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This is clear on the differences between right-brain stroke (which can mean left arm/leg out of action) and left-brain stroke (which I have, and means – in my case, being ‘severe’ – right arm/leg out of action…)

www.youtube.com/watch

My mum is really the only person who’s actually witnessed my getting up. Everyone else sees me when I’ve already got up – so I’m comparatively ‘fine’, if they choose to believe it…

Nowadays, I only have very few actual ‘ideas’. I didn’t have even ONE for the first 4 years post stroke. Then I GOT AN IDEA! I wanted to go on Pointless! I used to ask people and they’d say: That’s a terrible idea! And I’d say: I KNOW it’s a terrible idea. But it’s the only one I’ve got. It’s that or nothing. And like William Faulkner, I prefer grief (and Pointless)…

My brain has been damaged. Fair enough. I spent a long time talking to a neuropsychologist (who was well-meaning but not very good) who tested my intelligence before and after the stroke. They estimate it BEFORE the stroke from your vocabulary, which put me in the 2nd ‘very intelligent‘ category (of 5). Now I’m in the 3rd (just ‘intelligent’), bordering in some respects on the 4th (‘below average intelligence’). But it doesn’t go evenly across the board. So in some things my intelligence (or is it simply knowledge?) is more or less the same (notably, 40s and 50s movies!); in others (all medical things), less so.

I was actually GLAD to have the tests, because I could tell people I categorically WAS less intelligent… People who forever said: ‘Oh, he’s fine…’, just because it was better for them just to pretend not to know – so they could go on to the opera or some such…

Somehow, I think I’ve entered the 3rd act of my life (to use screenwriting theory). I’ve got enough money – just about, and only because I hardly spend anything. I listen to free music on Spotify and watch free films on YouTube. I DEFINITELY feel around 80 (but not as much as 88, which my father is. He at least is worse than me! In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king!).

Sooner or later, everyone gets here. (And to have been so much in geriatric wards at Colchester Hospital, I’ve seen it’s not pretty what happens to some 90-year-olds who have dementia…). I’ve got there sooner – which has SOME advantages, in that I’ve completely had the time to get used to the idea of retirement… Unlike the people who say they don’t want to retire and want to work forever… but – unless they die harnessed – will HAVE to…

And this is what concerns you, I suppose. It all depends on money. Maybe you have money, maybe not. You’ve got a young daughter – which can cut both ways. A lot of men would say: Right, I’ve got to EARN. But you might say, at 55: I’ve NOT got to earn; I’ve got to spend as much time as possible getting to know my daughter.

And – having done 50% childcare with the first 2 kids (I looked after them in the mornings) – it’s TOTALLY worth it. Every hour you spend with them NOW pays back infinitely. My only regret is that – after the crash of 2008 – I had to take a part-time office job in 2009, which was still going at the time of the stroke; so I never really got to know our 3rd son. (He’s now 11 and has just started secondary school… So there’s some hope I will…)

In terms of my life, 2012 – for a year before the stroke – till 2017 was AWFUL. So my late 40s/early 50s were the worst. But perhaps it was later than most for me having been a late starter. (Good wasn’t made until I was 43, and not released till I was 45… not exactly ‘most exciting new talent’…)

But above all, like me, you’re an ‘artist’, for want of a better word. By which I mean, given financial freedom, you basically would entertain yourself forever making music, writing a blog, whatever… (Only because of the stroke, I became an ‘ex-artist’, which lasted 4 agonising years…) Only one in ten (or maybe 100?) is that way inclined. Most people in their 50s that I’ve met – no matter how rich they are – are TERRIFIED of not working. Witness Rupert Murdoch, the saddest person in the world, if you ask me. Either he’ll drop dead ‘working’ – like Donald Trump! – and never get to his 3rd act (and REPENT!)… or he’ll die a horrible death, fighting it all the way…

