Pushing 60: Number 9, number 9, number 9 …

‘Everyone knew as time went by they’d get a little bit older and a little bit slower but …’
John never did.
Lennon and Farquhar were two Johns who never did get old.
I called my father ‘John’, he didn’t like names like daddy or pop.
He loved ‘A Spaniard in the Works’, he said ‘you have to know how to spell’ when we read it together and I didn’t laugh.
He had teeth like a vampire and a laugh like a snake. His voice was beautiful.
When I first heard John Cale reciting the sad ballad of Waldo Jeffers, I listened again and again. I couldn’t stop. My brother said it was because he sounded like ‘our’ John.

My brother cut an onion on hearing the news of John Farquhar’s death in July 1967 but remained tearless. He said he had wanted to look sad eyed for a party but the onion didn’t work. He was just 21, a cub reporter on the Rand Daily Mail in South Africa, and I was a misfitting little Chelsea girl of 9.

‘He checked in as a lodger and checked out as a stiff’ remarked my brother on our father’s association with the house in O Street.
It’s true he had arrived in uniform (Fleet Air Arm) to find a room in a bohemian part of town. He was bored at Browns.
Twice court martialled in the war, the first time was for smashing the controls of a plane he deemed unfit for flight.  And then, having been missed (he was apparently a great pilot and a great dancer), he was taken back only to be expelled again for pissing in front of dignitaries in Trinidad.
‘I thought I was in a lavatory’ he said in his defence.
I loved my John and could see he was troubled. I once drew him with a turned down mouth.
‘Can’t you give me a smile ?’ he asked.
‘Not till you give me one’ I said.
He told me about Jiddu Krishnamurti saying  that he liked him because he, Krishnamurti, had said he wasn’t a deity. I didn’t really get why someone saying they weren’t a god was so praiseworthy. He explained that certain people ( with many names ) had brought him over from India as a boy and elected him a deity but he had refused the mantle.
He told me about Gandhi and the blunders of the world.
I can see why he loved John Lennon, Mahatma Gandhi , Alan Turing, Martin Luther King, Karl Marx, Carl Jung and Albert Einstein but why Ken Dodd ?
The year he died was the year that
‘Sargent Pepper’ came out.
After the final session at the studio The Beatles came to play the acetates at the house where Mama Cass was staying, at the other end (later, Bowie end) of my street.
According to my friend Darryl neighbours applauded and shouted ‘louder louder’ and so the speakers were turned out to face the street in the middle of that first night.
I didn’t hear any of this but like to imagine it coincided with my father checking out, newspaper taxi waiting for a brilliant physicist to join the atoms.