Brogan’s Heroes — The Railway, Sports Justice and What’s the Bleeding time?

 

Good Evening,

Time.

Time – or universal time – is a relatively modern concept, and the world survived quite happily without it for thousands of years.

Many people may well be surprised to learn that the one device which single handedly brought about uniform time throughout the United Kingdom was the steam train. Until 1840, The United Kingdom had a whole series of local times  which were roughly similar but which in actual fact had no actual correlation to one another.

However, from 1840 onwards there was a move towards what was known as “Railway Time” which was seen as necessary to ensure that there was some form of recognised timescale for the arrival and departure of the new steam trains otherwise there would be huge confusion as to when the new contraptions would be coming and going.

However, it took another 40 years before time in the UK became standardised by law. In between times ( no pun intended ) the railway companies agreed to use Greenwich Mean Time as their standard time, especially because the exact GMT could be sent to other parts of the country via the telegraph.

However, It was not until 2 August 1880, when the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act received the Royal Assent, that a unified standard time for the whole of Great Britain achieved legal status and effectively became both law and practice.

Today, everything we do is affected by and measured by time.

Our phones tell us the time, the radio constantly informs us of the time, all television programmes are scheduled to time with such standardisation of society that as soon as you hear the familiar tune announcing the evening news you know that it is six o’clock without having to look or check.

All air-travel understandably is controlled by time, your car tells you the time, sat nav’s estimate the time between A and B, shops and other places are sometimes only allowed to open between certain times.

And of course for some, the choice of wrist watch — a simple and straightforward device for simply telling you the time— is a matter of extreme fashion and expenditure, with many brands of watch costing thousands of pounds whilst providing exactly the same information as a watch which can cost less than a fiver.

It is sometimes hard to fathom just why companies that do nothing other than make time pieces hold such a stranglehold in the world of advertising and marketing– especially in the world of sports. Whilst many events have sponsors such as banks or beer companies or insurance companies, all of them put together find it hard to see off what might be considered the time keepers union when it comes to sports sponsorship.

Rado, Sekonda, Patek Phillipe, Rotary, Citizen, Omega, Cartier, Swatch, Tag Heuer — and of course the Big Daddy of them all– Rolex– seem to appear with recurring regularity at golf and tennis events around the world — yet they all sell just the one product.

You will not find a similar collection of car manufacturers, house builders, airlines or whatever in world sport sponsorship. You may find any number of these businesses in a secondary role but they will play second fiddle to the time team as often as not!

Amazingly neither tennis nor golf are sports which are principally regulated by time — unlike football, rugby or whatever — yet it is here that the watch men are absolutely to the fore. Football and other similar sports are actually played within a set time whereas other sports do not deem time as the key regulating factor.

For that reason I have often wondered why the watch men do not recruit football managers as the ideal people to lead an advertising campaign. Can you imagine the impact of an angry Sir Alex permanently pointing to this or that brand of watch for the benefit of a referee or fourth official?

Yet currently our televisions are filled with another seemingly angry Scot who has become synonymous with time fixation.

The 118 118 advertising people have decided to dip into the time archives to revive old footage of the one and only James Robertson Justice repeating perhaps the most famous medical joke in history to promote the 118 service.

It was as the boorish, loud and establishment figure of Sir Lancelot Spratt in the Doctor in the House films, that  allowed Roberstson Justice playing the all domineering head surgeon to demand of one of his students ” What’s the bleeding time?” only to be met with Dirk Bogarde replying ” ten past ten , sir”.

The scene became famous in the annals of British Cinematic comedy and showed Robertson Justice in a role which in many ways defined his public persona.

Yet, if anyone had cared to take a little time to examine things further, you would quickly find James Robertson Justice was absolutely nothing like Sir Lancelot Spratt — in fact he was nothing like anyone else on the planet!

James Norval Harald Justice was born on 15th June 1907 in Lewisham South London. He was the son of an Aberdeen born Geologist.

He was educated at Marlborough College in Wiltshire, and went on to study science at University College, London. However, in what would clearly become the start of a trend, he left after a year and became a geology student at the University of Bonn, where once again he again left after just a year — although he would later claim to hold a PHd from the university. This is a claim which others have said is…. questionable!

He was a very keen sportsman and played rugby for the Beckenham Rugby Football Club  ( for just a year of course ) during the 1924/1925 season where one of his team mates was Johnny Craddock who went on to partner the famous Fanny in later life!

