We should take a few moments to remember Lesley Anne Downey, the young girl kidnapped, raped, murdered and dumped in a shallow grave at Christmas.

If she had been allowed to live, she would have been 69 years old.

The season of goodwill was in full swing in the background – music, laughter and families – but nobody in their right mind could have any goodwill towards Myra Hindley and Ian Brady.

Lesley was just 10-years-old when she was killed by them after they abducted her on Boxing Day 1964 at a fair in Ancoats, Manchester.

The bouffanted blonde and the strutting clothes horse-killer had no human feelings as they took the life of the child.

They even tape–recorded the last moments of her life. The little girl’s voice was full of fear.

“Don’t undress me, will you?” she begged. “I want to see Mummy.”

This recording has haunted police, reporters, lawyers and judges who became involved in bringing justice to the pair.

But it is Lesley’s brother who we must have sympathy for too. Throughout his life he blamed himself for her death.

Terry West, Lesley’s big brother, should have been with her at the fair on the day she was abducted.

Terry said recently: “I should have been with her. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been with her. I know it wouldn’t have done.”

Terry, was 12 at the time. Why should another child have to carry the guilt of a horror committed by predators of the worst kind?

But he did, he carries that guilt because on the day Lesley disappeared he had felt unwell.

He said: “I told Lesley, ‘If I feel any better, later on, I’ll take you to the fair. But as the day went on I just got worse and I was sniffling and sneezing.”

So, she went by herself, although friends and neighbours who knew her well were already there.

But Lesley didn’t return by 5pm and the family began to worry.

Terry said: “It wasn’t like her. I couldn’t get my head round why she wasn’t back.

By then they knew something had happened.

Terry said: “I should have been with her.”

Between 1963 and 1965 Brady and Hindley murdered five children – Pauline Reade, 16, John Kilbride, 12, Keith Bennett, 12, Lesley and 17-year-old Edward Evans.

***

Another memory, the death of Bob Spiers:

Bob Spiers was an old-fashioned kind of man. Big, bluff and tough.

He had to be, he lived on the streets of Garstang in Lancashire as a beat bobbie.

But at one time people felt that Bob had a ‘spiritual awareness’ about one of the worst series of crimes in the North of England, the Moors Murders.

Certainly it was his dogged determination and single-mindedness that led him to the discovery of Lesley Ann Downey’s body in the rain-soaked peat of the Moors overlooking Saddleworth.

It was a major breakthrough.

Yet, Bob became a bit of ‘forgotten hero’ in his later life. Not forgotten on the streets where he patrolled – but forgotten to the rest of the world.

When he died late last September he warranted barely a mention in the media, only the Garstang newspapers gave him a few paragraphs.

So, I thought we should remember Bob here.

He had only been a police officer for a month and was apparently a bit of an annoyance to his colleagues.

Bob, who was 23 at the time, was up on Saddleworth Moor and was refusing to come down. His colleagues were waiting in vans in the drizzle and were ready to go home.

They’d spent three days on the moors looking for John Kilbride. Bob shouted to them that he was busy ‘answering a call of nature’.

He told reporters many years ago: “It sounds daft but something was drawing me up there. I don’t know why. Why did I go right the way up there? Those moors had been searched the previous day and the day before that. I don’t know what made me stay but something did. Eventually, the sergeant came first and the others followed.

“I said I’ve found something, but nobody wanted to know,” he recalled. “The DS said it was probably a sheep. I said: ‘If that’s a sheep it’s wearing clothes.”

Bob had found a heap of wet clothes.

“Had we not found her then that was it and the search was off. We wouldn’t have found John Kilbride a few days later.”

Bob Spiers was a well-known officer in Garstang. Sadly, he collapsed in the town centre a few weeks ago.

Paramedics and police tried to revive him.

His son Scott said at the time: “Dad is going to be missed by a lot of people. He was so well-known and well-liked in the area. He was the ideal beat bobby because he loved people and loved meeting and talking to people. He loved going into town shopping during the week.”

Had Bob not made his awful discovery, the full extent of Brady and Hindley’s crimes may never have been unearthed. They may have only been charged with the murder of 17-year-old Edward Evans.

Further searches of the moors discovered the bodies of Pauline Reade, 16, and John Kilbride, but the remains of 12-year-old Keith Bennett have never been found.

Good on ya Bob.

#lesleyannedowney #bobspiers #hindley #brady #moorsmurders #saddleworth #ancoats

Dripping with ivy and memories, the early-closing city with style and a certain sadness

A rainy night in Paris is like no other. For one thing most of the back-street bars are shut by 7.30pm. The Left Bank is boarded up and the noise from the road that killed Diana is beginning to cool.

