Leigh, Ehi and Rodney are off round the world daily! We even have a song about FAKE FAKE NEWS!

Come and take AN HONEST trip with us!

Ehi E Ekhator’s publication, the Standard Gazette https://tstga.com/ has joined forces with the leighgbankspreservationsociety  /https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog in a major collaboration including https://airtv.international/ to bring intelligent news, features and broadcasts to all parts of the world! So, stick with us for the best in news and opinions … we are going places … Central and Eastern Europe, the United States,  the Iberian Peninsula, the United Kingdom – and flying south to the continent of Africa!

WE ALL HAVE TO AVOID FAKE NEWS!

Here Tokyo Rose singer and writer tells his own story in his own inimitable style …

You know I struggled to read and write at school

The Teacher branded me a fool

Then I saw a white bird in a blue sky

It taught me to read and write and lie

Now I’m a poison pen letter writer

And I’m writing and posting on Twitter

And what I write it aint true

Cos I’m the Head of Fake Fake News

Cos I’m the Head of Fake Fake News

I’m Tall Dark and Handsome and that aint true

I’ve been known to tell a lie or two

Come on let’s read all about it

And what I write it aint true

Cos I’m the Head of Fake Fake News

Cos I’m the Head of Fake Fake News

#news #leighgbanks #rodneyhearth #ehieekhator #standardgazette #airtvinternational #leighgbankspreservationsociety #honest #media #tv #newspapers #broadcast

Andrea Martin-Banks writes about her and her husband’s experiences in their home in the middle of nowhere:

I CAN HEAR the clock tick. I have never been so afraid in all my life.  The house has been like this for more than a week now, ever since we got permission to knock it down. And I don’t know what to do … but I do know if I don‘t do something soon, Harry Snape is going to kill Leigh.

Ten years we’ve been haunted by this house, but it’s never been this bad before. We’re trapped inside a nightmare. We’ve done everything right, cleaned the doors with brine, there’s frankincense and dried sage in the corners of every room and we’ve lit white candles and pinned prayers to the chimney breast.

The Land for Sale board outside rattles insanely.  Logs are roaring on the fire … but the room is   so cold   my breath is frozen in the air.  The clock ticks …

… footsteps on the landing. Snape’s back and he’s furious.  Annie Campbell’s been freed, you see,   and she’s taken all of his children with her.

Leigh moved in to The Old Stores, a beautiful old English village house in the Midlands, in 1987. He lived there alone in its 20 echoing rooms.  He’d paid £50,000 for the old place but from day one things went bump in the night, there were faces at the windows, footsteps and the smell of a dead thing on the landing.

Leigh is the gentlest person I’ve ever known but there is a darkness going back to his childhood. I met him in the village pub after my marriage floundered and I moved in to the Old Stores with my boys on Millennium Eve.  But the house never welcomed Adam, aged 14, or James, 17. James refused to stay, he was so terrified. Adam chose to live in the front with its inglenook and oak beams but he was scared to be alone in there.

Adam said: “I was in a bed when something woke me up. In the moonlight I could see an old man bending over me. He kept leaning closer and closer to me. Then he screamed into my face, it was if he was blowing the life out of me.”

The next Christmas I was dressing the tree in front of the log fire. I used to be a florist and decked the old oak fireplace with beautiful displays of mistletoe and holly.  Leigh and I were both kneeling, putting baubles on the tree when I shivered: “Gosh, somebody’s just walked over my grave.”

Neither of us felt remotely intimidated by our visitor though. I think it was Annie Campbell seeking comfort.  Another time – I remember, it was 4am – we were lying in bed holding hands and listening to three children playing in the lounge. They were giggling. At times like this, our house was a home.  But a few nights later, Snape pounded down the landing   and rapped his knuckles on the bedroom door just to let us know he was still around.

The paranormal investigators arrived from Warrington 30 miles away at midnight. It was like a military operation. They put an infra-red camera in Adam’s room and sealed it off. After two hours the house was quieter than an abandoned grave but then Martin Ward, aged 43, co-ordinator, nodded towards the infra-red monitor and I saw a diffused ball of light dancing on the screen.

“A Circle of Confusion …” Martin smiled. “In a sealed room too.”

And that was just for openers. Hundreds of orbs were flitting around the screen and electrical equipment around the house started to pick up impossible temperature changes.  The Ghostbusters picked up footsteps on the landing and the sound of something heavy being dragged down stairs, exactly where the stench of death lingered.

Three days later, the house was still crazy. Leigh had gone to bed early and I’d stayed up watching TV. He could hear a snarl, half asleep he tried to drown it out with the radio. But the louder the radio, the louder the snarl.  Then he saw a pale-green glow by the wardrobe … it looked like worms feeding on a pile of disgusting rags on the floor. Something was moving under them, rising and falling.

Leigh jumped out of bed and bound naked down stairs.   As he burst into the lounge something flung me sideways onto the couch .   I remember being angry with Leigh and demanded: “What did you do that for?”

“I didn’t do anything …”

“You were here, in front of me, holding my wrists and talking to me. Then you pushed me over.”

