Well, you can’t beat a good wedding but weddings are hard work, what with the planning, the arranging, the compromises, the cost, the logistics, and of course all the attendant stress that comes ready built in; very hard work indeed!
The wedding I went to at the weekend had a lot of great elements and the one important thing that only nature can provide; good weather! I shouldn’t complain really but I was sweltering in my three piece suit and a couple of degrees cooler would have been nice but that would be quibbling. The day was wonderful and one that all went to plan as far as I could see anyway.
Another fact that comes built in at a wedding are tears. I am referring to tears of joy of course and the bride and her Mum did their fair share as well as others. I doubt if there was a dry eye in the place during the speeches when it’s traditional to ponder in public about the subject of love and loved ones, those who are with us and those departed. On this occasion, the mother of the bride did a speech herself as her husband had passed away some years ago and her performance as she balanced emotions and stage fright was outstanding.
The one disaster, well for me anyway, came part way into the evening when I took a glass of red wine to my mouth, inexplicably missed and as a result poured red wine all down my shirt. Anyway, I nipped round the corner to my room, luckily we were staying at the venue and soaked the shirt in cold water which I think was the correct remedy for the situation, changed shirt (to a less formal shirt I should add) and was back at the reception within fifteen minutes. My fiancée Liz, and also the mother of the bride, who seems to like me in my three piece attire was not amused that I had ditched my splendid outfit (jacket waistcoat and tie had seemed a little superfluous by this time) but of course you can’t please all the people all of the time.
The only other problem came earlier. The wedding cupcakes were painstakingly assembled in the reception room by bridesmaids and friends only to be told of a rule, well a law actually, that food could not be placed on the tables until licensing hours! First I’ve heard of that so the cakes had to be hastily removed! The thing is the wedding was in Cumbria and my experience of Cumbria people is that they don’t necessarily care about things like rules or laws.
A couple of years ago Liz and I stayed in the small town of Wigton. We had rented a small cottage for a few days and the first day we went to the local chippy for some old fashioned fish and chips, then decided to wash it down with a pint in the pub next door. When we stepped inside there were a number of locals smoking away, happily flouting new anti-smoking laws. We ordered our beer and one of the group asked if we minded them smoking and if we did then they would go outside. Actually we did mind them smoking but being British and not wanting to upset the regulars of a pub we reckoned we would be visiting regularly during our stay we said ‘OK, go ahead and smoke.’ Just as we were about to ask if the pub served food a couple of other locals arrived with fish and chips from the chippy, sat down at a table to eat and called over pleasantly for two pints of bitter! Yes, that’s the way they do things in Cumbria!
Not long ago I asked my Mum what had happened to her wedding pictures as I don’t remember seeing any. She replied, rather shame facedly, that after a row with my Dad she had taken her wedding pictures and ripped them up! Still, she continued in her marriage to my Dad, happily I might add, until his death in 2000. My wedding pictures are still intact in a box somewhere in the loft although my marriage ended in divorce many years ago. So, perhaps my advice to Tania and Alex should be to rip up their wedding pictures! Not so easy in the digital internet age!
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The 22nd of November 2013 was the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most shocking events of the twentieth century, the assassination of President John F Kennedy. I personally expected a deluge of TV documentaries about the assassination but in fact on UK TV there really weren’t that many. A re-showing of the Oliver Stone movie, JFK. A documentary about media response to the assassination which was really the media looking at themselves. But that was really it, there were no probing or investigative programmes, perhaps in 2013 it was far too late for that.
In 1988, twenty-five years after John Kennedy’s death, a veritable wave of documentaries were broadcast on British television, including a rare showing on channel four of the 1966 film of Mark Lane’s ‘Rush to Judgement’. On ITV a documentary by producer Nigel Turner called ‘The Men who Killed Kennedy’ was aired, claiming fantastically that assassins from the French underworld killed the President. That particular film, which had its merits despite its incredible conclusions, was similar to many other films, books, and articles, in that they all challenged the establishment view, framed in the report of the Warren Commission, that the lone killer was a man called Lee Harvey Oswald.
In 1995, BBC TV’s ‘Timewatch’ gave us a view of Oswald that brought us full circle. Heavily influenced by the book ‘Case Closed’ by Gerald Posner, the film said look, Oswald really did it after all. So, have you had your fill of conspiracy theories? Have you heard enough of CIA plots and Watergate and Iran-Contra? Enough of the ‘grassy knoll’, the Book Depository, and Dealey Plaza? Has perhaps our interest in the fate of President Kennedy been diminished by revelations of the apparently numerous indiscretions in his private life?
