My Big Bang

For some people, the Big Bang is a theory about the beginning of the universe. For other people, it's all about 27th October 1986, when the London Stock Exchange changed its rules and embraced the electronic age. But for me, my Big Bang was a quite different event; one that changed my life forever.

I’d just finished my first year at University, and what a hard year that had been. My step-father had committed suicide because of mounting gambling debts, leaving my Mum as our main breadwinner. Her stepmother had become unwell and had come to live with us. And I’d been working evenings and weekends as a factory delivery driver to help put food on our table.

So I was astonished when Freddie, an extremely wealthy fellow student, asked me if I’d be his co-driver on a journey to Madrid. The deal was that we’d share the driving in his car, he’d pay all expenses, after which we’d part company. He was planning to spend the summer with his fiancée, who lived in Madrid. I’d be left to make my own way home.

Well, the prospect of a free ride to Madrid was irresistible, especially as Freddie wanted us to start the journey when the factory that I worked for was closing down for a fortnight. I reckoned I could hitchhike my way back home easily enough. So I accepted.

The drive was fun. And so was Freddie. Yes, he’d been born with a dozen silver spoons in his mouth; he was rich, intelligent, good-looking, debonair, multilingual, and a brilliant raconteur. He certainly kept me amused on that drive. I guess it was all the laughter that made us miss a turning somewhere outside of Pamplona, and we got hopelessly lost in miles of winding tracks, with not a building in sight.

It was quite late in the evening when we spotted a grand-looking Hacienda high up on a hill. Freddie was driving at the time, and made a beeline for it. I stayed in the car whilst Freddie knocked at the door to ask for directions. After ten minutes or so of conversation with a lady who opened the door, he returned to the car with the good news that we were invited to stay the night.

Freddie explained that the lady had recently been widowed, and could not allow us to stay in the main house. But she had given him a set of keys for a nearby caballeriza – an empty stable block with extremely comfortable overhead staff sleeping quarters, and a hot and cold water supply. That’s where we stayed the night, before continuing our journey to Madrid the following morning.

It must have been around nine months later when I received the letter. It was written in Spanish, from an Attorney in Navarra. I got the general gist of the letter with the help of a Spanish-English dictionary, but just to make sure, I had it professionally translated. It took me a couple of days of quiet reflection to work out what had happened.

I met Freddie at College shortly afterwards, and asked him if he remembered the young widow at the Hacienda. And I asked him if he’d popped back to the Hacienda during the night to thank her for her hospitality. He grinned, and confessed he had.

But what really amazed him was when I asked if he had given her my name and address, instead of his. He turned bright red with embarrassment, and said “How on earth do you know that?”

All I could do was smile.

You see, the letter had informed me that a certain widow in Spain, the Condesa Maria Echeverria Corriente Delgado, had died. And she had left me her considerable fortune in her will.
:-)

Midsummer's Night Madness

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I’ve just rediscovered an old script for Midsummer’s Night Dream in my bookcase. Yes, I’ve done a bit of acting in my time, but what a disaster that production was.

I played the part of Lysander, and I remember being onstage with Demetrius, Hermia and Helena when I completely screwed things up by repeating a line that I had previously delivered in the earlier part of our conversation.

The conversational sequence was Lys: Dem: Herm: Helena: - at which point I repeated my earlier line Lys.

The funny thing was that none of us noticed my mistake. The other three actors had all learned their lines by rote, and so Demetrius responded to my cue by repeating his earlier line, and then Hermia responded on that cue, as did Helena, after which I repeated my mistake. We were trapped in a closed conversational loop, in which everybody repeated their earlier lines.

It took us about five minutes of repeating ourselves before it gradually dawned on us that our conversation was going nowhere. I still shudder now when I remember the growing sense of bewilderment, confusion, and sheer panic that beset us. We were caught in a conversational time-warp, and none of us could figure out who was to blame (me) or how to break out of our predicament.

I think it took another 5 minutes of us repeating ourselves, and our audience dissolving into laughter, before our director had the good sense to temporarily lower the curtain.

At which point the audience started to cheer – and demand an encore….

:-)