Truble up t’North

For some reason football doesn’t grab me all that much. Perhaps it was being kicked in the head by English football supporters from the age of six that put me off. The news that the Beckham family have moved to Beverly Hills was of some interest to me. My own interest in Hollywood and the film industry is on the technical side. I was trained to be a film technician when I was younger.

When I first went to Greece (before it became crowded) I wanted to go to the Peloponnese to have a look around. When I got down there on one day of the week I was cycling along a road and was greeted by the site of some ponies. I stopped and leaned over the wall to have a closer look. As I stood there one of the ponies started to dribble a ball in the way that a footballer would when practicing for the big match. Then it passed the ball over to it’s friend and then they dribbled the ball and passed it backwards and forwards for a while. Then some more ponies joined in and something of a match took place. At one point one of them took the ball away from the others and using it’s two front hooves it manouvered the ball over to a building in the field and kicked it up against the side of the building. Then the game resumed. I don’t think they understood the concept of a goal post or scoring. But, it was great to watch. Like a live version of The Magus written by John Fowles.

When I came back I told people about the Peloponnese Pelé ponies and how good they were at passing a ball around and about the team spirit. Probably much better than David Beckham and the England football team.
In more recent times I was doing one of my many long walks along the West Highland Way on the west coast of Scotland. I stopped at the Kings House hotel at the top of Glencoe for two nights. On the first morning I went out to the local cafe to check my mail at their £2.00 an hour net connection. As I walked out through the door of the hotel a dozen catholic nuns from Greece started to perform a ritual around me which was a complete reconstruction of the Peloponnese Pelé ponies kicking a ball around in front of me. It was so bizarre that all I could do was laugh.

It’s still there.

I first went to Ronnie Scott’s back in 1978 when I went to work at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. At that time Ronnie Scott’s jazz club was known as Ron’s place.

I used to live there. Once in a while I might be found in my flat back at Bayswater or even at work sometimes. But, there was nothing quite like Ron’s place. The usual crowd of known suspects were to be found in there. Ron picked me up off the floor once when I was extremely drunk. Then he bought me a drink. A botle of wine. Between 1978 and 1982 I saw George Melly, Georgie Fame (both good for a late night boozing session) and Wynton and Branford Marsalis. What a session that was. Hardly anyone had seen either of them in England before and I was there on the night that it happened. In more recent times I found Ike Turner sitting in front of me giving his all and better now than he was when he was a young man.

Thanks to Ron I understood more about music and life and George Melly helped me to understand more about paintings. I didn’t really understand what Ron had done for me until I went out to work in the Caribbean back in 1984. That was where I met and mixed socially with what was left of the Glen Miller band. After that I followed George Melly’s nose - not something that’s easy to miss - and started on my own investigation of the New York Jazz scene and local artists and photographers down in the village. It’s not what it was but some history can be interesting. Daniel Falgerho who is a local photographer introduced himself to me and we had a chat about architectural photography and then I asked him why he wasn’t doing some work on the streets. After listening to me he did some work on the NY bus system. After all of that I ended up in San Francisco where the Jazz can be good.

It’s good to see that Ron’s place has survived the death of it’s founder and that it has now come back up and is once again the showbiz jewel that I knew it be when I was a young man.