A little bit of North Korea in London and glowing balloons in my garage…

Eager eaters await the opening of an ‘all-you-can-eat’ Korean BBQ restaurant in New Malden…

I am interested in North Korea and in the content of dreams.

Last night, I went to New Malden, Surrey, on the outskirts of London, with comedy afficionado and occasional Leicester Comedy Festival judge Louisette Stodel. Each of us was buying the other a belated birthday meal. So, appropriately, given her family background, we went Dutch.

We went to New Malden (her suggestion) to eat because I have been to North Korea twice, it interests me and New Malden has the largest population of North Korean ex-pats in Europe. In April this year, reportedly, around 700 of the 25,000 Koreans living in New Malden were from North Korea. New Malden’s total population was said to be around 90,000.

Statistics seem a little vague. A 2015 report in the Independent newspaper claimed New Malden had a population of just under 29,000 and 10,000 were Korean, 700 being North Korean.

Whatever… I was hoping for a little bit of suburban exoticism in an outer London borough. Sadly, New Malden was a bit bland, although it did have a fair number of Korean restaurants, a fish shop selling Vietnamese ‘swimming blue crap’,

one restaurant with a printed and priced menu which also had a pink post-it note under plastic saying “PLEASE NOTE: PRICES MAY VARY” 

and what appeared to be permanent Christmas lights on the lamp posts in the main street.

The local Methodist Church also appeared to be having a Korean Festival but, as the banner was in Korean script, I was a bit vague on the details.. 

However, over our sundry kimchee courses at the excellent Treestone BBQ restaurant, adjoining the ‘swimming blue crap’ fish shop, the subject of dreams came up…

An unusually reticent Louisette at the Korean

JOHN: So the other night, you had a dream about my garage?

LOUISETTE: I dreamt it was going to become an underground theatre.

JOHN: … and I was running it?

LOUISETTE: You were going to show me what you had turned your garage into, because you had had this brainwave and you had said: “Louisette, I am going to turn this into a performance space.”

JOHN: And did I?

LOUISETTE: I didn’t get any further. I think I woke up.

JOHN: …in a cold sweat of fear?

LOUISETTE: No, I just thought: Oh! I think it’s quite nice, the inside of that garage!

JOHN: You’ve never seen it, though.

LOUISETTE: No, I’ve never seen it in reality but, in my dream, it was very bright and there were glowing balloons and bulb lights and…

JOHN: Glowing balloons? Not just ordinary balloons.

LOUISETTE: Glowing balloons.I don’t know why I dreamt about the inside of your garage.

JOHN: Was the garage going to be for arty performance stuff or comedy?

LOUISETTE: I didn’t get that far enough in my dream.

JOHN: I think you’re going to have to go back into your dream and check.

LOUISETTE: I know what the outside of it looked like. It had a pair of rotten old wooden doors, not an up/down….

JOHN: But I have an up/down and over metal door…

LOUISETTE: I’m sure you do, but this was a dream. It was a dream!

JOHN: And did this come out of another dream that preceded it?

LOUISETTE: No. And I woke up in the morning and I thought: Oh, yes, John HAS got a garage.

JOHN: …but sadly lacking in glowing balloons…

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(This dream seems as inconclusive as the population of New Malden. ANY OPINIONS GRATEFULLY RECEIVED on what the dream was about – especially the “glowing balloons” and the “pair of rotten old wooden doors”…)

I had a car accident yesterday…

(Photo by Samuele Errico Piccarini via UnSplash)

Yesterday I was driving my red-coloured car along the road when a silver-coloured car came up beside me and accidentally bumped very lightly against it. It was more of a skim than a bump.

We both stopped and got out. I walked round to see if there was any physical damage but it was only superficial: some of the paintwork on my car had light grey scuff marks. 

The other driver was very amiable and said: “Turpentine and meths will get rid of that. If you rub it on, it’ll be as good as new.”

He was a very pleasant man. I visited him in his office later and he was getting ready for some big event or other.

