5 minutes of fame!

When Karen revealed that she once worked for the Queen Mother and it got me to thinking about how we sometimes have a brush with celelbrity, our own five minutes of fame, or more likely a tenuous link with someone ala 'tenous link' made popular by Chris Evans in his Radio 2 breakfast show. 

My best non-claim to fame is that I babysat Thandi Newton, she of Mission Impossible fame. Her lovely Mum was a health visitor / district nurse where I was working in reception and one afternoon I took Thandi and her brother to the park.. yeah, that's about it!

Then a few years later I worked for a MSC (Manpower Services Commission aka 'job creation scheme') encouraging volunteer activity through a local Radio station. Being as how I lived in Mousehole and they had a 'do' there I got asked to help out, being on the inside of the cordon to stop crazy public getting close to .. yeah, right.. Buck's Fizz who made an entrance to Mousehole by sea.. oh the glamour!! It made me look carefully at it and realised that all the fuss is very strange, they are real people in an unreal situation, despite being all made-up, thick glossy tights (on the girls!) etc, they still looked darned chilly and full of false smiles.. all for the pennies and as puppets to their management no doubt!

My step-dad Phil Wallis was a Mousehole fisherman and often had minor celebrities on his shark fishing boat.. Keith Floyd, Tom Mangold (Newnight?) and others. Phil was into birdkeeping and had been a budgie / canary keeper and local judge for these breeds and later he was into boxing training.  When one of my nephews got into bird keeping (pigeons this time) and later boxing, Phil had no qualms about phoning famous names and asking favours.

I remember he once rang a boxing shop owned by Dave 'Boy' Green and asked to speak to Dave.. he spoke to him like he was an old freind and got a good deal on boxing gear and used to chat to him regularly like they were mates, he had no question of their importance, he just thought he was just as great!
Another time he called the top pigeon breeder in the country and told him 'I used to be a Western Counties Judge (not mentioning it was for canaries and not pigeons!) and got lots of well bred birds for Carl to add to his collection.

One of my favourite famous moments was when I was in Florida with Ross & Lisa Feb 1991, we had escaped the snow here, only to be in Sea World in a real cold snap. In the cafe Ross spotted Lionel Blair and kept telling me 'that's the man from Give Us a Clue'  Eventually we smiled and spoke, he asked if we too had gone to Florida thinking we would be avoiding the cold weather!!

Well there's more, but they get more tenous so I will spare you those for the minute!!