Pantomime Hero by Ian Ridley

Author:Ian Ridley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2023-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

VIKKI, HER hair growing back after finishing six rounds of monthly chemo and ready for a little trip, said she’d like to come with me to Blackpool. It was mid-October in 2007 and Jimmy had said that he felt he was now ready, physically and emotionally, to catch up with people properly again and would I like to come up and interview him? I’d absolutely bloody love to see you again, I said.

I had been with my employers at that point, the Mail on Sunday, for two years by then and they had been wonderful with me and for me. For Vikki, too. My sports editor, Malcolm Vallerius, had suggested just as Vikki was beginning chemo earlier that year that I take her with me to Cornwall for a few days extra around a feature I was writing for the paper. Now he told me again to book a nice hotel, have a couple of days of sea air rather than travel up and back in a day, take Vikki again and that the company would pay. I’d just been named Sports Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards after a 2006 World Cup in Germany of comfortable hotels and efficient travel arrangements – and I remain convinced that such an attitude and treatment for the first time in my career, after working in broadsheets and doing things on the cheap for so long, helped me win the award as I only had to worry about my work.

We drove up the day before the interview and stayed at the Imperial. I think Vikki, from the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, liked the fact that famous Labour Party conferences had been held there. That evening, we drove slowly up from Lytham to Fleetwood so that she, still frail, could enjoy the celebrated Illuminations (which cost £1 extra on the room, I seem to remember, to help pay for them). The next morning, after breakfast, she said she’d like to come with me over to South Shore to Jimmy’s house and maybe try and walk around a little while I interviewed him. If I left the car keys with her and she couldn’t manage walking very far, she said, she could always come back and spread out on the back seat with a rug over her and indulge in her beloved pastime of reading a book while she waited for me. I was a little worried about leaving her, said I could interrupt the interview, take her back to a warm hotel room if she rang me on my mobile, but she said to stop fussing and she’d be fine. I was to tell Jimmy, by the way, that she still hadn’t forgiven him for prising Tony Currie from Sheffield United 30 years previously.

As we drove along the seafront then turned off the main road and inland past the Pleasure Beach for my first visit to his home, I remember thinking that the whole area and atmosphere was so Jimmy: understated and unpretentious but homely.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.