Later still, I was in the back of my van. There was a large carpeted shop in the back of my van. A couple of people from the United Nations – a young man and woman, as neatly dressed as Mormons, came in. I had met them at the amiable man’s office earlier.

We were standing chatting when a man with a broom came into the shop. He seemed to think that I was working for the amiable man’s organisation and he would be paid for sweeping the floor or rather, as it was, the carpet.

After he vigorously brushed the carpet there was, surprisingly, quite a lot of dust and minor bits of dirt which the man with the broom swept into a little pile. 

Then he left.

And I woke up.

Life is but a dream.

Just thought I would mention it.

I no longer own a car. I haven’t for years.

When I was a teenager, I dreamt I would die this year…

(Image by Enrique Meseguer, via Pixabay)

I tested positive for Covid-19 on the morning of Christmas Day.

It is 1st January now, a new year and I’m still testing positive…ho hum.

I had a dream last night. I was in the front room of my house with an unknown woman, watching a feature film from the 1950s.

Through the window, I saw this man who looked like a 1940s/1950s ‘spiv’ coming to the front door.

I said to the woman I was with in the front room: “There’s a spiv coming to the door”.

She looked out the window but could not see him, so I went out of the living room into the hall, then into the front porch and he just pushed through the letter box some ordinary leaflets about something I was not interested in.

I went back to watching the feature film with the woman.

For some reason the TV set was now on the floor and the woman had become six inches high and had pink hair, as young children’s dolls do. She told me she wanted me to hold her hair as she coiffured it. That was the word she used. Coiffure.

“I want to coiffure it,” she said.

She moved a small, padded stool over to near the wall, but this entailed turning the television round. We could still see the screen, but the TV set itself had been turned round.

The woman sat so close to the wall, though, that I couldn’t both hold her hair while she coiffured it AND continue to watch the television. Also, she was six inches tall, which complicated things. So I got another small, padded stool and moved it to the middle of the room and told her: “I won’t be able to do your hair so close to the other wall.”

So I turned the TV set round again.

I had to lift it up then put it down in its new position.

It was sitting in a low, one-inch-high wooden frame.

At least, that was what I intended to do but, when I was about to start, some more people arrived at the front door.

They were trying to tell me my back garden was in a mess and that I should buy a top layer of grass from them.

“Turf. That’s the word,” one of them said to me.

“Life is turf,” I told him. That is what I told him.

There were about three of them. I knew they were con artists and told them: “I like my back garden to be in a mess.”

The first man started lifting up the turf with his foot. One of the other men was holding some 6ft high poles. There were about six of them. The poles. Six round poles, each one the girth of a small man’s waist.

I thought I would try to confuse the men at the door.

“I don’t need any more poles,” I said. “I already have some. I was thinking of painting them. One can be red, white and blue for Britain. One can be red, white and blue for France. And I can probably get the German flag in there somewhere. I think if I paint one black, it would be very effective.”

I said this because I thought it would confuse the hell out of the man holding the six tall poles. And the others.

Then the woman I had been in the front room with came out to see what was going on. She was her proper height again.

It was now dusk or just after dusk. It was quite dark, so the gardening people went away, duly confused. 

But now there was a man at the bottom of the front garden who was allowing people to come in and offer their services to all the people who owned local houses.

I thought: This is very strange.

He was supposed to supervise them, but he was just letting anyone in who wanted to take a photograph.

Well, nothing wrong with that, I thought.

And then I woke up.

That was last night.

That is true.

Well, OK, that is not true. 

That was a dream I had on the 30th August last year. But I thought I would share it now. I muttered it into my iPhone, half awake, just after it happened.

And the heading of this blog is not true. When I was a teenager I did not dream I would die this year.

I worked it out logically when I was awake.

Back then, in the mists of the time when I was younger, I looked at the average life expectancy for an ordinary person. And I worked out that this would be the year I would die. I figured, all things being equal, I would die sometime in the 2020s and, if I were dead-on average, then 2022 would be the year I died.

We shall see.

Well, obviously, maybe I won’t. See.

But – hey! – life is but a dream…

(Image by Reto Scheiwiller via Pixabay)

Living the dream: my body is rusting

This morning I got a message from a friend.

