it uses lights to a dramatic effect. At night the bridges over the Seine glow with pale white light and the great palaces and museums are lit up like wedding cakes. The chill washes over you when you stand on the beautiful Pont Alexandre III and look at the gold dome of the Invalides lit up against the purple sky. You realize whey Adele filmed that video here.
Paris is also known as the City of Love perhaps due to the seductive cityscape, the legacy of decades of movies and the tacky love locks that were out on the Pont des Arts before they collapsed a section of it. In reality, about 51 percent of Parisians are single.
Nevertheless, there is something seductive about Paris. On my first trip, I slipped out of the cheap lodgings early in the morning and immersed myself amid the blooms and shady fountains of the Jardin du Luxembourg. It remains one of my favorite places.
Later that night we met my French friend Wilfy. He took us to the spot below a wall by the Seine where he told us he took his love interests. On the other side of the dark, lapping water the high vault of the Musee D'Orsay glowed against the evening sky. I asked about Bridgette and if she was going to show up. I had met her in England, and she had told me in a nonchalant way we might meet up Paris. Wilfy shrugged, and Bridgette never showed. Memories came flooding back of Natalie, my first ever love interest from the French exchange trip, and how it had disintegrated under the withering glare of her parents in her pool room. Later that night Wilfy took us around Paris in his car. He took us to some hidden places, palaces that slept in the moonlight, with courtyards filled with checkerboard works of art.
The next two times I returned to the City of Love I was with love interests, albeit not French, Still the city beguiled me with its sudden and unexpected vistas. The feeling of being in the big enamel bath tub in the chilly hotel room watching the Eifel Tower far off and flickering out the frosted window, still lives with me.
It was easy to become seduced by the City of Love, unless you ended up in one of the overpriced pavement cafes or experienced the notorious stand-up toilets. It was easy to block out the undercurrents of hate.
The appalling terrorist attacks of Friday 13, have made it a lot harder to filter out the hate. From now on Paris will always be mired in sadness and images of bloodshed. What those who fell for the marketing myth might not realize is the fact it has often been thus.
In the 1790s, the inhabitants of London looked east in horror at the events in Paris. The revolution in 1789 had overthrown the regime of King Louis XVI but it had initially been about the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the lofty ideals that were first developed by the writers of the US Constitution. By 1793, the revolution had turned in on itself and the king was executed. From 1793 to 1974 the Reign of Terror ruled Paris and as many as 40,000 people were guillotined in the streets. Around this time the brutal journalist Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed to death by Charlotte Corday, a young woman avenging the death of a friend. The painting The Death of Marat became an icon of the revolution.
The chaos on the streets of Paris only ended when an ambitious young officer called Napoleon Bonaparte took over the country and involved it in a series of wars and empire building. Napoleon experienced astounding success, establishing France as the most powerful nation on earth, before his empire was eventually dismantled. The world's first truck bomb was invented on the streets of Paris in 1800 in an attempt to assassinate Napoleon.
The monarchy was restored, but the great underclass of Paris, known as the Sans-Culottes set up, the barricades again in 1830 and 1848, overthrowing the monarchy. In 1871 after France's devastating defeat by the Prussians, the barricades went up again, and a radical government called the Commune took over Paris. It was eventually crushed by the French army in a series of bloody days that left as many as 10,000 Communards dead.
Urban design in Paris helped push the Great Unwashed to the sidelines. The beautiful boulevards we see today were a conscious attempt to clear out the slums of Paris and to remove the revolutionaries. Still they festered, out of sight but not always out of mind, in concrete satellite towns.
Although Paris stabilized after 1871, the order threatened to disintegrate again during World War One. With the German front line not far from Paris, massive missiles would hammer into the city on a regular basis, killing people.
In 1940, the Germans succeeded where they failed in 1914 and occupied Paris. Inevitably there was more bloodshed and sorrow as Jews were rounded up to be taken to the extermination camps. In the post-war era, France became embroiled in a bloody war in Algeria that saw frequent bombings in the capital. During one fateful day in 1961 as many as 200 Algerians were rounded up by the security forces in the city and murdered by its famous landmarks.
In 1968, students occupied the Sorbonne and rioted on the streets of Paris. A night of running battles with police left 300 injured, although there were no deaths. In 2005, the city was again the scene of riots, this time by disaffected Muslims.
