But it would be safe to assume he would have been at the forefront of all the great struggles of our day.
The Fall of the Wall, Apartheid, Black Lives Matter, Freedom from Covid.
Lennon bestrode his world, leaving his imprint, and still does.
And as his adopted New York celebrated his legacy by turning the Empire State Building blue, here are four Lennon cities.
Liverpool Lou Lennon
Liverpool 4
Oh Liverpool Lou, lovely Liverpool Lou, why don’t you behave like other girls do?
And we have Yoko Ono to thank for knowing this, that John would sing this song, his Mum’s fave, around the house.
John’s statue stands alongside his pals on the Liverpool waterfront near the Beatles Story museum.
Lennon is everywhere in his home city and the under-threat Cavern Club is a good first stop while let someone else do the work for you on their Magical Mystery tour.
Growing up in Hamburg
I didn’t grow up in Liverpool, I grew up in Hamburg.
Not that John was dissing his home city, it was just that he was giving an honest reply to a reporter.
Lennon and the boys (five of them then, with Stuart Sutcliffe on board and with Pete Best instead of Ringo Starr) lived in Hamburg between 1960-62.
And because this week I’ll be hooking up with my German pals for a virtual celebration of Beethoven, this being the 250th anniversary of his birth, I give you the classics.
Ear, ear Beethoven
This one’s for Elise
Beethoven, Teplice, Czech Republic: And you’d expect to see Ludwig in this wellness town back in the 18th Century.
Because Bohemia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Vienna and Prague were musical centres where Germans flocked to.
I paid my tribute to The Great Man this year at the Beethoven Spa Hotel in Teplice where he stayed, and his room is still there for him.
And he got treatment for his ears, tried out some funky horns and left his death mask.
We also tried out the titular cafe, and the hot chocolate and chocolate cake for research purposes. An empty piano awaited the maestro.
If Beethoven had written a Fur Katarina I’d point you to that in celebration of our host and my pal, but we have the equally enchanting Elise, so here’s Fur Elise.
Rock me Amadeus
Eine Kleine Sadie Music
Mozart, Salzburg, Austria: And, yes, the Austrian singer Falco toasted Mozart with this hit.
A Wiener, he was what Mozart wanted to be, though almost certainly not in musical terms, but certainly in his origins.
Wolfgang was no fan of his home place, Salzburg, which he thought had a small-town attitude.
High standards. We loved it on out ski trip to Soll (it is a Sound if Music Mecca too).
Although the museums are too spread out, you do get right under Wolfie’s skin ;and hair). Here’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, pretty much the only German I know.
Vivaldi’s Veneto
The Dragon, Constsnce and Bandanaman in Venice
Vivaldi, Padova/Veneto: And for many, particularly the Eighties generation, punk violinist Nigel Kennedy, and his rendition of Four Seasons, was it for classical music.
I don’t know if Kieran ‘The Dragon’ who was in our party in Padova was an aficionado but he took casual chic to a new level.
I take some responsibility as I’d wheeled him and fellow Venice newbie Constance out to Lagoon City.
We were back late but had each taken a change of clothes while Dragon was still in his boardies.
While the orchestra were kitted out and the waiters and waitresses too in the sumptuous Padova Botanical Gardens.
Puccini, Prague: And long before rockers namechecked cities, the Classical composers were doing it.
Whisper it, the opera is set in Paris, the Bohemian bit is the fun label attached to what are modern-day Czechs.
And so, for me, the ideal place to watch Giacomo Puccini’s Classic is the State Opera in Prague.
Everybody loves to party in Prague, monks in the Strahov Monastery Brewery and priests swigging Champagne during the intermission at the State Opera.
Handel with care
No cats or mice allowed
Handel Dublin: And George Handel chose Dublin, the second city of the Empire, because he felt the London audiences had started to take him for granted.
No shrinking violet George, there was a statue to him erected in Dublin while he was still alive.
The premiere was packed and ladies were asked not to wear hooped dresses so as to allow more in.
That show was performed at the Musick Hall in Fishamble Street. Now you’ll want to go to Christchurch Cathedral for your opera fix.
But not the place for a cat or a mouse whose mummified remains are on display in the cathedral’s crypt…. they’d got stuck in the organ.
