Memories

I must have been about 16 or 17 years old when I met Barbara Windsor very briefly outside a bank in Portsmouth, England.

While browsing Facebook in November 2022 I saw an advert from the Los Alcazares town hall advertising a lunchtime swim that they were organising on Boxing Day 2022. I thought it looked like fun and decided to give it a go.

The year my dad passed away, I took my mum out to Florida for five weeks. A day or so after his funeral, I took her out to my home in Orlando. The idea was for me to put my home up for sale and get my mum away from the thousands of telephone calls she would expect from well-meaning

My good friend Derek Almond took me to the Emirates Stadium to do a celebrity-guided tour in 2014. Our tour guide was Charlie George, an Arsenal legend.

I met Chris Eubank in Brighton when I was there for a friend's stag party. 

I got up this morning to discover I can't remember where the Christmas cards I had for my family had been secreted away. I bought them earlier in the year and put them away where prying eyes & little hands couldn't find them. The trouble is my normally perfect memory can't

My dad, Brian Llewelyn Morris, died in Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham, Hampshire, England, in February 2005. He had been admitted to the hospital on my birthday in January of the same year.

The first time I met Dave Courtney was in a pub in Barkingside called The Chequers. At that time I had never heard of him but I have since read his books & been told who he is. 

I have always been an Arsenal fan, and when I was a kid I did go to Highbury with my dad to see a lot of matches. I met David O´Leary, however, at Heathrow airport.

I have no memory of these stories other than what has been told to me by my parents, but I did have a major role in them. They involve me as a baby, & my grandmother, Doris Daniels, who had passed away sixteen days before I was born.

I was talking to a friend this week about jobs we have done previously, and I was reminded of this story when I fitted a gas meter in the wrong house in the 1980s.

This ghost story is a short story but has stuck in my mind and I remember what happened vividly. It happened during a hospital stay when I lived in Fareham, Hampshire, England.

At the end of August, I was feeling in pain & worried about my leg. I had a clot many years ago & wondered if that was what was causing the pain this time. 

I have a lot of family living in South Wales and I go to Porthcawl, Glamorgan, to see them when I can. Whilst there, one time I was introduced to Howard Marks in a pub in Kenfig Hill.

In the early nineteen nineties, I stayed at my home in Orlando and decided to go to Clearwater Beach for a weekend. I met Hulk Hogan in his bar there.

Jacqueline Carpenter is the author of the novels Louisa, Joan and Nancy. I met her at a quiz in a local bar in Los Alcazares in Murcia, Spain.

I met Jim Quillen on a tour of Alcatraz in San Francisco in about 1992. I had gone on one of the self-guided tours where you are given a headset with a narrated talk of the island and can do the tour at your speed.

In 1997 Les Wallace became the first left-handed dart player to win the World Dart Championship. I have met Les a couple of times since then.

While living in Florida, I met Mickey Spillane in a downtown restaurant in Orlando.

In 2014, I took a two-city break in Spain, staying in Madrid for a few days before travelling to Barcelona for a few days. My mum had been ill for a while, and I was taking a week's respite from being her carer.