George Sassoon

[spot]

I was just reading back-issues of the obituary column of the Telegraph - the way one does - and came across this paragraph toward the end of George Sassoon's from March 1996. This may well be my one and only utterly pointless thread on ForumGarden but truly, it's worth showing:He was also a keen student of international affairs, advocating a solution to the problem of Gibraltar that involved offering Spain a reciprocal enclave in southern England - perhaps Dover or Folkestone - which would become a centre for bullfighting and other facets of Spanish life.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... ortal.html

[neffy]

i found that intresting spot,i use to work in a second hand book shop in salisbury for 10 years and use to deal alot with s.sassoon,i see his son use to live sometime in wiltshire.

[spot]

Good lord, neffy, Siegfried must have died at least forty years ago, you're getting long in the tooth if you used to sell him antiquarian curiosities.

I've worked in neither a second-hand bookshop nor Salisbury but I do like both.

Strike that - I just remembered I did work in Salisbury once. That was a strange job, that one. I only got £1500 for it but I was never quite sure I'd been good value for the money.

I saw Kate Rusby and Richard Thompson play there too. It's a pretty town.

[neffy]

what job was it that you done spot?the book shop that i worked was by the cathredral close and it was called Beaches book shop.

Great place loved working there,started when i was 16 and a punk!!!! worked for 10 years until i had my daughter

[spot]

Do you know, I honestly can't remember. The firm had a whole mishmash of production datafiles and needed a management summary back-end process to get enough information condensed out of it overnight to be able to keep their factory running. I've no idea what language I wrote it in though.

Here's another comment from an obituary. The Telegraph's one of the few dailies with a sense of humour on these occasions, this time about one of the pilots who hunted down the Bismarck with string-and-paper biplanes:Tivy was noted for his luck and his superb airmanship. In 1939 his "stringbag" spun into the sea and was lost. In 1943 he had a prang landing on Attacker which wrote off his aircraft. While on loan to the Royal Canadian Navy in 1949, the passenger in his Fairey Firefly trainer mistakenly turned off the magneto switches and the engine died. But Tivy skilfully glided into a narrow forest glade in Nova Scotia, tearing off the wings and destroying the fuselage in another otherwise successful belly landing. Appropriately, his last appointment was as commander of the Fleet Air Arm's air accident branch.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... db0103.xml

[neffy]

god spot did you know i worked at waitrose? i love reading anything like that,my big love and i think have already said is T E Lawrence i find him so intresting

[spot]

Yes, you mentioned Waitrose a while ago. I quite like them. If they're not selling as much as they could I even have a good idea on how to increase their turnover but I don't quite know who to offer the idea to.

I saw that the movie poster on the wall behind your profile pic is Lawrence of Arabia but I don't know who the photo in the frame on the desk is.

[neffy]

it is my late dad spot loved him dearly.That poster spot in the only original one left,the nat art gallery has only a copy.The book case above the picture in the frame is where my books to do with T E Lawrence i have 2 books owned by him.

The head office of waitrose in in bracknel

[Uncle Fester]

I read the Obituaries and I find it strange that every one dies in alphabetical order :-2

[spot]

Excuse my extending this thread but I've just enjoyed another obituary. I don't make a habit of this, it was quite inadvertent. A parallel thread asked what concert was the most enjoyable or exciting and my mind chanced on a memory of hearing John Ogdon play. Much of the concert escapes me, but not the sense of being sat rigid in the stalls in Leicester's De Montfort Hall rivetted with the tension of the piece, the concentration of the man as he played and the utter transfixion of the audience. The only moment that came close to it was seeing Segovia alone on stage carefully building a shockingly pianissimo guitar passage through which even a pin dropping would have been noticed.

Anyway - John Ogdon, and Alexander Goehr's obituary for him in the Independent of 3rd August 1989 which brought back the colour of the occasion. Here's how it finished:He could touch the piano like a lover. He had an essentially improvisatory approach to the keyboard and could both hit it very hard and obtain the most ravishing and sensual sonorities from it. After a magnificent performance of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards at Cheltenham, he came off the platform and said “That piano won’t forget me in a hurry. Nor will we.It's a wonderful obituary, I'm glad I found it.