Following a train of thought, vis-a-vis the film industry (of course, and to generalise outrageously): producers and directors are (classically) Me people. (Just to be that in control of 20 or 200 or 2000 people, you’d have to be…) Screenwriters are (usually?) empathetic people. So the typical pre-production arrangement sees the screenwriter having his/her feelings trampled on, and the producer and director hardly noticing – especially when, as sometimes happens (Liability, for instance) it’s the screenwriter’s idea in the first place! Such is life… And the realistic screenwriters basically just go away, hope for the best – and write something else… (Which – if it’s ‘lucky’ enough – will in turn be shat on from a great height…)

Occasionally, a director may be empathetic (Stephen Frears, at least judging from his films). Occasionally, he/she will CLAIM to be that way, but still underneath be a Me person (Mike Leigh?). But mostly, they’re Me people and they just don’t care – or even KNOW – there’s an alternative (Alfred Hitchcock). Me people tend to wear out their ‘unique vision’ by 40 or – in exceptional circumstances – 60. Hitchcock was 64 when he released The Birds, his last good film. He went on directing for more than a decade afterwards, but just seemed less and less in touch.

Empathetic directors, few and far between, tend to be good for longer: witness Frears, who was 76 when he made A Very English Scandal…

One way you can divide people is between empathy and lack of empathy – into empathetic people and unempathetic (or, to put it another way, ‘me me me’) people. Say there’s about 50% of either. As a child, I basically marvelled at the ‘me me me’-ness of my father. How could he keep it up? Just ALWAYS thinking about himself. (Even when my mother had a mastectomy because of cancer, and was in hospital, his reaction was: Who’s going to cook my dinner…?) I thought – at the time, as a kid – he must somehow be BETTER than me. And then – as a teenager – thought: No, he’s WORSE!

But it’s not a question of better or worse. Sure, without Me people, we wouldn’t have Donald Trump. But we wouldn’t have Prince either… Or Miles Davis. The fact about Me people is they simply exist. If anything, you ought to feel sorry for them (typical empathetic behaviour!) for just NOT seeing how things really are. Other people are – above all – INTERESTING. If you just look at Me, you may (superficially) get what you want… But the price is too high.

For me, at least…

Talking of Francis Rossi, he’s a scion of the great ice-cream dynasty (Rossi’s, Southend and Weymouth. A correspondent from the Isle Of Portland informs me of the latter branch: ‘They had a sign in the window then saying proudly: “No dairy products are used in our ice creams”‘)

Like Anthony Minghella (Minghella Ice Cream, Isle of Wight)…

AND Peter Capaldi (Glasgow)…

AND Daniela Nardini (Nardini’s, Largs)…

Anyone else? I think it’s the start of something…

Thinking about Status Quo, it’s only regrettable that Francis Rossi (a Roman) chose to sing the lyrics not in the original Latin, but in English translation! I prefer them thus:

quicquid tu vis

quicquid amas

quicquid dicis

tuam pecuniam das

tuum dilectum eligis

quoquo tu eges

quoquo uteris

quicquid vincis

quicquid perdis

(With thanks to James W)

‘Is there anybody out there that wants to rock? (Cheers) Is there anybody out there that wants to roll? (Cheers) Is there anybody out there that wants to BOOGIE? (Even more cheers…) Tonight… live… from the Apollo, Glasgow… we have the number-one rock ‘n’ roll band in the land (roars)… Will you welcome… the magnificent… STATUS… QUOOOOO (crowd goes crazy…)’
(Status Quo Live!, 1977)
Listen to that! I’d never come across the word ‘boogie’ before. And I had no idea about the visual onslaught of gigs. I just heard the soundtrack, like Werner Herzog listening on headphones to the noises of Timothy Treadwell being eaten by a bear in Grizzly Man. He says calmly to a grieving woman: ‘You must never listen to this…. You should destroy it.’ But I wanted to KNOW MORE. It was 1977…
I was 13. The year before, I’d bought three Beatles LPs (there was a bit of a Beatles revival in the charts). I’d swapped them with Sam and Alexander (*) at school, so we all at least had cassettes of all of them. (Sam was later in 23 Skidoo, and was responsible for my hippest ever moment at Oxford: Scamps Discotheque – in the shopping centre, 10/5/1982, when 23 Skidoo played there and I WENT BACKSTAGE and hung out with the band!! M was very impressed and – almost as a result (not really) – married my sister…)
So at 12 I owned Revolver, Abbey Road and Yellow Submarine (fairly dismal, though Hey Bulldog is great. As for the White Album, my father had it – as one of only 3 or 4 ‘pop’ records. The reviewer in the Times had called Lennon and McCartney ‘the best songwriters since Schubert’ (talk about damning with faint praise…). So my dad had bought it. He particularly liked Blackbird)).