It’s immortalised in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
Anyhoos Christ Church Cathedral puts on recitals and thanks to my friends at Travel Department we channeled old Handel one balmy evening.
Would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here as young men and tell our enemies that they may take our lives but they will never take our stereos? – Braveheart
As students continue to be consigned to house arrest, they’ll only get through this with the staples of Uni, drugs and rock’n’roll.
No sex please, we’re British!
And so in a nod to our future parliamentarians, pioneers and care providers.
Here are some old bangers which got me through my young days.
And the places it took me too.
Tennessee waltz
With WC Handy in Memphis, Tennessee on my Deep South journey
On highway number 19 the people keep the city clean – Tina Turner, Nutbush City Limits
Nutbush City Limits and Tennessee (Ike and Tina Turner): And Nutbush was one to get everyone on their feet in the students’ union (alas no longer there).
Ninety nine dreams I have had, In every one a red balloon, it’s all over and I’m standing pretty, In this dust that was a city – Nena, 99 Ref Balloons
99 Red Balloons and Germany (Nena): You couldn’t qualify as a student when I were a lad if you didn’t march for the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Nuclear Disarmament or to Free Nelson Mandela.
And this anti-Communism clarion call by this German ball of energy played endlessly out of the window of the girls in the next flat.
The wall came down five tears ago and while I have still to make my mark on today’s wall, I have since visited behind the old Curtain.
Ich bin ein Dresdener
To see the revival of Dresden, the Venice of the Elbe, and learn about the Prague Spring and a nuclear bunker.
Mandela days
With my friend Siseko in Port Elizabeth
Are you so blind that you cannot see? Are you so deaf that you cannot hear his plea? Free Nelson Mandela, I’m begging you, Free Nelson Mandela – The Specials
Nelson Mandelaand South Africa: And, no, Free Nelson Mandela wouldn’t be one for the dance floor although maybe we pogoed to it.
It really came into its own on protest marches, demonstrations and the Free Nelson Mandela concert at Wembley.
Where me and my old pal from Cardiff student days clung onto our old undergrad days for just one more summer.
And while I never got to meet The Great Man I did get out to his home province of the Eastern Cape in South Africa.
And stood in his Voting Line.
So, for every student in the land, turn your boom boxes up loud and channel your Labi Siffre…
Your light will shine so brightly it will blind them.
Tell me what your University bangers and we’ll share
They know all about masks in Prague with every Communist schoolchild back in the day put through a daily drill of fixing on a gas one.
And woe betide anyone who didn’t do it quickly enough.
Today’s masks in these COVID days are cloth and less restrictive.
And the revellers at the long table on the King Charles Bridge at its grand reopening in July are lowering them onto their chins.
I know the management
To help them gulp down their Urquell Pilsner beer.
No country on Earth, not even Scotland, drinks as much proportionately as the Czech Republic (official).
And they even bathe in the stuff… close by in the Original Beer Spa.
Beer is everywhere in Czechland.
Monky business
Ya dumpling
Plain-clothes monks produce it and clink glasses on a night out up the hill in Prague’s Castle area.
The superannuated refresh with Pilsner after taking the waters and the treatments in the spa town of Teplice.
And the burghers of Hoptown, Zatec, notch up how many they’ve drunk on their beer mats.
In the Hope Museum next to the Beer Astronomical Clock which is better than the more visited one in Prague.
Here a skeletal figure next to the dials, and Satan himself, mock the teetotal.
They hold a Hop Festival too here in Zatec, eery year where among the competitions is a biggest belly contest.
I’m here to work on mine.
Just as soon as I get out this nuclear bunker.
Have I got nukes for you?
That’s all outside, we’re safe
Radoslav had warned us to stick together as we made our way through the myriad dark, dark passageways five stories down in the bowels of Parukarka Hill in Prague.
Where the only company is mannequins in protective suits and gas masks and the ghosts of Communist past.
Here is where 5,000 Czechs would have come to see out the end of days.
Let’s hope that they had plenty supply of Urquell then to wash down all that tinned meat.
The Czechs would, I believe, have prevailed. They are a durable lot, toughened by a lifetime of being fought over by the ‘Great Powers.’
But they’ve always had a Pilsner to pull them through.