If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the Seine.

There’s something special about Paris at night … even if you can’t get a drink away from the hee-haw of neons inviting you to go broke in posh eateries.

****

I turned my collar up against the cold, took a drag on my cigarette and studied the ancient revolutions in the skyline. It was like high-rise medieval history.

To my right Notre Dame was hunched grotesquely in the dark.

****

Yes, if you really want to find a drink, you can always take a stroll up the Champs Elysees – you can dine with the pretty people for thousands  of pounds.

The Champs Elysse is still the place to be seen.

Or you could go to Montmartre and sip a glass of red wine in the Place du Tertre, watching the street artists and the very wealthy go by – but you do have to be very wealthy in these cobbled streets, wine can cost you £50 a glass while somebody makes a fool out of you on a sketch pad.

Perhaps you might be attracted by the gay bars around the George Pompidou Centre – you know, that living breathing arts centre that has all its innards strung around the outside like some camp chainsaw massacre.

****

Actually, come to think of it, there are plenty of places to go for a drink on a rainy Parisian evening. You just need to know your way around, that’s all.

You see, everything is a little bit secret in Paris.

It’s the city of infidelity, intrigue, tragedy … and above all, it is the city of romance.

Take Pere Lachaise. How romantic it must be to be buried there.

It’s a ten minute ride by the Metro, probably the most amazing rail network in Europe. Amazing for its reliability, its cheapness, its cleanliness and its punctuality – not to mention the value-for-money three minute theatres – between stops – by street performers and beggars alike.

These undulating, motorised aisles are also the catwalks for some of the world’s most stylish people.

Pere Lachaise has more gothic dignity than Dracula … and more imprints of the stars per square inch than Hollywood Boulevard.

So many people who were somebody are buried there – Edith Piaf, Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde … Jim Morrison.

This walled cemetery, dripping with ivy and the memories of our minor gods, probably speaks volumes about Paris. It has an elegance, it has a style and a sadness. It has history and it has a dignified charm.

****

There are lots of bars open in the early morning around the flea market at Saint Ouen where you can buy everything from an over-sized mirror-legged imperial dressing table to a fake lava lamp.

Get there about 5am.

120,000 people go there every weekend – about the same number who visit the Eiffel Tower.

You get off the Metro at Porte de Clingancourt. And you walk.

The road is wide and the sidewalks are untidy in the early morning. The cafes and the bars are bustling – and so are the twenty restaurants that feed the thousands of traders at this, the biggest market in the world.

You can buy anything there. I bought an Imperial mahogany bed with a photocopied provenance that assured me it was nearly one hundred years old. Monsieur Ooelo dutifully had it shipped to Britain for me.

I considered buying an amphibious motorcycle sidecar for another 5,000 francs. It was built in the early 1960s at just about the time Renault literally launched their own amphibious vehicle.

I could have bought a plastic palm tree and enough Tiffany to reglaze every window in my house..

That afternoon was bright and it was breezy.

I felt good as I strolled carelessly near the Moulin Rouge waiting for the matinee at the nearby Theatre of the Macabre to begin. More of the gothic I guess – just a bit bloodier – but then nowhere does the unusual better than Paris.

By the time this traditionally sick freak show finished it was early evening and I started to walk in the rain again, ostensibly looking for a ‘chanson’ bar that was open and offering a little l’mour.

But in reality I just wanted to walk in the rain at night in a city it is so easy to loose yourself in.

#paris #jimmorrison #alcohol

Angry young man to protesting pensioner? Or is Dylan spot on about new music?

As he released his third album – this one triple – of grand old American lounge-lizard ballads His Royal Bob-ness attacked new bands, saying they are just fake when it comes to the blues.

He was performing on his 6,000 date Never Ending Tour – this time it was a whistle-stop in Sweden which coincided with the belated presentation of his Nobel Literary Prize at a private ceremony in Stockholm.

In something reminiscent of one of his 1960s ‘truth attacks’, Bob, then aged 75, turned his coruscating wit on bands making a living today.

He said: “Traditional rock ‘n’ roll, we’re talking about that. It’s all about rhythm. Johnny Cash said it best ‘Get rhythm. Get rhythm when you get the blues’.

“Very few rock ‘n’ roll bands today play with rhythm. They don’t know what it is. Rock ‘n’ roll is a combination of blues, and it’s a strange thing made up of two parts. A lot of people don’t know this, but the blues, which is an American music, is not what you think it is. It’s a combination of Arabic violins and Strauss waltzes working it out. But it’s true.

“The other half of rock ‘n’ roll has got to be hillbilly. And that’s a derogatory term, but it ought not to be. Fast cars on dirt roads. That’s the kind of combination that makes up rock ‘n’ roll, and it can’t be cooked up in a science laboratory or a studio.