The three mediums from London arrived the next day.  They’d been deliberately kept in the dark about their destination.  Shawn Jones chose   the top of the stairs and that’s where she saw them, three children and a teenage girl.

“Her name was Annie Campbell,” Shawn said. “Harry Snape bought her to look after his three children after his wife died. Her family in Edinburgh sold her, she was barely fourteen. I’ve released her and the children. They’re gone now.”

I asked: “Why were they here?”

“He tried to rape her and she ran down the corridor with him in pursuit. That’s the footsteps you can hear.  She couldn’t escape him and when she died, she couldn’t escape the house. He strangled her on the stairs, you see. The children didn’t know what to do, so they stayed with her.”

“Is he still here?” I asked.

Shawn smiled sadly: “Yes. I’m sorry.” Then she turned to Leigh:  “It’s him who is master of this house, Leigh, not you … but he gets his strength off you, off a deep-rooted fear you have from your own past.”

The clock ticks. Dust falls through the ceiling. Snape’s angry and stamps around. Leigh suddenly launches himself at the door and in that same instant the boots begin to crash down the landing towards us. I grab Leigh’s arm and shout: “Where the hell are you going?”

“To face him!”

They say that if your fears are real, then you have to face them. And I know Snape is taunting Leigh over his past.

Leigh   throws the door open – the air in the hallway is foul, putrid.    Snape, so full of hatred that even the ground rejected him, is standing there, tall as a tree and dressed in black.

Leigh said afterwards: “I could see   through him, right into myself … I saw things I’d forgotten about, things I didn’t want to remember.”

We can move on in our lives now and we’ve decided to repair the old house instead of knocking it down. Annie Campbell and her three wards have  moved on in their deaths, but sometimes I wonder where did evil Harry Snape go?

This story was ‘stolen’ by an unscrupulous internet site and used with the intention of raising advertising revenue. The copyright to this story belongs to Leigh G Banks and Andrea Martin-Banks … the matter is being presented to relevant authorities. Our story had been clumsily and amateurishly re-written but this is the original version from more than a decade ago.

#ghosts #paranormal #villageofthedamned #truehorror #leighgbanks #copyright

My good friend, The Dook, is one of the funniest, wittiest blokes I know.

He once drove more than a hundred miles with his mum to do stand-up to help injured soldiers at a little village pub in Staffordshire.

His name is Martin ‘Dook’ Ward and, dare I say it – he’s a stand-up guy.

I am proud to know him and to have been his mate for more than a decade.

We’ve had some laughs along the way with our mate Andrew ‘The Foz’ Foster. Foz is a giant of a madman, brilliant and hysterically funny and one of the North of England’s most accomplished chefs!

We used to go ghost hunting together … I can hear you say ‘you must be joking!’

But no we weren’t … we’d decided that if we could prove the existence of ghosts, then we could ultimately prove the existence of God.

Now that was a challenge!

Anyway, Martin ‘The Dook’ Ward, Andrew ‘The Foz’ Foster and Leigh ‘The Hack’ Banks went about it together with serious intent. We sat on the top of a hill at midnight regularly – Rue Hill it was called – because some very strange things were going on up there. We’d seen the Village-of-the-Damnders gathering there wearing nothing but their flash-lights and dancing round some very weird stones.

We camped in the ruins of a 19^th century cottage by the Shropshire Union Canal and tried to contact a young flower seller who, in the very early part of the 20^th century was driven out of the strange little village of Woodseaves because she had the mark of the Devil on her face … a harelip.

There was actually an international film made about her and her lover Kester Woodseaves in 1989, Precious Bane

We also uncovered the probable truth about the Vicar of Knightly, High Offley and other hamlets and villages near Rue Hill. He hanged himself in his Manse after being hounded by his parishioners who accused him of being a paedophile. The police, the church and his colleagues confirmed he had never been charged, had never been interviewed and had never ever been guilty – although still today some claim they were his victims.

But they would never come forward and talk about it, discuss it. Share it. The man of God may still today be their own personal demon.

And so to Martin’s own personal demon. Like so many of us he suffers with depression. He is brave. He fights it all the time and most of the time he is successful.

But sometimes, like so many he goes under and flounders.

Very quickly though, he comes back, starts telling jokes, winding people up on social media and making podcasts from his car to rival Peter Kay.

Recently, he sent me these moving and ultimately inspiring poems. Neither have titles but if you have ever suffered anxiety and depression they are worth reading.

Martin now tries to help sufferers. Good on him.

And thank you to The Dook and The Foz for being my mates.

Darkness falls across the land,

I no longer see your smile.

That of which once came to light,

Now appears to be no more.

The world we came to love has turned to rock,

The seas are all dried up.

The winds are fiery like furnace heat,

To hot for fragile human skin.

I feel my body changing,

But not like seasons – they are no more.

I feel a shuffle on this mortal coil,

I know that it’s my time.

I take one look at what I once knew,

And now I see you in the distance.

The girl I knew was in fact,

The Reaper in disguise.

She’s here to take to me to a place,

That I have never known.

Will it be like what we’re told,

Or just a re run of what was before.

Hell is not a mythical place,

It’s somewhere in which we know.

It’s in our heads

It’s on this earth.