Notwithstanding the violent history of the City of Love, 2015 will go down as one of the darkest years in the history of Paris, a year when new and more ruthless methods of terrorism were brought to bear. But while the horrors may seem to seem like new ground to us, it's easy to forget that more than 70 years ago millions of people in Europe were being shipped to camps for mass slaughter and thousands were dying each day on the front line. We forget the human capacity to hate at our peril.
James Bond is an odd British institution which, like the Queen, seems to have been knocking around forever.
Growing up, we were exposed to Bond in the most pervasive of ways. Goldfinger always seemed to be on the tele in the 1970s, the seductive voice of Sean Connery mixing up a powerful cocktail with the deep strains of Shirley Bassey.
Daniel Craig as Bond
Then Roger Moore came along. My parents made disparaging comparisons with the great Sean and the plots became as flimsy as Bond's one liners which still worked for him on getting women into bed.
James Bond was an odd concept. He was a spy who killed lots of people in a non-gruesome way. He was a Brit who was clinical and ruthless in what he did, a particularly un-British characteristic in itself.
It's odd to find Bond still making headlines in a very different era, but you have to wonder for how much longer. Daniel Craig is arguably the most effective Bond since Connery but he's admitted to being bored with the role. While Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace and Skyfall were critically acclaimed, the new offering Spectre is described as a bit of a dog's dinner, even if it's served from a classy plate.
Connery was a hard act to follow
Although it may be unpatriotic to say so, Bond movies have always left me a bit cold, although I liked to watch some of the exotic locations. However, the fast cars and the death-defying antics, always seemed to unreal and formulaic to me and there never seemed to be any reason why Bond was doing what he was doing apart from giving movie goers an adrenalin rush. Other action franchises such as Mission Impossible seemed to do it better. In his recent incarnation, Craig has been given more of a past and themes have been carrie across the episodes. It may not be enough to save James Bond, although I have been proved wrong before, recalling how Doctor Who became mired in low budget anonymity amidst ropey doctors like Colin Baker in the 1990s, only to gain a new lease of life in the modern era.
Bond has never been as quirky and imaginative as the Doctor, which gives him less room to get out of a tight spot in the modern era of reinvented superheroes. Nor can he fall back on the work of Ian Fleming which was exhausted rather a long time ago. The other problem is Craig will be a hard act to follow when he decides to do some real acting again, You have to wonder if it's time to give the character a golden gun to the head.
Pointless Bond Trivia
James Bond was the name of the author of a book called Birds of the West Indies. Fleming was rather taken with it as he was a keen ornithologist (otherwise known as twitcher). He thought James Bond would be a great short and unromantic name for a spy. Of course it was rather act as Bond certainly has a thing for the birds.
When I heard Mark was dead it was hard not to think of the words of Auden.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good. Of course, these days we don't learn about deaths from death notices or from conversations with friends but from Facebook. In his most recent incarnation, Mark was a fellow blogger but we went back a lot further than that.
Skopelos
Back in 1990 when I was an idealistic young reporter I was instructed I would be sent to work in the North Devon office, the equivalent of a posting to Siberia. All North Devon comprised of was open fields, small market towns and tumbled cliffs and, of course, Mark Clough - the bureau chief - who was known as The Rock of North Devon due to his longevity.
I found Mark to be initially a dour individual, a big man with a beard and a sardonic sense of humor. Every lunchtime involved large amounts of Bass down the local bar The Corner House. I quickly warmed to Mark who always had a witty anecdote for any occasion and an approach to life that was at odds with the anal people on the newsdesk. I recall one election night when we casually filed our results after getting a drink at the bar. We returned to the office to find the answer phones jammed with angry messages from the newsdesk demanding to know our whereabouts. Mark shrugged it off. I admired his recklessness of spirit.
Although Mark was good company he could be dour. One afternoon he informed me he had been in North Devon for 10 years as he gazed out over the same muddy river about some aluminium shed roofs. He would routinely mutter the words "I can't go on," at about 4 p.m., with a twinkle in his eye that told me his depression was part theatrical. Mark had lived in a picturesque village called Weir Gifford which we nicknamed Weird Gifford because behind the picture postcard image, it was pure poison. When Mark had tried to open up a home for people with mental disabilities in his house, he was met with diatribe of hate from the village. He eventually opened the home and came into work one day with his head in his hands. One of his residents had gone 'walkabout' around the village wearing just a string vest. He eventually left Weir Gifford and moved to Bideford.