It read:

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This is how you feel isn’t it?!

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I replied:

Nah. 

It’s just weird having an old body.

In my erstwhile teens I had a dream and wrote a short story about someone who had an artificial metal body and what he felt when his body eventually, inevitably started rusting.

Now I’m living the dream.

Last night, I stole a large iron safe…

I had a dream last night and woke up at around half past two.

I had stolen a large iron safe, shaped like a cube.

It was heavy and large and made of thick iron and had rounded corners.

I stole it from China and I was dragging it behind me, attached by a heavy, thick rope.

I was dragging it along outside Euston Station in London.

It was night.

But the safe was taken from me by three men working for a woman whom I had worked with at Granada TV in Manchester.

At five o’clock, I woke again. 

I was in the air, flying round and round, doing loop-the-loops.

I could feel myself doing them because, obviously, I was inside my body. 

But I was also watching myself objectively from about twenty or thirty feet away.

I watched myself going round and round in large vertical loops in the sky.

Going down towards the ground… up to the sky… Down to the ground… up towards the sky…

Large vertical loops in the blue sky.

Subjectively, inside myself, as I was flying, I could feel that the large iron safe was still attached to me and I was dragging it round behind me as I flew in loops.

But, as I watched myself objectively, from twenty or thirty feet away, I could only see myself.

I was dragging nothing behind me; there was nothing attached.

It was just me turning circles in the sky.

John Fleming’s Weekly Diary No 35 – Life is but a dream. This week for sure.

… CONTINUED FROM DIARY No 34(b) …

All the world’s an online stage in the coronavirus era (Photograph by Tianyi Ma via UnSplash)

THURSDAY 13th SEPTEMBER

I was talking to a stand-up comedian. She said she had done an online gig, but didn’t like them.

I can only imagine what it is like to play an online gig in silence from an invisible audience. It must be like a rehearsal where you have to deliver your performance at 100% all the time with no motivation and no reaction.

It is a strange twilight world, this coronavirus world, like a dream where brain fog is dense, motivation to do anything is very low and every day seems the same.

THURSDAY 14th SEPTEMBER

To add to the dreamlike quality of this week, I travelled on a Thameslink train today – never a good idea.

There was a lady with green hair and a red skirt sitting half a carriage away from me with a corgi dog on her lap – She looked like upside-down traffic lights.

When the brightly-coloured lady got up to leave at the next station, the dog was on a lead and followed her out of the carriage… And I saw it was not a corgi but a fox.

Is this even legal?

How did she get through the ticket barrier with a fox without being queried about it?

Thameslink may be unreliable and incompetent, but it has the bonus of having its fair share of eccentrics.

Don’t even get me onto the woman with the teddy bear who talks to anyone and everyone about the aforementioned bear; or the bloke with the bright clothes and over-enthusiastic moustache who, according to the Evening Standard, was once convicted of killing his brother.

THURSDAY 15th SEPTEMBER

In a chilling warning to all forced to use the Thameslink line, someone arrived at Elstree station to see me today and, before coming out, used the toilet facilities.

Thameslink: bottomless home of horror

She sat in there doing what she had to do.

The toilets have recently been refurbished.

This included the installation of a movement sensor controlling the lights in the ceiling.

Because there had been no movement for a short while, all the lights suddenly went off.

Pitch black.

My friend was sitting in a windowless cubicle inside a windowless Ladies’ toilet. She waved her arms around. No effect. She could not remember if the door had a bolt or a lever or where it was and she couldn’t find it. She couldn’t immediately see her handbag but eventually found it and, by touch and much guddling around, found her iPhone and switched its torch on.

The lesson to be learned from this is that, while sitting on a Thameslink toilet, be as quick as you can and move around as much as possible.

THURSDAY 16th SEPTEMBER

I think my constant waking up with a dry mouth during the night may be getting to me.

In my last Diary Blog, I mentioned an incident that happened in the street. No need to check back. It doesn’t matter; it’s just a McGuffin or possibly a MacGuffin.

