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Prime Minister of Barbados, David Thompson with head of the High Commission, Hugh Anthony Arthur |
Our apologies, Mr Prime Minister
APOLOGIES to those readers who noted that the man pictured as the Prime Minister of Barbados in last week’s Gulliver was in fact no such thing.
Several people wrote in to inform me of the error – the result of a last minute editorial mix-up – including the Barbados High Commission, whose venerable head, Mr Hugh Anthony Arthur, was the dignitary pictured.
And rest assured: the Prime Minister was no figment of my imagination. Please find him in the photograph on the left, pictured as originally intended.
Joy and elation on the campaign trail
A SNAPSHOT of the Obama campaign by a colleague who was electrified by the fervour of his supporters in New York says it all.
Obama got to the White House on the back of his army of supporters – ordinary Americans, trade unionists, kids from the streets.
During his visit my colleague found the HQ of Harlem for Obama in an empty shop, the ceiling leaking, the floor bare concrete but made comfortable by the warmth of the people hard at work, manning phones, organising people for leafletting, and to drive the elderly to the polling booths.
Scores of kids ran into the disused shop, wanting badges and leaflets to hand out.
Someone rushed in to say that the queues are lengthening at the booths, and wouldn’t it be a good idea to entertain them with, say, a gospel choir? Soon, a gospel choir is organised, and on its way to the booth. There was a buzz which told him this was a genuine people’s movement.
Steven McCadney, manning a desk, said a community network had been created – suddenly people had found their voice.
Will all this fervour die? As spin and political platitudes begin to dominate the discourse in the year ahead, as they probably will, how will this army of campaigners react? Go home, and wait for the next election? Or has something irreversible happened, and Obama, anxious to get elected, unleashed a force the Democrats will find difficult to control?
If my colleague has been electrified by a few days of the new politics of New York, I can imagine how these campaigners, on the road, for months feel.
If you could enter stage left, m’lord!
BETWEEN them, this group of barristers and judges have played prominent parts in almost high-profile murder, rape or fraud trial of the last 30 years.
Next week, however, QCs Anthony Arlidge and Nigel Pascoe and His Honour Judge Cowell will lead a cast of the British legal profession’s finest into the slippery, unchartered waters of acting.
Mr Pascoe has adapted the historical court martial of Admiral Byng into a play, to be premiered at the Temple Church, Inner Temple Lane, as part of the 2008 Temple Festival.
If ye break faith with us who die
WHEN a woman in a magnificent black fur hat described the night her grandfather helped to fight the blaze that brought down Coventry Cathedral, an unbidden memory flashed across my mind.
Sukey Parnell was reminiscing about her grandfather, an Air Raid Warden, and the night of the blitz in the last world war.
We were standing among thirty people who had gathered before the War Memorial at Hampstead Cemetery on Armistice Day, Tuesday, to remember the fallen of both world wars.
And the memory? I was a small child,
standing at the doorstep with my father, in the middle of the night, watching the reddened sky above Coventry
thirty miles away, the night the city fell prey to the Luftwaffe.
My father, also an Air Raid Warden, used to show me how easy it was in the blitz to read a newspaper in the night, the words lit up by the fires in the Birmingham streets, the air raid over.
Before the Remembrance Day Service began, led by the Rev Alistair Tresidder of nearby
St Luke’s Church, I took a look – as I have done each Remembrance Day for several years – at the twelve headstones at the back of the memorial.
Each tells a story, as sad as the first day I read the inscriptions, of twelve men who never came back from the war. Once, no doubt, they lived in the neighbouring streets. Where do they lie now? No one knows. They were simply killed in battle.
Some on land, some in the air, some in the sea.
Two headstones are always graced each year with sprigs of poppies, carefully laid, I suppose by relatives.
On the wet grass before each of the others lay a solitary poppy, left, I suspect, by a person, perhaps on Sunday, who felt the men should be honoured.
I first wrote about this memorial in the 1990s, the only one in the borough, I believe, that stands in a cemetery.
As the years went by fewer and fewer turned up, until one year I was the only one there. Then Councillor Flick Rea, whose home backs onto the cemetery, read this column, and decided the local church as well as the council should get involved.
And what a moving ceremony it was on Tuesday – the poem In Flanders Fields, read by Flick, a former actress, prayers by the Rev Tresidder, and a song, They Shall Not Grow Old, As We That Are Left Grow Old, beautifully sung by Sukey Parnell, once a professional singer, now a sought-after photographer, but one whose family was caught up in the wars.
At her home, near Brondesbury Station, she has lots of memorabilia from the war, including shards of glass from Coventry Cathedral that her grandfather brought home the night it was burned down.
Celebrating the life and principles of
Citizen Brien
SITTING in a flea pit cinema in Sunderland as a teenager, Alan Brien was enthralled.
The Orson Welles film Citizen Kane was showing and while his fellow cinema goers were not impressed (“I could hear the chairs flip up as others walked out,” he recalled) the late
journalist was inspired enough to decide that journalism was his
calling.
Now the life of the extraordinary journalist, novelist, raconteur and political sage is due to be celebrated at memorial service next week in Covent Garden.
His wife Jane Hill, who lives in the
Highgate Village cottage the couple shared before his death aged 83 in May, tells me that among the people coming to pay their respects is Camden Town folk singer Bob Davenport, jazz giants Ian Christie and Wally Fawkes and scores of his friends from the worlds of journalism and
broadcasting.
“He was a life long socialist, feminist and revolutionary and that never changed,” Jane recalled when I met her this week. “He had firm
principles and he stuck by them. It cost Alan personally at times, too. He was a serial resigner – if he was a member of an organisation and there was something he did not agree with, he’d walk out.
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Putting the villain on the couch
WITH measured, piercing eyes and granite features, Steven Berkoff has mastered the bad guy.
How fascinating, then, to see this enigma on the shrink’s couch on Sunday at the Hampstead Theatre, as the actor discussed his villainous obsession with his old friend, the forensic psychotherapist Estela Welldon.
Steven told me before the event – part of the conversation series that has placed Mike Leigh, Andrew Motion, and many others under scrutiny – that he never pursued the villain roles: they pursued him.
“A villain hates to be circumscribed,” he said. “Laws are for the little people. So when you’re playing them you do have this wonderful sense that you don’t have to obey the laws of the little people.”
Berkoff has just returned from Australia and the end of a 10 year
sporadic tour of his one man show about
Shakespeare’s villains.
About his own psyche he is less certain: “I don’t think anyone can get to the bottom of that.”
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