Why comedy act The Amazing Mr Smith committed suicide by jumping off a cliff

A fortnight ago, I blogged about the death of music and comedy act The Amazing Mr Smith. And followed it up with comedian Martin Soan’s memories of him in a second blog. His friend and former manager Joe Stead now tells me: “His state of mind the last nine months had actually been very good. He had a wonderful new girl friend. I popped down to Dorset regularly after his wife Viva died in 2009 to keep an eye on him. I was last there (twice) in November when he was in good spirits except for toothache.

“He had undergone tooth surgery in Hungary in July. Yes! Only Derek would choose Hungary over Guy’s Hospital in London and things were not quite right. He went back to Hungary for further remedial treatment in September and had been in pain on and off since then. The specialist he saw in Dorchester (private) hospital advised him there was nothing wrong, he was simply chewing incorrectly. Apparently if he chewed up and down like normal people – and not sideways like cows – his pain would disappear in a couple of weeks.”

Now Joe Stead has posted memories of an Amazing man in his own online blog: The Ramblings of an old Codger, which I reprint with his permission below:

* * * * *

Joe Stead, an old codger, remembers…

Derek (The Amazing Mr) Smith was born a genius on the 1st April 1948.  Now whether you believe in astrology or not you have to admit that out of the 366 days in which Derek could have chosen to be born that year, he chose the 1st of April. A pretty toxic mix don’t you think?

He had an IQ of over 160 and history is littered with people of equal or near intelligence all of whom walked the fine line of normality as they knew it.

 Spike Milligan was another hyper intelligent man who had spasms of deep depression that plagued him throughout his life.  There was a time in the sixties when Milligan was living with his then wife near me in a house in Blackheath, London. Spike lived upstairs, his wife lived downstairs. They weren’t really talking to each other. But Spike would phone her up every time he wanted a cup of tea.

 Educated at a grammar school in South East London, Derek went on to Bristol University graduating sometime in the late 1960s with an honours degree. 

He went to work at Burroughs Wellcome in Beckenham (later to become GlaxoSmithKline) as one of their top scientists specializing in heart diseases. 

The Amazing Mr Smith, in a recent Vimeo mini-documentary

He stayed in that employment until 1994 when he and his wife Viva bought the house down in Loders, Dorset. One of the first things he did, to fill his spare time when he arrived, was to take Pure Maths at University Degree level. He took two exams and got 95 and 99 percent marks. He was genuinely annoyed he didn’t get 100 in both exams because he couldn’t see anywhere, in his reasoning, where he had gone wrong.

He was, of course, an inventor par excellence. And most were quite simple inventions that you and I would never dream of. The condom bagpipes being just one example.

I remember one time, before he moved to Dorset, visiting him at his house in Bromley. He had taken a standard dining chair, sawn the back off it, drilled holes up each leg and he had it hanging from the ceiling as a lamp shade.

I actually first met Derek around about 1970. It might have been a little later; I can’t remember the exact year. Derek had appeared on the folk scene in South East London performing as the guitarist in the group Wild Oats.

Wild Oats’ album with Mr Smith (left) & his future wife Viva

Viva was lead singer. Ray Tassie played mandolin, with Mike Flood on bass. Ray tells me that apparently Derek, not Viva, worked out the four part harmonies for the group and he did them all at the same time. Note by note. He was never wrong. He was able to work on four harmonies at the same time note by note – and the bloke couldn’t even sing!

Derek and I became the closest of friends and we did many crazy things together.  All instigated by Derek of course.

In January of 1982, Derek came to my flat in Greenwich to ask me if I would be his best man.

I said” “Certainly. When are you getting married?”

He said: “I don’t know. I’ve not asked Viva yet”

At the time I was his manager, so I said: “Right, look. You’ve got three weeks in May when you don’t have any work. If you marry Viva on May 9th (a Saturday) I’ll get you an American tour between May 13h and May 30th.”

He said “Right” and apparently went home, woke Viva up and said: “Joe says we can get married on May 9th and go to America on May 13h. He’ll get me some gigs there.”

Viva apparently said “Yes,” and went back to sleep.

A slightly off-the-wall marriage proposal I suppose. But, with Derek, I guess you would expect nothing less. And so it was, as his best man, I got him to the church on time – and only just, if I’m honest, as we couldn’t find the church.

I’ll tell you about some of the crazy things.

Mr Smith’s 1987 audition for Jonathan Ross

There was the time he showed up at my house just before Christmas one year to go out for a Christmas drink. In those days, Derek was always super untidy. When I opened the door, he was in full evening dress – bow tie, the lot – and carrying a parcel which apparently was my Christmas present. I was really very embarrassed that I had not thought of buying him a Christmas present until he explained it was my present to him. 

When he entered the house, I suddenly realised that his evening jacket was rent at the back, down the middle, from collar to hem. In fact, it was only the collar holding it together. It sort of flowed open at the back showing his white shirt. Apparently we were off to Welling on a pub crawl and I was to give him my present when we were in the first pub. At the pub, Derek dashed off to the bar to get the drinks, making sure at least half the occupants saw his jacket, while I sat at a table with the parcel. Not knowing what was in it. When he came back, he enthused really quite loudly that I had bought him a present. He opened up the parcel and therein was the most hideous jacket you could ever imagine any American wearing to church on a Sunday morning. 

Derek was, of course, delighted with it and he swapped jacket immediately putting the dinner jacket with the rent back straight back into the brown paper parcel. Thus we made our way to the next pub and the whole procedure was acted out again in reverse. We did that all night going round at least eight, maybe ten, pubs drinking half pints to try to stay as sober possible. This was an impossibility in Derek’s case because, in those days, it only took a pint or maybe two to get him completely pissed.

A bit childish you might think. Not for Derek. He was in his element. He had a great need to entertain people.

A rather shy, gentle man with a propeller on his nose

I remember a time in Northolt High Street when he proceeded to water lamp posts, telegraph poles and phone boxes with a kettle he had filled in a friend’s kitchen. When he got to the bus stop, the queue all backed away from him by about three feet. And this was years and years before anybody tried making a TV programme like this.