A McMuffin – not to be confused with a McGuffin

But, for some reason, it has been reminding me today of a story I was told once. I may have mentioned it in a blog years ago. Dunno. I can’t be bothered to check. It doesn’t matter; it’s just a McGuffin. This is a story within a story within a story.

Back in the 1990s, I did not write someone’s autobiography. He is dead now. He was a ‘sleeper’ agent for the Soviets, part of a sleeper group run for them by East Germany’s Transport Minister. Strange but true.

This is the story as told to me by the man whose autobiography I did not write.:

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One of the most famous legends of Central Asia tells of a horseman, the standard-bearer of the great Khan. As the Khan’s army are entering a city after a glorious victory, the standard-bearer sees a dark lady looking at him. The dark lady has fearful eyes, as if she is looking right inside him.

Afterwards, he becomes scared that this woman is a witch and she has put the Evil Eye on him, so he goes to the great Khan and tells him his fears and says he wants to go to another city.

“Of course!” says the great Khan. “Give him the finest horse we have! Let him escape!”

So the standard-bearer takes the fastest horse in the Great Khan’s army, rides off across the desert and, in record time, travels to the other city. When he arrives, he sees the dark lady standing by the city gates, waiting for him. She looks at him, smiles and says:

“I was so worried. I knew I was due to meet you here today but, when I saw you in that other city so far away, I was worried that you would not make it here in time for your appointment.”

And the standard-bearer realises that she is Death.

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THURSDAY 17th SEPTEMBER

Even the spam is kinda weird this week. This was a comment on one of my blogs this week. You can tell it’s a tad odd from the first sentence:

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Spam (Photograph by Hannes Johnson via UpSplash)

Hello and welcome to my webpage. I’m Kyran.

I have always dreamed of being a book writer but never dreamed I’d make a career of it. In college, though, I assisted a fellow student who needed help. She could not stop complimenting me.

Word got around and someone asked me for to write their paper just a week later. This time they would compensate me for my work.

During the summer, I started doing academic writing for students at the local college. It helped me have fun that summer and even funded some of my college tuition. Today, I still offer my writing services to students.

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I was impressed by Kyran’s turn of phrase, particularly: “someone asked me for to write their paper”.

There was a link to his website and to his Trustpilot reviews which were almost all of the 5-star variety. The latest review read:

I may sub-contract writing my blog to Kyran…

THURSDAY 18th SEPTEMBER

Below is what happens when you give your iPhone to a 9-year-old and she asks Siri to translate the word ‘John’ into Chinese…

She also told me that one of the boys in her year had stolen one of another schoolmate’s micro pigs.

“A micro pig?” I asked. “This is some sort of cuddly toy?”

“No, they are real pigs,” I was told and, to prove it, a Wikipedia entry and Google photos were produced.

“He stole one of her micro pigs?” I asked.

“Yes, he stole one of her micro pigs after school. She has six. She brought one of her pet micro pigs into school in a top hat and he stole one after school.”

“She was wearing the top hat?” I asked.

“Of course not. The pig was inside the top hat. She carried the top hat in her hands with the pig in it.”

“Did she notice the pig had been stolen?” I asked.

“Of course… There was a tug-of-war. He tried to steal the top hat and the pig but she held on to the hat, so he ran away with the pig.”

As a postscript, I was later told that, although the light-fingered boy had stolen the micro pig, it was later returned to its rightful owner by “the man who looks after the boy”. I know no more about the pig’s fate.

“The man speaks English but I think he is French,” I was told.

“Have you heard him speak?” I asked.

“No,” I was told.

THURSDAY 19th SEPTEMBER

Last night, I woke up 14 times with a bone dry mouth and had to drink water. As always, this resulted in me being mentally zonked all day. Not helped by Thameslink.

I arrived at Elstree station at 1026 to catch the 1038 train which was (obviously) due to arrive at 1040 unless you read the indicator board which said the next train was at 0514…

Thameslink. The rail franchise holder with the slogan:

Reassuringly dependable incompetence in an ever-changing world.

I need to conserve my energy, because tomorrow is a big day – Thursday.