Whatever the truth of John Kennedy’s private life, his graphic death was the cataclysm of our age, imprinted on the minds of a generation by the flickering incarnation of amateur cine film. For many the case is not closed and has never been even remotely resolved despite two official investigations, the last of which -by the House Select Committee on Assassinations- concluded, ambiguously, that the President was killed “probably” by the result of a conspiracy.
So what are the facts of the assassination? Perhaps the only undisputed fact to emerge from the tragedy was that John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, was shot in the head and killed. President Kennedy was hit by rifle fire in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, while riding in an open topped limousine, part of a motorcade that had just turned onto Elm Street by the Texas School Book Depository. Almost every other fact, every statement, every report, every document, every exhibit, every disclosure, is open to question.
Were there three shots or four? Were there more? Was the President shot from behind or from the front? Was he shot from the sixth floor of the book depository or from the so called ‘grassy knoll’? Did twenty-four year old ex-marine Lee Harvey Oswald fire the shots? Was he alone or were there other assassins? Why did Jack Ruby, a local night club owner subsequently shoot Oswald? Was it to silence him, to stop him from telling what he knew? Did Ruby act out of rage or was he part of a conspiracy? Was he in the pay of the Mafia? Was the CIA involved? The questions are endless, the answers are few.
Image courtesy wikipedia
Lee Oswald was a young man with an extraordinary background. He was not the ‘lone nut’ as described by the Warren Commission, the investigative body set up by President Johnson to examine the assassination. An ex radar operator at a top-secret US base in Japan, Oswald had spent years in Soviet Russia as a supposed defector. He was known to the FBI and had connections with military intelligence and the CIA. He appeared to be involved in left-wing Cuban politics and supported Fidel Castro. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald shot the President but failed to answer the important question -why? Why should a left-wing activist shoot a liberal minded president who in the words of his critics had gone ‘soft’ on communism and Cuba?
But as we examine the accepted elements of the murder more and more inconsistencies occur. The President was shot at 12.30 pm, but Oswald, who worked at the book depository, was seen by witnesses in the second floor lunch room as late as 12.15, which left him only fifteen minutes to ascend to the sixth floor, produce his rifle and take up position. Of course fifteen minutes might have been enough time for a cool and organised killer, but the President was actually due to arrive at a reception at the Dallas Trade Mart at 12.30, which meant he would pass through Dealey Plaza at about 12.25, giving Oswald only ten minutes to be in place, and he had no way of knowing the President would be late. Immediately after the shooting patrolman Marrion Baker entered the Book Depository, drew his gun and with building superintendent Roy Truly hot on his heels confronted a young man in the lunchroom calmly drinking a coke. Truly explained that this was Lee Oswald, an employee. Had Oswald rushed down from his ‘snipers lair’ on the sixth floor or had he been in the lunch room all the while?
image courtesy wikipedia
Perhaps the strongest evidence linking Oswald to the murder was the supposed murder weapon, a 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano bolt-action rifle, a World War II vintage carbine found on the sixth floor of the book depository at 1.22 pm, almost an hour after the assassination. The rifle had been purchased mail order by an ‘Alek Hidell’ and sent to Dallas post office box number 2915, rented by Oswald. When arrested, Oswald was carrying an identity card in the name of ‘Hidell’. To this day there is dispute over whether Oswald’s palm print was found on the rifle. All pretty damning you might think, but the officer who first found the rifle, Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman, identified it as a 7.65 mmMauser, and was confident enough to make a sworn affidavit to that effect.
The day after the shooting, November 23rd, District Attorney Henry Wade also described the weapon as a Mauser at a televised press conference. How then does a 7.65mm Mauser become a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano? I personally know nothing about guns at all but I have seen enough war films to know that a Mauser is German, and stamped clearly on the side of the Mannlicher-Carcano are the words ‘MADE ITALY’ and ‘CAL 6.5’. And surely a police officer, particularly an American policeman, would know what he was talking about concerning guns?
Abraham Zapruder, a local businessman took his cine camera to work that day to film the Presidential parade but what he recorded instead was a Presidential murder. In doing so he contributed arguably the most important piece of evidence in the whole case. His film gave investigators a filmed record and a timetable for the shooting. Examination of the film by FBI experts revealed the time between the first shot to hit the President and the shot that struck his head was 4.8 to 5.6 seconds. It was first thought that there were four shots, one shot hitting Kennedy in the throat, a second completely missing and hitting the kerb, a third hitting Governor Connally also seated in the Presidential car, and a fourth shattering Kennedy’s skull. Given that it takes 2.3 seconds to operate the bolt action rifle, four shots will not fit the time frame for one assassin and one rifle so the Warren Commission came up with the so called ‘magic bullet’ theory, that the second of three shots hit both Kennedy and Connally. This view has been blasted from a number of angles, firstly the bullet itself emerged as almost completely pristine, while one which had passed through the flesh and bone of two human bodies would have been severely deformed. Secondly, in the Zapruder film Governor Connally is seen to turn around as Kennedy is hit then appears to be hit himself as he turns to face front again.
