Quoted by the Times:
Kerry Packer had already experienced eight heart attacks and after one of them, while playing polo in Sydney, the Australian media magnate technically “died” on October 7, 1990. His heart stopped beating for seven minutes before he was revived.
The experience did nothing to change Packer’s robust, if tenuous grip on life. “I’ve been to the other side”, he said. “And let me tell you, there’s nothing there”.
Wow! Mark Williams, not THE Mark William – the snooker player but another even more obscure one. Sure we’d recognise the face and “his work” but nobody would know him from the name.
Anyone else spot a crap celebrity.
My personal favourite encounters include Raj Persaud (cocky psychologist from daytime TV), Patrick Moore (worked with him as a singer), Richard Branstons (Maker of Virgin Pickle) in Chi and best of all Des Lynam in a petrol station. And Liv and I saw Boycott at the cricket once. Oh and Cwiss Eubank on the beach. Also saw Michael Jackson on a bus, no really!
I went out in brighton on friday for a drink and meal with the chaps from work. The first pub we went to was The Nelson which is opposite our offices. Upon entering I saw Mark Williams of Fast Show fame. He was sitting at a table with a pint of ale chatting with some of the locals. I concidered going up to him and say “ooh, suit you sir!” or “This season, I shall be mostly wearing…” but decided against it.
Maybe a colour change?
Concerning Larium:
http://www.upi.com/inc/view.php?StoryID=20030221-111929-7532r
Also:
“… my friend just got back from india. she was given, before the trip, some medication called larium, a popluar anti-malrial pill taken weekly. it has very few side effects, but she and her friends on the trip only experienced one- incredibly vivid dreams. in fact, on all the searches ive done about it, vivid dreams is listed as a side efect on them all. my freind had one so intense about an elephant trying to squash her, she rolled off the bed. they all can tell me nearly all of thier dreams, its crazy. anyone experince this med, becuase i think id like to take some, just in case the terrorists strike nyc with malaria. u never know. and if they dont, ill just be having dreams like wild acid trips on a nightly basis. thooughts? i know taking anything to dream seems dumb, but this isnt a hallucinagen, and isnt particularly harmful in any way. larium.”
Hail,
I feel the site is in need of a redesign, but i’m unsure what the new design should be. Any ideas? All design or feature suggestions will be considered, but may, of course, be rejected by the management ie. me.
- i’m thinking black text, so we’d have to lighten the background… white or possibly pastels.
- Have all contributors credited in the “a blog by…” section
- remove archive links to a separate page
When Bill Bryson first arrived in England about a quarter of a century ago, landing in Dover on a boat from France in the middle of the night, he slept on a park bench because none of the bed and breakfasts were open. Crawling off to a newsagents in the early morning to buy something to eat, the first thing he saw was a newspaper hoarding being put out with the legend:
“England collapse against Pakistan”.
He had no idea what this meant; but it certainly sounded portentous.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Toiling at the nursery, I was surprised by a rat jumping out from behind a sheet of plastic I was heaving at, and I leaped backwards, only to trip over a piece of farm machinary and land face downwards in the mire.
I hadn’t felt any pain but somehow my shin had connected with something sharp and was exposed to the bone, looking a bit like the flapping open end of a dead chicken. There wasn’t much blood, but I thought it might come gushing out any moment, so I clamped the two inch long flaps shut with my manure encrusted hands and hopped off to seek first aid.
Now I’m laid up, with all and sundry peering at my wound and wondering when it’s going to become infected. For my part, the pain and inconvenience make me glad it wasn’t worse. I mean, the way that machinery looked, if I’d fallen slightly differently, my leg could have been snapped like a Twiglet.
My God Nicky! You look terrible. And almost exactly like John Prefumo – disgraced ex-minister.
Well, now we’re back from the Lake District, and we didn’t get lost in mist, I can breath again and chortle quietly at all the electric spasms of fear I experienced whenever I saw low cloud approaching. In fact, it didn’t ever ‘approach’, since it was invariably already there. All in all, though, a good time was had. I won’t bore my readers with talk of map reading mistakes or extended sessions in the steam room but I feel I must set down a brief account of our unsuccessful attempt at ‘Taking Helvelyn by Striding Edge’.
We set off on a foul morning with Geoff and Tanya keen as mustard and the rest of us slightly less enthusiastic. Immediately we left the car, the wind hit us. It must have been 80mph. Unremitting gusts tore at our clothes and more or less prevented us seeing anywhere but down at the ground, away from the wind. Then the rain began. I’ve never known conditions like it. I was soaked through within minutes. My boxer shorts felt like a sodden dish cloth.
Shielding my face, glancing up, I could see thick blankets of swirling mist swooping down on us. So far as I was concerned, I had been ready to go back almost the moment we had started; but naturally, it wouldn’t do to be the one to suggest anything so craven, so I waited for someone else to mention the possibility that we would certainly all die if we went on, if not of hypothermia then by striding off Striding Edge into the well known and oft frequented precipice on one or other of its sides.
