Snapping to it

Rummaging through a drawer in the kitchen the other day, bored, looking for I know not what, I came across a rather careworn Polaroid photograph dating back more years than I want to recall. I don’t know why it was filed among discarded gifts from Christmas crackers, bent cutlery and a corkscrew (although to confess there is one of them in every drawer), but it was. When I rubbed away on the surface it revealed me with my arm round the legendary photographer Harry Benson. It was taken by his wife Gigi at the Old Course in Troon, where Harry was brought up and where he was back visiting.

The word legend is carelessly bandied about, but in this case it applies in neon. Harry was a well-known snapper when he first travelled to the USA with The Beatles in 1964, during their first barnstorming tour of the country, and he decided to stay. Well, the money was better for a start. His pictures – and you will have seen them – have appeared in Life, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He’s also taken more than 100 cover shots for People magazine and appeared in countless other publications.

Harry chronicled some of the most important moments in modern history. He has photographed every US president from Eisenhower to Trump, the Queen several times, was feet away from Bobby Kennedy the night he was assassinated – “I kept telling myself ‘this is for history, pull yourself together, fail tomorrow, not today’” – and he was in the room with Richard Nixon when he resigned. He witnessed the Berlin Wall being built and taken down, and was on civil rights marches with Martin Luther King Jr. He has history coursing through his veins.

He also took some stunning and shocking shots of Glasgow, where he was born. And if you look at his website you’re greeted with a large black-and-white picture of Richard Burton giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Elizabeth Taylor.

As we knocked around Troon, Harry showed me one shot he had taken of a major film star which Vanity Fair had passed on because it revealed a track of cocaine from the actor’s left nostril. Harry is also a national treasure – he’s still living in New York and on the go at 90. Legends never die.

Yeah, yeah, yeah

Harry Benson was yet to photograph them, but it was on this day in 1963 that the launch of what was shortly to become a worldwide and unprecedented musical phenomenon occurred – The Beatles released their first single, Please, Please Me.

Coronavirus churl

Tramping the streets on my permitted walk during the week I noticed a note under a car windscreen (below right) and, being a naturally nosy chap, I took a look.

A few hours later the “guilty party responded on Facebook (also below).

Enough said.

Cleaning up

In this time of pestilence and tribulation you can become obsessed with the trivial, although for me that also pre-dates the pandemic. The live-in daughter, the lawyer, who has never scrubbed a sink or washed a floor in her life, points me to someone called Mrs Hinch who is something called an influencer, because she has three million followers on Instagram who apparently take her advice about which product to scour their lavvie with.

Hinch, who is a 30-something Essex mother, has apparently made a million or more posting videos of her cleaning rituals. Personally I’d rather watch paint dry than her spraying her shower and getting stuck in with the rubber gloves. She holds up the cleaner pack to camera before getting busy and apparently each posting earns her around £6k from the manufacturer, and then next day Home Bargains is cleaned out of it by the YouTube generation.

It’s cheap advertising for the company, I suppose, and good for Mrs Hinch, who apparently used to suffer with severe anxiety – cleaning became her coping mechanism. You’d think she might have some compulsive disorder if she wasn’t laughing into her Marigolds all the way to the bank.

Fake news?

Why has Donald Trump so vigorously promoted hydroxychloroquine as a cure for Covid-19 when there’s not, as yet, a scintilla of scientific evidence that it works? It’s an anti-malaria drug which also can have severe side-effects, ranging from nausea and hair loss to blindness and cardiac arrest, and, since Trump championed it, speculators have been stockpiling. It’s manufactured by Sanofi, the French pharmaceutical company, and marketed as Plaquenil.

It’s inconceivable that the President would champion it because three family trusts have investments in a mutual fund whose largest holding is in Sanofi stock. Isn’t it?

The £64k question

Two of my kids have been furloughed from their jobs, on 80% of their pay. The UK Parliament is also effectively furloughed but MPs are still on their £80k pay. Just why is the £64,000 question.

The £300m question

I HAVE a soft spot for St Thomas’ Hospital in London, so much so that we named our son after it. I expect Boris Johnson does too – a massively grateful marshmallow spot, right next to his repaired lungs, now that he is out of intensive care. When he recovers, and when this transition period on leaving the EU is over, he’ll be forced to put – if not £300 million a week – a major investment into the NHS, bumping up the pay of not just nurses and doctors but the vital ancillary staff, like cleaners, who risked their lives to save his.

Perhaps even build those 40 news hospitals he promised, not just fitting out the insides of already existing buildings. Perhaps he’ll even suggest his partner, Carrie, has their baby at St Thomas’, rather in some private hospital?

I’ve met Boris two or three times, even suggested where he could park his bike (no, politely!) at the Commons when he was mayor of London, and he has always been affable, if faintly dismissive, in the way that good-natured toffs treat their minions. So I wish his physical health well, if not his political one.

My boy had a difficult birth and he, too, was saved by the life-saving intervention of the staff. So we decided to put in Thomas as as middle name and as he was born just as Big Ben was striking midday just across the Thames we put that in too –no, not noon, Ben.

It would have been my wife Justine’s birthday tomorrow had she lived. Not even St Thomas’ could have saved her. Missed by us all, every day.