Wie geht's?
Me? Slowly getting there - better each day. Thanks for asking.
The upside of living in Covid-ville is that the reading pile has been considerably reduced. Three books so far and halfway through the fourth.
Craig Brown's One Two Three Four is my latest acquisition and it's great! Mainly because he flits around with time - jumping into lovely anecdotes and offering some alternative realities (just like me and G Knowles esq - what if Paul hadn't failed Latin and therefore hadn't become friendly with the younger George Harrison at school?).
His research is top notch - I loved the background material on Jane Asher's family for instance. And his list of 1957's (a key year) neologisms include long playing records now being called 'albums'!
He turns the distance from the Beatles' evolution - some sixty to sixty-five years on now, into an advantage, so that he can forensically analyse the different witness statements from those who were there at key events. It's remarkable how different they all are, and how much the events morph over the years in people's heads.
Plus, and this is especially important, he interjects some excitement and personality into his musings, and I'll even forgive him this beast of a sentence and the non-use of a semi-colon after the colon.
If I could be any Beatle, at any time, I would be Paul in his Wimpole Street years, living with Jane, cossetted by her family, blessed by luck, happy with life, alive to culture, adored by the world, and with wonderful songs flowing, as if by magic, from my brain and out through the piano: 'I Want To Hold Your Hand', 'I'm Looking Through You', 'The Things We Said Today', 'And I Love Her', 'We Can Work It Out', 'Here, There and Everywhere', 'Yesterday'.
He makes a great point here.
By the way, Paul McCartney was aged 21 to 23 during this time (1963 to 1965). Extraordinary!
Love and peace - Wozza
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