SO IT GOES - John Fleming’s Blog

Tonight sees the 70th Eurovision Song Contest. This afternoon, I was talking to Colin Copperfield who, for 20 years, was in the musical group Wall Street Crash… They ALMOST represented Britain in the Contest… ***** COLIN: I think it must have been 1981 or 1982.  The people from the Eurovision Song Contest said: “We’d like your group to do it, to appear for the UK.” The only problem was, by…

At the time of posting this, Artificial Intelligence seems to be developing very, very fast… So this is partly posted to remember what things were like near the start of 2026… I have some black & white photos from my childhood. So i decided to ask Dola AI to colourise them and then animate them. I started with a photo of my father with me, a baby, outside Campbeltown, Argyll,  in Scotland, where…

A friend of mine whom I met in Vietnam in 1989, is going back there this year, after 37 years. We both think she may spot a few social changes. When we were in Vietnam in 1989, they were selling pictures created using broken pieces of eggshell lacquered over. When I was in China in 1985, there was a small industry based round painting glass eggs on the INside…  There was a small hole in the top…

Chris Daangerfield and his ‘missus’ in Phnom Penh, Cambodia… The last couple of blogs have been me chatting to the admirably individualistic Chris Dangerfield, who is plugging his new semi-autobiographical novel Love in the time of Nudie Mags and who is planning to move into the jungle with his lady friend. Now read on… JOHN: So where are you living at the moment? In Phnom Penh or rural…

In yesterday’s blog, online from his current home in Cambodia, Chris Dangerfield was plugging his new novel Love in the time of Nudie Mags. We chatted about more than that, though… JOHN: You mentioned you wrote a novel when you were around 23 years old. CHRIS: Yes. Tired, etc. I wrote that on a quarter ounce of sulphate and chain-smoking blunts when I was at Leeds University. The internet was…

So I got a WhatsApp call from a number starting +855. I looked up +855. It’s the code for Cambodia. So, of course, I was going to ignore it – I have had enough offers of million dollar windfalls – but the person had left a voice message and I listened to that. It was Chris Dangerfield, a stalwart of this blog a few years ago. He once told me he enjoyed reading my blogs about the chats we had but…

Getting movies made is neither an easy nor a fast process. I first met and blogged about the indefatigable, highly-creative, dyslexic and very determined Jason Cook back in 2010, when he moved into production offices at Elstree Studios. He was trying to raise finance for the first of a movie trilogy based on his semi-autobiographical books. Last year, his first film Cookster: The Darkest Days was…

A couple of weeks ago, I was saying to someone that I have always made very bad first impressions, particularly in my rare job interviews. I almost never got jobs through interviews. Then and now, on first impression, I think I come across as irresponsible and – this came up at my college interview – certainly not someone who would be able to concentrate or to keep deadlines. In fact, at college,…

Anthony Irvine, The Iceman, in Wolverhampton (Photo by Spencer Wakeling) Anyone who read my blog of a month ago (this means you, my loyal readers in Guatemala) will know that Melt It! The Film of the Iceman – the new documentary film about British performance artist The Iceman aka fine artist AIM aka Anthony Irvine – was due to be premiered in Wolverhampton last weekend. It happened but I was…

Forget the open-hearted autobiographical lyrics and the music (really great production)… This is a cracker of a video by British author/journalist/singer/songwriter Ariane Sherine…

(Photograph by Geralt, via Pixabay) Tempus fugit, according to Virgil, and increasingly so. 13 and 14 years are either a short time or a long time or both. So it goes. It’s Burns Night tonight (25th January 2026) and Russia continues to bomb Ukraine every night – Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Both (or all three of) these things reminded…

Anthony Irvine outside the National Theatre in London… My previous blog was the first part of a chat with Anthony Irvine AKA performance artist The Iceman AKA the fine artist AIM. The Iceman’s performance art involved melting blocks of ice. AIM’s visual art tends to be about him melting blocks of ice as The Iceman. He was talking to me partly to publicise Melt It! The Film of The Iceman – an…

In this blog, Anthony Irvine AKA performance artist The Iceman AKA the fine artist AIM has cropped up occasionally over the years. So here we are again… His on-stage performance art involved melting blocks of ice. His visual art as AIM tends to be about him melting blocks of ice as The Iceman. That’s all you need to know… This is Part 1 of a chat we had on London’s South Bank recently… Anthony…

This is certainly not be the most universally interesting blog I have ever posted, but – hey! – it interests me, even if it is not something with which my loyal reader in Guatemala may identify. I stumbled upon this piece of trivia today totally by accident. I was looking up ‘the Lang Stracht’. (Don’t ask.) I was slightly but not very surprised. My mother used to make the fire (a real fire with…

Occasional mad inventor (he hates that description) and designer of the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards trophies John Ward has cropped up in this blog recently for unfortunate reasons. (Look! If you subscribed to the blog, you would know!). So I asked him how he was feeling now and, instead of telling me, he sent me this memory… In the late 1980s, I was involved in a weekly ITV television series…

Almost all National Anthems are dreary, with lyrics that have no relevance to modern life or current interests – including Flower of Scotland. So I asked Dola AI to write a new Scottish national anthem referencing Scottish icons: “Create the lyrics to a new national anthem for Scotland mentioning whisky, Campbeltown Loch, drunken behaviour, deep fried Mars bars, haggis eating, kilts, bagpipes,…