One hot summer Sunday lunchtime in early May, we stopped off at Teignmouth for a drink at a pub by the dockside where workmen were laying huge pipes about 2 feet in diameter by about 45 feet long on the other side of the bridge. The pipes were stacked up on the dockside about 30 yards from the pub. A lot of people were drinking outside. Derek disappeared, ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but instead he appeared alongside the piping. Bending down, he sung into the pipework: “Day-o; Day-o, Daylight come and I want to go home” very loudly.  He then ran the 45 feet or so to the end of the pipe, cupping his hand to his ear to hear the sound come out the other end.

He did this at least half a dozen times, always from the same end, much to the amusement of the people drinking on the dockside, not to mention the workmen who were all totally non-plussed.

I heard somebody nearby murmour: “The lunatic must be drunk”. 

I turned and said: “No, it’s just a man with an IQ over 160 acting quite normally”.

His humour camouflaged a creative, sensitive, vulnerable man who, with careful artistry, consistently challenged his own inventiveness and put everyone, including himself, outside of their comfort zones.

He never ceased to amaze.

SO WHY DID THE AMAZING MR SMITH COMMIT SUICIDE?

Mr Smith died on beach at foot of East Cliff, Bridport, Dorset

Derek was being treated by his doctor for a number of problems which included either severe toothache or severe pain in the jaw.

Despite being assured by a specialist at Dorchester Hospital only 48 hours before his death that he had nothing wrong with him, he was convinced he had a poisoned bone which antibiotics could not touch.

His doctor had prescribed Seroxat.  Which he had taken for precisely two nights.

The NHS describe Seroxat thus………

Some people who take Seroxat may find that it intensifies depression and suicidal feelings in the early stages of treatment.  These people have an increased risk of self-harm or suicide in the early stages of taking Seroxat. As Seroxat starts to work these risks decrease.

The drug Paroxetine is sold under the name Seroxat

If you are taking Seroxat, or you care for someone who is taking Seroxat, you need to look out for changes in behaviour that could be linked to self-harm or suicide.

If you notice any of these changes or are worried about how Seroxat is affecting you or someone you care for, you should contact your prescriber, a mental health professional or NHS Direct as soon as possible.

It is important that you discuss with your prescriber how long it will take before you can expect to feel any benefits from taking Seroxat.

Do not share your medicine with other people. It may not be suitable for them and may harm them.

I therefore have to wonder why Derek Smith (a genius but, like so many geniuses, a manic depressive) was prescribed a drug that the doctor knew might cause him to commit suicide.

Seroxat, by the way, is supplied by GlaxoSmithKline UK. The very company for whom Derek had worked as a heart specialist.

I would like to thank those of you who wrote expressing their amazement and horror at the awful events that occurred in West Bay, Bridport in the early hours of Sunday December 8th.

* * * * *

There is a 7-minute mini-documentary about The Amazing Mr Smith on Vimeo…

…and snippets of his various acts on YouTube.

BBC TV’s current affairs series Panorama transmitted a programme on the dangers of Seroxat in 2002. The transcript is HERE.

Comedy – Secret Edinburgh – my view

A city guide with tips from over 160 comics

During this Year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Tim Clark and Andrew Mickel of the website Such Small Portions published a book called Secret Edinburgh which was sub-titled A Comedians’ Guide To The City. It had contributions from over 160 comedians.

Well, that is not really true. It had contributions from over 160 comedians and/or people listed in the Comedy section of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Programme.

Which is why I was asked to contribute, although I am not a performer.

One section of Secret Edinburgh was titled Out of Town and contributors basically wrote about their favourite places which are not in the centre of the city.

Comedian Dan Nightingale wrote about a hill to the south/south west of Edinburgh.

My much-used photograph of me standing on Blackford Hill (photograph by my eternally-un-named friend)

He ended his piece with the words: “I don’t actually know the name of the hill but I suppose I don’t need to. I know where it is.”

My contribution followed his. The hill is the one on which I am pictured in the header of this blog.

This is my contribution to Secret Edinburgh:

_______________________________________________________

I can tell Dan Nightingale that his hill is the Blackford Hill, just south of Morningside.

When I was newly 18, I tried to commit suicide with pills. This was a bad idea, because I had always been shit at Chemistry in school.

I was persuaded to go into a mental home in Essex, because I had tried to kill myself. I did. But I only stayed two days and one night because they kept asking me questions when I just wanted to be left alone.

I went back to my distraught parents’ home, but it was no better there. Not their fault. So I ran away from home.

I hitched to Edinburgh which was and still is my favourite city. Ever since I was an embryo, I had gone there once a year with my parents to spend a few days with my father’s aunt, who lived in Morningside.

When I ran away to Edinburgh, I slept one night in a multi-storey car park at the foot of the castle rock. I spent another sleeping in the stairwell of a block of council flats. It was very cold.

In Morningside, I saw my great aunt on the other side of the street. I did not talk to her.

Later, I walked up the Blackford Hill at twilight to see the view: the city spread out before me, the castle rising up in the distance on the left; Arthur’s Seat rising in the distance on the right. The waters of the Forth were twinkling in the background with Fife beyond them; the lights of the twilight city were starting to twinkle in the foreground.

It was totally peaceful and now, every time I go to Edinburgh for the Fringe, at least once I walk up the Blackford Hill to feel that tranquility amidst the Fringe adrenaline.

Two Jews on the pressures of comedy – or even getting a venue to perform in

Last August, I met New York based comedian Laura Levites when she was performing her show American Girlfriend in Edinburgh and blogged about her in a joint interview with her and London-based American comic Lewis Schaffer titled Two Jews Jabbering About Sex, Drugs and Suicide at The Edinburgh Fringe.

She is very funny. They both are. And they both have their worries.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from Laura. This is what she said (posted with her permission):

____________________________________________________________

Laura Levites flyers Edinburgh’s Royal Mile in 2012

I was going to the Fringe again this year. I was told by (Xxxxx venue) that I had a spot, in fact I’m sure I was one of the first to put my application in. Last week (Xxxxx venue) told me I no longer have a spot.

I’m pretty fucking pissed off, because I didn’t put in for anywhere else and I have no idea what to do.

I’m going to be completely honest here. I’m in the throes of finishing my first book, American Girlfriend, ‘the full version’. So, for the past two months, I have been locked in the confines of my head writing… or thinking about writing… which has required me to think about my life a lot and – What do you know? – Bang!… Full-blown depression kicks in…. So I thought about ending it. I’m like Fuck it. I’m done with life…….. and curled up in the fetal position.