Luckily, before things got even worse, Crip’s specs were whipped off his face. We all stumbled around for ten minutes pretending to look for them (if I had found them I would, of course, have secreted them in a side pocket and slipped them his way later) before admitting defeat and descending.
The nadir of this expedition, for me, was twofold. It was bad enough getting lashed in the face by a piece of brittle plastic flapping on the edge of Tanya’s poncho that felt like my cheek had been stabbed by an ice pick; it was worse when, sitting shivering in the passenger seat of Crip’s car, I felt scalding hot liquid suffusing my bum and thighs. Good Lord, I thought, the privations of the morning must have affected my bladder control. How shaming. Thankfully, as it turned out, the driver, who shall remain nameless, had spilled scalding hot coffee onto my seat. Oh, happy day!
This snapshot of me going out to dinner later tells its own story:
why thank you sir
Tom – here’s the name of the must read book either prior to or while you are in India:
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
It seems that through a combination of problems I shall not be returning to the Isle of Wight, instead I shall be on a break until January when I will rejoin the programme. Although unanticipated, this break has set me up nicely for the joys of Christmas retail temping. Tis the season to be…moaning, queuing, spending. I firmly refuse to be on the queing side of the counter this year and instead have planned to craft all my gifts by hand (so please ensure all stockings are stong enough for painted beach pebbles!).
It has been an eventful week. I have completed my first week of full time block experience working in schools. The journey to get there is getting no easier, especially the ferry crossing bit. I’m sure whenever Neptune hears I’m about to cross the Solent he ensures there is a good amount of stomach churning swell!
The good thing is that the experience seems to be going fairly quickly – Mainland placement roll on please.
Well I better go. Folks around for lunch so I better tend to the market bought, efficiently killed (i hope) chicken.
News: The editor of The Sun, Rebecca Wade has been arrested for assaulting Ross Kemp (Grant in Eastenders) who is her husband.
Rarely have I been so pleased by a news story. May she rot.
Hahaha, that’s hilarious!
Excert from a recent John Cale interview:
LP – Finally, there’s a popular story about you cutting the head off a chicken onstage with a meat cleaver…
JC – It was a really nice meat cleaver. I bought it in Berlin. So beautifully balanced. It didn’t take very much. There was no sawing, you just lowered your arm and the weight of the cleaver carried it.
LP – There’s been no explanation why you had a chicken and a meat cleaver onstage together in the first place. Presumably it was premeditated?
JC – Yeah. My band left over it. It turned out they were vegetarians. We got the chicken from a farm outside of Oxford. I told my tour manager to put it in a box and just come out with it. Of course, he had to grandstand it. He came out holding the bird, right up high, and that was it. We were screwed.
The bird was on the floor of the van all the way to London. The band had all this time to ruminate over what was going to happen. They were like ‘What are you going to do with the bird?’ Nothing. ‘Are you going to hurt it?’ Of course not.
Around that time everyone was gobbing on musicians. Tom Verlaine came over to play the Marquee, and he couldn’t believe that people would drink beer and spit it at you as a form of adulation. So I took it a step further. I threw both the head and body out into the crowd. Everyone was kicking it away from them like it was contaminated. After the show, the band came up to me and said, You lied to us. You said you weren’t going to hurt it. I said I didn’t hurt it. It didn’t feel a thing.
My three favourite musicians each released a new LP (or should I say album) recently. I refer to Mike Oldfield, John Cale and Brian Eno. The Oldfield double CD is okay, perfectly listenable, and a number one choice for having on in the background without it being necessary to stop whatever you’re doing to listen more closely. The first half is better than the slightly techno second. A bit too much of it is made up of snatches of better stuff from the past. Cale’s latest has its moments, but it’s a fairly typical offering, with some jaw dropping classics mixed in with a few total clangers. It definitely needs pruning down to half its original size. At any rate, it’s not a patch on his earlier work; although, I have to admit, I’ve listened to it much less often than the others, and it may grow on me yet. Eno, however, with his first vocal offering for many, many years, has come up with an absolute stunner. As the proud owner of the Eno vocal box set, comprising Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Another Green World, and Before and after Science, I feel I must know what I’m talking about. Staggering, chocolate melting melodies and bizarrely beautiful lyrics make this my release of the year.
This
This chord
This water
This son
This daughter
This day
This time
This land
It’s all mine
This Calling Bell
This Forge Bell
This Dark Bell
This The Knife Bell
This calling
This burden
This falling
The world’s turning
This What I thought I knew
This What I thought was true
This I understood
This In the deep wood
This Ah there I stood a child so fair
This On a certain square
This Down the dirty stairs
This To see the table set
This With golden chairs
This Ah to follow, follow, follow, follow there
This race
And this world
This feeling
And this girl
This revolver
This fire
This I’ll hold it up higher, higher, high
indeed. go team!
Visiting the Angmering Football ground again, and being selected as sub and running the line again brought back memories of last year where i ran the line for the whole game… fortunately, i was brought on – to near instant effect;-) – and put in a ok performance. hopefully i’ll make the starting 11 at sme point.
