RIP - Dorian van Braam

 

 

It's been a year of so many shocks but it was a particular shock to find out our dear friend Dorian van Braam died suddenly at the weekend only the day after we had spent a jovial evening with him in his flat. Luckily my partner Ollie had the presence of mind to take what turned out to be the last photographs of Dorian as he held forth in characteristic fashion and posed in authorial mode.

I met Dorian around three years ago when he started coming to the monthly writers group I ran in Hove Library and joined us in a nearby cafe with others to socialise over tea and cake afterwards. Although originally from Sussex he was new to Hove and didn't know many people. He also had books he wanted to sell in due course so it was useful to network. 

From the start he impressed me as a charismatic and cultured chap. A genuine eccentric Englishman possessed of an extraordinary blend of arrogance, spirituality, humour and earthiness. I determined to adopt him as a second father. He came to my very first stand up comedy gig and brought the house down when the compere picked on him and asked him what he did. 'I'm a writer of 50 million unpublished words in longhand' came the answer. There was no comeback to that. The compere then moved onto another lady from my writers group (Sharon) who'd come to support me asking what Sharon did. 'I talk to angels' she replied. There was hardly any need for us comedians! Later on Dorian came to a new comedy night to support me when I tried some new material, He was asked if he wanted a try out. Without hesitation he took to the stage and did a routine about Wagon Wheel biscuits shrinking and his frustrations with consumerism. While not being uproariously funny material, the audience loved him and found him naturally hilarious. Sadly he didn't take things further, despite my suggestion of a retired Biggles scene involving him entering in leather flying jacket and goggles (both of which he apparently owned), strutting round the stage looking in various directions before finally asking the audience. 'Has anyone seen my plane?'

It turned out he had owned a plane. Before crashing it into a helicopter and livng to tell the tale. He rode motorbikes, broke in horses, married a minor Spanish aristocrat, played the grand piano, owned a manor house in Ireland, acted, wrote prose, was an early performance poet, married a second lady, the mother of his three grown up children, of whom he was inordinately proud. He practiced woodwork and would turn his hand to anything practical be it fixing roofs, motorbikes or boilers and even baking bread. Careerwise, he'd farmed, been an estate agent in Spain an NUJ photojournalist and founded a successful water bottling company in Ireland. He had also once stood for Parliament and was descended from Dutch nobility. I thought he must be a Walter Mitty character until the first time I visited his flat and saw photographs of him with his horses, photographs of him with his plane, pictures of his Irish manor house, old business cards from his water bottling company and beheld an unexpected baby grand piano in his 1-bed flat living room! Then there were his 50 million unpublished words neatly stacked in A4 leather bound notebooks about 10 feet high in the corner, awaiting painstaking transcription to his Apple Mac. It was all true!

As if all this weren't extraordinary enough, Dorian had taught himself astrology and hypnotism and believed he was a reincarnated Spitfire pilot whose plane had been shot down in WWII and that he had almost immediately been re-born into a Sussex farming family with Dutch ancestery. Looking at him I could well believe it. He also said that when he took flying lessons, he already knew how to fly. A prior life was spent in a monastery he told me, and he would try and stay at a retreat at least once a year. Moreover he held no truck with conventionalism and didn't buy into the Covid or Brexit nonsense from day one, though he and I had differing theories about what was really going on.

In the time I knew Dorian, he fell off the roof of his manor in Ireland while repairing it, crashed his car into a motorway barrier, got knocked off his bicycle by an AA rescue vehicle, had one of his two motorbikes stolen and was involved in at least two long-running legal battles (in his spare time he fancied himself as a bit of a Clarence Darrow though he clearly stressed himself out over his battles with the world as well). One thing that stood out however was his utter fearlessness. He would try anything at least once and even if it were inadvisable.

Then there was Dorian's undimmed love for the ladies. He still had a twinkle in his eye and liked nothing more than female attention. He was therefore delighted to be invited to afternoon tea by my friend Ariana and her lady friends to entertain them and play the piano. Braams, of course! He also had some hilarious stories, like the time he went up to London to attend an opera singer's house party with plans to work his charm on the glamorous diva, only to accidentally fall asleep on her sofa instead!

Despite saying he'd had a botched heart operation a few years ago, Dorian seemed indestructible and came along to a recent Freedom protest and a Mod weekender. He also had a soft side, an ability to laugh at himself and a lifelong interest in the spiritual.

