No Right At All

Here’s a story which is guaranteed to get me going, and it’s a topic I’ve discussed before.  Seems as though this Old Phartte popped his clogs at age 91, and decided that because his grandchildren had never bothered to visit him while he was in hospital, that they weren’t worthy of getting any of his loot once he was gone.  So instead of cutting them out of his will, he left them each only a few bucks.

Needless to say, the grandchildren sued the estate, claiming that they were “entitled” to a third, rather than the 0.0001% thereof specified in his will.

Where do these people get the idea that they should be entitled to anything?  FFS, his estate, lest we all forget, is his own property — something that people (and governments, a rant for another time) seem to forget.

So if Grandpappy wants to leave his dough to Someone Not His Foul Grandchildren because they ignored him while he was alive, he’s perfectly within his rights to do so — just as if he were to give a birthday present to one person and not another.

This business of heredity “entitling” someone something is all well and good when it is, ahem, an actual title (e.g. royalty / nobility), but in the cold hard world of law and finance, descendants are entitled to nothing, if the owner of said estate says so.

Anyway, this group of ingrates lost their case, and a damn good thing it is too.  And for the record, they’re as ugly as they are greedy.

Gone Greek

Following my earlier post about Going Greek, I got this from Frequent Reader and Looongtime Friend Mrs. Sorenson (a.k.a. The Catholic):

Going Greek?  Why yes, yes we have. Twice this year actually 😌

Parga and Lefkada.  Go there.

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To start you off, breakfast from the Green Bakery, Parga.  All fresh, all made on the premises.

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One of Parga’s beaches.  Clear water everywhere you go.  Why is the bottle in the picture you say?  Because this is a taverna half way up the hill from the beach.  One simply HAS to stop and have an icy beer and nibbles, in order to make it up the rest of the hill.

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A little something from our favourite port-side restaurant.

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Said Green Bakery – fresh bread, huge fruit salads, fantastic coffee, great service, tables in the small courtyard to the left, lean-on bars at the shop inside.  Quick moving queues every morning.  Less than 50 yards from our apartment.

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This is Parga.  Hideous eh?  Lined with restaurants and quirky shops of all sorts, bars overlooking the port.

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You can get water taxis to the beach with the bar above.  The water really is this clear.

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Just so you know BA flights aren’t all bad – I’d drunk the champagne already, sorry!

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About 50km from Parga — private beach attached to the first hotel.

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From the viewing platform at the hotel.  Had to suffer this each night we were there.
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This helped tho!

Greece and the Greek Islands (Rhodes and Crete are both lovely), good food, great sights, nice people — bugger learning Greek, just scoff the food and you’ll be Greek enough for them!
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Gilly

Some time back, when I wrote about my time playing in the Atlantic Show Band back in Johannesburg in the ’70s and ’80s, I said this:

“For a few years, we had a girl singer: a 5’2″ little blonde thing named Gillian, who wore the shortest miniskirts in the Western World and had a voice that could stop a Sherman tank.”

I didn’t do her justice with that throwaway comment, because Gilly (not Gillian) was a sensational talent, and the fact is that we under-used her shamefully, for reasons I’ll get to in a while*.  Here she is (and yes, that’s Yer Humble Narrator on the right with his Rickenbacker and Knob on drums):

Gilly was, at 18 (!!!!!) and still in high school, already a consummate professional.  She always knew her lyrics off pat, had perfect pitch, and never came to the practice studio without knowing the songs we were going to get into that day.  When I say that she made Loverboy’s vocalist (in Turn Me Loose) and Stevie Nicks (in Stop Dragging My Heart Around) look like absolute beginners, I am not exaggerating.  (Juice Newton?  Forget about it.)

Seriously:  of all the female vocalists I’ve ever heard live, only Ann Wilson of Heart came close to our little girl.