Luckily for me, my brother called my shrink and intervened.

Hence, an idea for a new show SelfHelpless.

I had to make a deal with my shrink – He would only see me if I finish my book and not kill myself. So, this week, I’m seeing another new doctor to see if we can get my medication right. And, I kid you not, Friday I start going to a depression support group. Part of my mandated recovery is exercise, so I’m doing the latest in feminine exercise called Physique57, where I stand at a ballet bar in a room with a bunch of angry women and get yelled at to lift my leg higher. I’m actually starting to enjoy the pain of this.

I’m doing this depression right!

But I have been writing and I do have a book – Fuck, writing a book is hard. Hopefully it will be done in the next few weeks and I can start looking ahead instead of behind.

____________________________________________________________

Last night, I also got an e-mail from Lewis Schaffer who is performing his show Lewis Schaffer’s American Guide to England on eight consecutive Sundays at the Leicester Square Theatre, starting this weekend. He has been performing his free show Lewis Schaffer: Free Until Famous twice-weekly at The Source Below in London for the last three years or more. This is what he told me:

____________________________________________________________

Lewis Schaffer is worried about his Leicester Square shows…

My Leicester Square Theatre run starts this weekend and I’m in over my head.

How can I ask for £10? But then again, what is ten quid? Nothing. Bubkis. I am funny!

But, then again, am I asked to do the Old Rope comedy club? Or that Stewart Lee Alternative Comedy TV thing? Or nominated for a Chortle Award? Not even something for Nunhead American Radio. Nothing.

I am not sure who is going to turn up and pay ten quid.

The idea I pitched was Lewis Schaffer’s American Guide to England. 

Does anyone care about England nowadays, especially the English? Do they care about what an American thinks about England? I am not even much of an American, anyway. I am barely a New York Jew. I was weird in New York and I am weird here.

I want to tell the audience that the show they have paid £10 to see has been replaced by The Lewis Schaffer Show. All about me!

Knowing me, I will tell the audience that. Like when I told a Democrats Abroad fundraiser in 2004 that I had voted for George W. Bush. That didn’t go down well. Fact was I hadn’t voted for GWB. I hadn’t voted since 1984. I just couldn’t help saying it.

All I want to do is do what I always do: not be limited to some structure about England or Britain or America. I do need some kind of structure. I should be writing the show, or at least reviewing the stuff I have about Britain, which is probably a lot. Did I tell you I was on stage in Birmingham the other night for maybe two and half hours? Frigging mental!

I know what you’re going to say:

“But you always say you’re not ready and you always say no-one will turn up and it always works out.”

I have struggled in anonymity at the Source Below and, by charging money for my show at the Leicester Square Theatre, the reviewers from The Times and the Guardian will be coming in. I’ll be a total shambles and start panicking on stage and – boom – the work I’ve put in over the past few years will have been wasted.

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.

Two Jews jabbering about sex, drugs and suicide at the Edinburgh Fringe

(This piece was also published by the Huffington Post and by the Indian news website We Speak News)

Laura Levites and Lewis Schaffer: New York Jews together

At the Edinburgh Fringe, I know comic Lewis Schaffer and bumped into comic Laura Levites. It turns out they were both brought up in Great Neck, New York, but had never met. I suggested we should have a chat for this blog. Two New York Jewish comedians. What was I thinking? I hardly got a word in.

“Andy Kaufman was born in Great Neck,” Laura Levites said. “The first line in the movie Man in the Moon is It all started out in Great Neck…”

“And Groucho Marx moved there,” added Lewis Schaffer. “And in the movie Miracle on 34th Street, she wants to buy a house in Great Neck. And Alan King moved to Great Neck. And then there’s F.Scott Fitzgerald.”

“The Great Gatsby is set in Great Neck,” said Laura Levites. (It is called ‘West Egg’ in the book.)

“You told me Great Neck was full of sad rich, flashy Jews,” I said to Lewis Schaffer.

“And a few Jew failures,” he added.

“My dad wasn’t smart enough to get rich,” said Laura Levites.

I laughed.

“I’m not even joking,” she insisted. “He really wasn’t. And he was an asshole.”

“Did you live in a house?” asked Lewis Schaffer.

“We had a house.”

Lewis Schaffer: his show at Edinburgh Fringe

“Then we must have been poorer than you.”

“My parents didn’t buy the house,” said Laura Levites. “my grandmother gave them money to buy it.”

“Well my grandmother gave my parents money to buy a car,” said Lewis Schaffer. “I hate to talk about them this way cos it makes them seem like losers, my parents.”

“My parents ARE losers,” said Laura Levites. “My dad is dead and my mom is alive.”

“What did your dad do for a living?”

“He was in advertising and then he was just an asshole.”

“Did he divorce your mom?” Lewis Schaffer asked.

“Yes.”

“He moved away?”

“No, he stayed in Great Neck.”

“But the money was spent on another flat?”

“No, the money was spent in a bitter custody battle over me and my brother.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten.”

“So you were a child of divorce,” said Lewis Schaffer. “I sensed that. I sense that. Vulnerable.”

“I’m vulnerable,” said Laura Levites. “I have daddy issues. I’m a mess.”

“Am I old enough to be your daddy?” asked Lewis Schaffer.

“You wanna adopt me?”

“I don’t want to adopt you that way.”

“Yeah, but I mean that in a sexy way. I like to be spanked.”

Enough, already! Enough, already! Enough already!

“You like to be spanked?” laughed Lewis Schaffer. “I like to punch. Well, I would like to punch women, but I haven’t.”

“I can take a punch,” said Laura Levites. “You wouldn’t be the first guy who tried to hit me.”

“So basically.” I interrupted, “we are talking here about two bitter Jews who had a bad upbringing and became comedians.”

“My parents were not in a bitter custody battle,” said Lewis Schaffer, “because they were old school and thought they had to stay together until they or the kids died.”

“Lewis’ comedy,” I told Laura Levites, “is very autobiographical.”

“No,” said Lewis Schaffer. “I wouldn’t say I was autobiographical. I would say I mostly do penis jokes.”

“But,” said Laura Levites, “they’re about your penis.”

“There’s also a lot about his children and ex-wife,” I said.

