Where's Johnny?
I was called today by someone trying to get in touch with John Cooper Clarke. The best bet is to send a postcard to whichever place he's gigging during the next week or so and he'll pick it up there. Now, he's a quite lovely chap, frankly, a national treasure and Johnny Clarke is, however, a tad eccentric, doesn't hold with mobiles and relies on payphones when out and about - oh and he also a drink problem. Given his size (a height:weight ratio of a stone:foot and even without the hair he's a good 5'11") it takes two pints to get him blotto. And so it was that he was on a train, wanted to be elsewhere in mind, if not in body, blew a fiver on grog and woke up to find that his bag containing 30 odd years of notebooks had been nicked. Most stoically, he just sat down and wrote them out again. Rather like Carlyle, who rewrote the entire manuscript of "The French Revolution" (1837) after a friend's maid accidentally burned it. But Carlyle never appeared in a Sugar Puffs ad.