In 1964 the United States passed its official verdict on the Kennedy assassination when ‘The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy’, known unofficially as ‘The Warren Commission’, produced an eight hundred and eighty-eight page report that concluded that the gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the killing of John F Kennedy.
The first few years of our lives are truly the age of innocence when we have a glorious lack of awareness of the external national and global issues that are going on all around us and shaping the world and the environment to which we will one day grow up into.
They say that everyone remembers where they were the day that John F Kennedy was shot and I can confirm that my very first consciousness of world news events was November 22nd 1963, the day the President of the USA was assassinated in Dallas in Texas and even then the news itself didn’t particularly register as important but rather it was the reaction of my parents that proved to be my news awareness watershed.
Posted in Childhood, History, United Kingdom, World Heritage
Tagged Aemonn Andrews, American President, Andrew Petcher, apetcher, Childhood, Crackerjack, Dallas, Death of a President, JFK, JFK coup d'etat, John Craven, John F Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy conspiracy theory, Lee Harvey Oswald, Miss World, Texas
And the French are still precious about their language even today but their reluctance to communicate in or even simply acknowledge English gives me the opportunity to demonstrate my fluency in everyday essentials and I have to use all of that knowledge on my occasional visits there:
‘Vin blanc sil vous plait’
‘Vin rouge sil vous plait’
‘bier grande sil vous plait’
‘bier grande vite’. And so on. As Ricky Gervais advises if they don’t understand you, talk louder, if they still don’t understand you, then trash the place!
Posted in Childhood, Europe, France, History, Hotels, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Alcatraz, Charles de Gaulle, Great Train Robbery, John F Kennedy, Nuclear Testing, Rolling Stones, The Beatles
As a teenager I used to read American superhero comics like DC and Marvel and I was always tempted to respond to the full page advertisements for such things as a complete two hundred piece civil war army for $1.49, a miniature secret camera for only $1.00 or a free Charles Atlas body building course.
What prevented me filling in the order form and sending off the cash was not the rather critical fact that I had no idea how to exchange my paper round money into dollars but rather the fact that I didn’t know what a ZIP code was.
These days people pay good money to stay in an ice hotel in Sweden and spend an evening shivering in sub-zero temperatures.
When I was a boy a cold Winter would have been quite an ordeal I’m certain because like most people in 1962 we lived in a house without central heating and this was in the days long before double glazing and thermal insulation.
I don’t think we even had a fitted carpet! We didn’t have a fitted carpet for at least another five years or so. The house had an open coal fire in the lounge and a coke boiler in the kitchen to heat the water and that was it. Sitting around the fire was quite cosy of course but when it came to bed time tearing yourself away from it was a real ordeal – rather like Scott’s preparation for walking to the South Pole!
I unexpectedly came across Marilyn once in Haugesund in Norway and I discovered that the reason she should surprisingly turn up here is that her father, Martin Mortensen, came from the village of Skjold, just twenty kilometres away and lived in Haugesund before emigrating to America in about 1880. After abandoning his family after only six months of marriage, he was killed in a motorcycle crash without ever seeing his daughter – Norma Jean Mortensen.
Posted in Childhood, Europe, History, Norway, Travel
Tagged Bay of Pigs, Cuba, John F Kennedy, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Marilyn Monroe, Nikita Khrushchev, Oswald Mosley, Sex Education
Emma Peel was my first fantasy pin-up and I used to scour the television magazines and newspapers for pictures of her that I cut out assembled into a scrap book of cuttings that I carried with me at all times. Once (about 1966, I guess) some school pals happened to mention this to the English teacher, Mr Howe, who demanded sight of the book and immediately confiscated it for a couple of days.
Posted in Europe, History, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Apollo Space Programme, Bay of Pigs, Berlin Wall, Cold War, Coronation Street, Diana Rigg, Doctor Kildare, East Germany, Emma Peel, FA Cup Final, Farthing, John F Kennedy, John Glen, John Steed, Leicester City, NASA, The Avengers, Yuri Gargarin, Zero G Space Pen
1960 was a big year for literature when the book ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was published by Penguin books and whipped up a legal storm.
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is a novel by D. H. Lawrence that was written in 1928 and printed at that time privately in Florence. The publication of the book caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes, including the use of previously banned four letter words. When it was published in Britain in 1960, the trial of the publishers, Penguin Books, under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law.
Have Bag, Will Travel 