“But those are substitutes,” explained Lewis Schaffer, “for the core issue that my parents didn’t love me. Let me re-phrase that. My mother didn’t love me. So I focus on my ex-wife.”

Laura Levites’ show at the Edinburgh Fringe

“Does your family feature in your show a lot?” I asked Laura Levites.

“This one, no. But, by virtue of everything they did to me, yes. I mean, I am their fault. Are you going to come see my show?”

“You’re down there somewhere in the list,” I said.

“I’m somewhere in the list? I’m tired of people saying that.”

“So you grew up in the house with your brother,” said Lewis Schaffer. “and you were ten.”

“I was ten or eight. I was not fully-formed.”

“Did you have breasts?”

“I did not have breasts. I don’t have breasts now.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” said Lewis Schaffer.

“I don’t have breasts now,” she repeated. “Look at this! I have nothing! It’s just skin. Who cares? I don’t have boobies. My grandma used to work at Bloomingdales. My grandma, she’s in a nursing home. I went to see her one day. She put both hands on my breasts. She sold underwear: that’s what my grandma did for a living. And she said You have big nipples, but you’ve small breasts. That’s what she said to me. Even my grandma said I got no titties!”

“This is a New York Jew,” said Lewis Schaffer.

“I’m a New York Jew,” said Laura Levites. “What d’ya want?”

“If I were younger,” said Lewis Schaffer, “I’d be getting an erection right now. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I’m losing my shit if you’re not getting an erection.”

“Why is talking about nipples Jewish?” I asked.

“You couldn’t get a conversation like this out of an English girl,” said Laura Levites. “Because they don’t express themselves. They can’t even answer a simple question. It’s like How are you FEELING? Don’t give me the answer you THINK I want to hear. It fucks with your goddam head! I’m not even kidding. The English are fucking mad!”

“Did you see my show?” asked Lewis Schaffer.

“Three-quarters of it,” replied Laura Levites. “I was in the back”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Yeah. I REALLY enjoyed it. I feel at home with you. I understand everything you say. I relate to everything. I feel the same way you do.”

“I think circumcision should be illegal,” said Lewis Schaffer. “but not for women.”

“You’re cut and I’m sorry about that,” said Laura Levites. “You don’t know what you’re missing. I can teach you how to grow it back. You make this (wanking) motion and you pull every day or you put weights on it. I’m not even joking.”

“But, “ laughed Lewis Schaffer, “I do pull it every day and it hasn’t grown.”

“You haven’t been pulling it the right way. There’s a motion; there’s a technique; I’ll take you to the websites.”

I interrupted: “One thing I like about New York Jews is the pace. Jabber jabber jabber. No time to inhale oxygen. How do you breathe? You have no gaps to breathe in.”

“No no no. Wait! Wait!” said Laura Levites. “Look what’s written on my wrist…”

Laura Levites’ wrist reminds her that she has to BREATHE

She held up her arm to me. Tattooed on her wrist was the single word BREATHE.

“It’s written there,” Laura Levites said, “because I don’t breathe. You’re looking at my arm. You’re going to talk about my cut marks?”

“Suicide?” asked Lewis Schaffer. “They say suicide’s painless, but it’s not painless.”

“Yeah, it is,” said Laura Levites. “I tried to kill myself a bunch of times.”

“I won’t put this in the blog,” I said.

“You see,” Laura Levites said, “that’s so British of you. That’s fucked up. I don’t care. I’m OK with it.”

“You have to think PR,” I said. “Is it in your show?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t mention about trying to kill myself in this show, but I’ll talk about it all the time because I’m not repressed. I take pills and I’ll take ‘em in front of people because I don’t care. Anti-depressants, stuff for ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), sedatives; you name it, I take it. Do you know how many drugs I brought? Because you can’t get shit here.”

“Are these legal?” I asked nervously.

“They’re legal in America,” she said. “They’re not legal here because you guys have terrible drugs.”

“Look at my face!” said Lewis Schaffer. “Look at my face! I’ve become English now.”

“I got bottles,” said Laura Levites.

“I can’t believe you’re saying this,” said Lewis Schaffer.

“I came here with bottles of pills…” Laura Levites continued.

“You said they’re illegal in Britain,” I warned her.

“No, no,” she corrected me. “I can bring them in. I have prescriptions. But, like, my ADD medication isn’t legal in this country.”

“So you can’t get arrested?” I asked warily.

“I’m not going to get arrested EVER,” she replied. “I’m a white girl. No-one’s going to arrest me. Do you know how much shit I’ve gotten away with in my life?”

“You’ve got red hair, pale skin, you’re pretty and you’re American,” I agreed.

“No-one’s going to arrest me,” she said. “And I’ve done some fucked-up shit.”

“Have you really?” asked Lewis Schaffer.

“Yeah.”

“Can I get the video of it?” Lewis Schaffer asked. He paused… “The thing with this girl is you can’t get a rise out of her.”

“Why do you want to make me angry?”

“I love making people angry.”

“You’re not going to make me angry, because I actually agree with what you say in your show.”

“I know. I find that uncomfortable.”

“That I agree with you? That I think women are crazy?”

“Yes.”

“I do think we’re bananas. I know who I am. I have self-awareness. Do you know how much therapy I’ve had?”

“But that doesn’t make you any less crazy,” said Lewis Schaffer.

“I’m aware of my craziness,” she replied. “I don’t have a problem with someone saying that to me.”

“You’re like a wild girl,” said Lewis Schaffer. “It’s like old home week for me. You’re nuts.”

“I’m good nuts,” said Laura Levites.

“Yeah. You’re good nuts,” agreed Lewis Schaffer. “Well, you’re good but you’re not nuts.”

“No, no, I’m not nuts. Well, I mean, like on paper, I actually am. If I wanted to kill someone, I could get away with it.”

“Did it seem like I was funny in my show?” Lewis Schaffer asked.

“You’re naturally funny, yeah,” said Laura Levites. “The Jews and the Blacks are always funny. But American Jews aren’t dominating the comedy scene any more.”

“People are bored with the Jews,” said Lewis Schaffer. “The Holocaust was exciting, but we haven’t done anything interesting in a long time.”

Repeat. Mantras and madness. Post traumatic stress. Repeat. Tap. Tap. Tap.

