For the first time this year, I wrote 2019 at the top of this piece. How can one be so stupid! I suppose it’s a bit like driving on the wrong side of the road in a foreign country. When you first arrive, you are ultra careful about making sure you adhere to that country’s norms, if they are different to your own. It’s only later, maybe days later, that it’s so easy to come out of a turning on the wrong side of the road, when your mind, perhaps, is not entirely on the job in hand. We had a tragic example of that last year when an American diplomat’s wife, Anne Sacoolis, hit and killed a young motorcyclist, close to the Air Base where her husband was stationed. She promptly fled the country and has declined to return, claiming diplomatic immunity. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of that status how impossibly cowardly, callous and immoral is that? Even worse, Trump’s gallant America is claiming that it’s outrageous to challenge the sanctity of such Immunity by seeking her extradition back to Britain to stand trial for her evident, albeit accidental, crime. She wasn’t even a diplomat for heavens sake, merely married to one. How must the poor young man’s family be feeling? Is that really what Diplomatic Immunity is all about? She killed an innocent young man in the prime of his life. What an increasingly sick world we live in. Sorry, all I did was get the date wrong and end up on a soapbox!
On a lighter note, today is Jack Nicklaus’s eightieth birthday. It is possible that you have never heard of The Golden Bear, especially if you are under twenty and spend your life incarcerated in libraries dedicated to the Ming Dynasty, Ancient Greece and the Incas. Consulting Wikipedia, which is always an entertaining experience, I learn that “he is widely considered to be one of the greatest golfers of all time”. ONE of?! What do you have to do to be THE greatest? There is only one player who can even be considered in the same breath and that is Tiger Woods and those two are so far ahead of anyone else that they could even safely drive on the wrong side of the road. For all the arguments, Nicklaus’s record is far superior to Tiger’s, but the Black American still has power to add to his CV.
Jack shares his day of birth with other such luminaries as Emma (Baby Spice) Bunton, footballers Alex McLeish and Phil Neville, actor Martin Shaw, (I used to work on an airshow programme with his wife….isn’t that interesting?) and Placido Domingo, who is ONE of the greatest tenors of all time. Better than Caruso? Pavarotti? Carreras? In music it’s an even more subjective judgement than golf, where Major titles provide a yardstick. There is no question that measured as an all-round good egg, by his life on and off the golf course, Nicklaus is a giant of a man, hugely respected, if not loved, by everyone. When it comes to charismatic performers, there has surely never been a greater tenor than Luciano Pavarotti, with all due respect to the incredibly brilliant all-round talent of the seventy nine year old Domingo. Out of interest, I will consult Dan Jordan, a former member of the King’s Singers and currently the superb Director of Music at Eastbourne College.
Sadly the man who put cornetto into Opera is no longer with us. Happy Birthday Jack and may you have many more.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 