Miming, Lip Syncing and the like.

I Love Lucy title card.

Someone – well it was Julien Temple (and spelled that way) – said the closing ceremony for the Olympics was like a 'bad night at the Brits' – well I don't believe entirely with that opinion, but the show certainly came and went in places.

There was a wonderful moment when the familiar chords starting with 'C' on the piano to the great John Lennon song Imagine oozed into the arena; chords that we all know so well and obviously played by Lennon himself, but when the lyrics were sung by a children's choir, we kind of thought again about who the piano player was, until the face and voice of John Lennon was revealed on a large screen; then the crowd went silent taking a deep tearful breath before gently joining in.
At that moment we realised that this was the only way John Lennon would ever appear in a show like this and a time like this unlike his former band mate who closed the opening ceremony a couple of weeks earlier; we knew that if Lennon had survived he wouldn't be there in person.
To be fair to Paul McCartney, he was probably asked to sing Hey Jude as he must be getting fed up of it himself. Some singers have committed suicide rather than sing 'that damn song again' – Del Shannon with Runaway for example.

I would have liked to have heard the Ralph McTell song The Streets of London as this was supposed to be a celebration of British pop music and that is the most famous of modern London songs and they were the London Olympics – not the British ones.

There was a fault at the Opening Ceremony with McCartney's first song; the sound 'went funny.' That, to me, sounded like the sound filtering through from the stadium rather like the bad sound you hear at the winter Olympics, when the musical track is played straight from the skating arena through the microphones and on to your TV. It has a kind of hollow compressed sound and can be achieved when recording – to make a song sound as if it's being sung live – by allowing the playback on the speakers to be 'bounced' through the microphone, picking up ambiance on the way.

But my daughter told me it was his 'backing track;' I don't know how true this is but I wouldn't have thought that something as big as the opening ceremony with the money it cost to produce and the meticulous care Danny Boyle demands, would resort to the Saturday Night Live/Top of the Pops lip syncing technique.

Lip syncing, of course, is what we called 'miming' when we were kids and it means moving your lips to a recorded voice – either your own or someone else's.

We all remember Danni Minogue on Saturday Night Live when she just sat there as her song was played when she couldn't hear the playback and the unprofessionalism of some of the rock bands and performers on Top of the Pops in the 70s; they came on to Top of the Pops and made it quite clear they were lip syncing and what they were doing was going back on something that has been a very important technique ever since movies began.

I had a terrible time trying to tell my parents that all music in film is mimed to playback; there is no other way it can technically be done; films are usually shot with one camera unlike multi camera TV which adopted the format from I Love Lucy in the 50s.

I Love Lucy was on film, of course, which is why the quality is so good. When they started to shoot and/or record shows on video tape they used the same multi-camera technique and it is only with multi-cameras that you can perform live music without miming to playback.

It's quite simple: for music to be performed live with one camera the performance would have to be exact on every take – every take exactly the same from every angle or it couldn't be edited. The tempo would have to be the same and still it wouldn't sound right,

Paul McCartney tried it in Give My Regards to Broad Street; a terrible movie by the way and the live singing must have tripled the budget.

In all those old musicals, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor - the lot – lip synced to playback.

Then they had to add the dancing track if they were tap dancing – they weren't even wearing tap shoes!!

That was called a tap over, by the way! They were so professional the general public didn't notice and it wasn't till the aforementioned on Top of the Pops and the like came along that it became an issue.

I think the general public know too much these days and want to know too much about how things are made then they are shocked to find that a David Attenborough programme on the BBC didn't actually point a long camera lens into a load of snow to witness a giant polar bear giving birth to cubs.

I have had a few instances of being present when pop groups have mimed and when they have sung live.

When I was a student we would go to a cathedral near Christmas for a service which went out on TV as Songs of Praise. I was working at the time backstage on a Panto at a theatre and one of the pop groups (60s talk for band) in the show, The Kingsmen, sang their latest song. We, in the cathedral, could only hear the musical backing as the singers were singing into microphones which were going straight into the broadcast. It sounded great, when it was broadcast a week later.

Another time a great English blues singer (there are some) Jimmy Powell was in a drama and he sang live to a backing track. As the sound department wanted to control the sound we couldn't hear him – just like the church service.

I also had an occasion to be in the Top of the Pops studio when they recorded and even though they mimed it sounded live in there – that's why it sounded so good as they only had to mix the audience.