I’m only here for the beer
Something I cobbled together
Beer is at the heart of the Czech story, believed to be the oldest in the world, dating back to 993BC at Brevnov Monastery.
For 250 years in fact only monks were allowed to brew beer.
Which you can only imagine they gave up reluctantly.
They certainly haven’t lost the habit judging by the fun they’re having.
At the Strahov Monastery Brewery close to my opening night billet.
You’d be hard pushed though to recognise them as monks as there is barely a tonsure between them.
In the corner, two British girls on a hen night ply a local with shots and for advice on which bar to go to next and there is no shortage of options.
I am happy where I am though, with my waiter guiding me through the beer menu.
As I sup down my beer onion soup and beer goulash with dumplings.
Mild, followed by dark and finished with IPA, is the answer. But I’m not finished there as I’m given a tour of the brewery with samples at every stop.
Thankfully, it’s all downhill home to the Golden Key Hotel were I will sleep in a triple bed under a wooden ceiling with a sauna in the morning.
And wash it all down…
Roll over Beethoven
My hosts probably feel that they can’t trust me in Prague’s Beer Spa and that I’d drink all the suds.
So they take me next instead to the spa town of Lazne Teplice which is the last word in massage, saunas, bathing pools and medical practices.
But don’t just take my word for it.
Well do, but the luminaries of yore came here to take the waters.
Among them Beethoven who also sought a cure for his failing hearing…
And this is where he stayed
And you can see the horns displayed in the glass cabinets in the Hotel Beethoven corridor.
While you can also ask to be taken to the room where he stayed, although we didn’t get in.
He may very well still be in there and just not have heard the knocking.
Beethoven, the 200th anniversary of who’s birth it is this year, was clearly well looked after in Teplice.
Masked man… old Ludwig
And he would certainly have feasted on the town’s speciality chocolate cake in the titular cafe.
All of which I’ve been told I must work off next, as the Czechs themselves do, in Bohemian Switzerland.
Cerny statues
So, that’s where baby’s gone
No, I’ve not taken a wrong turning although I’ve not been myself since that first night in Prague.
Bohemian Switzerland is the park named for the two Swiss climbers who came here in the 19th century and were reminded of their own homeland.
It truly is an enchanted land and got the official stamp of approval.
Bohemian Switzerland… in Czechland
When the makers of The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe used an arch in the park and set Aslan there.
The Czech Republic is full of surprises and I spend my last night back in Prague which too has many still to reveal.
Two iron figures outside the Franz Kafka Museum, whose waists revolve and who shoot out water onto a map of the Czech Republic.
Hangin’ about: A Cerny statue
It is the work of experimental sculptor of David Cerrny and it is believed to represent what the European Union has don to their land.
The Czechs are wonderfully irreverent to their leaders.
Walk around Prague and you’ll see Cerny’s mark everywhere.
Babies in the tower
A man holding an umbrella hanging from a building a Communist Brabant car on leg and Babies Climbing a TV Tower.
You can get up close and personal to the babies in the tower cafe.
But be careful looking out the window because these weans have no nappies on.
Cerny’s statues blend seamlessly with the Medieval ions, King Charles IV, the nation’s patriarch chief among them.
St John and St Jimmy
Tourists though are urged toward the statue of St John of Nepomuk, who fell out with King Wenceslas, and, no, not the Good One.
This Wencesclas ordered Archbishop John to be thrown off the bridge when he refused to divulge Weneslas’s wife’s confession.
It’s good luck to touch his statue and make a wish and that wish will be lifted up to the heavens.
Me? I think St John of Nepomuk might just have drunk too many Urquells and fallen off the bridge that way.
Where to stay
Ooh missus! Teplice Spa
Hotel Golden Key: The Castle area of Prague from €70. Reception will help you out with maps and directions for the sprawling and tiring Castle area Also that yourself to a spa and the relaxation room. See Asten Hotels.
Stay in Teplice Spa: Beethoven hotel: Price per person per night in off peak season is €87 – including room, treatment. daily entrance to Thermalium pool and enjoy the water features, sprays, cold baths and spas. Lots of Beethoven features dotted around the walls and you can even see the room where he stayed. And full board.
Enjoy your trip
Trip to Bohemian Switzerland and see the arch from the film of CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. – €120.