By the time he returned from Bonn he apparently spoke an amazing number of languages fluently (possibly up to 20) including French, Greek, Danish, Russian, German, Italian, Dutch and Gaelic. This helped him to become a journalist with Reuters where he worked alongside Sir Ian Fleming and the father of Peter Ustinov amongst others.

Yet again, after a year Justice decided to move on, and this time he emigrated to Canada  where he worked as an insurance salesman, taught English at a boys’ school, became a lumberjack and mined for gold. He came back to England penniless, working his passage on a Dutch freighter.

Amazingly, when he returned to Britain, he somehow talked himself into the job of secretary to the British Ice Hockey Association and went on to manage the national team at the 1932 European Championships in Berlin where they achieved a seventh place finish. He combined his administrative duties in 1931–32 with a season as goaltender with the London Lions Ice Hockey Club.

Next came motor racing!

Justice entered a Wolseley Hornet Special in the JCC Thousand Mile Race at Brooklands on 3 and 4 May 1932. The car was unplaced. However, the following year a “J. Justice (J.A.P. Special)” competed in the Brighton Speed Trials. His car of choice which he christened “Tallulah” noisily expired before the end of the course, and was pushed back to the start in full view of the spectators. The Brighton event was won by Whitney Straight and according to Denis Jenkinson: “Flitting round the periphery of the team was James Robertson-Justice.”

In February 1934 Straight took delivery of a new Maserati but revealed: “Jimmy Justice went off to Italy to collect the first car which was 8CM number 3011” and Motor Sport reported in 1963: “We remember him at Lewes with a G.N. and in a Relay Race with a Wolseley Hornet.”

After the car racing escapade, Justice left Britain again to become a policeman for the League of Nations in the Territory of the Saar Basin (a region of Germany occupied and governed by France and Germany under a League of Nations mandate originating in the Treaty of Versailles).

When the Nazis came to power he left the area, and set off to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side joining the International Brigade. It was here that he first grew his signature trademark bushy beard, which he then retained throughout his career no matter what he did.

On return to Britain, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, but after sustaining an injury in 1943 (thought to be shrapnel from a German shell), he was pensioned off. In the interim, he had married nurse Dyllis Hayden in 1941 and together the couple would have a son who tragically died at the age of four when he drowned in a stream near the family home.

When Justice returned from the war he took the deliberate decision to reinvent himself and for the rest of his life he claimed ever stronger Scottish roots — whether they were real or not! For example, at one time he claimed to have been born in 1905 in the grounds of a distillery on the Isle of Skye, and on another occasion he claimed to have been born in Dumfries and Galloway. On the back of this newly emphasised Scottish persona, he persuaded the Labour Party to allow him to contest the North Angus and Mearns (UK Parliament constituency) in the 1950 general election. Sadly he lost, and we shall never know just where James Justice MP might have gone in the political world, but I am of the view he would have been a fabulously interesting although completely maverick MP.

In 1944, Justice had decided to take up acting and joined the Players Club in London which was then chaired by the amazing Lionel Sachs who would later find fame with the BBC TV show ” The Good Old Days”.

The club was the precursor of that show and staged music hall nights and variety shows.

One night, Justice stood in for Sachs and as a result he was offered a film roll in 1944 having been “discovered” in the club.

This was the start of an acting career, fame and celebrity.

His first leading role was as headmaster in the film Vice Versa, written and directed by Peter Ustinov, who cast him partly because he’d been “a collaborator of my father’s at Reuters.”

He would go on to appear in 84 films.

However it was the character of Sir Lancelot Spratt in the Doctor in the House films which ran throughout the 50’s and 60’s that Justice is possibly best remembered for. The overbearing  Sir Lancelot showed James Justice’s comedic timing and expression to a tee and for the rest of his life he would be cast in reasonably similar roles and persona’s. With his large frame, trademark beard and booming voice he was instantly recognisable in any film.

However, he was in no way finished with his own eccentricities and his determination to insist and demonstrate his Scottishness.

He appeared in no less than four films with Gregory Peck, including Captain Horatio Hornblower, RN, and most notably, Moby Dick, in which Robertson-Justice played the one-armed sea captain also attacked by the white whale. In the 1961 box office hit The Guns of Navarone he once again co-starred with Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn, Stanley Baker and Anthony Quayle. However Justice was also asked to be the narrator in the film as well as act.