“You have to have the right kind of rhythm to play this kind of music. If you can’t hardly play the blues, how do you put those other two kinds of music in there? You can fake it, but you can’t really do it.”

Bob’s set list at the Waterfront Theatre in the Swedish capital was liberally sprinkled with Tin Pan Alley standards normally associated with Sinatra and Bing rather than the gravelly-voiced folk rock and country singer, including Autumn Leaves and All or Nothing At All.

But the fact that 30s, 40s and 50s music has become a staple of his act in the last couple of years, it hasn’t stopped him from taking a swipe at some of the most respected song writers in history:

“I didn’t really care what Lieber and Stoller thought of my songs. They didn’t like ’em, but Doc Pomus did. That was all right that Lieber and Stoller didn’t like ’em, because I never liked their songs either. “Yakety yak, don’t talk back.” “Charlie Brown is a clown.

 “Baby I’m a hog for you.” Novelty songs. They weren’t saying anything serious. Doc’s songs, they were better. ‘This Magic Moment.’ ‘Lonely Avenue.’ ‘Save the Last Dance for Me.’”

“I just released an album of standards, all the songs usually done by Michael Buble, Harry Connick Jr., maybe Brian Wilson’s done a couple, Linda Ronstadt done ’em. But the reviews of their records are different than the reviews of my record.

“In their reviews no one says anything. In my reviews, they’ve got to look under every stone when it comes to me. They’ve got to mention all the songwriters’ names. Well that’s OK with me. After all, they’re great songwriters and these are standards.

“I’ve seen the reviews come in, and they’ll mention all the songwriters in half the review, as if everybody knows them. Nobody’s heard of them, not in this time, anyway. Buddy Kaye, Cy Coleman, Carolyn Leigh, to name a few.”

Bob’s bad-tempered but hilarious rant came hot on the heels of his attack on people who have been saying for decades that the man who has sold more than 100 million records simply can’t sing.

His Royal Bobness of Dylan ranted: “Critics have been giving me a hard time since Day One. Critics say I can’t sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don’t critics say that same thing about Tom Waits? Critics say my voice is shot. That I have no voice.

“What don’t they say those things about Leonard Cohen? Why do I get special treatment? Critics say I can’t carry a tune and I talk my way through a song. Really? I’ve never heard that said about Lou Reed. Why does he get to go scot-free?”

#bobdylan #bob #triplicate #blues

 (At ‘diggers’ ball…a ‘catch-all’ of the latter 1960s… and it’s release’s thru the 70s)

  TEN YEARS AFTER AT WOODSTOCK: 50,000 MILES BENEATH MY BRAIN…

BY ERIC LASTICK

Numerology a decade long…miles of rocky country…rough roads. Peace-nick and drumsticks—off to the Catskill highest of hills. Take towards these terrains. Brains big as the acid trips that dreams become. Yes, 50 thousand beneath. Yes of the tragedy of the 1960’s bigotry and bloated minds. Oblique in war games. Torturous struggles of just staying one step past the draft board. The seas are the limit of to and fro. Choices and wind gone next days—fly like the choppers of Southeast Asia…and of crimes against humanity. In numbers, in multiples…in media. They are figured creatures buried in the story…no matter who it hurts…who it gropes about. The clearing of the smoky air at Woodstock’s Yasger’s stage front…Ten yrs after…A.Lee and company—& to it’s brews,the brain to bequeath of percolating cheers—all across this great night landscape. Magic bus and all of us…dig as diggers 50 thousand miles low. Digs to China and back in our waste fill rag weed highs. The bridge in song. ”I’m going home” Deep run deep water blues. Electric Sas, high like fire! Alvin Lee sweat and sing…the 50 thousands. The play on…play backwards of the mind! World gone as crazy as crazy can be, but we had  each other. We had the night of Ten years. Brains scatter, brains plug in. Turn on…until morning strong. Will do it all again.

(TEMPTATION EYES IN THROUGH THE 70’S)

Temps of the sights of sultry women on a groovy early September skirted trip to the nearest and grooviest Hollywood sideshow and hideaways. Sunshine dream sequence of those sub-string nights. Harrowing roads to follow that dream. All the mischief. Temptation eyes is bigger than on could ever know. Grass rooted the excellence of what majesty awaits at the vinyl record and glass encased private headphones—escapes the hot smoke and sass-a-fras until the next morning…and another Labor day weekend. The wallet bend fine tune love affair of pop hits…Those 1970’s uniquely drawn. Rob Grill, founder of the Midnight confessions…Temptation eyes, a chart buster. Heaven on a barbecue spit across the Los Angeles district…scents and sights of the groovin weighs of that September laborer of lov. So far to the Canyon…so heavy the note and pop rock movement of those days. Pass the Nicholodian Senator McGovern ballroom charms. Anecdotes of a hit and never miss love song. Rooted be all of the love in an era of our vest of times. LA summer sunny vases of flowery long-haired —like fellow profits of love. Decisive drive, up and down to a bass rhythm …drums so endear, as if your right back in the times of our lives.

