A Big Day Out

INSTEAD OF DOING THE USUAL thing I inevitably find myself doing on Monday morning, I got up late and ventured to Central London in a hunt for German magazines.

I got off the tube at St Pancras International, where you get the Eurostar train to Paris and Brussels. St Pancras is surely the most beautiful station building in London if not Britain:



I found Der Spiegel and Stern on a newsstand outside. The hubbub of French voices drew me into the hi-tech inner hall where screens displaying 13:28 Paris Nord set off a frisson of excitement and longing inside me. It's been such a long time since I travelled anywhere at all except just down the road...



The last time I saw a newsstand with a half-decent selection was near Baker Street tube. Baker Street of course being famous for Sherlock Holmes... Madame Tussuad's museum is right by the tube station so the place is thronging with tourists (unlike in this snap!)...



Madame Tussauds is next to the Planetarium:



I picked up a weekly Take-a-Break -style magazine called Freizeit Revue. It is an old woman's magazine but I bought it for the endless crossword puzzles sandwiched next to advertisements for piles ointments and surgical support stockings ...

Then I meandered down to Regents' Park which is a Royal Park and so extremely well manicured.



The houses overlooking the vast greens are pretty impressive too ...



... then it was nearly rush hour so I had to fly home before the trains were too crammed to breathe.

And there we are! My first day out in London-London in over a year!

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Have a look at the arrogant French woman in the bottom clip ~ this is absolute classic telly!!

THE LATE, GREAT KEITH FLOYD was one of the most classic TV cooks of all time. There was a retrospective on his life and work on TV last night and these were the best clips shown:

Here from his best series Floyd On France, is his attempt at a mushroom omelette ~ with "angry dragon lady" "simmering" behind ...



And here's the most classic clip of all. This wasn't a set-up ~ the French-Basque lady was for real! "FLOYD CAN'T COOK!"

Wish I Could Find a Good Book to Read...

Someone's dumped a K2-sized mound of romantic fiction at the drugs clinic. Books with titles like A Woman of Substance by BTB and Granny Dan by Danielle Steel. Granny Dan!! I mean ... who would call a book that?? Come on, Danielle!

Because all were free I took some away --well that is my excuse-- and have been in tormented attempts to stick with reading any of them ever since. Barbara Taylor Bradford is, I think the best writer of this bunch. Her paragraphs are quite nicely woven together. Danielle Steel ... well how the woman ever got into print, let alone managed to sell so many gerzillions of copies defeats me and is, I believe, a sad indictment upon the "literature"-reading public. Honestly. Too Much Too Soon by Jacqueline Briskin is about three sisters embroiled in a passionate tale of love, hatred and revenge. The severely 1980s cover is what attracted me here. I don't think any of these novels are going to get finished. At least not by me. The only book I discovered which I am sticking with is called The Lives of Danielle Steel; can't remember who it's by but it's a fascinating tale that makes me feel more confounded about who Danielle Steel actually is and what makes her tick than ever before. She seems the most peculiar mixture of character and experience. One aspect about her for which I have no sympathy: this woman has never been short of a dollar in her entire life. Has never scrimped and saved out of necessity. Has no idea whatsoever how it feels to be so broke you have to be pulled away from pizza slices hanging out of rubbish bins...

Having said that, she does understand personal tragedy. Had a "bipolar" son who died of drugs. Married four times. One wedding took place in prison. Another husband was a junkie. Can't remember anything about hubby number one (well I only dip through books like this, I never read them in order. I'm an enormously selective reader. Besides, I have all the attentionspan of a fruit fly.

Why am I hammering on about Danielle Steel. Of all people. My Mum likes her books. I can't stand them. The best writer of trash in my opinion is Jacqueline Susann. Valley of the Dolls. Now that is a schlockbusting masterpiece!!! The last novel I stuck with to the end was The Da Vinci Code. In mitigation may I submit to the jury that I was unaware upon purchasing this that it had just recently outsold Michael Jackson's Thriller. I did not realize it was a "phenomenon". I was just taken in by probably the same aspects everyone else was... the absurd mixture of high culture, gnostic thought and lowbrow action thriller. I love a good thriller. Usually I go for stuff by people like Harlan Coben, Stephen King, (actually James Herbert is better for horror, he doesn't rabbit on nearly as much). & so on. What was I gibbering on about? Oh yes The Da Vinci Code ... the last book I read. Well I am a heroin addict, so how else to you expect me to furnish my intellect??

In closing... what am I supposed to say? I watched some television this evening and got so rapidly bored. Such tripe, you wouldn't believe. The only good thing on was an enactment of a rape trial, with fly-on-wall filming of the (celebrity) jury. They used celebs not to be tacky, but so that, knowing a little of their private lives, we might have a headstart on their individual prejudices and points of view. Jeffrey Archer is there ... who has done prison time for perjuring a libel trial in which he won a half a million pounds back in the 1980s. Years later it turned out he had seriously perverted the course of justice ... Now Lord Archer always used to be a bombastic self-trumpeting bore. A member of parliament. A high-ranking Conservative politician. A businessman. And of course a "bestselling novelist". To his credit, he's produced some superbly crafted short stories, though his novels (excepting Kane and Abel) aren't really up to much ... He's quietened down considerably and actually struck me as quite a wise (or perhaps the word is "observant") man. Who clashed instantly with the intolerable bore of the group, womanbeating exfootballer Stan Collymore. Who wins my personal prize for "person I would least like to be seated next to at a dinner party" ...

Quite fascinating to see how the real life bias and prejudices of a group affect the dynamic of a jury ...