Expert riflemen were called in to test the murder weapon. They were unable to duplicate Oswald’s supposed feat of marksmanship and complained of difficulty operating the rifle’s bolt mechanism and even the trigger. The telescopic sight could not be properly aligned and had to be rebuilt with metal shims added to make it accurate, which means of course that the rifle was tested in a configuration not available to Oswald. Also, test firing was done at still, rather than moving targets. The assassin would also have had to track the President as he passed behind an oak tree, resight his target and then shoot. So did Lee Oswald really do the shooting? What about the shot to the Presidents head which knocked him back and to the left indicating a shot from the right front -the grassy knoll area? And what about the bystanders who rushed up the grassy knoll including a motorcycle patrolman who tried to ride his bike up there? They felt the final shot came from the knoll as did railroad workers on the triple underpass, as did Abraham Zapruder the amateur cine cameraman, as did Mary Woodward of the Dallas Morning News, as did Lee Bowers positioned behind the grassy knoll atop a 14-foot railroad tower, as did many others. So, if other gunmen were involved, who were they? Who paid them? Who organised them? Who stood silently in the wings and watched while the President was killed?
JFK movie poster
Oliver Stone’s blockbuster movie from 1991, JFK. was a recreation of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation into the murder of the president and before filming had even been completed the US media had begun -if you’ll excuse the pun- to throw stones at Stone. In conclusion the movie offers us the theory that the American ‘military-industrial complex’ was responsible for the crime, the theory running like this; Lyndon Johnson took over the reins of the presidency following JFK’s death. He continued with Kennedy’s cabinet and Kennedy’s policies, all except one -Vietnam.
Not wishing to become embroiled in a guerrilla war in south-east Asia Kennedy had already ordered home from Vietnam one thousand troops. Johnson reversed that decision and thus began the disastrous American adventure that was the Vietnam War. Extreme right-wing elements opposed to John Kennedy’s policies of peace ‘removed’ Kennedy in favour of Johnson. Sound fantastic? To be fair to JFK, everything presented as fact was factual, and everything that was conjecture was presented as such, but the real life investigation by Jim Garrison concluded that the CIA were the real culprits.
After the disaster of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA-backed invasion of Cuba by Cuban exile brigades during which the CIA had attempted to force Kennedy into committing American troops into the assault, Kennedy had vowed to splinter the CIA into “a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds”. The CIA had become almost autonomous from the elected government, pursuing its own policies around the globe. It had developed a capability -revealed during the 1970’s in senate hearings- known as ‘executive action’, a capability of political assassination. The ‘company’ as the CIA calls itself, was involved with mafia hoodlums to murder Fidel Castro. Castro is alive and well today, but did the CIA collude with the mafia to murder its own commander-in-chief, the President of the United States?
Jim Garrison’s investigation came to nothing but in 1991 lawyer, writer, and JFK investigator Mark Lane was involved as defence attorney in a libel case instigated by CIA man and ex Watergate burglar Howard Hunt. The hub of the case was a newspaper article claiming Hunt was in Dallas on the day of the President’s murder. Hunt denied this, claiming to be in Washington at the time. In court Lane introduced testimony that indeed placed Hunt as part of a CIA team in Dallas on the day in question. Leslie Armstrong, forewoman of the jury said afterwards “Mr Lane was asking us to do something very difficult -he was asking us to believe that John Kennedy had been killed by our own government. Yet, when we examined the evidence, we were compelled to conclude that the CIA had indeed killed President Kennedy!”
A shocking and significant breakthrough in the JFK murder you might think? Leslie Armstrong went on to call for action to be taken by the proper authorities in the government. Nothing was done. The US Justice Department did not stir, nor has any other organ of the forces of law and order in the United States. The US media continues to ignore the countless revelations that have appeared in the years since John F Kennedy was killed, yet conspiracy theories are abundant in Europe and the UK. Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandals have shown us the dark underbelly of the American establishment, could it be that some secret influence is at work, hidden from public perception, preventing serious examination of the crime of the century?
