A Life in a Year – 7th January, Leaning Tower of Pisa Closed for Viagra Treatment

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is probably one of the most instantly recognisable buildings in Europe and probably the whole World. I can certainly remember it from a school encyclopedia article and when I was a schoolboy I was always intrigued by the concept of a building listing so perilously to one side that it was apparently just waiting for a strong wind to topple it over. I had secretly suspected that the pictures had exaggerated the buildings predicament so I was astounded when I actually saw it for the first time and was able to satisfy myself that this tower really does lean over a very long way indeed. The tower actually leans at an angle of five and a half degrees and this means that the tower is four and a half metres from where it would stand if it was perpendicular. That may not sound like a lot but believe me this thing really leans.

Although intended to stand vertically of course, the tower began leaning over soon after construction began in 1173 due to a poorly prepared ground that allowed the inadequately prepared foundations to shift. Today the height of the tower is nearly fifty-six metres from the ground on the lowest side and nearly fifty-seven metres on the highest side. The width of the walls at the base is a little over four metres and at the top two and a half metres. Its weight is estimated at fourteen thousand five hundred tonnes so little wonder then that it started to sink.

Impending collapse brought construction proceedings to a halt for a hundred years while architects and builders considered what to do and over the intervening years there have been a number of attempts to prevent the whole thing giving in to the law of gravity and crashing to the ground. In 1272, for example, builders returned to the project and four more floors were added at an angle to try to compensate for the lean. Their answer was to build the support columns higher on one side than on the other to get the whole thing vertical again. Now I am not an engineer but I think that even I would have spotted the inherent problem with this particular solution that has resulted in the curious curve in the structure about half way up. It continued to lean of course because more weight meant even more pressure on the dodgy foundations. Then in the 1930’s Benito Mussolini ordered that the tower be returned to a vertical position, so concrete was poured into its foundation. This was a massive engineering cock-up and the result was that the tower actually sank further into the soil. In 1964 Italy finally had to concede that it couldn’t maintain its erection any longer, called for help and requested aid in preventing the tower from falling over completely. A multinational task force of eggheads was assembled to come up with a miracle Viagra cure. Then, after over two decades of serious cranium scratching, work started in 1990, but it took a further ten years of corrective reconstruction and stabilisation efforts before the tower reopened to the public in 2001.

We were glad of that and purchased a ticket for the trip to the top. There are two hundred and ninety four steps up a spiral staircase that take visitors up and which due to the absence of windows, and therefore orientation, is reminiscent of a fairground wacky house attraction, especially when although you know that you were ascending sometimes according to the extreme angle of the tilt of the building it feels as though you were going down at the same time, which, believe me, is a very weird experience.

Because the Tower had been built at a time when health and safety was not such an important consideration in construction the modern safety instructions were quite clear especially in respect of young children and how parents should take care to hold the hands of the under twelve’s. We were bemused therefore to see some young American children dashing about the building and their parents defying this sensible instruction. Sensible because even if the stone surfaces were dry, which today they certainly were not, it really wouldn’t be too difficult to disappear over the side in an instant and become a permanent addition to the new foundations. I was surprised at Americans, I though that they were more health and safety conscious than that.

I liked the Leaning Tower of Pisa because it lived up to all of my expectations, I tried to bring to mind anything else that was famous for leaning but all I could think of was Oliver Reed after forty pints of beer and George Formby who used to lean on lamp posts looking at ladies but that was in a previous age when this was still an innocent and acceptable thing to do.

A Life in a Year – 6th January, the Crown of St Stephen returned to Hungary

Because the sun was shining we left the hotel early this morning to take full advantage of the unexpectedly good weather. On the other side of the Liberty Bridge was the Market Square and the covered central market building. As with other cities that we have visited the market was filled with excellent produce, meat, fish vegetables and, this we hadn’t seen before, several stalls devoted to selling different paprika and herb combinations to be used to flavour the Hungarian national dish of goulash.

The weather now was unbelievably good, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and the temperature was several degrees above average for this time of the year. Today we were going to concentrate on Pest but with an eye on the blue skies had a mind to return to Buda for photo opportunities that had alluded us yesterday. This meant that time was an issue so there was no time to dawdle about. From the market we walked through the streets of the city, past the Hungarian National Museum and down a long road that went past some very fine buildings and came out in a Elizabeth Square which was big and spacious and was surrounded by impressive buildings and wide boulevards. In the nineteenth century Budapest earned the tag of Paris of the East and looking around it was easy to see why.

After the creation of Budapest as one great city, there was a rush of construction and Pest was extensively remodeled in the image of Vienna, acquiring the main arterial street Nagykörút or Great Boulevard and another, Andrássy Avenue, which led out to Hero’s Square and a great park with magnificent fountains and lakes, and all of this frantic reconstruction reached a fanatical peak to coincide with Budapest’s millennium anniversary celebrations of the settlement of the Magyars in the region of 1896. Today Budapest is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in the world and is considered an important Central European hub for business, culture and tourism. we weren’t expecting this and it certainly took us by surprise and like most other places we were beginning to realise that two days was hopelessly inadequate to appreciate this really fine City.

Moving swiftly on we were in full speed sightseeing mode now and next it was St Stephen’s Basilica which at ninety-six metres high is the tallest building in Budapest. Actually the Hungarian Parliament building is also ninety-six metres high which might sound a bit of a coincidence but in fact this is no accident and is quite deliberate because the number ninety-six refers to the nation’s millennium, 1896, and the conquest of the later Kingdom of Hungary in 896. The Basilica is named in honour of Stephen, who was the first King of Hungary from 1000 to 1038 and whose mummified fist is kept in a shrine at the back of the church. There is also a copy of his crown which is quite important to Hungary because it represents the legitimate authority to govern the country and it was first used in the coronation of Stephen which is an event that marks the beginning of Hungarian statehood. The Holy Crown was removed from the country in 1945 for safekeeping, and entrusted to the United States government. It was kept in a vault at Fort Knox until 1978, when it was returned to the nation by order of U.S. President Jimmy Carter and it is now kept at the Hungarian Parliament building where it belongs. It is a pity that Jimmy Carter doesn’t run the British Museum because if he did then the Elgin marbles might get returned to Athens.

Seven years after Budapest was united from the three cities in 1873 the National Assembly resolved to establish a new representative Parliament Building that appropriately expressed the sovereignty of the nation. A competition was announced, which was won by the architect Imre Steindl and construction from the winning plan was started in 1885 and the building was inaugurated on the 1000th anniversary of the country in 1896 (no surprises there) and completed in 1904. During construction the project was a major employer in the city and there were about one thousand people working on its construction in which forty million bricks, half a million precious stones and forty kilograms of gold were used. It is the third largest Parliament building in the World after those in Roumania and Argentina. Although it has an eastern appearance it is similar to the Palace of Westminster and was built in the same Gothic Revival style and has a symmetrical facade and a central dome. It is two hundred and sixty-eight metres long and one hundred and twenty-three metres wide. Its interior includes ten courtyards and six hundred and ninety-one rooms.

It is set in the spacious Louis Kossuth Square and there is plenty of room to wander around and admire the magnificence of the building. Louis Kossuth led the 1848 revolution that attempted to overthrow the Hapsburgs and there is a large monument to his memory at one end of the square. At the other end is a statue of Imry Nagy, another Hungarian martyr and hero, who was Prime Minister during the post war occupation years and led the ill-fated 1956 anti-soviet government after the revolution of the same year attempted to break free from Soviet control. Nagy’s government formally declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and pledged to re-establish free elections. By the end of October this had seemed to be successful but on 4th November, a large Soviet force invaded Budapest and during a few days of resistance an estimated two thousand five hundred Hungarians died, and an estimated two hundred thousand more fled as refugees. Mass arrests and imprisonments continued and a new Soviet installed government was installed and this action strengthened Soviet control over Central Europe. Nagy was executed for treason in 1958.

I have to confess that Budapest was an absolute revelation, I had not been expecting anything so grand, it was easily as good as Vienna and in my opinion much better than Prague, the scale of the city eclipses Bratislava and Ljubljana and I liked it as wll as any other city I have visited. An interesting fact is that after London in 1863 it has the second oldest metro system in the world which was opened in the famously important year of 1896.

A Life in a Year – 5th January, Communism, Oppression and the Prague Spring

All of my childhood, and indeed the first thirty-five years of my life, was spent with Europe separated by an iron curtain behind which lurked the spectre of communism. This post war balance of world power was highly significant and provided the tense atmosphere of the Cold War years that lasted until the Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989 and I spent my childhood with a dread fear of the USSR and in an environment preparing for imminent nuclear conflict and the end of the world. During this time the very thought of visiting eastern European countries was completely absurd which makes it all the more extraordinary that in the last few years I have been able to visit the previous Eastern-bloc countries of Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and the Czech Republic.

In 2006 I visited the Czech Republic and went to Prague Castle, which, according to Guinness World Records, is the largest ancient castle in the world and stands proudly at the top of a very steep hill. It was already getting warm and the walk was pleasant. We decided not to go in straight away and we walked instead to discover the Hradčany area that had a regal air full as it was of old royal palaces and government buildings. We walked to the top of the town, which brought us out close to the observation tower that we had climbed yesterday and at the top we stopped and admired the view over the city and hurried past a beggar with no toes just in case he was a leper. He didn’t have a little bell however and on reflection I guessed that it was more likely that he had just enjoyed a spell in a Gulag in Siberia and lost them all to frostbite. This was quite likely because one of the principal features of Stalinist Communism was the vigilant exposure of the alleged enemies of the state and the political purges in Czechoslovakia from 1950 until Stalin’s death were on a larger scale than in any other Eastern European country. Thousands of accused individuals were coerced into admitting to crimes they hadn’t committed for which they were sentenced to years of slave labour or if they were lucky very quickly executed.

In 1968, the Prague Spring was a brief period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union. It began on 5th January, when reformist Slovak Alexander Dubček came to power, and continued until 21st August when the Soviet Union and other members of its Warsaw Pact allies invaded the country to halt the reforms. The restructuring, you see, especially the decentralisation of administrative authority, was not received well by the Soviets who, after failed negotiations, sent thousands of troops and tanks to occupy the country. A large wave of emigration swept the nation and Czechoslovakia remained occupied until 1990.

A Life in a Year – 3rd January, the Curse of Tutankhamun and Pickles the Dog

On 3rd January 1922 the archeologist Howard Carter discovered and entered the tomb of Tutankhamun and allegedly released an ancient curse that led to the deaths of many people associated with the discovery.

But this is not the only story of a sinister curse and I will fast forward now to 1966.

The biggest story of this year of course was that the England football team won the World Cup when they beat West Germany 4-2 and Geoff Hurst famously scored the only world cup final hat trick ever. The whole country went football mad that year and everyone knows all about the brilliant victory. Sir Alf Ramsay’s England team however were not the only national footballing heroes of 1966. There was also Pickles the dog, without whom there may not have been a trophy for Bobby Moore and his teammates to lift on that glorious day in July.

The solid gold Jules Rimet trophy was stolen while on public display at an exhibition in London and this led to a nationwide search and the Football Association Chairman, Joe Mears, receiving threatening demands for money to ensure its safe return. Brazil, the then holders of the trophy were understandably outraged and accused the English FA of total incompetence. No change there then and they were almost certainly right of course but by a delicious twist of fate the trophy was stolen again in 1983, this time in Rio de Janeiro and this time it was never ever recovered. It is believed that it was melted down for the precious metal and it will almost certainly never be seen again.

Back to 1966 and this is the point where the story becomes unbelievably weird or perhaps just plain unbelievable. One evening a week after the theft, a man called David Corbett was out walking his mongrel dog Pickles, in south-east London, when the dog’s attention was caught by a package wrapped in newspaper lying under a bush in somebody’s front garden. It was the World Cup. I’ll say that again. It was the World Cup! No one has ever satisfactorily explained what it was doing under a bush wrapped in a copy of the Daily Mirror but David Corbett received a reward of £5,000, which was a huge sum, the equivalent of over £250,000 today and Pickles became an overnight national hero. I am surprised that he wasn’t in the BBC top one hundred greatest Britons.

But some people said that the trophy was cursed and within weeks of the cup’s recovery, Joe Mears died of a heart attack having suffered severe angina after the stress of the hunt. Pickles, in a remarkable instance of bad luck, choked to death by snagging his choke lead on a fallen tree while chasing a cat and the man accused of the theft David Bletchley served two years in prison for his part in the crime and was released, only to promptly die of emphysema.

That’s what I call a curse!

A Life in a Year – 4th January, Donald Campbell and an Ouija Board

In the late 1960s with imagination fuelled by Dennis Wheatley books like ‘To The Devil a Daughter’, the Rolling Stones and ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ album and Christopher Lee in Hammer Horror films like ‘Dracula’ there was a short time when a group of us used to dabble with the occult. At this time it was possible to buy a Parker Brothers Ouija Board which supposedly helped people to make contact with spirits on the other side. This turned out to be completely irresponsible and a number of people were psychologically affected by the experience of speaking to a dead grandparent or the Goat of Mendes and eventually it was removed from sale.

This didn’t matter because it wasn’t at all necessary to have a merchandised version because it was easy to arrange a séance for ourselves without it because all that was needed were the letters of the alphabet on some scraps of paper together with the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and the numbers 0 to 10 arranged in a circle on a smooth table top and an upturned glass and with that speaking to the spirits turned out to be relatively straightforward.

To get the mood exactly right this had to be done in the dark and preferably with a spooky candle flickering on the sideboard and of course parents had to have gone out for the evening. When everything was arranged and everybody had got a glass of Woodpecker cider then the fun began. Sitting around the table everyone would put a forefinger on the top of the glass and someone would assume the role of Medium and ask the question ‘Is there anybody there?’ This usually had to be repeated a couple of times because I don’t suppose spooks are just hanging around people’s front rooms on the off chance of someone looking them up for a chat but after a minute or so you could reliably expect the glass to start to wobble and then the glass would move and move towards the letters and spell out ‘Y, E, S’. No one really knew who they wanted to call up but generally speaking we didn’t really want a poltergeist unless we were in someone else’s house.

Once a spirit had made contact then the Medium would try and establish a name, if the spirit had a special message for someone in the room and whether they were good or bad. If they had a message then the glass would move towards that person and when that happened believe you me the hairs really stood up on the back of the neck.

It was most likely of course that someone was playing a prank and was pushing the glass around to try and scare the shit out of everyone else but I have to say it did seem to glide rather effortlessly and had sufficient self momentum to be convincing. If it slowed down the Medium would ask ‘Do you need more power?’ and then the glass would speed up and dash around the table in a circular movement until the spirit had supposedly built up sufficient energy to continue.

Anyway, that’s the background so I will move on to the point of my story. On one occasion a spirit in the glass claimed to be Donald Campbell who had died on 4th January 1967 in an accident whilst trying to set a new water speed record on Lake Coniston in Cumbria in the Lake District. I think we asked the question about more power but as it was this that had killed him Donald obviously didn’t need any more at this stage.

We asked him some questions that anyone around the table could have answered, such as did it hurt when you crashed? And how fast were you going? but then a really spooky thing happened. Because of the impact of the crash Campbell’s boat disintegrated and his body could not be found so we asked where he was and the glass replied with some map co-ordinates, 54°21′N 3°04′W, which, when we checked the school atlas just happened to be right in the middle of Lake Coniston! Now, it is quite possible of course that someone could have planned all of this in advance but I’m not sure anyone around that table was capable of planning such an elaborate deception and I am sure that we collectively panicked at this stage and brought the séance to an abrupt end just in case this really was happening. Perhaps one of my pals went home that night smirking all over his face but that is something I shall never know.

Anyway, the fascination with séances and devil worship quickly passed and I thought no more about it until one night in 1977 when Linda and I were spending an evening with our next door neighbours Neil and Nettie and the conversation turned to the subject of the Ouija board. I told the Donald Campbell story and Neil laughed it off as nonsense and just to prove it set up a séance table. Sure enough we managed to make contact and Neil was dismissive of everything that happened. Then I suggested that I should take my finger from the glass and ask a question only I could know the answer to. We all agreed and I asked the spirit if he could tell us my middle name. Without hesitation the visitor spelled out ‘J.A.C.K.’ and I had to admit that this was wrong so we wound the session up.

While we poured more drinks Neil looked up Jack in a dictionary of names and read out its foreign language equivalents and when he got to Russia he read out IVAN and I had to stop him there because Ivan is my middle name. Perhaps Donald Campbell was talking to us that night after all?

I haven’t ever bothered with spooks again but one night in 2004 something strange happened in the middle of the night. For some reason I used to keep my driver (golf club) in my bedroom and this particular night it fell over and woke me up with a bang. It didn’t slide down the wall or slip it turned over on itself and fell over. The odd thing was that it was propped up in a corner and if you know the design and shape of a driver then it is physically impossible for it to fall over in this way! I have often wondered since if it was Donald Campbell getting his own back on me for disturbing him in the underworld that night!

A Life in a Year – 2nd January, James Wolfe and the Boys’ Book of Heroes

On the 2nd January 1727 one of Britain’s greatest military heroes, James Wolfe was born. He became an army officer known for his training reforms but remembered chiefly for his victory over the French in Canada. The son of a distinguished general, he received his first commission at a young age and saw extensive service in Europe where he fought during the War of the Austrian Succession. His service in Flanders and in Scotland, where he took part in the suppression of the Jacobite Rebellion, brought him to the attention of his superiors.

The outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 offered Wolfe fresh opportunities for advancement. His part in the aborted attack on Rochefort in 1757 led to his appointment as second-in-command of an expedition to capture Louisbourg. Following the success of this operation he was made commander of a force designated to sail up the Saint Lawrence River to capture Quebec. After a lengthy siege Wolfe defeated a French force under Montcalm allowing British forces to capture the city but he was killed at the height of the battle by a French cannon shot.



This fact reminded me of a book that my dad gave to me when I was a young boy. It was one of his own that he had had as a young lad, it was printed during the second world war sometime between 1941 and 1945 and was reproduced on thick low quality yellowing paper and it was called the ‘The Boy’s Book of Heroes’ and naturally Wolfe was included in a chapter called ‘Heroes of the Empire’, which also included Robert Clive, Duke of Wellington and Horatio Nelson. The reason that I can date it reasonably accurately is because the chapter on Douglas Bader states that that at the time he was in a prisoner of war camp in Germany.

Dad loved history and always had books and stories to share with me the tales of the past and I know that he passed down his interest to me and this led directly to me developing my own interest and ultimately to studying and gaining a degree in history at Cardiff University in 1975.

I think that few would argue that Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was probably the greatest Briton of all time. I know that I can say this with some confidence because in 2002 the BBC conducted a nationwide poll to identify who the public thought this was. The result was a foregone conclusion and Churchill topped the poll with 28% of the votes. The BBC project first identified the top one hundred candidates and the final vote was between the top ten. Second in the poll was the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel who received nearly 25% of the votes.



There were eleven Kings and Queens and eleven politicians, ten military heroes, eight inventors and seven scientists. This is what I would expect but then there were eight pop musicians including Boy George! Now, surely there must be dozens of people who could be more appropriately included on the list than that. Even if you do accept that pop stars are great Britons what is even more unbelievable is that Boy George beat Sir Cliff Richard by seven places! John, Paul and George were included in the eight but there was no place for Ringo, which doesn’t seem very fair. Enoch Powell was one of the politicians and he was a raging racist. Richard III is in but not Henry VII.

There is an issue of equality because of the one hundred only thirteen were women and I can’t help feeling that there must be more than that. Here are some suggestions of mine; the prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry, the philanthroprist Octavia Hill, the pioneering aviator, Amy Johnson, the nineteenth century gardener, Gertrude Jeckyl and the very embodiment of Britishness, Britannia herself. Interestingly this inequality isn’t something new because in the ‘The Boy’s Book of Heroes’ all of the fifty-five people included were men but inside the book it did make reference to a companion volume called ‘The Girl’s Book of Heroines’, which was nice but I can’t help wondering why they had to be kept apart like this?

I have still got the book and hope to pass it on one day to someone who will appreciate its value just as much as I do. All of the pictures here are from the book.

A Life in a Year – 1st January, The Euro

On January 1st 2002 the universal European currency the Euro (€) was introduced.

The euro is useful because it has simplified travel to Europe but I miss the old pre-euro currencies. To have a wallet full of romantic and exciting sounding notes made you feel like a true international traveller. I liked the French franc and the Spanish peseta and the Greek drachma of course but my absolute favourite was the Italian lira simply because you just got so many.

When going on holiday to Italy you were, for just a short time anyway, a real millionaire. The first time I went to Italy, to Sorrento in 1976, the notes were so worthless that it was normal practice for shops to give change in the form of a postcard of a handful of sweets. That was really charming but it doesn’t happen any more of course!

My most favourite bank notes are probably from Switzerland. Everyone knows that the Swiss are fond of money and they leave no one in any doubt of this with the quality of their notes. Not only are they brilliantly colourful but they are printed on high quality paper as well. It is certain that these notes won’t fall to pieces quite as quickly as our own flimsy five-pound notes printed as they are on tissue paper!

Foreign travel and different bank notes remind me of my dad’s insistence on always returning home from foreign holidays with currency for his personal treasure chest. Even if it was 90˚ in the shade and everyone was desperate for a last drink at the airport dad was determined to bring a souvenir note or coin home and would hang on with a steadfast determination that would deny last minute refreshment to everyone so long as he could get his monetary mementos back home safely. How glad I am of that because now they belong to me and now my own left over bank notes from my travel adventures have been added to the collection.