Oh this is boring you isn't it – here's me miming to a rock song I wrote and in order to film it I had to shoot it about 20 times:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCYcHnzWW6k

Memorial Day - one year on.

Burcot Grange (above) built in 1890 and my home for a while as a young child.

The blog has been down for the past few days due to some kind of bug and I am repeating a post from last year's Memorial Day as there are still things, anniversaries and people to remember.

It's Memorial Day here; Memorial Day Weekend with the actual 'day' being on Monday and who do I remember? I remember lots of people as I am fortunate to have a good memory. On a site in the UK called Friends Reunited I looked at the people in my class at school and there were just a few; one or two of them got in touch with me, the memory man, and one or two wrote to me that I had forgotten; so not too much of memory man after all. All the things I write on here are from memory and sometimes I look on the Internet for some details like the road where such and such happened; one guy I wrote to, wrote back and said he couldn't remember anything about school at all. If you mention his name to anyone from my class they certainly would remember him as he would sit back on his chair in full view of the rest of the class and . . . well maybe if I put that in it will be picked up as a metatag and draw porn readers to the site – so he forgot all about school did he? The teacher (male) of the class must have seen him but what could he do? What could he say? **** put that thing away? That boy is probably a grandad now and what would his grandchildren think? A year or two before that, a boy at school suddenly stopped coming to school; nobody said anything and we didn't notice that his name had been taken off the register; his name was Michael Holmes. He came to our house to play a couple of times and I got to know his sisters later on; after a few weeks we found out that he had fallen into the canal and drowned. It was a shock but the school didn't let us know; I don't know what age we were but I would guess around eight or nine; I was in the Junior School in any case – Clifton Road Junior School. Now I don't need memorial day to remember Michael as he springs into my mind quite often. What happens here this weekend is the same in Britain only in Britain this weekend it will bank holiday weekend – I think it was called Whitsun at one time and on this American Heathen word processor on this computer it comes out as a spelling mistake – there now I've added the word to the dictionary so it's officially in. In Britain remembrance day is in November and people wear poppies to signify the ending of the first world war at 11/11. That's when Britain remember their heroes. The heroes they remember, of course, are the dead from wars. I think they go back to World War One which started in 1914 and ended in 1918 and there is hardly anybody left who actually fought in that war – the great war the war to end wars. I heard recently that the last one died either here or in the UK. The other world war started in 1939 and ended in 1945; I have to put those dates as some people here have different dates when the Americans joined in; here they might say 1941-1945 and 1917-1918 – I have heard both and, indeed, people just might not know. I hate the idea of war as it has always been young men fighting old men's battles and even though I had a small amount of military service war heroes have never been my heroes; they are everybody's heroes and should be; they paid the ultimate sacrifice and they should never ever be forgotten - but my heroes have always been pioneers and not necessarily people who fight. I am more impressed by ideas and most of the long conversations I have are about ideas; once a week I meet a pal for breakfast who majored in philosophy and we have many an interesting tête-à-tête and I have read books by Nietzsche for example as a result of our meetings; I have another friend I meet once a week for lunch to talk about politics; I talk British politics and he responds with the American version; another friend I meet intermittently and we talk about the theatre. I feel quite privileged that I have experienced both worlds and can't think what I would have done without that knowledge; I would never have written my novel, for one, and I don't think I would have started my one man Irish show in the theatre – A Bit of Irish. But I have always been curious; I watched a film once called The Land That Time Forgot and I remember one line from it - Plato was right and I wondered who Plato was and researched it; I put this curiosity down to my lack of formal education so when I look back I don't regret anything about my education or experience. But the four men I admire the most (no not the Father, Son and Holy Ghost) are Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Roger Bannister. I really admired the way Ali stood up to authority, forfeited his world championship for his beliefs and finally, in the end, won. A lot of people disagreed with him including Jackie Robinson who was also a black pioneer in baseball – his own business, of course, but I know very little about him. John Lennon was just a hero because he was a singer; I stood within three feet of him once in a bar after seeing the Beatles at the Ritz Ballroom, King's Heath, Birmingham. Looking at him then, and you could see the Beatles were destined for something, I wasn't sure if he knew what was going on; The Beatles came from a middle class background; John wanted to be a 'working class hero' but he was middle class; they were art students and up to that time art students – students in general in Britain – liked jazz. When I say students I mean mature ones as the Americans tend to call everybody at school students as opposed to pupils in the UK. When I was a student – a mature one – we liked The Beatles. Later on John might have been misguided by Yoko Ono but I think he was a man that did more for peace than is generally realised; I know Beatles fans dislike Yoko and he loved her but I love my wife; I wouldn't take her to work. Bob Dylan I just find the most talented poet I have ever heard or read; I like lyrics by Chuck Berry and John Lennon but Dylan has so much imagery in his work - just look at any of his lyrics – look at these I ran into the fortune-teller, who said beware of lightning that might strike I haven't known peace and quiet for so long I can't remember what it's like. There's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin' out of a boxcar door, You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars After losin' every battle. I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin' 'bout the way things sometimes are Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin' me see stars. You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies. One day you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzin' around your eyes, Blood on your saddle. I have been more influenced by Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran when I know, as an actor, it should be Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier. So who have I left out? Ah!! Roger Bannister.

Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile barrier in May 1954; I was a little boy watching my friend nearly drown at Moseley Road Swimming Baths and finding out that another friend had died. I lost a lot of time at school as I suffered from conjunctivitis (in the eyes) which developed into ulcers; I remember seeing the horrible white things on the blue of my eyes and I was told that this was because I rubbed them; I couldn't face the light and water would consistently run from my eyes.

So that was the end of my education as I failed the secondary exams - but that's only an excuse as I can clearly remember sitting to do a paper for the 11+ and not putting anything at all on to the sheet of paper.

Then one day on the TV, the news came on and it said that the 4 minute mile had been achieved; the race came on and there were only 3 runners in the race; the other 3 were invisible. Christopher Brasher was ahead with Bannister behind up to about half a mile and then Chris Chataway took the lead with Bannister second to him up to half way around the final lap and then on the final lap Bannister took the lead and made history; to a ten year old boy this was like an orgasm. Later in the year the Bannister/Landy Miracle mile and that was the best mile race I have ever seen – do yourself a favour and look for both races on YouTube. I won't give you the result of the latter race but John Landy of New Zealand broke the world record after Bannister and then they had to meet in the Empire Games. Have a look - it will bring a tear to your eye and a lump to your throat.

So I had to go a place called Burcot Grange - above; this is a very large house in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. It is a very large Victorian House and had been donated to the Birmingham Eye Hospital by its owners giving prolonged treatment of children suffering from inflammatory conditions of the eye associated with harsh city life. It was also a place where squint operations were performed and a lot of the other children had lost an eye. It was at Burcot Grange that I was introduced to elevenses which was a snack at eleven-o-clock; maybe a biscuit (cookie) and some orange squash. It was like being let loose as there were 5 acres of grounds; so we played cowboys with real hills, valley and bushes to hide behind. The other thing I did was run; I was going to be a Roger Bannister and I ran around those acres every day. My mother came to see me with a tear in her eye, and encouraging one in my infected ones, every week and I cried when she left and then forgot her for a while. Of course one of the nurses was my girl friend; she was nurse Hollingshead and maybe 15 years older than me. She wrote to me for quite some time after I left and when I did they presented me with a book by Enid Blyton called, something like, Around the Year. It was a nature book and they wrote in the inside cover to Christopher with lots of love from Burcot Grange. I still have the book which is at my daughter's in Suffolk. As we sat there in the sun the nurses would 'time' me as I ran around the grounds. I remember I could get around in about three minutes; one day one of the nurses, who had timed me, called another nurse and said 'Hey! Is it the four minute mile or the four mile minute.'

I can just imagine the four mile minute. When I got home I would run around the block – where we lived – and I managed to get a sucker to beat. He was Roger and looked more like Roger Bannister than I did and I would let him run ahead of me so I could run along the back straight which ended just by the lane where we lived in South View Terrace on Moseley Road. So Roger Bannister is my hero; he ran for many years after that to keep fit although he retired from competitive racing early after the 'Golden Mile' to continue his studies to be a doctor where he worked at Northwick Park Hospital as a neurologist and later as Director of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London and a trustee-delegate of St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington. A few years ago I bought his book called The Four Minute Mile, of course, and just as I was coming up to the Golden mile on page 224 about the Empire Games, where he met Landy, I found the page was blank. The next page was there and from there till the end of the book many pages were missing and there was only an intermittent report from that section. I called Amazon, where I had bought it, and they referred me to the publishers, The Lyons Press, and when I called them they hung up on me. So there we are – there are my memories on this memorial day; I wonder what yours are?