Anyway, I emigrated, the band eventually broke up (the two things are not related) and Gilly went on her way to become something of a star in South Africa, first as part of a duo with her boyfriend/husband/ex-husband:

…and then in her own right as a solo artist, when she really got to show off:

…and ended up hosting the South African TV equivalent of “_____’s Got Talent”:

Gilly got out of South Africa about fifteen years ago, went back to her native Britain, and carried on singing a bit, only this time with… her daughter (!!!!):

Yes, her daughter (who is now 29):

Only Covid put an end to all that, as Britishland of course went crazy and locked everyone up in their homes.

At this point in these stories of my past, I generally write something tragic.

By various lies and subterfuges I managed to get back in touch with Gilly a couple weeks ago, and we spent ages chatting on the phone and on WhatsApp (along with the surviving members of Atlantic, who of course treated her as badly as we had in the old days — but that was because we always treated her as one of the guys, and she responded in kind).

The only Big Fat Bummer is that I learned that Gilly now lives just down the road from The Englishman’s Farm in Wiltshire, and in fact I’d visited her town several times when I was staying there.  We could have met up back in 2017 already, FFS.  (That sound you hear is me eating my liver with chagrin.)

Anyway, that’s enough from me.  Folks, say hello to Gilly and (at age 21) Big Spender.  Then a little Marilyn… in her forties.

As you may have gathered by now, I miss those days, a lot — and Gilly’s a big part of that.  And the other guys in the band feel the same.


*The main reason we underused Gilly’s voice was that because of her extreme youth, we couldn’t be sure that she wouldn’t dump us and follow another path, leaving us in the lurch.
Also, our principal vocalist was jealous, and refused to let her sing more than a few songs.

We were such idiots.

Leosh

His name wasn’t Leosh, but Leos — Elias Leos — and he wasn’t Portuguese, but Greek.  Old Greek, but we’ll get to that in a minute.  I met him on campus in 1972, under circumstances that I don’t quite remember, but I suspect Mervyn The Jew (who’d been at high school with him, and who himself became one of my lifelong buddies) saw my buddy Zonk and I (Zonk, one of the Four Muscadels) fleecing some witless rich kids at bridge in the student cafeteria.  Mervyn was an excellent (but flamboyant) bridge player, and he asked if he could sit in, and we said yes.  Elias had never played bridge before, but he watched us and then a week later, rather nervously, asked if we could teach him how to play.  Zonk, Mervyn and I saw the chance of having a permanent foursome, so we said yes — somewhat reluctantly on my part, because the three of us were almost tournament-class bridge players and I was a little leery of having a rookie in the four.

I needn’t have worried.  Inside a month, Elias was almost as good as we were.

He was, easily, the most intelligent and eloquent man I’d ever met, and to this day I’d still put him in the top three of that class.  For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the smartest guy in the room — not even close — but such was our friendship that it never bothered me.  He was studying law, and I was majoring in, well, bridge, drinking and virgin defloration.  (Shuddup, I’d spent my entire adolescence at a boys’ boarding school;  waddya think was going to happen to a 17-year-old kid away from parents and schoolteachers for the first time?)

For some unknown reason, Elias and I affected being Portuguese, our common greeting (and exclamations of rage) becoming “Como es ta?”  (pronounced Coom’ esh ta? — our pronunciation corrected by a real Porro, Maria Raposo Soares).  His name, ending as it did in an -s, became “Leosh”.  His nickname in our group of very close friends became “Greek Bastard”, always said with the utmost love and affection.

Leosh and I spent the next five years together, even after I quit university, an ignominious failure.  (He, of course, graduated top of the class cum laude.)  We would meet up for lunch, dinner (even though he didn’t drink —  a real anomaly amongst the gangsters I called my friends at the time), and he’d come over to my parents’ house often, where we’d just chat, listen to music and try to make each other puke with laughter.  It happened often.