(This blog was also published in the Huffington Post)

Last Thursday, I wrote a blog about attending a Symposium at Lincoln University.

This Monday, I wrote a blog about being in a mental asylum when I was 18 after attempting suicide.

I only realised today that there is a link between the two, though tenuous.

One of the participants at the Symposium – a retired senior fire officer – said that, at one point in his life, he kept having a recurring image (spot the tautology) popping into his mind of a young girl with a hideously burnt face and body sitting in the back seat of his car when he looked into his rear view mirror

Eventually, he was able to find someone who could get the frightening image out of his mind. All that someone did was to tap their finger rhythmically on the senior fire officer’s hand.

It took three sessions, but it worked.

No idea why it worked.

Perhaps it was something to do with the rhythm of the distraction bringing the brain back to reality.

But, afterwards, he no longer saw in his mind the image of a young girl with a hideously burnt face and body in his rear view mirror.

The image he saw in his mind was eventually identified as the view he had had of a girl through the windscreen of the car she had been sitting in when it collided with another car, trapping her feet.  The car burst into flames and she burnt to death, while fully conscious. The senior fire officer had been in charge of the team that recovered her body, which involved him putting his face next to hers.

The repeated tapping on his hand somehow removed the repeated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder image from his brain.

I asked if the speed of the rhythm of the taps altered or if they were always at the same speed, because I thought maybe there was some connection with the fact that people can have epileptic fits when they see tsunamis of flash photography. I read once about people having epileptic fits when driving along a particular road in France.

It was one of those long, straight, flat roads with tall trees planted on each side at regular intervals. When there was bright sunlight shining through the trees at one side and a car drove at a particular speed, the trees caused the human eye to see flashes of sunlight at a rhythm which, I think, coincided with the brain waves of drivers prone to epilepsy and they had a fit. The solution was to replant the trees at irregular intervals.

I wondered if tapping at a particular speed was somehow replicating the speed of some brain waves.

I showed a rough version of the blog you are now reading to the retired senior fire officer this morning. He warned me:

“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is somewhat different to the epileptic fit process you describe and it does not help those who suffer to confuse the two.

“In my case, I blame thirty plus years of emergency service work in both the Police and Fire Services.  Whilst a single traumatic (traumatic in the eye of the beholder, but not necessarily in the eye of someone else) event can have long lasting impact, the impact of multiple traumatic events over a period of years, (say daily or more frequently for thirty years) is more likely to cause problems for that viewer, unless they are emotionless.

“The impact of long term exposure to horror or stress has been described to me as being like placing books of problems on a shelf. At some point there will be too many books on the shelf for the screws holding it up, they will loosen and the shelf collapses. The shelf and books have to be re-hung and re-ordered. That’s what the tapping does. It re-tightens the screws and re-orders the books in the right place.

“My burnt girl vision came about some years after the event when my then employers sought to train me and five other officers in how to deal with traumatised fire fighters. To do this, they used a number of actors to play the roles of the said fire fighters and explain to us their feelings after a particular set of scenarios including a person being burnt alive. We had to recognise and treat their suffering. Four or five of the six of us receiving this training then experienced our own Post Traumatic Stress Disorder  symptoms, which had to be treated. The training method was then abandoned.”

It would be interesting to know why the repeated tapping cured his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder visions of the young girl with a hideously burnt face.

I have never tried chanting mantras morning and night – as someone I met the other week does. My sense of the ridiculous holds me back. But I think I read somewhere that it does not matter what you chant – you could chant over and over again Om mani padme hum – or Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare – or Scrambled eggs, see me eating, thirty scrambled eggs to the tune of The Beatles’ Yesterday – and the effect would be the same.

I remember lying in a bed in King George’s Hospital in Ilford after I had tried to commit suicide and I realised, without consciously having started to do it, that my forefinger was tapping rhythmically on the mattress under the pillow loud enough for me to hear it through the pillow though not loud enough for anyone else to hear it. For some reason, this helped clear my mind of thoughts, perhaps like some sort of repeated mantra.

It is the repetition not the content which is important.

The human brain must be an interesting thing.

I wish I knew something about it.

Perhaps those episodes of Doctor Who which had The Master going on and on and on about hearing a tap-tap-tapping in his head had some reflection in reality.

I must watch the repeats.

What happened when I was admitted to a mental asylum when I was newly 18

I was born on Friday 28th July.

Just after my 18th birthday, on Friday 11th October, I tried to kill myself because of a girl. I have blogged about it before.

Obviously I failed and after I got out of hospital – as was not uncommon then – it was suggested I should go into a mental asylum. It was at Goodmayes, Ilford, in East London.

On Saturday 19th October, I wrote to a friend in Wales about it:

________________________

I never was any good at chemistry in school – I think I once managed to come next-to-bottom instead of bottom. I got out of King George’s Hospital on Wednesday afternoon. My underpants and one black sock had disappeared mysteriously while I was in there.

On Wednesday evening, I went in voluntarily to Goodmayes Hospital (the nuthouse) because I knew I wanted a rest and they thought I wanted help.

I was only there for one day because, on Thursday evening, I discharged myself, much to the annoyance of a point-nosed grey-haired man – a charge nurse – slightly balding, who filled in all sorts of forms and kept muttering about the extra work.

There was a secretary to the point-nosed grey-haired charge nurse – tall, thin and always reading intently – who laughed nervously at anything. He laughed loudly and shrilly. A really shrill laugh. He seemed like a patient, but he was one of the staff. The difference between the staff and the patients was that the patients walked slower.

Anyway, this charge nurse bloke was giving me what sounded like a prepared and rehearsed lecture on how I should not discharge myself and, at the same time, he was rolling a cigarette, looking down at it while he rolled it.

“You’re not reading it from the cigarette paper, are you?” I asked.

“Now why do you say that?”

“Hallucinations?”

“Well, it could be…”

I think that was why he was not too keen on letting me out.

He thought I might be seeing little green point-capped and grinning goblins crawling out of cracks in the walls.

When I had arrived at Goodmayes Hospital on Wednesday night, I had been very depressed. Very in the pits. They gave me a pill which gave me a surge into emotional elation. I did not really want to be elated but I had no choice. It was like a rocket taking off inside my body after I took the pill. Phwoeeeeeeehhh! Mindless happiness. I had trouble getting to sleep so they gave me two sleeping pills. The difference between the staff and the patients was that the patients walked slower.