Landy and Bannister Statue in Vancouver; the scene of the Miracle Mile.

John Lennon

It was John Lennon's birthday on Saturday – the 9th – he would have been 70 years of age; hard to believe. We were served with a lot of his music on the radio and on Saturday we watched the movie Imagine – for Beatles or John Lennon fans that movie is a must. You will see that George and Ringo played on the album Imagine so it was really another Beatles album without Sir Macka.

John Lennon has always been more important to me than The Beatles and John had more influence on society than the straights, the squares, realise and would probably accept.

I saw The Beatles, with my brother, three times in their very early days. Now isn't that something? Friends have said they saw Sinatra, Elvis, Nina Simone, Bing Crosby et al but they don't get it. We saw The Beatles – in their early days and The Beatles, with John's influence, changed things.

The Beatles made it ok to question authority; they tried to be working class, but they were never working class, they were students when students usually liked jazz. Lots of students liked jazz because students were supposed to like jazz but when The Beatles came along students started to like rock.

I was the number one Buddy Holly fan and The Beatles reminded me of Buddy Holly and that's why I drifted into them; the other Beatles used the harmonies of The Crickets and the black girl groups like The Shirelles and John's voice, on songs like Baby It's You and Anna from their first LP, is worth a listen to prove my point.

We had heard of The Beatles as they had a small hit with Love Me Do – by the way I've heard the 3 versions of Love Me Do with the three drummers: Pete Best, the session drummer and Ringo and Ringo's playing is far superior – so when they appeared on Thank Your Lucky Stars lip syncing to Please Please Me we knew who they were.

Please Please Me was a great song; John wrote it for Roy Orbison (slower) and was in the same bag as Buddy Holly so naturally my ears pricked up. Three of the Beatles had the famous 'Beatle hair cut' – not Ringo – and John stood with his guitar held high on his chest and his legs open like Elvis and it had an amazing affect on people; me in particular.

The following week Please Please Me shot to number two in the NME charts, and the following Sunday they were due to appear at our local dance hall, The Ritz in King's Heath. We would go there every Sunday to drink their brown ale, nut brown ale or Bruno brown ale, pick up girls and dance; more of the former and less of the latter two I'm afraid.

So we went to our usual spot at The Ritz and saw the most amazing show; not many girls came that night as The Beatles were a geezers (male) group; they were famous in Liverpool and they hadn't quite caught on with the girls yet.

They sang most of the songs from their first LP, Please Please Me, including A Taste of Honey and Twist and Shout and when their set was over we went down to the bar for our nut brown ales and who should join us but The Beatles. The rest of the crowd were still upstairs in the Dance Hall and we were at the little bar.

We didn't have any intimate conversation with them as they were very excited and photographers were asking people to have their photos taken with John and Paul and when they posed they would all shout ha ha ha haaaaaaa and the photo would be taken.

Then George came followed by Ringo; George wore a big fur coat; it would be easy to say there was something about The Beatles and that you could see it at the time but you could; you could see that they had the world at their feet.

We saw groups every week at The Ritz – look it up on line The Ritz, Kings Heath and the Regans who ran it – from The Rolling Stones to Freddie and the Dreamers; when Brian Poole and the Tremeloes came they seemed to have a million dollars worth of equipment, with a microphone each and clear succinct sound but The Beatles shared microphones – which is why their harmonies could be heard.

We saw them twice more; once more at The Ritz when they played their return engagement – and opened with Tony Orlando's version/arrangement of Beautiful Dreamer – but it was never the same. They were too popular and the girls drowned out the performance.

Before the Beatles it was the age of the angry young man – Look Back in Anger and all that and this spread into movies like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life and other movies but the great mass of youths in the early sixties and the Teddy Boys before them had never heard of Look Back in Anger and John Osborne and all that intellectual stuff that the educated were privy to, so when John Lennon started to ask questions – intelligent questions – we sat up and asked questions ourselves.

There's a piece of film where John is being interviewed, after the Beatles disbanded, and he is espousing peace and an American female interviewer says 'you have it all wrong my dear boy' in such a condescending way that when you see it you want to throw cushions at the TV set; he wasn't taken seriously all the time at the time but the FBI sure kept an eye on him and last week the FBI confiscated his set of finger prints from a New York auction.