We live in it every day.

I wrote this more than two years ago and never shared it, ’til now. Hope you like it …

For the hands of time move on,

as I sit and ponder

what was and what could have been.

My goal in life is to see happiness on faces

But in the mirror it does not show.

For everyday I meet my goal,

when internal feelings do not glow.

I may not speak, when my mind runs wild.

But the words I write, speak in volume.

I want people to smile,

I want people to be happy.

The hands of time move on,

they show no sign of fatigue.

Yet my mind is damaged and my time is broken

Is this the end I see?

Could it really be nigh?

For the bell has rung, my last order is upon.

I’m weary, I’m broken,

I’m down and I’m used.

I need to find my happiness out of the darkness i am prisoned.

Listen to these word, take note of what I write.

For happiness is key, for all to be free.

#poetry #depression #art #survival #inspiration #ghosts #ruehill #staffordshire #shropshireunioncanal

Simple fact: Nobody in the world really knows what’s going on any more … not politicians, scientists, financial institutions, medics, kings and queens, conspiracy theorists, journalists, newspapers or social media.

Humanity has become the flotsam and jetsam bobbing in a dark sea of uncertainty and despair. So many of us can no longer see the shore or even hear the distant bells toll.

Now Boris Johnson has announced an independent public inquiry into the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. This will surely be mirrored across the world.

Failure and success will be measured against each other … delays and roll-out. What matters more?

Boris said it would examine the decisions “in the cold light of day” and “identify the key issues that will make a difference for the future”.

So, here are ten questions which may clear the way to understanding this dystopian horror story we have all lived through for 423 day…

Q Do you believe there is a pandemic?

Q If not, what is happening to the world and why?

Q When did world controllers, governments, banks, kings and queens, conglomerates, police forces, civil servants, armed forces … so many of these with dissenting voices  … get together covertly and come up with this mass conspiracy against us a

Q Why did nobody leak it, given that media of all sorts is so massive today?

Q What is the benefit of this mass conspiracy against us all? We are already controlled by all the people above. And all of them too have access to the world’s bucket of information?

Q The world is being reset as we speak… but is it for the betterment of the planet? A lot of mistakes have been made along the way and a lot of people have had their lives ruined, I have lost four friends to Covid but have been lucky enough, because, of my job, to carry on travelling … mainly by car …. across once non-existent borders …. and have been able to see family members for short periods.

Q But what would you do differently to Boris and all the other world powers?

Q How would you stop this destruction of our world?

Q What would you return to? Fisciality? Commerce? Industry? Or the brutalism of alternative lifestyles and funding?

Q How does not wearing masks, not having jabs etc guarantee the future any more than the ways Boris and all the others are employing?

#covid #conspiracy #journalists #liars #socialmedia

Quite often I’m asked by writers tempted by self-publishing, how to get their work in front of traditional publishers. Those people who are not there to massage your vanity but to get down to the hard-nose business of literature. Here are a couple of tips from my own experience…

Writing has been very good to me …

But then I have been good to it, working hard to grow as one of its motley crew and learn something new every day, a way to manipulate language for instance.

But mainly how to make my writing disappear from the reader’s mind, so there is only the story itself left.

Moving on though, a good half of my career has been as an Editor, sub-editor, rewrite sub (I was one of few trusted to rewrite Chapman Pincher, for instance).

I am now very good at what I do and I’m not looking for work. (I will, though, work with somebody who I believe has talent and can go places).

Today I’ve been asked how to present work to a traditional publisher, a true venue where you will be rewarded for your talent and helped to realise your dream.

The first step on the road to a publisher’s heart is of course a query letter. Treat it as your first publicity event!

As an Editor I have received many query letters – and some ‘queerer’ than others!

https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/a-run-in-with-a-trad-publisher-and-an-army-of-drunken-lamp-posts/

And let me say, most Editors won’t countenance a strange query letter, basically because we’re a busy breed.

The next publicity ‘stunt’ is the pitch!

My own book, The Boy in The Ravine, which I am about to launch at traditional publishers, is about 175,000 words and my pitch is waiting for a short promo film to be completed.

Then, I hope it will explode over the world!

The touch paper is its dedicated pitch focused on an identified marketplace and a target reader. And it’s backed up with a review of the success of similar products, an edifying covering letter, log lines, ad lines, plot line, a reader base in excess of 100,000, publicity opportunities through my shows on TV and radio, Roku and Netflix.

I have a 200 word query mail, a short sharp 300 word description of the book, 50 pages from the book, including the first two chapters.

And a follow-up project.

The reason is I want a good contract with good film rights and a good advance.

And that’s the only way to do it!

And one more point while talking about strange pitches and query letters … amateur self-published writers often try to excuse their dalliances with over writing and over describing by calling it experimental writing. And, don’t get me wrong, experimental is good.

But there is an old adage – ‘to live outside the law you must be honest’.

In writing it reads ‘to live outside the rules you must be brilliant’.

Writers need to discover the laws before they can complete the task they were put on this earth to carry out.

OR you need a good editor who understands what you are trying to do and will work hard to make it happen.

#writing #editing #self-publishing #vanitypublishing #realwriting #author