The next morning, a doctor interviewed me at his desk in his room.

“You seem to explain it very well,” he told me. “I am talking to some students tomorrow. You can come and talk about your feelings to them so they can understand how someone like you thinks.”

The last thing I wanted to do was to talk to a room full of students like some academic lecturer. I wanted a rest. I did not want an audience. I wanted to be away from people. I realised they were not going to let me alone. I wanted a rest and they thought I wanted help.

I was in a ward with about ten people.

There was a queer bloke with glasses and smiling, intent eyes who had not had a shave that day. He kept going on about masturbation and had I ever let anyone do it to me and how good it would be. He was one of the nurses. He had started as a nurse in Goodmayes Hospital seven years ago, then left and been a clerk and a book-keeper and all sorts of things but then he came back.

“I came back to take care of people like you,” he told me.

When he heard I was discharging myself, he looked me deep in my eyes and told me:

“You’ll be back. People always come back. They think they won’t. But they come back.”

Also in the ward, there was an Irishman who read books about three inches from his nose and held them tightly with both hands and never looked at anyone, avoiding any eye contact with anyone else.

Then there was the hairy man with a torn pyjama jacket who lived in a triangular padded room at the back of the ward. They let him out for meals. He walked oddly, like he was doing it in slow motion. He would say: “Charles the First said it would happen,” and “Charles the First said he would never indulge it. He said he would never indulge it,” and “Harold Wilson Harold Wilson Harold Wilson Harold Wilson.”

And then there was the 20 year-old boy in the wheelchair who said he had a jaw disease.

“I’m in here because I have a jaw disease,” he told me.

He looked backward but I don’t think he was.

He kept talking about how he used to go mountain climbing and bog exploring.

“I used to like to go to quiet places and old ruins where I was completely alone,” he told me. “When I was outside. Before I came in here.”

He told me how he wanted to go camping and hiking. How told me how he threw cups and plates and bottles up in the air and liked to see things destroyed.

“I like to see things destroyed,” he told me.

He did nothing but cut out pictures of the athlete Lillian Board.

He was making a large Olympic chart backed by hardboard, covered with pictures of Lillian Board.

When I told him I was leaving that night, his eyes were like the sea without waves. He told me his girlfriend Evie, who used to live in Chingford, could not visit him very often.

“She has gone to live in Exeter,” he told me.

I gave him my address. I told him to write to me and promised to visit him.

When I left, the queer bloke with glasses and smiling, intent eyes was telling him about an isolated shed in the gardens outside the ward.

“You will be in here for a long time,” the bloke with glasses and smiling, intent eyes was saying to the 20 year-old boy looking up at him from the wheelchair, “And I will be in here too.”

_________________________

After I got out, I never wrote to the boy in the wheelchair. He never wrote to me. Other things happened.

Two years later, the athlete Lillian Board died of bowel cancer, 13 days after her birthday. She was 22.

Digressions in British comedy and acting and a sad death in Los Angeles

I went to Hastings on Friday for the first of Vivienne and Martin Soan’s monthly Pull the Other One comedy shows there. They now have monthly Pull The Other One shows in Peckham, Herne Hill and Hastings. One laughing audience member came out at the end saying:

“I haven’t seen so many naked men since… well, I don’t think I ever have…”

I guess that will inevitably happen when you have Martin Soan, Bob Slayer and Dr Brown in among fully-clothed Simon Munnery, Sol Bernstein and Charmian Hughes, who tells me she is not (as I thought) giving up her sand dance just at the very point when she is thinking of performing next year in Australia – a land not short of sand.

Australia has sand the way my blogs can sometimes have digressions.

Nay. Nay. Thrice nay. Charmian tells me she is not giving up her sand dance but will be “rationing it due to the erotic pandemonium in unleashes on unsuspecting audience ‘members’.”

She will instead occasionally replace it in her stage routine with the ‘dance of the seven cardigans’.

The real highlight for me of trekking through Friday night traffic to get to Pull The Other One, though, was chatting off-stage to actor and now film-maker Robin Hayter, a man of inexhaustible and fascinating anecdotes.

His ubiquitous father James Hayter starred in BBC TV’s first ever sitcom Pinwright’s Progress in 1946-1947, seemed to be in every British feature film of my childhood and is perhaps most fondly remembered as the definitive on-screen Mr Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers and as the original actor who declared in TV ad voice-overs that “Mr Kipling make exceedingly fine cakes”.

I had not known that James Hayter appeared in a regular role in BBC TV sitcom Are You Being Served? nor that the Mr Kipling cake people paid him a very large sum of money indeed to drop out of the show because they felt it was too down-market a series and his appearances in it might devalue his dignified voice-overs in what they saw as their up-market cakes’ ads.

It also turned out that Robin Hayter and I had both worked with the wonderful David Rappaport. Robin was a fan of ‘Green Nigel’, the character David performed as a piss-take of children’s TV show Blue Peter when I worked on the final series of anarchic TV show Tiswas.

David Rappaport was a very highly intelligent man; a friendly, kind person and a charismatic actor who appeared in Time Bandits and many other movies. I never saw his appearances in his own US TV series The Wizard but, apparently, he was wonderful.

Like Robin Hayter, I was very shocked and very sad, when I heard that he had shot himself, depressed, in Los Angeles in 1990.

Very sad.

_____________________________________________

Robin Hayter’s video ‘pitch’ for a proposed documentary movie is HERE.

Can mass murderers really help you to become a better person or is the best answer just to eat lots of chocolate?

If you have popped in to read this blog for a bit of levity, I suggest you give it a miss today and try tomorrow, when mild titter-making may make a welcome reappearance.

At the weekend, I got an unexpected Facebook message from someone I do not know.

At first, I thought it might lead on to some scam in which I would be told I could get access to millions in a Nigerian bank account if I gave out my own bank details. But, no, it was a genuine question. It was (and this is true):

“I know these times is not very easy but I would like to ask you about purpose of life what do you think most important thing in this life (sorry for my language I am just began learn English)”

After a couple of Facebook messages, my reply (again, this is true) was:

“Purpose? None. Just try not to hurt other people. The most important thing, sadly – and it took me a lifetime to realise this – is money. Because without it everything else is difficult. Money will not bring you happiness but, if you are unhappy, it will make being unhappy less uncomfortable! Friendship and relationships, of course, are what matter in the long-term, but never underestimate money… and trying not to hurt other people…”

In the last couple of days, a couple of people have asked me if I saw last week’s screening by BBC TV of the movie The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (set in a World War Two concentration camp). And, yesterday, someone asked if I saw Sunday’s ITV1 drama Appropriate Adult about the multiple murderer Fred West.