So RIP John Lennon; in about two months it will be the 30th anniversary of his death; December 8th (although it was the 9th GMT at the time he was killed) and there will be other remembrances then; number 9.

Memorial Day and my hero.

Burcot Grange (above) built in 1890 and my home for a while as a young child.

It's Memorial Day here; Memorial Day Weekend with the actual 'day' being on Monday and who do I remember? I remember lots of people as I am fortunate to have a good memory. On a site in the UK called Friends Reunited I looked at the people in my class at school and there were just a few; one or two of them got in touch with me, the memory man, and one or two wrote to me that I had forgotten; so not too much of memory man after all. All the things I write on here are from memory and sometimes I look on the Internet for some details like the road where such and such happened; one guy I wrote to, wrote back and said he couldn't remember anything about school at all. If you mention his name to anyone from my class they certainly would remember him as he would sit back on his chair in full view of the rest of the class and . . . well maybe if I put that in it will be picked up as a metatag and draw porn readers to the site – so he forgot all about school did he? The teacher (male) of the class must have seen him but what could he do? What could he say? **** put that thing away? That boy is probably a grandad now and what would his grandchildren think? A year or two before that, a boy at school suddenly stopped coming to school; nobody said anything and we didn't notice that his name had been taken off the register; his name was Michael Holmes. He came to our house to play a couple of times and I got to know his sisters later on; after a few weeks we found out that he had fallen into the canal and drowned. It was a shock but the school didn't let us know; I don't know what age we were but I would guess around eight or nine; I was in the Junior School in any case – Clifton Road Junior School. Now I don't need memorial day to remember Michael as he springs into my mind quite often. What happens here this weekend is the same in Britain only in Britain this weekend it will bank holiday weekend – I think it was called Whitsun at one time and on this American Heathen word processor on this computer it comes out as a spelling mistake – there now I've added the word to the dictionary so it's officially in. In Britain remembrance day is in November and people wear poppies to signify the ending of the first world war at 11/11. That's when Britain remember their heroes. The heroes they remember, of course, are the dead from wars. I think they go back to World War One which started in 1914 and ended in 1918 and there is hardly anybody left who actually fought in that war – the great war the war to end wars. I heard recently that the last one died either here or in the UK. The other world war started in 1939 and ended in 1945; I have to put those dates as some people here have different dates when the Americans joined in; here they might say 1941-1945 and 1917-1918 – I have heard both and, indeed, people just might not know. I hate the idea of war as it has always been young men fighting old men's battles and even though I had a small amount of military service war heroes have never been my heroes; they are everybody's heroes and should be; they paid the ultimate sacrifice and they should never ever be forgotten - but my heroes have always been pioneers and not necessarily people who fight. I am more impressed by ideas and most of the long conversations I have are about ideas; once a week I meet a pal for breakfast who majored in philosophy and we have many an interesting tête-à-tête and I have read books by Nietzsche for example as a result of our meetings; I have another friend I meet once a week for lunch to talk about politics; I talk British politics and he responds with the American version. I feel quite privileged that I have experienced both worlds and can't think what I would have done without that knowledge; I would never have written my novel, for one, and I don't think I would have started my one man Irish show in the theatre – A Bit of Irish. But I have always been curious; I watched a film once called The Land That Time Forgot and I remember one line from it - Plato was right and I wondered who Plato was and researched it; I put this curiosity down to my lack of formal education so when I look back I don't regret anything about my education or experience. But the four men I admire the most (no not the Father, Son and Holy Ghost) are Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Roger Bannister. I really admired the way Ali stood up to authority, forfeited his world championship for his beliefs and finally, in the end, won. A lot of people disagreed with him including Jackie Robinson who was also a black pioneer in baseball – his own business, of course, but I know very little about him. John Lennon was just a hero because he was a singer; I stood within three feet of him once in a bar after seeing the Beatles at the Ritz Ballroom, King's Heath, Birmingham. Looking at him then, and you could see the Beatles were destined for something, I wasn't sure if he knew what was going on; The Beatles came from a middle class background; John wanted to be a 'working class hero' but he was middle class; they were art students and up to that time art students – students in general in Britain – liked jazz. When I say students I mean mature ones as the Americans tend to call everybody at school students as opposed to pupils in the UK. When I was a student – a mature one – we liked The Beatles. Later on John might have been misguided by Yoko Ono but I think he was a man that did more for peace than is generally realised; I know Beatles fans dislike Yoko and he loved her but I love my wife; I wouldn't take her to work. Bob Dylan I just find the most talented poet I have ever heard or read; I like lyrics by Chuck Berry and John Lennon but Dylan has so much imagery in his work - just look at any of his lyrics – look at these I ran into the fortune-teller, who said beware of lightning that might strike I haven't known peace and quiet for so long I can't remember what it's like. There's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin' out of a boxcar door, You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars After losin' every battle. I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin' 'bout the way things sometimes are Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin' me see stars. You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies. One day you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzin' around your eyes, Blood on your saddle. I have been more influenced by Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran when I know, as an actor, it should be Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier. So who have I left out? Ah!! Roger Bannister.

Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile barrier in May 1954; I was a little boy watching my friend nearly drown at Moseley Road Swimming Baths and finding out that another friend had died. I lost a lot of time at school as I suffered from conjunctivitis (in the eyes) which developed into ulcers; I remember seeing the horrible white things on the blue of my eyes and I was told that this was because I rubbed them; I couldn't face the light and water would consistently run from my eyes.

So that was the end of my education as I failed the secondary exams - but that's only an excuse as I can clearly remember sitting to do a paper for the 11+ and not putting anything at all on to the sheet of paper.

Then one day on the TV, the news came on and it said that the 4 minute mile had been achieved; the race came on and there were only 3 runners in the race; the other 3 were invisible. Christopher Brasher was ahead with Bannister behind up to about half a mile and then Chris Chataway took the lead with Bannister second to him up to half way around the final lap and then on the final lap Bannister took the lead and made history; to a ten year old boy this was like an orgasm. Later in the year the Bannister/Landy Miracle mile and that was the best mile race I have ever seen – do yourself a favour and look for both races on YouTube. I won't give you the result of the latter race but John Landy of New Zealand broke the world record after Bannister and then they had to meet in the Empire Games. Have a look - it will bring a tear to your eye and a lump to your throat.

So I had to go a place called Burcot Grange - above; this is a very large house in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. It is a very large Victorian House and had been donated to the Birmingham Eye Hospital by its owners giving prolonged treatment of children suffering from inflammatory conditions of the eye associated with harsh city life. It was also a place where squint operations were performed and a lot of the other children had lost an eye. It was at Burcot Grange that I was introduced to elevenses which was a snack at eleven-o-clock; maybe a biscuit (cookie) and some orange squash. It was like being let loose as there were 5 acres of grounds; so we played cowboys with real hills, valley and bushes to hide behind. The other thing I did was run; I was going to be a Roger Bannister and I ran around those acres every day. My mother came to see me with a tear in her eye, and encouraging one in my infected ones, every week and I cried when she left and then forgot her for a while. Of course one of the nurses was my girl friend; she was nurse Hollingshead and maybe 15 years older than me. She wrote to me for quite some time after I left and when I did they presented me with a book by Enid Blyton called, something like, Around the Year. It was a nature book and they wrote in the inside cover to Christopher with lots of love from Burcot Grange. I still have the book which is at my daughter's in Suffolk. As we sat there in the sun the nurses would 'time' me as I ran around the grounds. I remember I could get around in about three minutes; one day one of the nurses, who had timed me, called another nurse and said 'Hey! Is it the four minute mile or the four mile minute.'

I can just imagine the four mile minute. When I got home I would run around the block – where we lived – and I managed to get a sucker to beat. He was Roger and looked more like Roger Bannister than I did and I would let him run ahead of me so I could run along the back straight which ended just by the lane where we lived in South View Terrace on Moseley Road. So Roger Bannister is my hero; he ran for many years after that to keep fit although he retired from competitive racing early after the 'Golden Mile' to continue his studies to be a doctor where he worked at Northwick Park Hospital as a neurologist and later as Director of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London and a trustee-delegate of St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington. A few years ago I bought his book called The Four Minute Mile, of course, and just as I was coming up to the Golden mile on page 224 about the Empire Games, where he met Landy, I found the page was blank. The next page was there and from there till the end of the book many pages were missing and there was only an intermittent report from that section. I called Amazon, where I had bought it, and they referred me to the publishers, The Lyons Press, and when I called them they hung up on me. So there we are – there are my memories on this memorial day; I wonder what yours are?

Landy and Bannister Statue in Vancouver; the scene of the Miracle Mile.