(GOODBYE YELLOW BRICK ROAD)

Labor Monday’s holiday, never short of small miracles…Styles and piano inflatables to what the Philadelphia Freedoms never dream …as the labor  day appears—big as Reginald’s glasses…The Billy Jean King serves…and the good of our labors—ride of Elton John, Bernie Taupin. Surrealistic flavors coast to coast–along memories—so clear in song…and as if out of all our bedroom windows…sequenced farms…The look-about train tracks..conductor of harmony; the destination of all our youth’s dreams…adult run and find the Yellow Bricks on that path to view and find the goodbyes of that day in time. Although, Elton closes out the theme with a bright and cozy woolen vocal high note…all to sing—thus spectacular fill—this young generation of higher minds, the 70’s…September returns of the labors of growing up abridged with the pushing hills and sliding valleys of all ebb and flow. Great song—all alongside the Yellow Brick Roads, throughout the era…Honey pies and imitating writs watch, chocolate watch band…Smith bros black beards…burly outdoorsy hippie cultivated wisdom’s of where our fathers failed to feel the love. The music in us, so rare…and as alive as earth itself! Groovy chick’s steer my way…as the sign reads: ”SAVE WATER, TAKE A BATH WITH A FRIEND!” Sea rise at Big Sur.

(BLASTED…THE DARK SIDED TRIPS OF THE 70’S HIPPIE POP CULTURE…ALICE COOPER, THE STOOGES…TRULY NOT 101)

 Free spirit go all hellbent…The Motor City 5 leaves a Sinclair card cut in two…so  said the Hippie forge—with drives and sparkle eyes of glitter—along suggests, to the brother and wedge-wooded endeavors…justly—with the peace sign. 2 fingered share all in one pocketed. Lady love…potted bushels of wonder weeds. Hand picked fresh flower power, all of 17. Thus the fears of the black limousines…rage the politician man…Madness on all sides…burn the bridges…the asks and tells of foreign wars. Old Nash and 8 car garage. Dick Nixon back on the hate of Ashbury…German helmets style the road masters of long hairs…Hells Angles …Oakland Coliseum feeds of the white donkeys…the nineteen seventies brigades at a stone fest at Altamont. Remember to add bleach to the factory of wars…wash away human love; as Hippies rumble…and hate on corporate Raiders…golden seal, a lie—off the bridges of Gold Gate…and as so far the radar smooths coast guard glide but wide, the smiles of the allegorical stews…the black and the white. Panthers black, still sprawl along the banners—too late of the Chicago land eight. Leafs and tinges of jeopardy feels…ray up a light to what may help improve…cops are a-looming…stage fright is every Rock-Hampton home clog…thrusts the show of hippie,as one must continue on, so says Jerry Garcia. Lenny Bruce takes the brass band warriors known as the un-bashful Knights of humor…Hippie stay a little while longer, until the clock chimes of where he will hail of one hell of a bend…and soliloquy of a show, as if the 1980’s and Jerry Garcia, seed a few new goings to heaven! The clock is not on anyone’s side when the final hippie drum slows to  a steady stop. Jerry Rubin and uncle Abby Hoffman buy new cars. Drive in the summer sun a little to long. One corporate and the other off his nut! Loss of ideas. Hippie drippy wet weather report gone off it’s axis. Professor Cornell West bakes a cake in hunger of the patrol watch at every door. It’s time to intellectualize all crimes on humanity. Underneath the collar shirt, the teacher of hearts knows—no longer bleeding. Sells to the sounds of the go too Wall Street Rise…as i close my eyes in fear of what’s to come. We all do. Labor day of it’s way. 50 years long. 

Robbie Robertson has died. He was 80 years old.

He was an ol’ rock’n’roller, a fabulous song writer, king of the choppy guitar, chat show story-teller, charmer and joker.

But more than anything, I remember him as the leader of The Band… the man who stuck it out with the amphetamine, howling, thin white clothes-horse Bob Dylan as they sped together round the world getting booed and accused of being talentless traitors.

Way back then, like Bob, Robbie was wired and tired, battered and bruised.  But the show must go on.

In reality, Robbie and the boys in The Band were as much a part of this  tour that literally electrified the world. The chief folky tried forlornly to pull the plug.