President Obama has recently been elected to another four years in office, and in accordance with US law they will constitute his last term. Obama’s presidency has been largely unremarkable but he still has a chance to offer something significant to his fellow Americans and to the world. He can appoint a special prosecutor and special investigators and direct the CIA and FBI to answer pertinent questions. Not about how many shots, or from what direction, or any of the other thousand and one questions regarding the minutiae of the assassination but who was responsible? Who gave the orders? Who really killed President Kennedy? Still, perhaps even that would be fifty years too late.
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Forget the blue skies and the swimming pool
Your desk is all ready so don’t act like a fool.
Forget the pavement cafes and Mademoiselles
As your computer fires up with a thousand e-mails
Enough to numb the pain
And the nagging desire for a glass of red wine;
Act cool.
Briefings, meetings and folders to review
Memoranda and consultations to plough through
Forget the camembert and French bread
Close the door on the plat du jour
Its not even lunch and I can’t resist
The thought of a cool aperitif;
As if . .
Revised protocols need to be sorted
And I see the new software is unsupported
I’ll enjoy my lunch in the works canteen
A ham sandwich and a cup of tea
And the memory of a French bistro won’t even arise
All bustle and chatter and joie de vivre
No, not for me . .
Sunday, yesterday as I write this was Fathers day in the UK and I thought I’d take a few minutes to look back at my Dad who died in, well, I was going to write the year but was it 2000 or 2001? Can you believe that, I can’t even remember the year he died!
The thing is, the year isn’t really important, what matters is that he’s no longer here and what’s worse is that me and my old Dad spent a lot of time not getting on with each other and that was a lot of wasted time, time that neither of us will ever get back.
My Dad and I were from different generations. Dad was born in 1928 and he was part of the World War II era. A time of shortages, of national emergency and an uncertain time when you weren’t sure if you or your loved ones were going to make it through that next air raid. Christmas for my Dad, he once told me, was an apple and an orange and maybe, just maybe, an out of the blue present like a tin of lead soldiers that were, of course, second-hand. Anyway, perhaps that’s why he couldn’t really relate to TV obsessed youngsters like me and my brother who were given a pillow case full of gifts on Christmas morning. In the seventies when I was a teenager my long hair and my denim outfits didn’t sit well with my Dad either who used to put a tie on to take the dog for a walk!
Anyway, the good thing is that when something really dreadful happened to me in my late twenties I told him about it rather than my Mum and instead of the usual moans and groans I had come to expect, when the chips were down he stood up and supported me. I’ll always remember him saying to me ‘don’t worry about your Mum, I’ll talk to her.’ It always seems to me looking back that that was the start of our relationship proper.
I describe my Dad pretty accurately in my kindle book ‘Floating In Space’. He was a big man but he was quiet and cat-like too. Everything he did had the same qualities of quiet and calm. He worked for the Manchester Highways department building roads and pavements and every day of his working life, come rain or shine, he set out for work on his old pushbike. One day the gears on his bike stripped and he took it in to the bike shop for a repair. They couldn’t fix it there and then so Dad had to borrow my bike to get to work the next day. What he didn’t know was that at the time there was a new craze -the chopper bike- and as I couldn’t afford an actual chopper bike, I had bought a chopper seat for my bike and fitted it the previous day. Looking back that bike looked pretty ludicrous and later I reverted to the normal seat but I can still see my Dads face as he pulled my bike out of the out house where it was stored and then me and my brother watched as this middle aged man set out for work on his hybrid chopper bike!
For fathers day many years ago I bought him an apple tree to plant in his back garden. When I turned up late on the Sunday my Mum was really pleased to see me and said that my Dad apparently was feeling a little neglected that day as until then, neither me nor my brother had turned up to see him.
We planted the tree in the back garden and years later, whenever I looked at that tree it reminded me of him. Of his quiet ways, of his ‘lets get on with it’ nature, of his spirit so like my Mum’s really of never letting anything get them down. Imagine my feeling one day last year when I looked out of my Mum’s back window to see the tree had been chopped down! I was seething and was all ready to get on the phone and give Manchester City Council some major grief when Mum told me she had asked for the tree to be cut down. What on earth for I asked?
Well, my Mum is a little unsteady on her feet and the tree was crowding her washing line and she was worried about falling over. So, she got the council to chop it down. It was clear she didn’t see the tree as I saw it, as a sort of living, growing, monument to the man I had given it to many years ago. Still, last time I was there, only last week, there were green shoots growing from the stump. The tree had beaten the man from the council and its indomitable spirit was still alive. I am sure my Dad, who loved nature in all its forms, would have smiled.
If you liked this post why not try my novel, ‘Floating In Space’ set in Manchester 1977? Click the links at the top of the page for more information.