Well I'm fading fast here from fatigue because it is approaching 1am and beddybyes is calling me (yet again!!) so I'll love yer and leave y'all and see yers tomorrow. By the way:--Does any of this posting actually make sense??

An Addict Dies ... Name: Anna Nicole Smith

ANNA NICOLE SMITH: Playboy model and Naked Gun 33&1/3 actress, billionaire's wife and reality TV star is dead.
In the cruel, judgemental world of Hollywood, even the (American) Star Magazine's editor admitted that Anna Nicole, busty, beautiful, very blonde and seemingly naive was truly a lost soul to the very end of her 39 years.

Entire forests of trees have been felled to tell the story from her rise from diner waitress to Playboy magazine model and sometime Hollywood actress. She looked set for life when, in 1994, she married the decrepit and wheelchair-bound 89 year-old Texan oil billionaire J Howard Marshall II. Smart move, girl! Who died a convenient one year later, leaving Anna Nicole in the throes of an ugly lawsuit over who should really inherit the dead man's billion dollar plus estate.

I might add here that in English law a man simply cannot do other than leave reasonable provision for his wife in his will. In fact, without a will his wife would, under ordinary circumstances, inherit everything. So I can't pretend to begin to understand the technicalities of Anna Nicole's legal battle with J Howard Marshall II's son. What I do know is that legal beagles had always said they expected Anna Nicole to win... If only she had lived long enough...

I have always thought (and this is my sincere opinion) that if an old man (and, let's be realistic, he would have to be rich for this ever to happen) meets a beautiful young girl who is willing to be his wife, trophy and constant companion throughout his twilight years, freindly, uncomplaining and a true friend even if the marriage is not based on "love" or "passion" as we normally understand them... and if both parties enter such an arrangement willingly (and obviously knowing the young girl has half an eye at least on his will) ... then good luck to them! Why shouldn't a pretty girl make an old man happy? Why not?? None of us know the ins and outs of the Marshall-Smith marriage. Although the fact that he did not leave her his fortune in a watertight will suggests the "dynamics" of their relationship may be a little more complicated than we first imagine...

Anna Nicole had two children by different fathers. A son, who died a year ago of a reported methadone overdose and a daughter, whose paternity was being contested ...

Methadone... that brings us to the crux of the Anna Nicole story. The woman was an addict! Let's be frank here. A self-confessed 100-pill a day painkiller & tranquillizer popper, who had methadone lying around her house in unlabelled bottles, one of which killed her late son a year before she went ... what else can I say? Nobody dabbles with methadone, at least not for any length of time, unless that person is a heroin addict. Yes, folks. Anna Nicole Smith, blonde, beautiful, immaculately groomed (most of the time) and hardly the sharpest tool in the box ... was a heroin addict.

Surely we have all seen clips of her trolleyed out of her head, singing songs through limousine windows to a press corps who did all they could not to laugh in her face so as not to spoil such fabulous shots.

Yes, at the end of the day, Anna Nicole, for all her white-trash glamorous life-&-death is really one of an innumerable rollcall of the insulted and the injured, the battered and abused, downtrodden, misunderstood, disadvantaged. The misfits and don't fits of the world. She was like every other pill-popper, drinker, crackhead and junkie in the world. She was an addict plain and simple. Maybe her death was not inevitable, but in hindsight there seems precious little choice of other way for her to bow out. So ...

Goodbye Anna Nicole and Goodnight. May you rest in peace at last ...

The Monday Papers

HOW COULD I HAVE DONE THIS? I LEFT OUT from yesterday's news review Mystic Meg’s MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE-!!

Surely she does them with a Road Atlas Britain, eyes shut, with a pin, flicks randomly through a “name your baby” book, then pulls sundry words from hats to complete the effect. Every week there is hidden treasure to be "revealed". EVERY WEEK.

Here goes:— SARAH OF BIRMINGHAM: YOUR LEGACY IS AN EMERALD RING IN THE GARDENING GLOVES. GARY OF EDINBURGH: YOU MADE THE RIGHT DECISION FOR THEM AT THE HOSPITAL. LIZ OF DOVER: TIME TO SMILE AGAIN.

Do you reckon Liz is so happy because she got to the gardening gloves before Sarah?

And now today’s Sun newspaper.

Shilpa wins BB for us all

TRIUMPH OVER RACISM SEE PAGES 4 & 5

(This is the bitchy Brit girls vs Indian Bollywood superstar actress “racism” row. The press continue in their typical way to squeeze every penny’s worth of value from the scenario.

Front page, main headline. (This is a laugh.)

STATE X-RAY SPIES TO SEE YOU NUDE

Secret cameras in street lamps

X-RAY cameras capable of seeing through people’s clothes would be installed in LAMPPOSTS under leaked anti-terror plans seen by The Sun.

All passsers-by could effectively be seen naked in the Home Office scheme.

Police would monitor the pictures to snare terrorists and criminals …

… page 3 NEWS IN BRIEFS (half-page colour picture of Keeley, 20, from Bromley, tanned and naked but for bikini bottoms.

KEELEY has mixed feelings over the idea of anti-terror x-ray machines ... “I’ve got nothing to hide. But some will see it as an intrusion.” She perceptively declares.

More “celebrity” Big Brother bluster on pp4-5.

Hooray for Bollywood — headline. Indian actress Shilpa has won. (She’s a far greater star than the rest of the house “celebs” put together because she has a following running into hundreds of millions on the Subcontinent.)

Jo “I don’t give a ‘forklift truck’” O’Meara “was last night in pieces” over the death of her agent over the weekend from a heart attack. Now, after all her bad behaviour, her mentor has died. And she’s beating herself up and blaming herself.

Oh dear.

And that, dear Readers, is today’s NEWS.