The Band’s music was sharp as knives, brittle as nails, screaming, thumping, ear pounding … Bob whirled and posed, patted his hair and harangued his audience while Robbie rocked and mugged. And smiled a lot, always his eyes on the new foppish leader of his band.

Robbie himself was behind such classics as The Weight, Up On Cripple Creek and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

But perhaps, musically, Somewhere Down the Crazy River is the one I remember from way back when we all thought that people like Robbie Robertson would never die.

Crazy River had a swamp beat and a dark sensuous broken brick of a voice.

He wrote: “Yeah, I can see it now

The distant red neon shivered in the heat

I was feeling like a stranger in a strange land

You know, where people play games with the night

God, it was too hot to sleep.”

There’s Kerouac and Ginsberg in those 41 words,  stranger in a strange land is a thumbs up to science fiction ‘god’ Robert Heinlein … there’s Burroughs in there and a sniff of Mailer.

And Robbie kept on working almost to the end. Martin Scorsese was his big mate and they did a lot of things together after they forged a friendship on the set of The Last Waltz.

They went on to share a lot of laughs and bottles and even the same Hollywood front door at times for the next half a century, sharing credits on  The King of Comedy (1982), The Color of Money (1986), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), and  The Irishman (2019).

Robbie Robertson smiled and made his way down his own crazy river, had a laugh, told stories, sang, wrote, influenced, was admired and loved.

Robbie made a success of it all, ultimately.

#bobrobbie #robbierobertson #rr #theband #canada #bobdylan

Demolish part of your home or   we’ll tax you on your granny ..!

People with a back door are potentially being forced to knock down part of their homes to avoid paying Britain’s outrageous ‘granny flat’ tax.

The Society today focuses on a Government method of swelling its ailing coffers by charging more than 30,000 home owners, whose houses have annexes, hundreds of pounds a month in council tax under a law so outrageous it eclipses the empty bedroom levy and rivals the medieval window tax.

Here, a couple reveal their two  year fight to stop paying more than a £2,000 a year in extra council tax because they have a sink unit next to their back door … we have agreed not to name the couple for now because of the sensitivity of their negotiations …

There plea for help to The Society:

I hope you can help – we are being forced to pay £200 a month on top of our council tax, basically because we have a sink unit and a back door in our utility room. The Valuation Office Agency says the sink and the door mean we could rent that part of our property out as a separate self-contained unit.

They have even tried to frighten us by saying: “We have taken people to High Court who have no cooker point, hot water or cooker and still won the case.”

This is particularly worrying for us because we want to sell up and move on – but we can’t because our house will be classed as two separate houses. It’s insane and cruel!

This all began for us two years ago when my son moved into our property after losing his job. We were living abroad at the time.

Unbeknown to us he contacted the benefit agency and asked if he was eligible for rent allowance, which he wasn’t. However, the council came down to revalue the property, which at the time was classified as derelict and decided we could use part of the house as a rental property.  This meant they could charge us extra council tax.

Because of this we tried renting it out privately but the local rental officer decided that it was not legal to rent this part of the house out as it had dangerous, out-of-date stairs, had no cooking facilities, no separate heating, electric or hot water.

So, we decided to remodel the house and blocked up the front door. We also knocked through a pantry creating a corridor to our kitchen.

However, the VOA maintain that by putting in a door on the new corridor and locking it, by losing the use of our back door (patio doors) which is our way to get to our dustbins and to our garden we could actually recreate a self-contained rentable unit.

 We asked him, if we take the sink unit out will that be the end of it? His reply – ‘I can’t advise you about that’.

To make this part of our home rentable we would have to:

1. Open up the blocked front door
2. Block off the new corridor and put in a safety door
3. Relinquish our back-door access to our garden and dustbins
4. Put in hot water
5. Replace the dangerous stairs
6. Put in a cooker point

 I think this is a massive imposition –    why would somebody want to buy our property when it is penalised because of a sink unit?

Also, because of the length of time the VAO have taken to come to their decision – more than a year – we are likely to face a debt for back council tax in excess of £1,000.  

Answer.

This is a terrible application of a law.  Basically, families who own homes with ‘granny flats’ could be forced to knock them down if they want to sell their houses after being hit by the tax.

As many as 30,000 homeowners live in properties with a self-contained flat for an elderly relative.  Under tax rules   they will be classed as owning two properties if they try to sell up.  That means the person who tries to buy their home will have to pay an extra 3 per cent on the value of properties as stamp duty.

At the moment it would appear all you can do is substantially alter your property … i.e. at least get rid of what is seen as your extra kitchen to have a chance of getting the extra tax on your home removed.