Oh… And… by the way… I made up the story about the fox on the Thameslink train. Life is what you make it and reality and surreality overlap all the time. Everything else apart from the fox story – the live miniature pigs, darkened toilets, illiterate humanity paper writers, the top hat, the homicidal man with the over-enthusiastic moustache and every day of my life being a Thursday – was true.

Or was it?

Yes, it was and is.

… CONTINUED HERE …

My dream is out-surrealed by reality…

Yesterday morning, before waking up, I had a dream.

Well, that’s the way dreams work normally. You tend to be asleep.

I have no idea what triggered the dream.

I was looking down on the scene, either from a balcony or from the first floor of a building opposite. That’s the second floor for any readers in the United States.

Factual reality can be fluid.

I was watching a hidden camera TV show ‘sting’ going on. 

I used to work for a couple of TV shows which used hidden cameras to pull ‘stunts’ in the UK – Game For a Laugh and Surprise! Surprise! 

Fair enough. At least that has some connection with my reality.

From the right of frame in my dream, a young woman was approaching another person who was standing by some grey stone steps on the left. The young woman was an ordinary member of the public – she was the object of the TV sting. 

As the young woman got to the other person by the steps, another older woman came in from the right.

She (the older woman) ‘misunderstood’ why the younger woman was meeting the other person by the steps and she turned away, back towards the right, distraught. 

What she misunderstood and why she was distraught I had no idea.

The distraught older woman then walked off to the right and onto a grey railway station platform. But, instead of railway tracks beside the railway platform there was a choppy, grey, storm-swept sea with white foamy crests on the waves.

The older woman intentionally walked straight into the water and disappeared beneath the waves. 

I was shocked.

And then some man, who was in some way connected to the TV production, was being interviewed on television.

“So you write for The Times and…” the TV interviewer said to him and, somehow, I knew this meant he wrote for the New York Times.

“And…” the interviewer continued…

…and then I woke up.

I had no idea/have no idea how any of that connects to my reality nor what any of it meant.

The strangeness was in the back of my mind all day yesterday.

But made-up dreams and surreality can never compete with the allegedly real world.

Last night, I accidentally spotted an online article on a site called Catholic New York, which bills itself as “America’s Largest Catholic Newspaper”. Not a satire site… A real, genuine Catholic site.

The headline on the article was:

LOURDES SHRINE CLOSES HEALING POOLS AS PRECAUTION AGAINST CORONAVIRUS

…and the story was, indeed, about that. It started:

“As the number of people testing positive for the coronavirus in Europe continued to grow, the French Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes announced that pilgrims were still welcome, but the pools the sick bathe in hoping for healing would be closed temporarily…”

As Wikipedia currently correctly says, Lourdes is “one of the world’s most important sites of pilgrimage and religious tourism. (It) hosts around six million visitors every year from all corners of the world”… hoping to be cured of their ailments in its holy, healing waters.

Now, I am no Christian believer, but I just cannot get my head round how someone who believes that illnesses can be cured by God at Lourdes can possibly logically come to terms with the fact that the holy waters have had to be closed and put out-of-bounds in case a visitor should catch a current viral disease.

Reality is almost always curiouser than fiction.

Or dreams.

The nightmare effect of travelling on too many Thameslink trains – beetroot

I very rarely remember my dreams but I woke up during one this morning.

I was working, freelance, for a TV company and, during the lunch hour, I had to go to hospital where one of the treatments was to put beetroot on my stomach.

Next, I was scheduled to see the oncologist, but I could not remember the name of the person I was working for to phone and tell them I would not be back after lunch and someone had, as a joke, tattooed the bottom half of both my legs while I was asleep during the beetroot treatment.

This is what happens when you have to travel four times on a Sunday during a Bank Holiday weekend on the anarchic rail service Govia Thameslink – as I did yesterday – it turns your head into a gooey mess.

The beetroot was not even edible.

It was a nightmare.

The journeys not the dream.