Everyone has their heroes, writers perhaps more so than other people because it’s our personal heroes that inspire us or perhaps even make us want to write. I come from a working class area of Manchester called Wythenshawe and when I get a bit down and look at my pile of rejected screenplays, essays and novels that seems to get bigger monthly, I wonder if I will never make it to the big time as a writer. That’s when I think about four working class northern men who did make it big, who worked hard at their craft and had incredible success. They weren’t authors but musicians; the Beatles!
One hundred percent northern through and through, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr became the Beatles and didn’t just make it to the top of the hit parade they reinvented the pop music industry and their genius as both writers and performers will live on as long as music is listened to.
Many moons ago when I worked for a cigarette vending company I used to visit a small pub in Woolton and the owners of the pub were two retired ex shell tanker drivers. They were both friendly guys but one in particular was outgoing and talkative and if he was on duty at the bar we would always have a good chat while I sorted out the cigarette machine. One day we got onto the subject of the Beatles and Lennon’s working class background and I was surprised to hear that Lennon’s house was just around the corner. Woolton is a very pleasant middle class suburb of Liverpool and I remember thinking what? This is where Lennon was brought up? John Lennon always struck me as a typical working class guy and his image as a sort of working class hero led me to assume he had a background in a rough and tumble area of Liverpool, like the Dingle where Ringo was brought up. The truth was different. Perhaps Lennon fermented the working class hero thing, perhaps the fault was mine, I just assumed something without knowing the facts.
Driving round the corner I found Lennon’s old house, 251 Menlove Avenue. This was where Lennon lived with his aunt Mimi from the age of five. He was living here when he started his first band, the Quarrymen and also when he met Paul McCartney. Lennon’s life was one heck of a journey taking him around the world with the Beatles and finally to New York with Yoko Ono where he was shot and killed in 1980.
This blog is about personal heroes and I’ll introduce you to more of them in another blog but for now I’d like to finish by wandering off the subject and returning to that pub in Woolton.
I’m not totally sure but I think the pub was the Derby Arms and the owner, whose name I cannot remember told me a story about the death of his father. His father was an old chap, a veteran of the first world war and had picked up a habit in France of always having water with his meals and he would always raise his glass and toast ‘bonne sante’ to whoever he was with.
My friend went to visit him in hospital on his deathbed and asked the nurse how his was. ‘OK’ they replied ‘but a little dehydrated. Try and get him to drink a little water’
In the hospital ward the son passed a glass of water to his father’s lips and the father murmured ‘bonne sante’ before passing away.
So to all you who are reading, let me wish you ‘good health’ and if you enjoy my writing why not take a look at my book. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information.
I’m coming towards the end of my three week stay in France. I do love it here, I really do. My fiance and I spend most of our weekends at vide greniers and brocantes. A vide grenier is literally a loft sale, the equivalent of a UK car boot sale. A brocante is slightly different, a cross between a flea market and an antique sale. Many of these events in France are combined with a village fete and have a bar and a food area which can range from a full three course French sit down meal to merguez (French sausages) and frites (chips to UK readers and fries to you in the USA)
There is also always a bar, hey we are in France after all. Eighty cents for a glass of vin rouge, two euros for a glass of beer, and nothing stops these events. Rain shower at a UK car boot -forget it! Event over! Everyone leg it to your car and pack up. Are the French bothered by a downpour? No way! Put a bit of plastic sheeting down on your goods and quickly make way to the bar for a glass of red. Open up again when the skies clear. Now, here’s another thing; All these events are pretty well attended which means there are people about inhabiting these places but- and this is an important question. What do the French do when there isn’t a village fete on? Where do they go? What do they do and where do they do it!
Okay, deep breath needed here. I don’t mean to get excited but I’ve travelled for three weeks and here’s the thing; French towns close at 12 midday on the dot. Shops close. The only places open are the restaurants because nothing, and I mean nothing interferes with the French lunch. Nothing! Everywhere shuts down until two pm. Okay, I’ve noticed in recent years the supermarkets have started to stay open, which is a good time to shop for all us UK tourists. But even in the late afternoons French villages are still and quiet. UK villages are full of people, cars, traffic and kids. Where do the kids go? Why aren’t they kicking balls about in the middle of the street like normal kids? Where do the people go and what are they doing? If you know the answer, let me know!
This is what we need to do. Not so long ago on BBC there was a pretty interesting documentary about cats. The BBC team wired up all the cats in a village, had cameras and tracking devices on the cats and worked out what the cats did, where they did it and in fact the whole pattern of their behaviour. What the BBC need to do for a follow up programme is to attach cameras and gps tracking to a village of French people and report the results as soon as possible!
We need to know!
If you liked this post, why not buy my book! Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 