But rest assured The Society is actively investigating this and will report regularly on it until some kind of sense prevails.

#council #authority #home #house #granny #tax #twiste

Narcissists are sick people, alright… sick as people can get. And they are on every street corner and in your bed…

A Greek youth was so taken by the reflection of his own face he was scared to ever look away again.

Narcissus had found the true love he was willing to die for.

But Echo, a nymph with a speech impediment caused by unrequited love, spotted him in the woods. Down by the lake. She was smitten by him immediately but could not speak it.

And she couldn’t see Narcissus was already staring his own death in the face. 

Soon, he died from the neglect of all  the love waiting in the world around him.

Echo faded away like the dying toll of a church bell.

But Narcissus, a grave-train robber and twisted mind by any other name, was reincarnated as a flower.

The Narcissus bloom.

 It is said it gives us numbness and the big sleep.

Sadly, today though his despicable spirit is still here and reflecting a dark nightmarish pool at so many of us.

Look around, Narcissus may be sleeping in your bed tonight, he may be the one with a liquid grin down the local, he might be giving you advice behind a sheet of sanitised Perspex, he may be whistling at the wheel of the school bus – or he could be like Elvis, frying tonight down the fish n chip shop.

 Narcissus is out there, waiting to drown you with his eyes.

This story of Narcissus and Echo is not a moral tale you know. And neither is it a romance… it is simply a salutary one about empty people, flat and one dimensional, those who can see nothing but themselves.

Male and female, young and old.

I’ve had three narcissists in my life. One in childhood, one wife and one business partner. I despise each one of them for what they did to me and my family.

I have forgiven them, more or less, but I still despise them for their lies, their manipulation, their disrespect and their inability to comprehend love outside themselves.

Here’s a list of the traits of these emotional traitors, those lost in a world of self-seeking fantasy.

 See how many you recognise – I saw each and every one in each of my abusers:

1. Narcissists get mad at you for no reason at all.
2. They are always right.
3. They have very fragile egos and are unable to self-reflect on their own weaknesses.
4. Sadly, we think we can help them get right. We can’t.
5. You will never get the truth out of a narcissist.
6. Narcissists will only play ‘victim or hero’.
7. Narcissist loves a good argument. The more they attack you, the more opportunities they have to break you, insult you, and get their own way.
8. The narcissist withdraws love and spends time with other people. They can become passive-aggressive, they gaslight, they make you question everything about yourself and your sanity.
9. They use name calling to hurt you.
10.  When you realise what they are, they will do everything to discredit you.

Do you know, everyone thinks differently, feels differently and behaves in their own way.

That’s personality – some of us have it, some of us have it to a lesser extent. Some of us, it’s said, have none at all!

But Narcissists think they have personality in bundles … what they don’t see is that their personality is disordered, bizarre, cruel and cold.

Disorderly hits the victim straight in the emotions, dictates how you cope with life, and manage relationships. You can develop depression or anxiety.

About one in twenty of us apparently live with a personality disorder.

Some narcissists though identify their tendencies of selfishness and

work hard to avoid it. But they will often fail because of their neurological limitations.

On the other hand,  “bad” narcissists do not have any kind of concern or reaction to the impact of their behaviour.

They show the same traits as a psychopath. 

What may really throw you too is that narcissists can be extremely charming. They can be perceived as very caring people due to their social charm.

At first, you find them to be intelligent and kind, but later you may see this complete shift in personality. This shift in personality can become punishing, cold and calculated, leaving the victim feeling very confused and questioning what they did wrong.

Remember, none of this is YOUR fault!  This is a personality disorder that has nothing to do with you.

#narcassist #cruelty #family #madness #liar

When Andrea and I moved to Shropshire in 1989 we were the proud owners of a black Jaguar, a black cat, and an Albino golden Retriever. The car might have been a bit of an overdraft-hungry wreck but when we reclined its big leather seats it became a large double-bed, room for the dog and the cat in the footwell.

In those days petrol was less than 40p a litre and it was our greatest weekend pleasure to head off into the wilds of Shropshire and slide with oil-slick precision down the nameless byways and country lanes of this fabled county.

 We’d take beer and sandwiches and camp overnight, in our Jaguar, outside hamlets and ancient settlements with curious names like Loppington, English Frankton and Clive …

One summer’s evening we arrived at a crossroads with a derelict three-storey Victorian mansion on the top of a hill to left. The crossroads, however, were nameless and marked only by the roots of an upturned tree, the four litre engine purred like a panther at rest as we tried to decide which road to follow. The dog was as happy as the day had been long, panting out of the rear window. The cat was asleep on the back shelf.

Andrea smiled and said: “You choose.”