Where to eat
Strahov Monastery Brewery in the Prague Castle area. When in Prague do like the Czechs and eat goulash with dumplings, of course. Go for a starter too – onion soup with an infusion of beer. Heck. go the full three course and dig into the apple strudel.
Flights
With Ryanair – to Prague if purchased way in advance from €40-€120.
The festival is slated to return from November 18-21 and I expect they’ll keep my seat for me, you know the one I share with Richard Gere.
No bull in Istanbul
Istanbul, From Russia With Love: And Aussie model George Lazenby’s sole excursion as 007 took him to Istanbul.
Bond is in Istanbul to pick up potential defector Romanova.
And he obviously performs his derring-do through the Grand Bazaar, Hagia Sophia and on the Bosphorus.
Double O Venice
Roger Moore, Moonraker, Venice: And, yes, Bond was in Venice for Casino Royale and From Russia With Love but also the lunar escapade, Moonraker.
Roger arrived by gondola, obvs, and patronised some pretty decent billets. Me, I prefer a vaporetto.
But however you get here, and I went AWOL here with two newbies from a party in nearby Padova, get here how you can.
Jamaica? No, she came of her own accord
Sean Connery, Live and Let Die, Jamaica: And the Caribbean is a fave of James (no fool him or us).
Jamaica was one of the settings for the first Bond film, Dr No, but it was really in Live And Let Die where it became a main character.
Never mind that it’s Rasta rather than Voodoo in Jamaica (you’d be looking at Haiti for that) the Caribbean character is a great fit.
The Man With The Golden Pun
Roger Moore, TheMan With The Golden Gun, Hong Kong: That’ll be me then the Pun bit, while Bond nemesis Scaramanger, wonderfully cast for Christopher Lee, is The Man With The Golden Gun.
Now like us all I have my preconceptions of Cuba, their Fifties classic cars, rumba, cigars and Castro.
And my friends have been urged by all I know who tell me I must continue my Caribbeaneducation there.
Unmistakably Havana
And with my projected next destinations, the Czech Republic and Switzerland (doncha just know it?) now made pariah states by the UK it’s time for a rethink.
I’m reminded too that I have got close to Havana in that I visited San Cristobal de La Laguna in Tenerife on which Havana was based.
Happy World Friendship Day and this post is dedicated to the friends we make around the world on our travels.
And whom we’re all missing so much.
Winnie the Pooh is the patron of World Friendship Day.
And who better than the silly willy-nilly old bear all stuffed with fluff.
I’m forever indebted to Mississippian Zach who looked after me (and the rest of the group but mostly me).
On the second leg of my American Odyssey in the Deep South.
Marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King and honouring the two other Kings, Elvis and BB King.
Hit the road Zach
If it had been left to me it would have been more Tragical than Magical Mystery Tour.
With me leaving my mobile phone back in Cleveland, 124 miles from state capital Jackson.
Zach keeping an eye on me
Where we were assembling for the opening of the Two Mississippi Museums, the Museum of Mississippi and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.
Zach only organised for a friend who he said was travelling up to the opening himself, but who may very well have been enlisted to help this dopey Scotsman, to take the mobile with him.
The story doesn’t end there though.
And when I put my phone down in the huge hall in the convention centre in Denver Zach appeared to warn me:
’We’re not getting someone to travel 100 miles if you forget your mobile phone this time!’
Geraldine, my Soca friend
We binge-watched American sitcoms when the children were younger (whaddya mean? we still do).
And that meant following the misfortunes of old divil Arthur who had to be walked by his daughter Carrie’s friend Holly.
I’m obviously too young for any of that only I’m not.
And Geraldine walked me and my new Virginian friend Patsy when I went in search of Rihanna at Club Barbados in Barbados
As well as being a reason for getting up early Geraldine went the extra mile for me.
When I showed an interest in Soca music by singing King Bubba tunes.
And on the last day of my trip a CD of her favourite Soca music was waiting for me at reception.
Ich bin ein Dresdener
If only I’d had Ingrid as my teacher when I was young.
Ingrid took us on a walk through Dresden and Saxon history at the German Travel Mart.
Her grandmother had talked to her about the Red Heaven firestorm that set alight their city at the end of the Second World War.
And told us of life under Communist rule. So good I went back for the same tour after my booze cruise on the River Elbe.