‪Happy Thameslink passengers enjoying the relaxed holiday atmosphere on one of the tranquil platforms at St Pancras station in London, untroubled by trains.‬

Yesterday, I saw an old woman and the publishing industry jumping off a roof

The future of traditional print publishing

Last night, I had a dream.

I was standing on one side of a slightly old-fashioned British shopping street, perhaps built in the 1950s or 1960s, just after the Second World War.

The buildings had right-angled edges and flat roofs – What were architects thinking after the War? Flat roofs? This is rain-drenched Britain, not some part of sun-drenched California.

The shops on the other side of the road were two storeys high and slightly set back from the road with a wider-than-normal pavement. They liked to have lots of pedestrian space in front of shops after the War. I guess there were flats where people lived above the row of shops; I wasn’t really aware of such fine details in my dream.

But I became aware, at the last moment, that an old woman was standing on the edge of the roof above the shops, two storeys up. As I became aware of her, she jumped. She was wearing a light pink, thick woollen coat. And she wore a head scarf.

When she hit the concrete paving slabs below, there was the sound of three – it might have been four – ear-deafening cracks – the sound of breaking bones. There was a slight echo as her bones broke. Her legs hit the concrete paving slabs first, then she crumpled. But she survived the fall. As she lay there, I could see her face contorting as the ever-different agonies hit her. But I could not hear her desperate screams.

“People think you’re certainly going to die if you jump,” I said to someone. “Stupid.”

I guess she died eventually.

Well, she would do, wouldn’t she…

People do.

So it goes.

Yesterday, I went to the first in a two day seminar about Self Publishing held in the Guardian newspaper’s very modern new offices. I was not initially impressed as, at this cyberworld event in their flash new-ish building, it took over ten minutes for someone to tell me what the access code for the internet was.

“Here it is,” she eventually told me, “but it’s very unreliable.”

And so it proved.

Very very unreliable.

It took me around nine attempts to actually post my already-written blog yesterday morning.

Not impressive.

I was also not impressed when the intro included the words (I paraphrase) “Penguin Books are not going to collapse.”

They were taken over by Random House in the last month. The new entity has been nick-named ‘Randy Penguin’.

In a tea break, an art lecturer said to me: “Artists have always been self-publishers when they start out.”

True. And something I had never thought about.

I had also never thought about the fact that, with books now selling online with small thumbnail images of the cover, book designs have to be less detailed and perhaps less interesting than they used to be – in the same way that, when CDs replaced LPs, the cover artwork was more effective when slightly simplified because the physical size was smaller.

The very wise and very clever author Polly Courtney pointed out that the people wheeled on to radio and TV shows to talk about some subject-of-the-moment are often actually not genuine experts – they are just people who have written a recent book about the subject.

The day’s talks made me even more certain that printed books – like vinyl records and soon CDs – are dead. Vinyl records still exist, as do VHSs.

That art lecturer told me a student had recently wanted to shoot and edit something on VHS “to give it an old-fashioned feel”.

Vinyl records still exist. I guess printed books will still exist. But the business will be in cyberspace. Print-on-demand will fill the gap as traditional publishing declines, but eBooks are the future. And self publishing.

Apparently, last year, 18 of the top 100 books sold on Amazon were self-published.

Apparently, crime writer John Locke – the first man to sell over a million self-published digital books on Amazon.com – sold his first two novels at 99p each… His third book was priced at £1.99… and then he priced his next book – How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months! – at £5.99 … It now seems to be on Amazon at £8.99 reduced to £1.88.

Other things I learned yesterday were that only the foolish self-publish in the run-up to Christmas because the current competition from traditional publishers is too intense… and there is a spike in e-book sales in January because people are playing with their new Kindles, iPads and other electronic readers.

Traditional publishing, like the woman who jumped from the roof, is not dead. But it is in agony and terminally crippled.

And, no, I did not make up the dream of a woman jumping.

Yes, I  really did dream that.

Any psychologists out there who can explain the dream, please do.

Any traditional publishers out there with money they want to throw my way to prove me wrong, please do.

Last night I had a dream and saw a Native American not Michael Winner

Unseen film director Michael Winner

I had a dream last night.