Behind us was the way home, to the left was the road back to Ellesmere and rural civilization, if we took a right we’d head off into Wales, so, I chose to take the overgrown narrow lane ahead. It looked like night had already fallen down there.

Andrea looked at me: “It looks a bit scary!”

I smiled back: “That’s why we’re going.”

She laughed as I slipped the car into ‘drive’. The dog lay down as we moved slowly into the darkness.

***

We’d gone less than half a mile when our dog noticed something. He didn’t make a big thing of it, just cocked his ear and began to pant a little more heavily. The cat had moved from the window shelf onto Andrea’s lap.

Andrea and I were musing about the eeriness of this early evening darkness, yet the other roads I could have picked were still basking in the sunset.

Then something rushed by in the bushes. It seemed as big as a horse.

There is a geist that follows travelers in the darkness you know and once she is on your shoulder you lose the power to predict the future and to forget your own past. The female geist can make the wheels fall off everything from a travelling man’s wagon to a salesman’s Mondeo if she is so minded. 

Hoof beats fell away into the distance. The dog was still tense.

Well, it’s said too in the world of the traveler, that everything is revealed to he who travels slowly. And sure enough as we sailed slowly around the next bend, she was there as tall as a ship on top of a black gelding. Her black hair was cascading around like an eruption, and she appeared to scream as she yanked the horse’s head to the left. The animal reared twenty feet in the air and pawed the darkness as if it was boxing shadows.

           It all happened in abject silence until the moment this startling figure laughed triumphantly like a warning bell and looked directly at me. Birds fled the treetops as she crashed the horse into the undergrowth. Once she was no longer there, there wasn’t even a snapped branch to show where she had gone.

****

Chastened, we continued on down the lane with our ghost-hunterly antenna as tuned and as sensitive as the skin inside an old fashioned telephone.

           Eventually we came upon an oxbow lake, a tranche of water cut off from the meandering of a nearby river. Good idea or bad we decided to stay here, the animals could have their freedom and the crescent shaped lake looked romantic shimmering as it did in the newly arrived moonlight.

****

According to the moon now it was about 3am. Andrea was sleeping on the thick leather seats of the Jag the dog by her side, the cat was off incising dragon flies and moths. 

The power of the night stirred up a kind of awe inside me. I listened for noises in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the heavens danced with silent shooting stars but the air around me fluttered with tiny wings. Bats were tumbling in this teeming silence.   Nights like this were for dreaming and planning and worrying about nothing.  

… then I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a blade slicing through the forest.  Our cat abandoned its ballet of death and vanished, the dog began a long low growl.  Whatever it was was coming towards us, the dog slunk to my side, I let my hand rest on his head as he cocked his ears and narrowed his eyes.  This wasn’t a car or a station wagon.  

The night seemed to go out as this thing crashed through the forest, everything fell silent, the   sky emptied of stars and became so dark it was as if we’d fallen inside death itself. Irrationally I began to fear that this thing manifesting before my eyes was actually the geist.  Perhaps she  had mistaken us for true travelers, not just eccentric tourists.

Even the forest   was swallowed by the blackness and the air bristled with a sense of   revenge … it’s said that the geist is like a broken memory skipping through an obsessional list of needs and desires and here she was – now – speeding towards us like a ghost train. Thank God Andrea was still sleeping.  

The transformation that took place before my eyes was terrifying. The blackness slowly metamorphosised as this monolith of dark sucked in all the night and all the sap from the trees in a grand re-manifestation of single-minded revenge.

She was as tall as a ship on the back of that black gelding, her boots were long, to her knees, her blouse was sticking to her just about everywhere as she rasped for breath, I could make out it was  coagulated blood from the wide open gash down the side of her face.

She rode that gelding like it was kicking down waves as it reared high above me and my dog and boxed the air. She held the horse in that position for so long it became impossible. And she never once took her eyes off mine, not once. She was burrowing inside me, reading me until my head felt like it was exploding. The geist was sifting through my mind, overturning my very existence to see if I was the one she was hunting down.

I think in those few moments one wrong thought inside my head might have brought about my death … or worse. 

 The gelding flailed hooves as giant as clubs as the women leaned forward in the saddle moving her face closer to mine, I could see the snapped veins inside the gaping wound which had almost split her face in two. Her jaw was loose, swinging held on only by dry sinew. She drew closer to me.

Then she was gone and the stars came back into the sky.

****

The next morning we could hear a steam train off in the distance, see the steam too cutting through the plains. It was so early the birds were still rising, field mice were chattering.

Ah, this really is England but after I told Andrea what happened in the early hours, she thought it prudent to collect our animals and be on our way. 