I wear the wrist band pass for the tour to this day.
And also others from my Travels which includes Denver, Los Angeles, the Czech Republic and Portugal.
And if you’ve felt too silly to ask what it is, the food that gives its name to Liverpudlians as in Liverpool scouse, this week’s Hungry and Thursday is all about Liverpool scouse and stews around the world.
Scousers have been getting their voices heard (and what’s new there?) these past few weeks, culminating in their fireworks party as they lifted the Premier League title at Anfield yesterday.
But seeing this is a food and drink post, and I already give you a sporting post, My Sporting Weekend every weekend, I’ll stick to scouse.
In a Stew
Which will stick to you teeth or in them. Because it’s really just stew with extras.
Ally in red, naturally
I first had myself a plate of scouse in Albert Dock, Liverpool, as I waited for my interview at the Liverpool Daily Post back in the 1990s.
I had pulled a sickie to attend and was to go on and stare inside the studio where the British morning magazine programme This Morning was televised, only for the camera to turn on me.
Just the job
Which is when I got a shiver down my back as I thought of my boss’s wife watching from up in Aberdeen and reporting to Jim that I was really down on Merseyside when I should have been at my desk.
Still, I got the job so it wouldn’t have mattered.
Back to the scouse and the word derives from ‘lobscouse’ which was a Scandinavian and Northern German stew brought to Liverpool by sailors.
The Liverpudlians, of course, reciprocated and sent exports of their own to these parts… The Beatles. And you can hear all about that in the city they made their home, Hamburg.
Hamburgers… and stew
On Stefanie Hempell’s Beatles tour (and you won’t get better).
While scouse isn’t the only comfort food that the Hamburgers have exported with great success. See Hamburgers and ships.
A Star in Hamburg
So what’s in Scouse?
Scouse consists of mutton, lamb (often neck), or beef with vegetables, typically potatoes, carrots, and onions. Serve with pickled beetroot or pickled red cabbage and bread.
Ethiopia and the world
While I leave my Liverpool-born son to make his way back from the festivities to Scotland, or indeed the phone call to bail him out of jail, I’ll take you on a gristlestop tour around the world of stew.
With the queen of Ethiopia, Meseret
Meat of Africa
Ethiopian chicken stew: And I’ll miss those Ethiopian New Years in Dublin which I shared with my friends Carole, Lorcan, Tony and my Queen of Ethiopia Meseret.
Because Enkutatash runs to the old calendar which means that you actually lose time. I, of course, lose all sense of time when the wine starts flowing which I only do to soak up the Ethiopian stew which you eat with your hands soaking it up with bread.
And you can get a fancy dish too
Balkan bellies
Bosanski Ionac, Bosnia & Herzegovina: And they love their homely food in the Balkans and it unites the different cultures and traditions.
Carbonnade, Flanders, Belgium: And the brave soldiers who went to the Front in the First World War would take their pleasures where they could.
So that meant wine, women and song… or in Ieper, dark beer (there’s lots of it in this dish), women (they’re the same the world over) and drinking shanties. All right up a Tommy’s street and the best people to go with are GTI Travel and Visit Flanders.
Load your plate up with shellfish and don’t be liberal with the squids and octopus.
You’ll need a rich base of onions, white wine, olive oil, and tomatoes, and season with a variety of fresh herbs and spices such as saffron and nutmeg.
They’ll be the dumplings then
Cesky goulash: Not to be mistaken for Hungarian goulash. All right, it is quite similar. Mop it up with the obligatory Czech dumplings and sauerkraut.
And, of course, Pilsener Urquell.
They had a big post-lockdown feast on the Charles Bridge in BohemianPrague recently and I[m hoping there were leftovers!
And with apologies to Irish stew and other meaty greats from around the world.
Heck for fear of being force-fed vegetarian I’ll return to this subject.
The Lennon Wall, Prague
Eine Kleine Sadie Music
The Dragon, Constsnce and Bandanaman in Venice
With WC Handy in Memphis, Tennessee on my Deep South journey
Ich bin ein Dresdener
Drinks all round: In the Spa Triangle
Swan lake? No, the River Vltaca
We’ve been expecting you, James
Acting all goofy in Orlando
And this drink Becherovka is a healing potion
And a swim will relax the muscles
Sweat off the rum and food