I was in a very large warehouse. It was completely empty.

Two young men came in. Both acted like jack-the-lad Essex boys. Both were a bit twitchy, but smiling, yet I knew there was something dangerous about them. They were talking to each other and to me. They were being amiable but in a dangerous way.

The warehouse was so big its floor stretched almost to infinity. It had a horizon and the floor and ceiling and walls were a light brown, sandy colour.

From the horizon, a figure started running towards me. It was a miniature Red Indian – sorry, Native American – perhaps only two feet high but his head-dress and his head were out-of-scale and were too big for his body like in a Warner Brothers cartoon. He was in sepia and, as he ran, light tan dust clouds were created behind him.

As he approached me at immense speed, I motioned to my left and he swerved and leapt upwards onto one of the two youths. As they fought, the Red Indian – sorry, Native American – turned into rapidly-changing abstract coloured shapes and he lost his fight with the Essex boy.

Then we were outside the warehouse in an open shopping car park, but there were no cars. The Red Indian – sorry, Native American – still in the form of rapidly-changing abstract coloured shapes – was ricocheting around in random movements as if he had been radio controlled and the controller had gone haywire.

I do not know what happened then. The dream just fizzled out.

Or perhaps I woke up.

Sometimes with dreams it is difficult to know if you have woken up or not.

I had been going to write a totally different blog this morning, but it fell through last night.

Famous people are strange. We dip in and out of their lives, missing big chunks including, sometimes, their deaths.

The late late Larry Hagman of Dallas

When the new series of Dallas started on channel Five a few weeks ago, my eternally-un-named friend and I were both amazed that it co-starred actor Larry Hagman, because we both thought we distinctly remembered him dying a few years ago.

Then, yesterday morning, came the news that he really had died the day before.

Last night, my eternally-un-named friend and I went to the Cinema Museum in South London to see an interview with film director Michael Winner which, unknown to us, had been cancelled a fortnight ago because of his ill-health.

Apparently, last month, he revealed he had been told he only has 18 months to live. I had missed those reports.

Apparently he is going to sell his large house in Kensington and move into a flat.

As I mentioned in a blog last December, I sat in the garage of Michael Winner’s large house in Kensington a few years ago.

He was being interviewed for a documentary and, not unreasonably, did not allow the film crew into his house. If he was to be interviewed at home, it had to be in his garage. It could have been in his garden, but the weather was variable.

When he was making movies, he had a fearsome film industry reputation for being polite to the stars of his movies but treating underlings with a lot less deference.

Movie critic Barry Norman once stated: “To say that Michael Winner is his own worst enemy is to provoke a ragged chorus from odd corners of the film industry of Not while I’m alive!”

I had seen an interview with Michael Winner a few years before our garage interview in which he claimed that, when he went to parties on his own, he was sometimes almost too shy to go into a room full of strangers.

On the day of the garage filming, he provided value for money. His answers were vivid and filled with excellent sound bites. A real pro. But he was very prickly. My cheap psychology would say he was defensively sarcastic; he put up a surprisingly defensive wall for someone so successful.

Last night was strange.

I had somehow missed the fact Michael Winner had eaten an oyster in Barbados in 2007 and, as a result, had caught the bacterial infection Vibrio vulnificus, which kills 95 per cent of its victims within 48 hours, that he had to have 19 operations over 10 weeks and been on the brink of death five times. He also caught the superbug MRSA and had to have part of his leg cut away.

He wrote his own obituary for the Daily Mail in 2010

I had also missed the fact that, last year, he married the woman he had dated briefly when she was a 16-year-old wannabe actress and he was a 21-year-old aspiring film-maker. They had met again in 2005. It sounded very romantic and very touching.

We dip in and out of other people’s lives, glimpsing only random snapshots.

As we drove home round the Elephant & Castle roundabout, my eternally-un-named friend said to me: “It’s just so random.”

“The traffic?” I asked.

“Life,” she said.

“Compared to being brought up on RAF camps?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes we used to be at war. As a rehearsal. The camp would be at war for two days. Life in the outside world is just anarchy.”