However, sometimes he would insist that the credits in films should be changed to accommodate his Scottish roots. Accordingly in some films he was credited as Seamus Mòr na Feusag — The Scottish Gaelic translation of this phrase is literally  “Big James with the Beard” — at other times he was credited as James R. Justice, James Robertson or James Robertson-Justice.

In private he much preferred the big James with the beard tag or just plain “Jimmy”!

He has twice served as Rector of Edinburgh University. First from 1957 to 1960, and again from 1963 to 1966, In between, the post was filled by the Right Honourable Joe Grimmond MP the leader of the Liberal party, and when his second spell ended he was succeeded by Malcolm Muggeridge.

He was a close friend of Prince Philip despite his lefty politics, he went on to become an informed naturalist and an expert falconer–  and he even taught the young Prince Charles how to handle a Falcon.

He would continue to act, however not long after he completed filming on the set of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 1968, the seemingly invincible Justice suffered a severe stroke which brought his career effectively to an end.

By this time he had long separated from his wife who had left him after the tragedy with their son and after Justice had embarked on numerous affairs including one with Molly Parkin who described him as her sexual Svengali!

However, Justice and his wife did not divorce until 1968, by which time the great bearded one had been living with the German actress Irene von Meyendorff for a period of 8 years.

Von Meyendorff would nurse him through numerous strokes over the next seven years, before marrying him ( he was her fourth and final husband ) 3 days before he died on July 2nd 1975.

By the time of his death, Big James with the beard was penniless having lived enough of a life for several men, and having spent any money he ever earned on whatever took his fancy –everything from racing cars to horses.

However, before leaving the Justice story it is worth noting what he thought of as his most important and proudest screen roll.

At precisely 5:30pm on the 31st of August 1957, Scottish Television began its first ever broadcast with a variety special programme entitled This is Scotland. The broadcast came live from the Theatre Royal studios in Glasgow and featured a huge number of Scottish show business personalities and celebrated Scotland the nation. In truth the entire show was a remarkable production.

Those taking part included Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Ludovic Kennedy,Jimmy Logan,Stanley Baxter, Kenneth McKellar,Alistair Sim, Moira Shearer, Jack Buchanan, Ross Taylor,Sheila O’Neill, Andrew Keir,The Starlets,The Mitchell Singers, Geraldo’s orchestra,The Clyde Valley Stompers, and The Rock’n’Roll Sinners.

However, the main presenter on this the first ITV franchise show outside London was Scottish James with the big beard!

It is clear from the live nature of the show that Justice is visually moved and proud to be reading from the first autocue used for a broadcast from Scotland and he is forced to pause when reading the description of Scotland and all its glories. The sheer emotion of the moment clearly gets to him before he is able to recover.

Whatever he was, whatever he did in life and wherever he believed he was born, James Robertson Justice believed he was a larger than life Scot and in accordance with his wishes, Big James was cremated and his ashes were scattered on a remote Scottish moor to linger there for time immemorial.

 

The entire first programme ever broadcast by Scottish Television with James Robertson Justice can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7UqDUeWn14

We will not see his likes again anytime soon.

Brogan’s Heroes — The tale of the army pilot.

The story goes that the man was simply sitting in his kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee one morning and generally minding his own business when it happened.

All was peaceful outside. The man lived in a house that could only be described as showing the obvious trappings of success. The house was in a good neighbourhood, was spacious with several bedrooms and public rooms, had a sweeping lawn outside — all of which would make it the envy of many a passer by.

Apparently, as he drank his coffee and read his newspaper, he was faintly aware of what was going on outside. There were the usual traffic noises, he could hear a helicopter buzzing overhead somewhere, he could hear kids — maybe his kids– playing and making the noises that kids make when lost in completely innocent play.

So he drank his coffee and continued reading.

Then, something changed.

Surely the helicopter was getting louder?

In fact so loud that it must be very low, and on checking out the window the man could see that trees and bushes were now bending in the wake of the wind being created by the rotor blades.

In the time the man took to utter the words ” What the Fuck?” sure enough a commercial chopper appeared as if from nowhere and literally came to rest on the man’s well manicured lawn as he looked on from his kitchen in a mixture of amazement, fear and complete fury.

Just who did the pilot think he was landing on the lawn?

Before the rotor blades stopped spinning, the door of the helicopter opened and the pilot stepped out. He was alone in the chopper and so was clearly to blame for the unexpected arrival. He was not accompanied nor apparently acting on anyone’s instructions in deciding to set the helicopter down in the man’s garden.