My answer was that I did not watch either of them because I really did not think seeing them would make me a better person. Do I really want to sit through something harrowing and/or feel uplifted at the end from watching the fictionalised reality of something obscene?

For perhaps 25 years, I had a paperback version of Emlyn Williams’ highly-regarded 1968 book Beyond Belief, about the Moors Murders. I could never bring myself to read it and, three years ago, a year after after my mother died, I took it to a charity bookshop because I knew I would never read it. It would not increase my sympathy or empathy for other people’s suffering.

When I was about 11 or 12, I saw film footage shot when the first Allied troops went into Belsen in 1945. It was one of the first concentration camps to be liberated and the cameras went in with the first troops; later, the cameras went into camps after they had been partially ‘cleaned up’.

The footage was and is the worst thing I have ever seen. I remember seeing a pile of skeletons. Dead skeletons all piled up. Except, then, one moved – he or she was still alive and, I think, got up and walked – staggered – slowly like some unreal Ray Harryhausen stop-frame animated figure.

Wikipedia currently quotes BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby, who was there when the camp was ‘liberated’:

“Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which… The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them… Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live… A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”

I only saw the film footage. What on earth it must have been like to be there on that day I cannot imagine.

It made me realise when I was 11 or 12 what people are capable of doing and it made me put anything that has happened since into some perspective. I think it would do most people the world of good to see the footage of Belsen when they are 11 or 12, at an impressionable age before they are capable of putting up psychological barriers to defend themselves from what they see.

The other horror I am, in a sense, glad I saw were the killing fields of Choeung Ek in Cambodia in 1989. They were the killing fields for the capital Phnom Penh. Before the Khmer Rouge took power, the fields (formerly an orchard and Chinese graveyard) had apparently been somewhere families went for tranquil days when they were not working.

It was not the killing fields which upset me so much.

In the killing fields were tiny, tiny shards of shattered, broken-off bones on the ground, there were occasional tiny little pieces of torn clothing and there were the covered-over pits where no grass grew. But they were just objects – bits of bone, fabric, earth.

It was Tuol Sleng – S-21 which upset me – the ‘interrogation’ centre which had previously been a high school in Phnom Penh.

At Tuol Sleng, the former classrooms had been divided by roughly-built brick walls into thin prison cells… and then there were the confessions. The Khmer Rouge had had an almost Germanic efficiency, perhaps because they had been so sure they were in the right. After torture, people had admitted their guilt and their confessions had all been carefully written before they were taken off in trucks to be killed in the fields of Choeung Ek, usually by agricultural implements because why waste bullets?

After torture, they confessed they had worked for the previous regime – behind the counter in a post office or in the Ministry of Agriculture or whatever their crime had been; they had been a schoolteacher or they had worn spectacles or were family relations of people who were guilty of any of the many capital offences decided-on by the Khmer Rouge.

But it was not the confessions which upset me so much. They were just bits of paper, even if they had real people’s words on them. It was the photographs.

The Khmer Rouge had indeed been very efficient. They had photographed each and every guilty person before they were driven off to be killed in the fields. Small portrait-style chest and head shots of everyone. And hundreds of these photographs papered every inch of the walls of the two entrance rooms to Tuol Sleng.

Hundreds of photographs. Hundreds of faces. Hundreds of eyes staring at you.

It was like the American radio reporter’s commentary as he watched the Hindenburg airship burst into flames: “Oh the humanity!… Oh the humanity!”

And all the hundreds of people in the photographs at Tuol Sleng had exactly the same look in their eyes as they stared into the Khmer Rouge photographer’s camera. Each one of them knew they were going to die and you could see the look of hopeless resignation in their eyes; they knew they would be dead very soon.

It was like Richard Dimbleby’s description of Belsen: a “ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them…” because they knew for certain that they would be dead soon. The look in their eyes was hopelessness.

I remember when I was back in London, crossing Shaftesbury Avenue near its junction with Piccadilly Circus and I cried for no reason, remembering the look in those people’s eyes.

I think, when I saw the film of Belsen when I was 11 or 12 and when I saw the hundreds of photographs of people at Tuol Sleng, I was a better person for having seen what I saw. Perhaps a bit more sympathetic. But I do not think watching the Fred West drama or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas or reading Beyond Reason would have increased my empathy.

They were all, to an extent recreating evil but they were not the evil itself.

I saw Schindler’s List when it came out because it was a Spielberg film and I was interested to see how he had filmed it. But you cannot make a film about concentration camps.

I remember when the acclaimed US TV mIni-series Holocaust was screened. I had no interest in seeing it because, however good the acting and direction and however much the Method actors starved themselves for their roles, they could not replicate the walking dead of Belsen and all the other work camps – Belsen was a work camp, not a death production line like Auschwitz.

If what people see and remember are highly-acclaimed TV series and movies like Holocaust and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Schindler’s List, then what they see is, in a way, what they and their brain will remember as the reality.

But the reality was not the TV series and the movies; the reality was the film shot in Belsen and the photographs taken by the Khmer Rouge of the faces and the eyes of their victims.

Seeing them, I have always been aware that people are capable of anything.

When I was newly-18 I tried to kill myself. Unforgivable, because of the pain I inflicted on my parents. Blinded by pain and incomprehension, they visited me in hospital. Trying to be kind and considerate and loving, they brought me some oranges to eat and, to cut them, a short knife with a sharp, stainless-steel, serrated blade. After they had left, under the bedclothes, I ran my finger along the knife a few times and ran the knife across my wrist a few times. Eventually, I gave it to a nurse.

What I learnt was never to trust anyone because even someone with your best interests at heart can destroy you without meaning to.

And they are the good guys.

The world is full of genuine bad guys who actively want to harm you and destroy you because it makes them feel good.

I am sure the guards at Belsen got a hard-on watching people die.

