Denis Kilcommons
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Summer of love ...

6/21/2017

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THE Summer of Love in 1967 was helped by the Scott McKenzie song San Francisco which became its anthem. Hippies had made the Haight-Ashbury area of the city an enclave of free thinking youth who wanted to wear flowers in their hair and believed all you needed was love as an alternative to what was seen as the strictures and corruption of government.
Teenagers reacted across Britain in response and we had better music: Whiter Shade of Pale, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Penny Lane and Purple Haze. Young people from Llandudno to London wanted to be part of the Magical Mystery Tour.
The 50th anniversary of that period will be commemorated and remembered over the next months and has already had its detractors. It may not have achieved anything tangible but it was a concept of optimism that has never left those who embraced the ethos and music of the time. It's legacy has been felt by succeeding generations of teenagers.
I got married in Blackpool at the end of that summer. I was living alone in my wife Maria's family home before the wedding. It was a mansion and was about to be put up for sale and I became caretaker. Minstrels' gallery, servants quarters, study and a drawing room with a bar. And rent free.
Just the location for the occasional hippy party, with the french windows open onto the grounds at the back and a game of midnight rounders in the nude.
And yes, I wore flowers in my hair, not that the manager of the off-license down the road was too impressed when I appeared in jeans. Afghan coat, beads around my neck, Zapata moustache and a daisy chain in my hair to ask for a Watney's Party Seven. And wasn't that a terrible beer?


Weather is always better in retrospect but I seem to remember high temperatures and sunny days. And the memories, and the message of love and peace, have stayed with me ever since.





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Kevin Bacon and I are just good friends.

6/14/2017

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IT STARTED with John L Sullivan, the world heavyweight boxing champion between 1882 and 1892. He was so famous people would say: “Shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of John L Sullivan.” It was a way of touching history before radio, TV and instant communication.
A chap recently said something similar to me: a relative three generations before had met Buffalo Bill during one of his Wild West tours. “So I spoke to a man who met Buffalo Bill,” he said.
The modern equivalent is the theory of six degrees of separation. This has been around since 1929, and spawned a play, film, TV programmes and a Hollywood parlour game involving actor Kevin Bacon
It postulates that anyone in the world is only six steps away from anybody else. To put it plainly, Donald Trump is only six people away from everyone, through a friend of a friend or acquaintance. Which is scary.
Let me explain.
The best man at my wedding was comedian Lennie Bennett who played Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra. So I am connected in two to Sinatra, in three to the complete Rat Pack, the Kennedy clan, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and most of Hollywood. Keep following their friends, relatives and work colleagues and you see how swiftly it all expands.
The theory has been tested by Facebook. Among its 1.6 billion users (which is 22% of the world population), the difference of separation was only 3.57. Which takes the breath away to think that you could be connected so easily to a Chinese rice grower on the other side of the world.
Then again, I can connect to both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in three: through MP Barry Sheerman to Theresa May who has met both the world leaders.
Come to think of it, I can connect to Adolf Hitler in three, through friend, author and biographer Stephen Dorril who interviewed Diana Mitford, who married British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley in Berlin in 1936, when Hitler was one of the wedding guests.

The Hollywood game was to connect that very fine actor Kevin Bacon to other actors through films they were in together. I can even make that connection personal in only five degrees of separation.
Kevin Bacon was in the film Frost/Nixon with Michael Sheen who was in The Damned United with Sir Michael Parkinson who was a friend of George Best who chatted up my wife Maria in a Manchester boutique in 1968. She turned him down.

Try it yourself and discover that it really is a small world.

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Me and Lennon and McCartney

6/12/2017

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ALBERT Einstein was brilliant at 26, Mozart published his first piece of music at five and just soared through his teens and twenties, 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes famously declared “I think therefore I am” at 23, Alexander the Great was well on his way to fame in his mid 20s, and Harry Styles is a musical genius at 23. Er, sorry, cancel that. How about Lennon and McCartney?
A lot of the world's brightest people make their mark early and go on to even greater things. Research, in fact, says the golden age of creativity peaks at 25. It's all downhill after that, which means I must be treading water at the bottom of a particularly mucky mill pond.

Things could have been so different if I'd had the breaks when I was 20, even though I was more interested in football, rock and roll and girls rather than creating a masterpiece.
Mind you, I did send a play I wrote to Granada TV. It was called Left Luggage and was about a talking head abandoned in a hat box at a rural railway station. They returned it as unsuitable and were probably right as I was going through my Samuel Beckett period at the time, but without his talent.
This followed my rejection by Manchester United in my teens who also said I was unsuitable. I'll bet they wouldn't have said that to Alexander the Great.
So I packed in my job and went to Africa. Unfortunately, Africa eventually thought I was unsuitable and I was deported from Uganda. All this before I had hit my creative peak at 25. How many set-backs can one aspiring genius take?
Life might have been different if I had been suitable for United, Granada TV or Africa. But I have no regrets. If I had been suitable, I wouldn't have met my wife and have the family I have today plus all the fun along the way.
As Rene Descartes might have said, I think I made the right choices, therefore I am happy.




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