Live Music; reading; going for long walks, people watching, wine tasting(!) and writing the occasional article for my friend's fanzine, The Beat Goes On And On; also supporting my local band The Overtures makes for a great social life; attending the Beatle Week Festival once a year in Liverpool where you can relax, drink, meet up with old friends, make new ones and meet/mingle with the fab bands that make the event so special. I love my holidays in Italy - I really think that if I had to move out of the UK for whatever reason, I could live there,quite happily!
My ancestors
Mainly 60s - Beatles, Kinks, Hollies, Beach Boys, Byrds, Dusty, Simon & Garfunkel, Crispian St Peters, Joe Brown, Monkees, Donovan, George Harrison, Searchers, Traveling Wilburys,Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison; also some really early stuff - including the Everly's, Buddy Holly, Billy Fury, Cliff and Elvis P. Also on my fan list are Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb songs. I also love the music of the brilliant 80's/early 90's power pop bands The Pencils and The Green who wrote all their own material - the majority of it penned by Den Pugsley (bass; Den along with Steve Phypers (drums), evolved from The Green to become The Overtures. The Overtures are a 60's covers band who,in IMHO, are the best in the world, at what they do. They were honoured to be the only band chosen to play at Elton John's wedding to David Furnish in December 2005 - so, yes, they really are that good! Elton has sinced sung their praises very highly in an interview given in the Sept 2006 GQ magazine. They also released a song on the 6th June entitled Forever England -a song that Den wrote quite a while ago but was persuaded would make a good alternative to the official World Cup song - and it really did. It's brilliant. It got quite a bit of airplay at the time, so it's a real shame England didn't stay in the World Cup a bit longer!!
Not a great film goer but certain films have had an effect on me over the years. ET was the one and only film that ever made me cry (but then, I refused to watch Bambi which I'm sure would have!) Moulin Rouge which I hated on the big screen but really liked when it came out on video. Harold & Maude, which I thought was wonderfully quirky and goes to show that age is no barrier to meeting your soulmate; It's A Wonderful Life which took me years to sit down and watch even though it came highly recommended by friends - I got there in the end though - and was glad I did. Lovely film! Lawrence of Arabia which was the only film I've ever gone back to the cinema to see again (something to do with those wonderful blue eyes of Peter O'Toole or could it have been the beautiful dark eyes of Omar Sharif?) Anyway, whatever it was, I regretted seeing it a second time cos I got really bored quite early on! Psycho, which terrified me and was shocking because the heroine died early on in the film - unheard of at the time, but that was Mr Hitchcock for you (and I could have sworn it was made in colour!) And of course The Beatles Hard Days Night. No comment necessary! I liked Help a lot, but HDN was always my favourite.
I'm not really interested in TV at all - I find most of it so boring it hardly ever gets switched on. I watch Heartbeat cos it's set in the 60's and I like the music - the same can be said of The Royal! I occasionally get hooked on the soaps, but as I'm out and about such a lot, I miss huge chunks and then lose interest. I like Life on Mars a lot and the new series has started - but as for any kind of reality TV, forget it - I hate it with a vengeance.
Mainly thrillers; I like Patricia Cornwell's series of books particularly; also a few biogs. I'm about to get engrossed in The Two of Us by Sheila Hancock, which is about her life with John Thaw.
People who can still think of others when they've been to hell and back themselves.