There was no sign of distress in either the pilot or the helicopter and so there was no suggestion that this was an emergency landing. The helicopter was an old one and its decal showed that it belonged to a company based in Louisiana called Petroleum Helicopter’s International.

Whoever he was, this pilot had just decided to land his rickety old helicopter in the man’s garden without a by your leave, and the man was not best chuffed.

As for the pilot himself?

Well he emerged from the Helicopter wearing boots, denim jeans and a shirt. He had a mop of unruly thick hair, stood about 5’10” tall, was bearded and looked like a bum who had just got out of a helicopter! In later years the householder would swear that when the pilot emerged from the helicopter he was carrying a bottle of beer! In contrast, the pilot would always claim that this was definitely not so, stating that you never ever flew one of those things with a drink in you—- NEVER!

What you would never guess from the pilot’s appearance was that this was a dyed in the wool, 3rd generation military man.

The pilot was the son and grandson of distinguished forces stock with his father in particular reaching the rank of a US Air Force Major General complete with stars, stripes, medals and bars.

The Pilot himself had been raised “an army brat” and had eventually seen 5 years in the services rising to the rank of captain. He had served in the 8th Infantry “pathfinder” division of the US Army and had successfully completed the 61 day Ranger School . For those who don’t know, The US Ranger School is where certain members of the US Armed forces are trained in special ops and put through a series of courses and tasks which taxes the participants to the point of death!

The courses include airborne assaults, desert survivals, mountaineering training, swamp tests, Water survival tests, Ambush scenarios, Assault scenarios, Physical tests ( 49 push ups in 2 minutes, 59 sit ups in 2 minutes, 5 mile run ( with gear ) in under 40 minutes, Psychological and Mental tests ( effectively simulating torture ), Demolition training, leadership techniques and training, and all sorts of other things some of which have now been stopped as they are seen as inhumane!

Following the completion of Ranger School, a student will usually find himself “in the worst shape of his life”. Military folk wisdom has it that Ranger School’s physical toll is like years of natural ageing; high levels of  stress, along with prolonged sleep deprivation ( training is 20 hours per day ) and continual physical strain, inhibit full physical and mental recovery throughout the course.

Common maladies during the course include weight loss, dehydration, trench foot, heat stroke, frostbite, chilblains, fractures, tissue tears (ligaments, tendons, muscles), swollen hands, feet, knees, nerve damage, loss of limb sensitivity, cellulitis, contact dermatitis, cuts, and insect, spider, bee, and wildlife bites.

In short, to complete Ranger Training you have to be one tough son of a bitch — and one had just landed a helicopter on the man’s lawn!

However, by the time he landed the helicopter on the lawn, the pilot had turned his back on the military life — a decision which would cause a rift with his entire family as his parents saw it as a decision which rejected everything they stood for and believed in. It was a rift of such force, it would never heal.

Before going into the military, the Pilot of the helicopter had graduated from San Mateo High School in California, and had gone on to attend Pomona College in Claremont California. Pomona is ranked as one of the most exclusive colleges in America and is noted for its liberal arts faculty. To say that it is an exclusive college is an understatement, as on average it accepts only 13% of applicants and the average class size is just 15.

The college has a superb academic reputation and an enviable sports reputation. Many of its alumni would go on to work in Law and Government, Business and Finance, Education, Health and medicine and all the major professions.

However, the pilot– who graduated from Pomona Summa Cum Lauda with a BA in Literature would follow none of these paths.

However, while at the college he was to feature on the cover of Sports Illustrated Magazine as one of their ” Faces in the Crowd” for 1958 celebrating his athletic prowess in the fields of Rugby, Boxing ( He had featured in the Golden Gloves ), American Football and track and field.

The Sports Illustrated “Faces in the Crowd” feature was used for years to celebrate unknown amateur athletes or young athletes who would go on to make their mark or set records in a big way. Other “Faces in the crowd” from around the same time included Jack Nicklaus, Bobby Unser, Bobby Fischer, Al Oerter, Billy Jean King, Wilma Rudolph and Arthur Ashe.

Whilst at Pomona, the pilot would be instrumental in reviving the Claremont Colleges Rugby Club of California which has remained a Southern California rugby dynasty and institution.

