Dealing with death is difficult. Not just the emotional side of death, losing a loved one but dealing with the other side of death, the practical side, can be just as hard.
My brother died recently. He loved his TV and despite not having much money he had a top package from Virgin media. He mentioned only a few weeks before his death that he could even get the Sky F1 channel and I told him over the phone that I would be round to watch some live races. The only chance I got was actually the recent Spanish Grand Prix which wasn’t such a great race until a late safety car livened things up towards the end. Anyway, once I’d watched the race I called up Virgin to advise them that my brother had died. I must have gone through about three menus; press one for this, press two for that and so on. After menu 3 I finally got to an ‘other’ option. I clicked on that and finally there was an option for bereavement. When I went through to option 5 I think it was, the recorded voice advised me to ring a special bereavement line and quickly rattled off the number. I wasn’t expecting that so I reached for my pen expecting a repeat of the number but all I got was a thank you for your call and a dialling tone as the call was ended.
OK, I dialed again, at least I had my pen and paper ready. So, through the first menu, then the second and finally to the third. Press option 5 and the voice comes on with the phone number, I went to jot it down but the pen wouldn’t work!
Aaaagh!
After a few minutes of screaming I managed to calm down and realised that I had no choice but to go through the nightmare scenario again, this time with a working pen. I finally got the number but seriously, couldn’t they just put it on their web page; Bereavement, call this number 0800 blah blah blah. No, that’s clearly too easy. Anyway, now to repeat the process for his gas and electric, the DWP (actually pretty easy) his water rates, his insurance and of course I need to speak to the Undertakers.
My brother, despite never planning anything in his entire life actually bought himself a funeral plan. Sadly, the company he chose, One Life, went bust last year but he had even looked out for that eventuality, he had bought himself some life insurance with Sun Life which was happily linked to a funeral home.
Another annoying thing is registering the death. Despite us being in the hi-tech age of 2025 you can’t do it over the phone or online. You have to do it in person which meant a bus ride into town because cars are decidedly unwelcome these days in Manchester city centre. The other thing with the register office is that you can’t just walk in, you have to have an appointment. I made my appointment online but arrived 45 minutes early. Could they see me early? Of course not, so I went for a wander round the area and even passed a small tapas bar which many years ago was a very exclusive men’s tailors where my brother Colin had his very first job. Among the clientele were the presenters of Look North, the BBC’s local news show and Granada Reports, the ITV version. I remember Colin telling me that he once served the guy who played Alec Gilroy on Coronation Street.
Colin’s former workplace. Once a menswear shop, now a tapas bar.
His boss was a very well to do fellow who lived in Wilmslow and drove a Rolls Royce. Every morning he picked up Colin for work at a busy junction by the Bluebell pub. Colin was living at home in Handforth then and you might think that with his boss picking him up he would be keen to get up out of bed and get ready for work.
Unfortunately, Colin just could not get out of bed in the morning. My mother told me that she used to throw a pan of cold water in his face to get him up but even so, he usually arrived at work round about lunchtime. His boss wasn’t happy at being left waiting and Colin was given his p45.
The coroner had already sent all the relevant info to the register office so all they really needed from me was a signature which I signed with the registrar’s old fashioned fountain pen.
Here’s a funny thing about death, the way things come around again. The vinyl albums that he and I argued over for instance, we swapped records, swapped back again and swapped back and forth so many times neither of us knew who finally owned what. Well, now all those vinyls have come back to me. Not only those but the audio tapes I was going to throw away, Colin took them and now they’ve come back too, as well as the copy of High Noon, the 1950 film starring Gary Cooper. I lent it to him ages ago and he told me he’d given it me back. I said he hadn’t but he insisted he didn’t have it. Either way, it’s come back to me again.
I took the bus into Manchester as I mentioned earlier. At one point we were stopped at a set of traffic lights and I looked up to see what appeared to be Colin crossing the road. A man looking just like him with his identical walk and his identical leather jacket was crossing and I was convinced it was him until he looked up straight at me and I realised that of course, it was someone else.
Later on, sipping a half of lager at a pavement pub table in Albert Square, a woman came past pushing one of those granny trolleys that old ladies push and she was the absolute image of my mother. I remember thinking that all I needed now was to see my dad. I scrutinised lots of people as I travelled back home on the bus and finally, I spotted someone who looked a little like dad. I convinced myself the man was the perfect double of my late father but when it came down to it, I knew he wasn’t. Death just messes with your head I suppose but, in a way, I felt that I had seen my entire family that day.
I tried to think of the last time we were all together and it was probably some occasion years ago when I visited home on a Sunday and we all ate Sunday dinner together. The time that came to mind though was a birthday. Perhaps it was my birthday but me, Colin and Mum and Dad, all met together in a pub on the border of Manchester and Salford called the Mark Addy. The pub was situated on the banks of the Irwell and at lunchtimes they served rather nice portions of either pate or cheese with plenty of fresh bread. It was a sunny afternoon and it was rather warm so I rather suspect it was my father’s birthday as his birthday was in August.
Some years ago, the Mark Addy was flooded when the river burst its banks. The insurers declined to insure it again and the pub has remained closed ever since but I often think about it and that last sunny afternoon we all spent together.
One last sad story. Years ago my brother had a dutch girlfriend named Inge. He has kept in touch with her and while I was sorting out his flat I came across a framed picture of Inge. She is one of my Facebook friends so I sent her a photo of the picture and we messaged each other for a while and talked about Colin. A little later she told me that she had had an online meeting with someone in the USA and during the meeting the woman’s three-year-old son came into the room. When the meeting was over the woman introduced the boy to Inge. She asked the boy to say goodbye to Inge and he did so. Inge asked his name and he told her.
