Yesterday was like all last days before the start of the Edinburgh Fringe

It is the same every year but different.

Horrible.

Dies horribilis.

I got to bed at 2.15am this morning and set off for Edinburgh by car at 6.15pm.

Yesterday started at 8.00am with the postman ringing on my door bell.

I went downstairs. I did not have my keys in my pocket.

“Hold on a minute! I don’t have my keys! I’ll be back in a mo!”

Upstairs. I could not find my keys.

Spare bedroom. Look for the spare set of keys. Could not find the spare set of keys.

Downstairs. The postman had gone. I could not see anything left outside the door.

“I won’t be here tomorrow to collect it from the sorting office,” I thought.

I went back upstairs. I could not find my keys.

“It is a bad enough problem when you are locked out of your house,” I thought, “but it is actually worse if you are locked inside it and can’t get out.”

It was going to be embarrassing to phone the two neighbours who have spare sets of keys to my place. And I think they may be away on holiday. Which would mean phoning my friend in Greenwich and asking her to get two trains across London to let me out of my own house.

Then the phone rang.

It was a call from New York. It was not glamorous.

It was now 8.30am.

“Buggeration!” I suddenly thought. “It is 3.30am in New York. What on earth is he doing?”

I found my spare keys in the spare bedroom.

The postman had left a package outside my door. It was not for me.

I had to go to Kwik-Fit for 9.00am to have my tyres and treads checked. One of my headlight bulbs had also stopped working the previous night.

“Great!” I thought. “The Kwik-Fit man can fit it quicker than me.”

I am not one of Life’s naturally practical men.

The Kwik-Fit man had trouble getting access to the headlight bulb; another Kwik-Fit man tried. He had trouble. I looked at the area under the bonnet behind the headlamps. It looked hermetically sealed in plastic.

The two Kwik-Fit men said to me:

“Can’t do it. It’s got a plug socket thing attached. You can only get it from a Toyota main dealer.”

They are very nice people at Kwik-Fit. I like them. They did not charge me.

I drove to my local Toyota dealer.

The young couple in front of me had been waiting 20 minutes for two light bulbs. That is the short version of their service trauma. Toyota are usually very good. They were having an off-day.

“Halfords told us we could only get Toyota light bulbs for our car from Toyota,” the young couple said.

“Kawk-Fit told me that about my car,” I said.

They were not impressed.

Eventually, I got my light bulb fitted.

Then a travel company phoned about a trip I am making next year. There was a long but necessary 15-minute conversation. It was almost all settled. Except Aeroflot have not yet confirmed their flight schedule for next April. I was told I could travel by Emirates, but I prefer Aeroflot for the eccentricity factor because, when I last travelled with them under Communism, scowling stewardesses used to serve you caviar to demonstrate what life was like in a true Socialist paradise like the Soviet Union. Things may have changed now they have discovered capitalist corruption and McDonalds.

Back home, I found my doorkeys under a Boden clothing catalogue.

I started to wonder if Johnnie Boden’s wares had reached Novosibirsk yet. They do very good winter coats. You need good clothing in Novosibirsk.

I think Edinburgh Fringe fever may have started early this year. It is a swirling of uncertainties in the head, coupled with a slight shivering. There is no known antidote except September.

Around 1.00am this morning, I collected elfin comedian Laura Lexx (she was once employed as an elf in Lapland) from the Elephant in South London (American readers will just have to pass over this reference, mystified) for the trip up to Edinburgh later in the morning. Laura had no Boden clothing, as far as I could tell, and had given me the impression she had packed as if for a year-long expedition to the Sahara and the Antarctic by the massed ranks of the Dagenham Girl Pipers and would have the entire contents of the Colindale Newspaper Library for her Fringe play Ink.

Unfortunately, she had packed quite modestly.

I told her: “I had been going to say I have a Toyota, not a TARDIS.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because,” I explained, “I pre-wrote tomorrow’s blog and I was going to say you had too much luggage.”

“Well just make it up,” she told me. “I don’t mind.”

When we got back to my home, there was a drip-drip-drip sound in the kitchen.

“What’s that?” Laura asked.

I thought for a bit. “That’ll be the new washing machine,” I explained.

And it was.

A handyman (much cheaper than a plumber) had sorted a leak on the water tap when connected to the new washing machine; he had made his own rubber washer to stop the water leaking.

It clearly had not worked.

We mopped the floor under the washing machine, having dragged it out of its recess and into the middle of the kitchen floor.

I got to bed at 2.15am. I will post this blog around 6.15am.

Ars longa, vita brevis.

Or maybe Limbus longa, vita brevis.