He had more plans and dreams than any nearly 80 year old I've ever met including an additional university degree and could have easily done with an extra twenty years to achieve them all, even if he did have eccentricities that often got in the way, like the restless spirit, which couldn't decide where he wanted to live for the rest of his life. And while he adored his children and grandchildren, he didn't seem in a hurry to put down roots or streamline his life, even at his age, much as I offered to help him find his dream property locally with the garden and shed that he wanted, and large enough to accommodate a grand piano.

Despite his business acumen and other talents, Dorian identified with writing the most and yearned to be a celebrated writer and poet. It was his life's dream. He self published a couple of books to this end and very sweetly insisted on giving us copies.

I saw flashes of genius within the pages, but sadly undercut by the lack of a strict editorial scalpel coupled with a pointblank refusal to admit that he needed such. If Dorian asked you to look at something he had written, you quickly learned he expected nothing but flattery. He didn't want any other type of feedback. I felt this was a great shame as he certainly had no shortage of ideas. He also had an excellent command of the English language and the ability to really graft at his computer for up to eight hours a day. A level of commitment many writers would give their eye teeth for, including me!

RIP Dorian. A man who lived life to the full and on his own terms. A man who did it his way (to the extent of rebranding his motorbike to a de Braam!). We shall miss you enormously. You may have been nearly 80 when a suspected heart attack claimed you, but somehow you still left us long before your time. 

*Photograph at top taken about six weeks ago when we spotted Dorian walking past from an outdoor cafe in Brighton. We invited him to join us for a cuppa but he was in a hurry so just posed outside the card shop opposite, aptly named Scribbler!

A Titan of Talent - the remarkable David Bowie

Few rock stars have managed to shock the world by dying at 69. From cancer. But somehow David Bowie had us convinced that he was both ageless and immortal, as well as an undoubted musical genius.

The genie of reinvention, he provided the soundtrack to the youth of at least two generations of we fans. Then, just as he had started to reinvent himself as a recluse, along came music downloading sites, enabling today's youth to pick and choose their own childhood soundtracks from a plethora of eras and he rode the crest of yet another wave. Now in death he is set to have one last hit album - his parting gift to the world.

His death has affected me in unexpected ways. An endless stream of his hits have been playing in my head for the last week. I have found myself reading every tribute, playing his music videos, watching YouTube interviews.

I find Bowie an extraordinary example of how some individuals are just BORN to do something. What an accident of birth that he happened to be born at the right time (ie directly following post-war austerity and in time to capture the optimism, space race and 60s obsession with Sci-Fi) in the right place (London), with the right looks (pretty boy but could almost be an androgynous alien), the right talent (multi) and the hunger and single-mindedness to succeed! Not only that but he seemingly knew his destiny from an early age, forming bands and experimenting with music-making from his early teens onwards. His media-savvyness was also in evidence from an early age. A musician friend of similar vintage to David Bowie used to marvel at how in the 1960s, a young 'David Jones' seemed to pop up on every earnest TV documentary interviewing Britain's youth on London street corners about how they were in danger of taking Britain to hell in a handcart with their long hair and liberal views, so young David was cannily planting himself in the public consciousness long before he became a rock legend!  He even went so far as to form his own 'Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men Society' for tongue-in-cheek media coverage.

Even David's crooked vulpine teeth and mis-matched eyes served him perfectly in the 'alien' years and well into the 80s, though it's not entirely surprising that he got his teeth straightened when he married a supermodel.

Too many co-incidences to be a co-incidence indeed. The midwife who delivered him apparently remarked; 'This child has been here before', somewhat freaking out his mother.

One of the stand-out moments of my childhood was watching David performing Heroes on Live Aid in 1985 and it's nice to read in interviews that performing live in my living room was one of his life's highlights too!

The surprising thing about his TV interviews was how quietly spoken and polite he was. He wasn't prolific in his interview-giving but when he gave them he was chatty, warm and witty and very definitely still a sarf Londoner, even after living as an alien in New York for some years. The interviewer for their part, always looked as if they were somewhat nervously interviewing the messiah with The Thin White Duke in front of them and there was a palpable sense of the whole studio hanging onto his every word.

While they may yet crawl out of the woodwork, the number of ex-lovers queuing up to dish the dirt has been surprisingly absent, possibly because Bowie had a habit of politely asking them for sex and literally shaking them by the hand and saying 'Thank you' afterwards. Perhaps therefore, they felt less ill-used than the offcasts of other rock stars.

Now I read Bowie was also a business genius having weaned himself off industrial quantities of drugs in the 70s, partly as a result of realising he was being royally ripped off by his then-management, though responsibility for a young son following his divorce doubtless also played a part.