She turned to the boy and said “goodbye Colin.”
This was my first holiday since last year. I had been working hard at my day job as a content creator for a bank as well as my own website The Left-Handed Blogger. My girlfriend had left me for another man and the weather was cold.
Essentially, John Darwin was facing bankruptcy after getting hugely overreached on a series of buy to let mortgages. He decided that the only way out was to fake his own death and cash in on some life insurance policies. His wife apparently tried to talk him out of the idea but John, a dominating and overpowering personality, went ahead and faked his own death. Amazingly he even went back to live with his wife, sometimes having to retreat to the bedsits next door when any friends or family came to visit. He arranged a false passport using a method explained in the book ‘Day of the Jackal’ by Frederick Forsyth and then the two, Darwin and his wife, planned to buy property in Panama and live a new life. Later, Darwin decided he wanted to return to the UK under his own name by posing as someone who had suffered with amnesia and in fact one day he disposed of his fake passport, walked into a police station and told them ‘I’ve lost my memory!’
For me, who has been interested in the JFK assassination since at least 1968 when his brother, Robert Kennedy was also murdered and I was 12 years old, it’s a fascinating record. Others might think perhaps that the author has spread his research too far, that we are not interested in what the President’s pilot thought or did or how the honour guard prepared for the President’s funeral and how the President’s sister or brother-in-law reacted.
Marlene was one of those people perhaps born at the wrong time. Today might be a better time for her when lifestyles of gay and lesbian people are not so much of an issue.
The story of the Titanic, the ship that hit an iceberg and sank in 1912, is one of those stories which seems to be forever in the news. It’s a story that has caught the imagination of pretty much everyone. Even the other day, just scrolling through the BBC news page, I came across an item about some new digital scan of the Titanic wreck which revealed new information about the disaster.
This was a film produced by TV mogul Lew Grade who was wanting to move his TV production company ITC Entertainment into the world of cinema. He had read the original book and thought that it might be possible to make a film series about US government operative Dirk Pitt in the manner of the Bond series.
I only have one book in my collection about the Titanic. It’s a big glossy picture book, not about the actual ship, but about the shooting of James Cameron’s film. It documents Cameron’s twelve dives in a tiny submersible which gave him the idea of the treasure hunters looking to find the necklace the ‘Heart of the Ocean’ and his realisation as Cameron himself mentions in the book’s foreword that the main thrust of the story should be a love story with the Titanic disaster almost as a backdrop.
My brother died this week. As you can imagine I’m pretty upset. He was the younger brother so the accepted plan was for me to die first but somehow, things didn’t work out that way. Still, to a certain extent my brother was a burger and pizza eating TV watching couch potato so perhaps him dropping dead like that was not really unexpected. He was a guy that I sometimes wanted to slap and tell him to sort himself out, to clean his flat up and wash the pots and hoover up and get himself off his lazy backside and get a job or do some training or something.
Got the picture yet? The film is Alfie. It was directed by Lewis Gilbert who also directed some of the earlier Bond films. The script was written by Bill Naughton and adapted from his own book and play. Alfie is a fascinating film on many levels. It’s a peek back at the swinging sixties; it explores the elements of comedy versus drama, something I’ve always loved and which I looked at a while ago in a post about the 
Don’t you just hate TV adverts? I certainly do. There are those times when a TV advert comes in useful I suppose. Perhaps when you are watching a good film and you need to make a cup of tea or pop to the toilet. These days in the hi tech world of TV, most people are able to pause live TV and do those things anyway. I wouldn’t mind if the TV adverts were actually worth watching but these days of course they aren’t. Anyway, here are 6 classic TV ads of yesteryear that I think are rather good. Here we go . .
At the age of 15 Reg got himself a job playing the piano at the local pub and in 1962 he and some friends formed a small band called Bluesology and they soon picked up a regular gig supporting singer Long John Baldry.
An artist that suffered criticism in the same way as Jack Vettriano was Margaret Keane. I think I had seen her pictures floating about the internet but I knew nothing about her until watching a film about her life. The film Big Eyes starred Amy Adams as Margaret who is an illustrator at a furniture factory. At an outdoor art show she meets painter Walter Keane. The two hit it off and later marry. Keane rents wall space in a nightclub to exhibit his and Margaret’s paintings but he gets into a fight after finding the paintings are displayed by the bathrooms. The fight becomes headline news in a local newspaper and the resulting publicity brings people in to see the pictures that started the fight.
This is an autobiography by Fenella Fielding, co-written with Simon McKay, and the title comes from her part in Carry On Screaming when she played a seductive character, possibly derived from the Adams Family, Valeria. In one scene Valeria tries to seduce Harry H Corbett standing in for the absent Sid James as a detective. Valeria asks ‘do you mind if I smoke?’ and then rather than smoking a cigarette, a cloud of smoke seems to arise from her body and envelop her. Harry H Corbett adds ‘just when I was trying to give it up’ before embracing her in the smoke.
In Fenella’s book above, she mentions that she hoped her book would not go the way of a lot of other showbiz autobiographies, interesting at first but then dissolving into lists of plays and films and other celebrities. Sadly, that seems to be the way this book does go, even so I enjoyed it.
I do love my showbiz biographies and autobiographies and one I picked up a while back was an autobiography by Dora Bryan. I love Dora from her many appearances in British films but my favourite film is probably 
This final book is the odd one out in this quartet of British comedy stars. It’s a biography rather than an autobiography. I don’t think Tony Hancock ever wrote one.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 