I didn’t go over to his parents’ house but once, and I learned why.  You see, Leosh had a sister;  a very comely, dark and exotic-looking girl a couple years older than I.  Leosh saw me looking at her and said, “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”
“Don’t look at my sister.”
“Why not?  She’s lovely.”
“I know.  Don’t.” 
The look he gave me was unlike anything I’d ever seen before:  it was menacing, and quite sinister.
“You mean,” I said playfully (never give me an opening like that), “I couldn’t even ask her out for a date?”
“It’s impossible.”
“Why?  You scared I’ll seduce her?”
His voice darkened even more.  “Drop the subject.”
Of course, I wasn’t about to.  “Come on…”
“You’re not Greek!”  he hissed.  “It’s never going to happen.  Besides,”  he added, “she already has a boyfriend.”
“Greek, no doubt.”
“Of course.”

And that was that.  Young Playboy Kim meets Old Greek Tradition, loses by a landslide.

I never teased him about it, either.  It was clearly not something to make fun of, and I had no doubt that he would have ended our friendship in a heartbeat if I had.

So I never went after his sister;  but I did steal his girlfriend away from him a couple of years later.  And we still remained friends, after I discovered what he’d discovered:  she was a total tramp, the little Scouse tart.

Anyway, Leosh graduated with his law degree, and I couldn’t dodge the draft any longer, so off we went together, by some miracle assigned to the same unit, nay to the same company and platoon even.  Our beds were side by side in the barracks, and together we struggled on through Basic Training (boot camp).  Then he went off to Officer Training Command (OTC) and thereafter as a lieutenant to the SA Army equivalent of the JAG.  I went off as a lowly private to play my guitar at the Entertainment Group.

We stayed in touch less frequently after the army thing ended, mostly because of his work — he became, surprise surprise, the youngest-ever partner in his law firm — but also because I was playing in the band, and trying to start my own career in the process.  Whenever we did meet up, though, it was as though we’d only seen each other the week before and not months and months previously.

Then, disaster.  Coming home from work late at night, Leosh was in a terrible car accident.  Terrible in that his brain was damaged and his head nearly severed from his body at the larynx.  He came out of his coma after many months, but while his brain recovered somewhat, the damage to his larynx was devastating, and permanent.  Leosh, the smartest, most eloquent and most quick-witted man I’d ever met, couldn’t even speak in a whisper.  For the rest of his life.

I met up with him in 2017 when I went back to Seffrica for that brief visit in December.  I’d mentioned to Mervyn that I’d be in Joburg, so we met for dinner, and to my delight (and without my knowledge) he’d invited Leosh and his longtime girlfriend Bonita (whom I’d known way back in the day, but that’s an even longer story).

Anyway, I tried to talk to him, but couldn’t understand a word he said.  Bonita actually had to translate everything he tried to say, and the evening was marred by my sorrow at what had become of my dear friend, and my frustration at not being able to communicate with him as we had so joyously in the past.  Here’s the pic of us at the dinner:  Mervyn, Leosh and Yours Truly.  (If Zonk were still alive and been there, we’d have played a rubber of bridge.)

Anyway, life went on after that;  I came back the the U.S., married New Wife, and the rest you know.  Mervyn carried on with his life, smiling as always.

Leosh didn’t.  In the past year or so he’d become deeply depressed;  the latest operation on his busted throat (the eleventh!) had failed like all the others, and he began talking about ending his own life.  So obsessed did he become on the topic that Bonita finally left him, saying, “I don’t want to come home from the supermarket and find you dead!”

Anyway, two Mondays ago it all ended.  His brother-in-law (his sister’s boyfriend of earlier) went over when they couldn’t reach him and found Leosh hanging from the rafters.

His last words to Mervyn had been over lunch, only a couple days earlier.  Merv was remonstrating with him about always death death death talk, when Leosh croaked painfully, “Mervyn, I died thirty-eight years ago.”

He was quite right, but that doesn’t soften the tragedy of a life crippled and a wonderful, beautiful man brought low by it.

R.I.P.  Leosh, you Greek bastard.

Your friend forever,