Look it up on Google Translate.

But most definitely the traditional pre-Fringe dies horribilis.

Spaghetti-juggling at the Fringe will be like a walk in the park.

The News of the World, the Profumo Affair and the planned military coup

(This blog was later published in The Huffington Post)

I studied journalism at college – well, radio, TV and journalism.

The man in charge of the journalism part of the course was the Production Editor of the News of the World. So we got lots of good lecturers – people like Cecil King, who had created Mirror Group Newspapers and the then-all-powerful IPC.

As a result, we got a very good insight into the real workings of the press and occasionally some great anecdotes.

One was about Rupert Murdoch’s take-over of the News of the World in 1969.

At the time, obviously, there was a lot of publicity about the re-launch of the ‘new’ Murdoch version of the paper and the News of the World’s TV ads promised one big thing – the REAL story of the 1963 Profumo Affair which had brought down Harold Macmillan’s government.

The News of the World had been a major player in the 1963 scandal and had interviewed almost everyone involved in the affair on tape at the time and had sworn affidavits from all and sundry.

But, when Rupert Murdoch took over the News of the World in 1969, he realised that, sitting in the basement in boxes of tapes and papers, there was much that had gone unpublished in 1963 – in particular about the sexual proclivities of Profumo’s wife, actress Valerie Hobson… and about exactly what type of sexual services Christine Keeler provided to Profumo (the UK’s Secretary of State for War) and to Yevgeny Ivanov, the senior naval attaché at the Soviet embassy in London.

However, when the News of the World published their ‘new’ stories about the Profumo Affair, they were just the re-heated previously-published stories. There was nothing new or earth-shattering.

Apparently this was because there had been such unrelenting legal, political and financial pressure on the News of the World that they had backed off. There were even stories of the police listening to tape recordings in one room while, next door, News of the World staffers were busily erasing parts of tapes.

I am a great fan of Doctor Who and, boy, do I wish I had a fully-functioning TARDIS so that I could come back in 100 years or 150 years and find out what had really been happening during my lifetime.

Cecil King, our occasional lecturer at college, was an interesting man because, with some good reason, he had an ego that engulfed any room he entered. Years later, it was claimed or revealed (two words that expose a gulf of possibilities) that he had, in 1968, talked to Lord Mountbatten (who was later assassinated) about the possible overthrow of Harold Wilson’s government with Mountbatten replacing the Prime Minister.

It seems to have been a relatively low-key bit of idle ego-boosting by Cecil, as opposed to the more seriously-thought-through plans for a military coup to overthrow the Wilson government in 1974-1975.

This plan for a military coup in the UK was briefly mentioned in some editions of Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times in 1987 but, I think, removed from later editions. The article does not seem to exist online at the Sunday Times, but I have the original newspaper cutting.

I did once ask the MP Dale Campbell-Savours about the ‘Cunard Affair’ – part of the plans for a military coup in the UK – as he had brought the subject up in the House of Commons. He asked me to phone him at home at the weekend, not at the House of Commons. I did. And he then told me he could not remember any details. “We were looking into a lot of things at the time,” he told me. “I can’t remember.” I always thought this was a little strange. However many murky affairs you were looking into, a planned military coup to overthrow the UK government (with a dry run during which tanks were taken to Heathrow Airport), might stick in the memory.

Only journalists or time travellers know the truth about history while it is actually happening.

The general consensus seems to be that the perceived necessity for a military coup in 1974/1975 lessened and became unnecessary when Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975 and subsequently won the 1979 General Election. The so-called Operation Clockwork Orange in which Margaret Thatcher’s close adviser Airey Neave (who was later assassinated) may have been involved may also have had some effect.

Clockwork Orange and the linked Colin Wallace affair, in which he was framed and imprisoned for manslaughter after he claimed the security services had tried to rig the 1974 UK General Election, surely has the makings of a feature film. A pity the title has already been used.

Conspiracies and conspiracy theories are always gripping entertainment, especially if they are real and who knows what is real?

Earlier in this blog, I specifically wrote that both Lord Mountbatten and Airey Neave were peripherally involved in political machinations and were both later assassinated.

Paranoid conspiracy theorists could have a field day with that. But, of course, they were both assassinated by Irish terrorists for reasons totally, utterly unconnected with the alleged plots: they were assassinated because they were high-profile targets.

As for other matters, I always think it is healthy to maintain a certain level of paranoia. There was a saying circulating in the 1960s: No matter how paranoid you are, they are always doing more than you think they are.

I wish I could get a time machine and go forward 100 years to see what was really happening in the world during my life.

If only.

If only.