Straight Up!

In all my time on this planet I've never been up in a helicopter. Until today, that is.

We met up with a friend of ours and his young lady for a sumptuous three course lunch at Hintlesham Hall in Suffolk, and Peter being Peter decided to eschew public transport and instead helicopter down from the wilds of Yorkshire where he is sometimes based to his work premises in London. Handily this meant he could drop out of the sky a few miles from us, giving me an excuse to take a day off and for us all to meet him for lunch.

It's always great catching up - the last time we saw each other was at a villa in Portugal in February, but his suggestion that the pilot, Steve, take us up for a quick buzz of our house was an unexpected bonus, and so we found ourselves crossing the Suffolk/Essex border at 900 feet to look down on where we live.

The ride itself was fantastic. We hardly knew that we had taken off, such was the smooth ascent (though the ground rapidly moving away was something of a giveaway), and hurtling through the air, watching the cars crawl like ants along the ribbon thin roads, trying to spot familiar sights from a whole new angle was exhilarating.

I must admit I had a slight trepidation about asecnding in a metal dragonfly, but once strapped in and filled with confidence by the fact that Steve was ex-RAF and had flown a few of these things in his time, the experience was one of the better ones I've had in recent years.

The pseudo freedom of hurtling through the air with only a glass screen to protect us from the elements was unlike anything I've ever been party to. Sat in the body of an airliner you barely know you're airborne, but here, strapped into the front seat I could see everything.

All too soon the ride was over, and we engaged in our delightful lunch, but it's definitely an experience that I want to repeat.

The K-erching! of Pop

I suppose it was inevitable, but even so, it causes the bile to rise at the back of my throat.

Michael Jackson, as you might have heard, is dead. The King of Pop has moonwalked his way to the great gig in the sky and now the real business has begun of selling his death to the masses.

It’s nothing new, of course. Ever since The King (no assignation needed) checked out of Heartbreak Hotel the money makers have been quick to cash in and milk the grieving fans for all they are worth. The same thing happened with Cobain, Mercury, Lennon and lest we forget the Queen of our Hearts, Diana Spencer.

Somehow, though, and perhaps because no entertainer since Elvis has permeated society and culture in the way the Jackson did, the frenzy surrounding his death seems particularly distasteful.

Here in the UK a popular ‘chat’ magazine called OK! Has produced its version of a Jackson tribute issue and to show their love and admiration for one of the greatest entertainers of recent times they’ve not gone with the obvious picture from his finest years, nor one of him as a doting father, nor even one of his recent visit to London to announce his record breaking run of shows at the O2.

No, instead they’ve gone with a close up shot of him on a stretcher, oxygen mask strapped to his gaunt face, being wheeled into an ambulance, and if reports are to be believed that he had stopped breathing some time before that, technically dead. Yep, OK magazine really love and respect him.

The other notable cynical ply to tap into the grief of the hardcore Jackson fans comes from the promoter, AEG Live, who have come up with a ruse to attempt to minimise their losses from refunding upwards of £50 million in ticket sales that would be laughable if it weren’t so sickening.

Knowing that the ‘true’ Jackson fans will want some final memento to remember their hero by, they are making the kind offer of allowing the fans to be sent the original tickets for the gig, a hologram encased in plastic designed by Jackson himself, in return for waiving their right to a refund.

Now, given that the average ticket price was somewhere between £50 and £75, and that the tickets themselves must have cost all of a pound at most to produce (and probably considerably less given that there will have been approximately one million of them produced), this is nothing but a shameless ploy to play on the emotions of the diehard fans who will want to have something to remember the night they never saw their hero.

These examples are but two of many that I’m sure we’ll see over the next few weeks, the most obvious being the currently in production DVD of the tour rehearsals that will no doubt be released ‘because the fans demanded it’, but the one saving grace is that Jackson himself, whatever you thought of him, is not around to suffer anymore at the hands of those who seek nothing more than to exploit him.