It's been some time since I wrote a post here, but I have kept my eye on it, checking the comments, seeing how many hits it gets and deleting offensive comments and spam. It doesn't get as many hits as it used to about ten years ago and the only reason I don't write so much these days is that I am writing other things. It's never because I have nothing to write as I think of things when I'm on a train or walking down a street which is a little bit like the following:
It's strange the way we travel and the way the mind travels as I was thinking the other day about walking along Sunset Boulevard at one time; another time along La Croisette, in Cannes, on the French Riviera and another time going through Saint Anne's Shopping Centre (arsehole) in Harrow-on-the-Hill, and who should I see in those three none connected locations, but the guy who played Hercule Poirot on television; David Suchet.
I never met the man but the reason I remember it so well is that he is well known, has a well known face and wouldn't remember seeing me in those places. Setting aside the recognition on my part there must be many others I have passed closely to and not realising it.
In Los Angeles I would go to the post office each day where I had a post office box to pick up my mail. The other place I would go to daily was the supermarket (rock'n'roll) Ralphs and maybe the doughnut shop in the Farmers' Market on Fairfax and a few times I saw the same person at each one.
At a certain period in my life I was a regular patron of The Red Lion pub in a place called Little Houghton in Northamptonshire and a guy who drank there on a regular basis, who really wasn't very friendly with me, but who might say 'hello, said he had been on holiday in Florida and that he met a glamorous girl and the great thing about her was that she was an 'extra' in the TV series Magnum – even though Magnum was filmed in Hawaii; but we'll leave that.
Many years later I was getting off a small boat, on the island of Catalina, which is 22 miles out in the Pacific from Los Angeles, and there he was, waiting in the queue to get on the same boat: by himself, dreaming of meeting some other distinctive person he could tell storeys about in The Red Lion when he got back home.
Kind of makes me think that after I finished in a soap opera on TV (Crossroads for ATV), I went into a pub in Birmingham and a fella came up to me, wearing an 'ATV tie,' and said 'what's it like being out of work?' He was the big man at the bar, apparently, with his ATV tie – but we'll forget about him cos I'm the one name dropping here.
In 1993, I was in some kind of demonstration, outside of our hotel in Jerusalem. I didn't know what it was about so I went down and joined them: I could see film cameras, there for the news, and it seemed peaceful albeit a bit noisy.
I noticed that they had locked the hotel and wanted me to come back. 'Come back, come back,' they were shouting 'you should keep away.' But I wandered into the crowd. I met a guy from Chicago and we chatted. When the TV camera came close by the few people it was pointed at, started to get exited and shouted something in Hebrew at the camera and then when it went away they quietened down.
I asked the Chicago guy, who had immigrated to Israel, what they had said and he said 'we want Rabin to meet Arafat – it's time they talked.' I asked him why they were in that particular place – 'it's where he lives' he said 'just over there.'
Rabin hadn't been seen for some time as he was away; writing his own death warrant; he was with Arafat – Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinians, talking peace; he had recently won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Two and a half years later Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a right-wing extremist who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords.
The place where he was killed is now called Rabin Square.
Yasser Arafat died nine years after Rabin, in France, and it was thought that he died under foul means - but who knows, aye?
I wanted this post to be about coincidences and it's turned out to be a travelogue – hence the title; that's the way writing goes.