When I left North Devon, Mark gave me a lavish send off. He had suffered my idealistic enthusiasm and cub reporter mistakes with good grace and we remained good friends. Looking back I wish I had made a greater effort. He came to my wedding - my first one at least. Mark had the kind of larger than life, reassuring jocular presence, backed by a big heart, that would make you feel better about yourself.
Life took me different places and I didn't think about Mark so much until a friend told me he had won the lottery as part of a consortium. It meant he was finally able to leave North Devon. A couple of years ago, he moved to a Greek island with his family and hung out in an olive grove blogging with a glass of Ouzo in his hand. Had it been anyone else, I may have felt jealous but I was happy that Mark had finally got his time in the sun. He took part in the A-Z challenge with his blog View from the Olive Grove for the last two years and became part of that ramshackle fraternity of bloggers I have been fortunate enough to be part of forever.
His story made me wonder what it would be like to finally be free of the pressures of the world and to spend the days soaking up the sun in the olive grove while looking at the azure seas of antiquity. I wondered if I could do it, or if the sudden emptiness of the days would undermine me and force me to return to what I knew.
About six months ago Mark did return home, although I could not understand why at the time. He wrote that a life of peaceful apathy was not for him, adding, "All things must pass, nothing lasts forever." Later on, I heard from a friend that he had terminal cancer. In the last picture I saw of him, the rock was a tiny and shrunken presence surrounded by his family. There was a Facebook posting from a friend who had visited him in the North Devon Hospice and today tributes to his passing. In the days to come, like most of those who pass, he will become a mere footnote but I promise to raise a glass to him from time to time.
It's hard to come to terms with the thoughts that come rushing in and the realization that the best die young and we are left with also-rans, although I know that's not true. At times my life seems fractured to a point of breaking but the everyday battles about finance and divorce and child visitation are clearly nothing in the great scheme of things where great men and women go to their maker by the hour. I was honored to know Mark and although my life can seem trite at times, I know it's not the case because I have love and she is my North, my South, my East and West.
Over the last few weeks blog neglect has set in which I know is regrettable for those of you who hang on my every last word. I know where you are and I assume you are in a phone box somewhere near here. Or maybe you are not because it's rather hard to find a phone box even in Britain where just a few are reserved for ceremonial purposes.
Americans are often rather fond of red phone boxes. They have probably seen those cute pictures of them outside museums or honeycomb villages in the Cotswolds. Having grown up with them I'm more cynical. Phone boxes were usually places of last resort. if you went into them you'd be hit by a pleasant aroma of cigarettes and pee. The phone book would invariably be ripped and the slot to put your coins in jammed up with chewing gum. English phone boxes were never cute and they have now been rendered obsolete by cell phones.
One thing phone boxes have made me realize is we need to be ready for change. We need to be able to embrace tragedy and new love. Recently when my father was taken to hospital for a serious procedure that was rather too close to life or death than I care to think about, the reality of mortality hit me. Unlike most people I know, I have yet to lose an immediate member of my family and I am chronically unready in this regard. Fortunately the operation was successful.
All the time we see people around us who adapt well to change and those that don't. The British Monarchy may not be good for a lot beyond selling tabloids and cutting ribbons, but at least it had thousands of years of pedigree which provides us with a lot of examples of the human psyche in all of its flawed glory. I have always been fond of Etheldred II The Unready due to his inability to get his s.. together. Etheldred ruled from 979 to 1013 and had another stab from 1014 to 1016.
The Official Website of the British Monarchy points out Ethelred became the King of England at the age of seven at Corfe Castle in Dorset, following the murder of his half-brother Edward II by his own supporters. With supporters like that, who needs enemies. I digress.
Corfe Castle
Ethelred was known as Un-raed or "Unready" which meant he was unwise and had no counsel. At the time the Danes - who were clearly unlike the bicycle and peace-loving Danes of today - were in control of large chucks of the country. Their leader Cnut - a man who suffered much from his name being misspelled - was considerably more aggressive than the King and not best pleased by Ethelred's order to kill all Danes.
Ethelred then tried another tactic by giving the Danes a large amount of silver in the hope they would go away - a measure that was unsuccessful and was lambasted by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - the tabloid of the day.
In 1013 Ethelred did a runner to France when his throne was stolen by the powerful Viking Sweyn of Denmark. He returned to rule in 1014 but undermined his return by dying in 1016.
So ended a fairly inglorious and forgettable chapter which has something or other to do with adapting to change.