All you can do is carry on, eat chocolate, laugh at the pointlessness of it all and die. When you are lying on a bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to blink or close your eyes and all you can hear is your own death rattle, nothing matters – not career, not money, not anything except the memory of friendships and relationships.

I guess.

Who knows?

I watched my father die like that.

No punchline.

Mild titters may re-appear tomorrow.

The man who kept accused war criminal Ratko Mladic’s hat in his living room

I posted this blog a few months ago but, with the arrest yesterday of former Serbian general Ratko Mladic, I thought part of it might be of interest again. It is about one of the most interesting people I never met.

* * *

Bill Foxton is dead now and we’re back to that famous Rutger Hauer death speech in Bladerunner.

He’d seen things you people wouldn’t believe and, when he died, almost all those moments were lost in time, like tears in rain. His death went mostly un-noticed, but he intersected with History.

In the mid-1990s, I (almost) wrote the autobiography of a Soviet sleeper agent who, let’s say, was called Ozymandias. I have blogged about him before. He believed that the British and the Spanish were the most violent people in Europe. He told me about a British friend called Bill Foxton who, he said, had gone to public school in Somerset, then joined the French Foreign Legion for five years and fought in the Algerian War of 1954-62.

“At that time, a lot of guys in the Legion were German,” Ozymandias told me, “Many of them former S.S. men. Bill told me that during the French Algerian War in the early 1960s, when they entered a village to ‘clear it up’, the Spaniards were the only ones who would shoot babies in their cradles. Even the ex-S.S. men didn’t do that.”

After his experiences in the Algerian War, Bill Foxton returned to England in the Swinging Sixties with lots of money in his pockets and met lots of girls who fancied him and, according to my chum Ozymandias, joined a privately-run special services group. They used to train Idi Amin’s bodyguards in Uganda and there was an incident in Qatar when the Emir’s brother was shot.

“Finally,” Ozymandias told me, “in 1969, Bill was employed as one of a group who were paid to go and kill Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. But they were stopped at London Airport by the British security services and the private company they worked for was closed down. Because of his experience, Bill was persuaded by the British authorities to join the SAS and was immediately sent to Ireland 1969-1973.

In a previous blog, I mentioned an extraordinary true story in which an Irish Republican was kidnapped in Belfast, drugged and put on a plane from Shannon to New York. Bill Foxton was involved in that. He was also a member of the British bobsleigh team in the 1972 European Championships. He was an interesting man.

In 1973, he was sent to fight in the secret war in Oman which, at the time, was called ‘the Dhofar insurgency’ and was said to be restricted to southern Oman; it was claimed the Omani Army were fighting some Yemeni insurgents. In fact, the insurgents were backed on the ground by South Yemeni regular troops supported by East German advisors and troops, acting on behalf of the Soviet Union. Oman was backed on the ground by British SAS troops (plus, in the early stages, the Royal Navy) and by units of the Shah of Iran’s army and the Jordanian Army. The commander of the British forces was an admiral and his problem was to cut the rebels’ supply routes from South Yemen into Oman. The British strategy was to construct three fences along the border, manned by more than 5,000 Iranian troops. Behind these three fences, inside Oman, the war was fought by the British SAS and Oman’s mainly Baluchi army while Jordanian desert troops defended the northern part of the desert in Dhofar province.

In 1975, Bill was inspecting a sector of the border fence when East German troops fired an RPG – a rocket-propelled grenade – at him. He was alone, but managed to jump back onto his jeep and drive off, holding his blasted and bloodied arm onto his torso with a torn strip of his uniform. He held the strip of fabric with his teeth and drove with his other hand, while the enemy troops continued firing grenades at him. He drove about 6km to a British base where a Pakistani medic came out to see him.

“I think I’ve lost my arm,” Bill said through his clenched teeth.

“Well, let’s have a look then,” the Pakistani medic replied sympathetically. Bill let go of the strip of fabric he was holding with his teeth and, when his arm fell out, the medic fainted on the spot. Alan fainted too. They flew him to the British base at Akrotiri on Cyprus, where his arm was amputated and, by the time my chum Ozymandias met him, he had an artificial one.

“I am a big man,” Ozymandias told me, “but Bill has a neck twice the girth of mine. He may only have one arm but, when we met in 1982, I could see immediately he was extremely tough. Red hair, red beard, strong, broad neck. We immediately got on.”

According to Ozymandias, Bill Foxton had won an award from the SAS:

“At that time, Bill had already lost his left arm but was still a serving member of the SAS; he was training in the deserts of Oman with younger SAS troopers closing in on his position from all sides and he buried himself in the sand. He dug a hole with his one good arm and simply buried himself deep underground. The SAS troopers passed over him without realising until he told them and the Regiment was so impressed they gave him their Award.”

After the secret war ended, Bill decided to stay in Oman and started running the Sultan’s Armed Forces (SAF) Beach Club: apparently a splendid, well-organised place with a restaurant full of ex-patriot British soldiers from a wide variety of armies. He had his SAS Award plaque hanging on the wall of his office.

I heard all these stories about Bill Foxton from my chum Ozymandias and then, one day in the 1990s, I accidentally heard him being inteviewed – Bill Foxton – he was by then spokesman for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and apparently also head of the European Commission Monitoring Mission during the Yugoslav wars.

According to Ozymandias, Bill kept a hat in his living room in Britain. The hat belonged to Serbian General Ratko Mladic. During the Yugoslav wars, Bosnian forces ambushed Mladic’s car in an attempt to assassinate him; he was not in the car but his hat was. So the Bosnians killed his driver and gave the hat to Bill, whom they admired. That was the explanation Bill Foxton gave.

In 1999 he was awarded the OBE for his work in Kosovo.

By 2008, he was working in Afghanistan, running humanitarian projects.

The next year, in February 2009, he shot himself in the head in a Southampton park with a 9mm Browning pistol after he lost his life savings – reportedly over £100,000 –  in the $64 billion Bernie Madoff fraud.

His death was not news except in the local Southern Daily Echo in Southampton. The BBC mentioned it as a ‘human interest’ aside to the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme fraud story, like a teardrop in rain. His death went mostly un-noticed, but he intersected with History.

Oh – that British plot to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in 1969, the year he came to power… it was allegedly stopped because the US Government felt that Gaddafi was sufficiently anti-Marxist to be worth ‘protecting’.