bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel,

As a Beatles obsessive from a very early age, I know that ‘Komm gib Mir Deine Hand’ is German for I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Also, while I wouldn’t swear to it, I think that ‘Schlaufe vorbei interessiere ich nicht, was Ihr Gesicht wie aussiehts’ is also German, this time for ‘Bend over, I don’t care what your face looks like’. I once overheard Tony explaining this to Slack Matt as I wandered around the East Yard, and while it is not a sentence that I need to employ every day, I do get a tiny bit of squalid pleasure from knowing that I know it.

[Hitting Read More will reveal - at last - the hidden meaning of the Kink's Waterloo Sunset]

I also know that I share my birthday with Loretta Lynn, Gerry Anderson and Robert Carlyle, which, had I only known at the age of seven, would have saved me a brief period of birthday envy which came about as a result of a school project where we had to find someone famous with the same birthday as our own, and write something about them. I was a bit crestfallen to discover that there was no one of any immediate note born on April 14th.

I therefore did what any self respecting only child would do, which is sit in complete isolation with a Panini football sticker book and go through the statistics for every single player in the old English First Division – and there were over 450 of them – trying to find one born on the same day as me. I probably made some kind of graph, or flow chart, or venn diagram, as you have to get the most from an evening’s entertainment when you have no siblings. I eventually found out that April 14th was also the birthday of – yes, that’s right – former Tottenham reserve keeper Melia Aleksic. Never a fortunate sportsman, Aleksic smashed his jaw into tiny bits playing against Man United in his second game and never played again, which endeared him to me at the time.

I later found out that Julie Christie shares my birthday, and was so pleased that I immediately fell in love with her, in the way that you only can when you are eleven. I subsequently found out that she is the ‘Julie’ mentioned in Waterloo Sunset. However, the ‘Terry’ is Terence Stamp and sadly not Carry On film stalwart Terry Scott. This is probably for the best, as if she had been meeting Terry Scott, their Friday night shenanighans would have been remarkable for the removal of trousers being accompanied by one of those comedy descending whistles, and copping a bit of a feel would have been spiced up no end, as Julie’s knockers, norks or Bristols – and this really is how we must refer to her breasts in this context – would have honked like geese at the slightest touch. On the minus side, they would probably just have ridden a tandem into the Thames by accident, so I suppose there’s an equal case either way.

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