I bought them all at Our Price in Golders Green, between buses, on the way back from school. For my 13th birthday, I got How Dare You? by 10cc from my sister. It had a brilliant Hipgnosis cover and I’m Mandy Fly Me AND Don’t Hang Up, which contained the (for me, at just 13) immortal couplet: “When the barman said: ‘What are you drinking?’/I said: ‘Marriage on the rocks.’”
How sophisticated can you get? (Listening again now, the music is anodyne, but the lyrics are fantastic…)
At 13, in 1977, I went to a new school. I branched out musically. I bought Status Quo Live! (It was around that time I started wearing my overcoat with my arms not in the sleeves. I’d seen it on tv and thought it was ultra-cool! Though it tended to fall off… **)
And then in January 1978 I discovered New Wave and started again with my first single, Shot By Both Sides.
And then in 1979 I discovered gigs! First gig: Magazine at Drury Lane (sitting down. Really it was like the theatre…)
Second: Joy Division at the YMCA!!! (2/8/79 – I don’t even have to check!) I was 15 and it was like: Here’s what I’m meant to do!

I didn’t make a film for 4 more years, but from that moment on, I was hooked on ‘art’. (Joy Division were also my 3rd, 4th, 9th, 21st, 26th, 36th and 37th gigs. The last two were a Factory Special at the Moonlight Club, West Hampstead, 2/3 April 1980. And in case you think my recall’s weird, I wrote it all down in a notebook, which I still have…)
And then in May, Ian Curtis hanged himself. I was 16. It was when I was listening to John Peel on the 19th that I heard. It was after 10pm, and everyone else was in bed. I was up and writing an essay about – and I remember this – Henry I and his domestic policy.
At that moment, it (whatever ‘it’ was) was OVER…

* Alexander is currently director of the Ashmolean Museum. It was that kind of school. I last saw him doing magic in Oxford, 1984. And on tv, he did magic on Jonathan Ross, I seem to remember…

** It’s called ‘shoulder-robing’, my sister tells me.

This was made as the feature film spinoff of the eponymous San Francisco police procedural tv series. And a really boring series it must have been. Two ‘stars’ of it are featured, and they are totally forgettable. But…

At 22 mins enter the ‘guest villains’, on a plane from either Chicago OR Miami (both are mentioned). Eli Wallach, a theatre star in his second film, is Dancer, the hitman who worries about grammar. And Robert Keith is his rather donnish ‘coach’, called Julian, gay (as far as you could be in 1958) and collecting the last words of Dancer’s victims ‘for a book’. (Keith is great as fathers in Written On The Wind and Young At Heart.) The duo rendezvous with a bleached, crew-cut Richard Jaeckel as their driver and tour the sights of the city, Dancer bumping people off along the way. (I suspect the Australian Stuart Beattie must have known this film before writing Collateral.)

Stirling Silliphant wrote the screenplay (before going on to write In The Heat Of The Night, The Poseidon Adventure and so many others), revisiting the spirit of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, which Don Siegel went on to remake in 1964 with another suit-wearing couple of hitmen, Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager…