Strange Accolade
Friday 26th June, very warm and hazy. It's Ginger's birthday, she's eight.Up to London yesterday evening, too hot, crowded train, me having failed to complete my draft of the Long Price essay, for my brother's birthday dinner at The Star, Belgrave Mews. We ate, we drank, we talked about many things up and down the long table. . . On the train home again, suddenly somebody called out, Michael Jackson's dead!
Seemed like it was true, because the same call went up from other seats in the carriage, the news conveyed to a moving train by our futuristic world's telecoms, and then passed around in the simplest way, mouth to mouth. . . As we walked along the Upper Lewes Road someone came out of a house and called to us, with the same absence of emotion, yet the same conviction that something important had happened, hey, man, Michael Jackson's dead!
Strange accolade.
He was a very good dancer, a phenomenal entertainer, a rock and roll casualty who died painfully, shamefully, publicly; over decades. Poor kid.