Kicking drugs in itself was a huge achievement. Bowie admitted he was 'lucky be alive after all the crazy sh*t' I did in the 70s' and 'Heroes' was partly a celebration of that.

So we are lucky he didn't accidentally join the '27' club and lived to contribute so much more to rock, fashion and everything else. We are also lucky, that despite a few close shaves with insanity, he managed to tread the tightrope and avoid plunging into the schizophrenic madness that claimed his tragic elder stepbrother Terry.

Apart from his enormous musical legacy Bowie gave we youth permission to go through many Ch-ch-changes before deciding who we really were. He made it normal to try on various 'yous' and find out which suits the best, just as it's normal to experiment with various fashions, and even sexuality and gender. Though for all that and his statement 'I think I've probably done everything it's possible to do' - I suspect he may have eschewed the tattoo!

My favourite Bowie track...? So hard to choose, but I have particular fondness for the lesser played ones such as 'Loving the Alien', 'The Wedding', 'Jump' and 'Lady Grinning Soul'.

PS: And just when you thought he couldn't get any cooler, apparently he was a cat fan!

Brian Gunn-King 1933-2013

Since I have been so taken up lately with advising all the societies, workplaces and clubs my father was involved with of his recent death, I thought I would share a tribute on this blog. It is of course far from the full story of my father, but his death is naturally about him, not me. And for all his faults as a father and general eccentricities, he was at heart a well-meaning man who achieved much in his life. Something else quite surprising was the realisation of just how many remarkable men I had met in my childhood via my father's involvements - many of whom were friends of his - Richard St Barbe Baker (founder of an international organisation now responsible for the planting of some 23 trillion trees worldwide), Lord Dowding (commander of Bomber Command) Dr Gordon Latto (an eminent Reading physician credited with saving Sir Francis Chichester from cancer prior to his circumnavigation of the world, Gurudev Shree Chitrabhanu (Indian spiritual leader of the Jains, whose handshake was like an electric shock), Professsor Scott Nearing (a pioneer of self-sufficiency long before The Good Life was thought of) and Wilfred Capper (founder of the 560-mile Ulster Way to rival the famous Pennine Way in England). Then there were the videos my father featured in which we watched after the funeral and made him seem like a David Attenborough of architecture and conservation (completely different to how he was at home!) I will end with said tribute...

'It is with sadness I advise of the death of Brian Gunn-King on 18^th March 2013 in his eightieth year, following a long neurological illness, bravely borne. Brian became a vegetarian during his teens and devoted the rest of his life to spreading the word about vegetarianism, veganism and the environment.

Brian was primarily involved with the International Vegetarian Union of which he was for many years, Honorary General Secretary, helping to organise several international congresses and working closely with the then-President of the IVU, the late Dr Gordon Latto, winning the Mankar memorial award for services to vegetarianism (see photo) in 1977.

On a local level in his adopted Northern Ireland (he was born in Coventry), Brian and his Iyengar yoga teacher wife Margaret arranged many events and cookery demonstrations via the Vegetarian Society of Ulster of which Brian was for some years the president. Brian also served as the president for the Ulster Society for the Preservation of the Countryside working alongside the late founder Wilfred Capper who, inspired by the foundation of the 250-mile Pennine Way in England, founded his own  560-mile ‘Ulster Way’ in Northern Ireland, saving many areas of outstanding natural beauty across six counties from ruinous development.

In his professional life as a town and country planning chief, Brian also did much to protect and conserve both beautiful architecture and beautiful scenery, successfully advocating responsible landscaping and greater tree-planting in a number of new and rejuvenated areas. One village Brian worked on – Gracehill – won 15 environmental awards as a direct result of his input and Brian featured in a number of books, papers and documentaries on the environment and architecture of Northern Ireland. In addition Brian served as judge for Ulster’s ‘Best Kept Village’ competition for many years.

Brian was a lifelong member of Men of the Trees promoting the planting of millions of trees worldwide in addition to a number of architectural societies. When not campaigning for healthier lifestyles, animal welfare and the saving of heritage and the environment, Brian enjoyed veganic gardening, philately, photography, coin and postcard collecting, rambling, travelling and relaxing with his beloved cats in front of detective dramas.

An avowed atheist, Brian was buried in Northern Ireland following a humanist service, in accordance with his wishes. Regrettably no green cemetery was available in the area, though the family managed to source a handsome willow casket of which Brian would have thoroughly approved. Brian leaves a wife Margaret, and two daughters, Sita-Laura and Venetia.'