TUESDAY, 28 MAY 2024
The BBC’s Culture section posted an article with an interview they did in 1976 with amongst other people, the lead singer of the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten.
Rotten, who got his nickname because of the state of his teeth, filled decent people of the middle to late 1970s with loathing and fear for the future.
Yet what did Rotten do as soon as he had some cash in his pocket? Spend it on drug-fuelled parties? Got himself a hotel room for a couple of months and spent all his money on booze and women? No, he bought himself a nice apartment in a nice neighbourhood, where he settled down with his wife. They remained happily married for more than four decades, until she died after several years of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. For the last five years of her life, Johnny Rotten was her full-time caregiver. Very rotten of old Johnny.
FRIDAY, 31 MAY 2024
Europe, in the 1860s. A princess known for her beauty is engaged to the crown prince of a neighbouring state. Everyone thinks they are a beautiful couple. Then the prince dies. His fiancée returns to her native country. She’s inconsolable. Her fiancé’s family let it be known that they really liked her, and what are the chances that she might marry her late fiancé’s brother (who is madly in love with one of his mother’s chambermaids). She replies that she is very sad and that nothing can change that. Nevertheless, the brother visits her. They cry together. Then they get engaged. Everyone thinks they are a beautiful couple. She gives birth to four sons and a few daughters. She and her husband ascend to the throne after terrorists blow off her father-in-law’s leg. After a decade, her eldest son becomes king. She is convinced that her adopted country needs reform to stave off revolution. However, little reform is implemented. Twenty years later, her eldest son, the king, her daughter-in-law, and six of her grandchildren are murdered in the basement of a large house where they were kept under arrest by revolutionaries that had overthrown the government. She and her daughters flee south. Her sister, who was married to the king of another country, convinces her own son, now himself king of her adopted country, to send a ship. The group of seventeen nobles who are thus saved includes her one daughter who goes on board with five of her sons, six dogs, and a canary.
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East Coast of America, February 1978. A catastrophic blizzard hits people on their way home. It snows continuously for more than thirty hours. Schools and universities and businesses shut down. Trains stop running. Thousands of cars are stuck on the highway and other roads. Fourteen people die because their cars are so covered in snow that the exhaust gases cannot escape. Many people are without heat, water, food and electricity for days. Accumulated snow is dumped into the harbour to make way for more snow. Many houses collapse or are washed away into the ocean. One child disappears a few meters from the front door of his house during the storm. His body was not found until three weeks later.
* * *
England and Ireland, 1970s. A woman born into a rich family sells all her shares in the family business, sells her house, and distributes the cash to poor people. She lives with her lover in a working-class neighbourhood. Together they rob her family’s mansion. Later she joins a terrorist organization in Ireland. She throws milk jugs with explosives from a helicopter. She takes part in another robbery. This time they steal a bunch of paintings – among them the only Vermeer outside Buckingham Palace in private hands. The police find the paintings in the trunk of a car. In prison she marries another lover and gives birth to his child. On the loose again, she makes powerful missiles, with packets of cookies to absorb the recoil. She continues arguing and fighting until she dies decades later, penniless, living with old nuns in a retirement home run by the Poor Servants of the Mother of God.
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