We packed up quickly and set off back up the lane to Ellesmere and what we felt was safety. It was strange because the overgrown lane was still dark although the day was glowing all around us. As we reached the crossroads with the roots of the upturned tree I saw the derelict mansion again. I stopped and looked trying to read its atmosphere from a distance, I knew right away it was a monument to tragedy, abandoned because memories inside it were to strong for anyone to live with.  It was a ghost towering on the hill, dead eyes in the upper ruins of rooms filled by the whistling of the wind by day and by agonised memory in the night. Time stood still inside its broken wings.  

I said nothing to Andrea and we drove on.  

I’ve never been back to that part of Shropshire although we’ve travelled extensively in the county, it really is a beautiful place to explore. But part of me wants to discover the story behind the tall horse rider and the abandoned house on the hill.

Perhaps one day soon we will return.

#GHOSTS #HUNTERS #SHROPSHIRE #SUPERNATURAL #JAGUAR #COUNTRYSIDE

I washed up in Central and Eastern Europe as an itinerant travel journalist in the blistering summer of 2015 … I remember Mr Vlad ‘Action Man’ Putin was still, daily, baring his chest and his teeth after annexing Crimea.

Mr Putin was obviously emboldened by his new war of attrition.

After all, he’d got noticed by raising his manly shaven head above the world trenches – and nobody had blown it off.

He was like a farmer in the city, land-grabbing wherever he wanted and boasting he was only taking back what was historically Russia’s.

Not many had died in the Crimea anyway. So, apart from three protesters and three soldiers, not much damage done. In Putin’s mind.

Me? I was out there to report on the big damage the little man had done to Crimea’s once-booming travel industry.

Crimean Peninsula was regularly described as ‘the diamond suspended from the south coast of Ukraine’. It was one of the world’s top destinations,  accounting for about a quarter of Crimea’s economy.

But now tourism was dead on its Lilo in a pond of lilies.

****

A few months later I was invited by a group of business people to look at tourism in neighbouring ‘Little Big Country’ Slovakia, another victim of greed behind Russia’s twitchy iron curtain.

On August 20, 1968, 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks had hit  Czechoslovakia to destroy what was being described as the Prague Spring — a liberalising of a communist country. But they were no match for the Soviet tanks.

Within weeks of arriving in Slovakia, I felt at home in this once tin-pot little country of shell suits, leaky Trabants and hard liquor. And I stayed there for fifteen years … in fact ‘til my liver inflated like a back street Russian balloon shop, and I remembered the NHS.

I flew back to the covid greyness of the UK and took the cure.

Slovakia had grown around me and when I flew home – July 6, 2021  – the Trabants and polyester suits were being rapidly replaced by BMWs, Armani and posh eating houses.

A few months later Russia’s dogs of war gathered and howled as missiles and bullets rained down on Kiev, a city I’d got to know well.

I hope to return later this year to the Slavic ‘states’. But I know I will be going back to regions filled with fear and loathing.

I wanted to share two stories that in some ways express the true human cost of Russia sending its dogs of war to mark their horrific territories for its resurgence.

https://open.substack.com/pub/leighgbanks/p/death-at-the-bus-stop-the-intimacy?r=drr6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

https://open.substack.com/pub/leighgbanks/p/jozef-bonk-19-was-shot-and-then-demonised?r=drr6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

It would be so easy to go with my tabloid mates and write a short eulogy to Sinead O’Connor headlined Nothing Compared to Her …

And it would be true.

I met her once, on a dark rainy night in a dingy back-street pub in Birmingham.

And nothing did compare to her, way back when, towards the turn of the last century. Sinead was beautiful in every way, diminutive, elfin, dark, stylish, gypsy and smiley.

But it was her eyes.

All I can say is that, as she sipped her small beer – and, I think, smoked one cigarette after the other – it was her eyes, deep as black pools. She watched everything like survival.

It was impossible though to avoid seeing fear in there too.

And yet heroism burned in the background, always her mind was ready to fight for what she saw as true and right.

Sinead O’Connor was beautiful in every way. I was a bit jealous of the man with her, a fellow journalist I knew vaguely who was holding her tattooed hand protectively under the table.

But she wasn’t just a dark child from Dublin, not just a serial wife, not just a mother or a singer, or an activist, or a victim of life’s fickle horrors. Sinead was an artist, a woman who sang her life away for us.

Sinead never hid her pain, and the late 90s was a rough period within her life. She was derided, became a figure of ridicule and responded by exposing herself even more – anger, challenges, attacks – running through the darkness in America.

Then her beautiful son Shane, aged 17, died. And so did she.

It took her a year to go though.

 Sinead was shaved bald, waif-like, vulnerable and yet she was ferocious too and beautiful and honest. And a fighter.