From Pomona, the pilot earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College Oxford where he studied for several years gaining a Bachelor of Philosophy to add to his literature degree from Pomona. He also gained an Oxford Blue for boxing whilst in England. From Oxford, he proceeded into the US Army where he learned to fly a helicopter at Fort Rucker in Alabama, completed Ranger School, before being sent with the 8th Infantry to West Germany on active oversees duty at the height of the cold war.

When his tour of duty came to an end in 1965, he was offered a professorship at West Point where he was asked to teach English Literature and Philosophy.

However, he had already decided on another course altogether, and it was his decision to turn his back on the military and academia which lead to the permanent estrangement from his family.

Instead, our Pilot had decided on another lifestyle entirely– a course that would lead him to land a helicopter on someone else’s lawn out of the blue one day and risk the consequences!

Having left behind some of the finest educational establishments in the world, and a cosy career as a military academic which could have led to politics, the diplomatic corps or who knows what, the Pilot had headed down to Tennessee ( by this time  with a wife and child in tow ) where he held down a number of manual jobs before he took up a position as a janitor sweeping the floors at Columbia Studios in Nashville Tennessee. However, the janitor’s job did not pay enough to keep house and home, and so every second week he would move on down to Louisiana where he would fly service helicopters out to the rigs situated in the Gulf of Mexico. After a one week stint on the chopper, he would resume his sweeping duties in Nashville.

It was while he was at Columbia that he had first met the man with the house. The man was already a living legend in many respects, and respected as someone who was at the very top of his profession. A touch on the wild side, and definitely not someone to be trifled with, the janitor come pilot had approached the man at Colombia in an attempt to pitch his talents with a view to impressing the man and getting in tow with him.

Alas the man had looked at what the pilot had to offer, considered the proposition and had said politely but firmly, ” Thanks- but no thanks!”.

It was this rejection that had led the Pilot to take the extreme step of having another go by simply turning up one day in the helicopter and setting down unannounced on the man’s lawn.

So— Imagine the scene:

The owner of the house is drinking his coffee when a great big helicopter suddenly lands in the garden and the be-denimed, bearded, bum looking pilot gets out of the cockpit carrying a parcel and starts to stroll up the lawn. In one telling of this story, the owner of the house comes out of the house carrying a shot-gun such is his disgruntlement at the helicopter descending onto his property.

The gun carrying owner is a somewhat shocked and annoyed Johnny Cash — a man not noted in the mid 1960’s for his patience and understanding.

He is met on his lawn, by the boot wearing janitor with the degrees from Oxford and Pomona, the graduate from US Ranger School, the former US Army Captain, Oxford Blue and Sports Illustrated cover boy who simply extends his hand as cool as you like and says:

” Hi, my name is Kris Kristofferson and I wonder if you would listen to some more of my songs?”.

The above is just one version of the story about the unknown Kristofferson landing a helicopter on Johnny Cash’s lawn.

Kristofferson is on record saying that as far as he recalled Cash might not even have been there at all ( which Cash denied ) and Cash alleges that Kristofferson got out of the chopper and offered the beer as well as a tape of songs ( which Kristofferson denies ).

What can’t be denied is that the incident took place and that Cash once again listened to songs written by the academic janitor.

Among the songs that he heard was one song among several that Kristofferson had written while his legs had been dangling off the edge of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico — it was called Sunday Morning Coming Down, which Cash would later claim he sort of made his own for a number of years.

Before he ever became a performer of any note himself, Kris Kristofferson would write songs which various other people then sang and turned into hits. In 1966, Dave Dudley released a successful Kristofferson single, “Viet Nam Blues”.  Within the next few years, more Kristofferson originals hit the charts, performed by Roy Drusky (“Jody and the Kid”); Billy Walker & the Tennessee Walkers (“From the Bottle to the Bottom”); Ray Stevens (“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”); Jerry Lee Lewis (“Once More with Feeling”); Faron Young (“Your Time’s Comin'”); and Roger Miller (“Me and Bobby McGee”, “Best of all Possible Worlds”, “Darby’s Castle”).

Kristofferson would eventually achieve some success as a performer himself, when Johnny Cash’s introduced him as a singer songwriter at the Newport Folk Festival.

Yet Kristofferson was never going to be the greatest singer songwriter. He did not have the most pitch perfect voice and to be fair his guitar skills were never those of a six string maestro.

Notwithstanding his limitations as a performing artist, over the next few decades any number of people would take and record Kristofferson compositions and turn them into huge hits earning him substantial royalties.

