GraceKennedy

THE MOST LOVED ENGLISH KING….

As you know I am a keen student of history, particularly the early periods in the development of Europe. Much of our “history” is relayed to us in films, usually from Hollywood with much poetic license in interpretation. A long time ago I developed the habit of seeing a film and then buying a book about the period or the persons involved to try to understand the truth. However since history is written by the victors, often this is not infallible!

THE REAL KING ARTHUR

There have probably been more films about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table than any other personage in history.

There are fascinating tales with knights in shining armour and turreted castles, protecting fair ladies.

WHY ENGLISH IS SO DIFFICULT….

English is full of funny spelling and pronunciation with seemingly no logic to follow.

The whole problem is easily understood in the history of the island race and the various invasions in the early years, coupled with the later expansion of empire.

The first inhabitants were Celts who spoke a language common over northern Europe. It had lots of double consonants and few vowel sounds. Llandewy in Jamaica is a Celtic name. It means David’s church.

AGINCOURT AND ST. CRISPIN’S DAY

Jamaica has just had its Heroes weekend.

I would like to tell you about an oft forgotten English celebration, St. Crispin’s Day.

Over five hundred year’s ago a small English army was in France, trying to go home with their path barred by a French army that outnumbered them 10 to 1.

Shakespeare’s play Henry V, dramatized this event, with such phrases as: “The happy few, we band of brothers”.

ALL BUT MY LIFE….

When I had my various cancer scares the specialists got very excited about “bone anomalies”.

I tried to explain that, given the number of bike racing crashes, I was not surprised that I had some anomalies on the various scans I had completed. This is my current total, that I have no haste to increase:

•    Pelvis-      2

•    Fibia -      2

•    Ankle-       1

A PROPHET IS NOT WITHOUT HONOUR….

I have changed the names to protect the guilty in the following true story….

One day I was summoned by my boss and told:

“Since you have a strong technical and sales background we are going to give you some special training as an experiment away from our normal process”.

DARKNESS…..

It was the year 1940, Europe was in the throes of its darkest hour with England alone standing firm against the grim forces of Nazi Germany. Winston Churchill in his famous speech had said: “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost, we shall never surrender”. At night there were no lights to be seen, houses had special blinds called “blackouts”, to deny German bombers any visible target as nightly they came to destroy and sow the seeds of fear in the populace. All the men had gone off to the war.

They say that fear is the unknown and that when you reach a mature age there are less things to perturb you. Here are some of my “bad places to have been”.

Where the name comes from:

The telephone rings: “This is your doctor, you need to come and see me”. 

Anyone who receives such a call will be worried. In my case the bad news, from a regular check up, was that my PSA number was too high for my age. PSA measures the condition of the male prostate gland. 

Over the next three months I did the test twice more and eventually we agreed that I needed to see the urologist. 

If I were in Europe I would not be writing these lines, which are about “doping” in sport. Why? Because I was a professional cyclist for 17 years and was the “dean” of the English cycling fraternity; in other words, I was part of the system. The “system” has a code of silence, what goes on in the business stays there.

Doping in sport is now headline news and thankfully, my sport cycling, has cleaned up its act compared with others.