Calamaty John

There is an old adage among commentators, editors and news anchors that when the journo becomes the news, something’s gone wrong.

Starting out in life as an ad agency copywriter, then account planner [comms strategy analysis], then agency entrepreneur, then retiring to become a freelance journalist, blogger/author and general nuisance, on the whole I subscribe to that theory.

But some people really are just accident prone, and I’m one of them. I’m about to give you a potted history of disasters in my life, only one of which was down to my own inebriated stupidity…. so let’s clear that one up for starters and then move on.

In 1965, fellow Dylan freak Shaun Whittaker and I spent the summer in what was then the American sector of West Berlin deep inside Sovyet territory, doing voluntary work in Glieneker Park for the charity Christlich-Judische ZusammenArbeit.

In the evenings, for further entertainment, we would drink a lot of Dortmunder Bier, and go skinny-dipping in the River Havel….on the far side of which were East German gunboats patrolling and protecting the happy citizens of the East German People’s Republic by blocking their escape to the West.

On one particular occasion, the waterborne Volkspolizei [Vopos] took umbrage at the sheer number of we drunks (Del, me, Shauny, Ulli, Jeff, Hans, Franz et al) and used their loudspeakers to demand we return to dry land.

Oh how we laughed. Oh how they fired live rounds. Oh how we ran away naked into the night.

It remains the only time I have ever been “under fire” – and once was more than enough.

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But the rest of my calamitous history has been just one of those things. Things happened to me, and I accept zero blame. As one longstanding New York friend Kenny observed many years ago, “John, remind me never to travel with you”.

I arrived in London during November 1971 to join J Walter Thompson. I rented a bedsit in Streatham, not knowing that the basement flat was being used by a couple of heroine addicts with a penchant for shooting up and forgetting what was on the stove. The house burnt down. I jumped out of a second-floor window and still have the arthritic feet to prove it: X-ray my walking equipment, and they look like condoms full of marbles.

In 1973, my Alitalia flight was hit by lightning on the way to Milan. The pilot put us down on a runway already reserved for another plane. It was a near miss. I rented a car on the way back. A drunk driver smashed into me head-on. He turned out to be the Mayor’s son, so my three cracked ribs were paid for by the local police and I got free business class medicare all the way back to London.

The Paddington Rail Disaster of November 1999 killed 31 people including both drivers. I was unlucky enough to share this experience, during which my lower teeth were smashed and later replaced by falsies.

In 2012, I was beaten up by person or persons unknown outside my guest gite in Aquitaine – which I now suspect was a case of mistaken identity. This broke my left shoulder and pushed my humerus bone out of its mooring.

In 2017, my right shoulder decided to do same thing, the long-term outcome of being a keen basketball player prone to repetitive strain injury at Grammar School.

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Yesterday here in 2024 did not involve waking up to a house on fire in 1971, a Paddington-bound train mangled metal in 1999 or a mysterious punch-up in Lot et Garonne in 2012….but the familiar whatTF is going on experience arrived again when I awoke at 11.30 pm to the sound of what I thought might be a negative structural event in my apartment block – but in fact turned out to be an incompetently fitted cistern water heater breaking free of its inadequately anchored Philips wall-screws, and spraying its white-hot water contents in all directions, but mainly those involving my apartment.

After three weeks of painstaking choice about how to arrange a personally owned living space here, one dickhead plumber’s moronic mistake untold years ago reduced the entire project to underwater chaos.

It is now 8.15 pm Gambian time prior to the onset of a multicultural African weekend. Thanks to good friends, colleagues and freeholder staff going the extra mile [special hat-tip here to Belgian mate Marten] I can now cook and shower again.

But there are people this shit happens to – and others it doesn’t. I’m not paranoid about that, nor do I resent the turds raining on my head at regular intervals. It is part of who I am: I now grasp that real wisdom comes from mistakes, not material success.

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Source: https://therealslog.com/2024/08/30/calamaty-john/