Beyond Johnny Cash, other luminaries such as Janice Joplin, Perry Como, Ray Price, Joe Simon, Bobby Bare, Jerry Lee Lewis, O.C Smith, Patti Page, Willie Nelson, and many many more took his songs and turned them into standards. One by one, the leading artists of the day brought their interpretation to Kristofferson’s lyrics, emotions and general ability to tell a story and teach a lesson with his words.

He had become a lecturer in literature and philosophy after all.

In 1971, Kristofferson swept through the Grammy’s with several of his songs being nominated with Help Me Make It Through the Night being awarded Country Song of the year.

It would be easy from here to recount his successes in terms of awards and nominations. It would be just as easy to describe how he broke into acting, starred in films directed by Dennis Hopper and Sam Pekinpah and went on to play the lead role opposite Barbara Streisand in the hugely successful remake of a Star is Borne ( an experience he described as tougher than any boot camp ) for which he won a Golden Globe award and later films like Convoy and others.

He was also nominated for an Oscar for his original score for the film songwriter.

At one time, Kristofferson could do no wrong in terms of music and film.

Yet, all of that ignores his drinking and how he made his way through  a few marriages including his marriage to Rita Coolidge, had several high-profile affairs including Janis Joplin and Streisand and Joan Baez, and how he eventually kicked the bottle and achieved a status as a songwriter poet with inclusion in various song writing halls of fame.

Interestingly,  Rita Coolidge’s ancestry is part Cherokee Indian and part Scots. Kristofferson’s grandfather was in the Swedish Army, but his mother’s line was Scottish/Irish.

Since 1983 he has been married to Lisa Meyers and together they have 5 children ( in all he has 8 kids ) and he now lives a tough old life on the Islands of Hawaii.

Kristofferson is now 77 years of age and still tours regularly. He became part of the county supergroup ” The Highwaymen” along with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, but continues to travel playing solo concerts with just his guitar, his music stand and his voice.

As I have said, he is not the greatest solo artist in the world but what cannot be denied is that he has an unmistakable presence and a unique style — the last time he was in Glasgow he played to a packed Royal Concert  Hall and did not make it to the end of the first song before stopping to tell the assembled audience that George W Bush was an asshole!

President Clinton did not escape his wrath either as the former military man and Ranger condemned drone attacks in Iraq which killed innocent men, women and children, and was able to cite poets and songwriters as among those who  had perished.

However, perhaps the point of this long diatribe is to tell a tale of someone else entirely — then maybe it is not!

Roddy Hart is less than half the age of Kris kristofferson and went to University graduating with a Law Degree — well nobody is perfect!

However, he decided against a career in the law and instead chose a music career like Kristofferson and so far the ” Boy has done good” with successful albums and of course his own Radio show on Radio Scotland.

However, a while back when he was less well known he took the mad notion to send some demo recordings to………… Kris Kristofferson…… although not really expecting much chance of receiving a reply.

To his surprise, the once bum like pilot and Oxford Scholar did reply, invited Hart to Hawaii and recorded one of his songs.

Since then the two have become great friends.

Perhaps Roddy Hart didn’t land a helicopter in Kristofferson’s garden but the similarity is there.

It could be argued that Kristofferson’s most famous lyric says” Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to do” yet he has said that when his time comes he wants to be buried under a stone which contains another songwriters lyrics….. another songwriter of a similar age, who dated some of the same women and who made his way in the music business around the same time as Kris Kristofferson.

The lyrics concerned come from Leonard Cohen and they perhaps some up Kris Kristofferson’s attitude to life from a very early age:

Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

However, before he is ready to lie beneath the headstone he is about to release his umpteenth studio album and is involved in touring it around Europe. Incidentally, I did hear a story which said that Kristofferson preferred to drive between Gigs with his family in a great big Winnebago, which he would also sleep in at night rather than stay in hotels etc like other major acts.

Roddy Hart and his band the Lonesome Fire are also touring, indeed three of them made a wee pit stop and performed an acoustic set in Fopp on Byres Road on Saturday!

However at the end of the month Roddy Hart will play an acoustic set on his own in Glasgow……… and he will be accompanied by a septuagenarian who once landed a helicopter on Johnny Cash’s lawn!

Two days later, the pair will again team up for a repeat performance in downtown Wick.

Whether they will travel from Glasgow to Wick by way of helicopter is not known.