Last week I threatened to send out the Flying Monkeys, and they didn’t disappoint. Even diplomatic immunity couldn’t spare Joss Ackland his chance to meet his maker.   

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Joss Ackland, 95, British actor (White Mischief, Lethal Weapon 2, The Mighty Ducks).  
• Rosalynn Carter, 96, American mental health activist, first lady of the United States (1977–1981), complications from dementia. 
• Annabel Giles, 64, British actress (Riders, Firelight) and psychotherapist, glioblastoma. 
• Terry Venables, 80, English football player and manager (Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur). 

 In Other News

One of the fattest men in the world has been found dead in his home just days after he vowed to shed the weight. Leonid Andreev, 60, weighed more than three baby elephants and had been trapped in his own home for five years. The 44-stone man was found at home in the village of Armizonskoye, Russia, only a day day after he told local media how he was planning a new life of losing weight and moving apartments. But on Friday, he was found dead in his home after reportedly suffering from a heart attack. He said he planned to start a new diet with just a cup of light soup for lunch. It came after a doctor warned him he had to lose at least seven stone in order to live normally again. Andreev said: ‘I tried to lose at least a little weight – I ate less and did not indulge in flour products.’ The 60-year-old was married and divorced twice and had no children. He also shocked reporters by revealing that he used to be an athlete and weighed just 11 stone. Tragically, just ten years ago Andreev was a hunter who ran his own farm and took part in harvesting the crops. Andreev said his weight problems began when he left a career in the army and in just three months, his weight nearly doubled to 16 stone and never stopped rising. His weight gain was caused by a metabolic disorder and five years ago his size was so much that he had to quit work. Then he began his reclusive life on the sofa where he lived and slept while watching TV all day as his neighbours helped clean and take care of his house. At one point, Andreev’s blood pressure soared so high that he called for an ambulance. However, after controlling his symptoms, paramedics refused further aid because of his weight. He said: ‘In the morning, I get up, cook food, eat a little, watch TV. Tried to move here, move there. I used to have porridge – the heaviest, well, and buns, potatoes, bread. That’s how I got fat, probably.’ Even though Andreev was extremely heavy, there have been fatter people in history. American Jo Brower Minnoch was the fattest man who ever lived and weighed 100 stone (see below).  

Each year, fans are left scratching their heads when I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here contestants are excused from some of the trials. Before the series kicked off, former UKIP leader Farage was asked about the trials he could avoid due to his severe injuries from a plane crash in 2010 that he sadly survived. He said: “Anything involving weightlifting, I’d be out. I’ve obviously had some quite serious physical injuries and neck reconstructions, and goodness knows what else. So they are fully aware that I’m a little bit damaged when it comes to bodily structure. But having said that, I can still do most things. I doubt any of the trials are actually going to kill me, although I don’t think they’ll all be a bag of fun. But look, I signed up for this. It’s in for a penny in for a pound. So let’s go.” Farage suffered long-lasting injuries after an aeroplane he was flying, displaying a banner with the slogan ‘Vote for your country – Vote UKIP’, crashed on polling day for the general election in 2010. He managed to escape the wreckage but suffered from a punctured lung, two chipped vertebrae, several fractured ribs and a fractured sternum. Three years later, he underwent an operation to help with the health problems caused by the crash, and told the Flying Monkeys that he had a “couple of discs removed and replaced” in his back. In 2015, he admitted that he was experiencing tremendous pain in his shoulder and back and had been prescribed the strong sleeping pill Temazepam. He had been visiting the hospital twice a week for treatment and was struggling to raise his arms above a 45-degree angle. He added: “I think I am going to have to have medical treatment for the rest of my life.” Before the accident, the 59-year-old also had a serious car crash in his 20s, and problems from the accidents combined have left him with the ‘body of a 70-year-old’. Let’s hope he does the decent thing and dies on the show. 

On This Day

• 1820 – An 80-ton sperm whale attacks and sinks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi) from the western coast of South America. (Herman Melville‘s 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this incident.)
• 1947 – The Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, who becomes the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey in London.
• 1974 – The first fatal crash of a Boeing 747 occurs when Lufthansa Flight 540 crashes while attempting to take-off from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, killing 59 out of the 157 people on board.
• 1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0, the first graphical personal computer operating environment developed by Microsoft, is released. Windows has now been shit for 38 years.
• 1990 – Andrei Chikatilo, one of the Soviet Union’s most prolific serial killers, is arrested; he eventually confesses to 56 killings.

Deaths

• 1910 – Leo Tolstoy, Russian author and playwright (b. 1828).
• 2003 – Robert Addie, English actor (b. 1960).
• 2006 – Robert Altman, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1925).

The Heaviest Man Who Ever Lived

Jon Brower Minnoch was an American man who was the heaviest recorded human in history, weighing approximately 635 kilograms; 100 stone at his peak. 

Minnoch was born in 1941 in Seattle, Washington, as the only child to John Minnoch and June (née Brower). Minnoch’s father worked as a machinist and died of a heart attack in 1962. Minnoch’s mother was a graduate of Seattle Pacific University and worked as a registered nurse at Providence Hospital and later as a telephone operator. June died in 1986, three years after her son. 

Minnoch suffered from obesity since childhood. At the age of 12, he weighed 133 kilograms (21 stone). By age 22, he weighed 178 kilograms (28 stone) and became 320 kilograms (50 stone) in 1963. Minnoch stood 6ft 1in in height and had a body fat percentage of about 80%. Minnoch said water retention was the primary cause of his obesity, however British obesity specialist David Haslam contends Minnoch’s water retention was a consequence of his severe weight, not the cause of it. 

Despite his condition, Minnoch tried to live a conventional life and stated that he was “in no way handicapped”. He drove taxi cabs for 17 years and married his wife, Jean McArdle, in 1963. The couple operated the Bainbridge Island Taxi Co. together, the only taxi cab on the island at the time. According to a friend, Minnoch had a reputation as a “warm and funny family man” on the island. In March 1978, Minnoch weighed twelve times his 50 kilograms; (8 stone) wife, breaking the record for the greatest weight disparity between a married couple. Minnoch and McArdle divorced in 1980 and he married Shirley Ann Griffen in 1982 and fathered two sons, John and Jason. 

Minnoch eventually “got so tired” of being heavy that he decided to cut his food intake to “almost nothing”. Under a doctor’s prescription, he went on a 600-calorie-a-day diet of only vegetables. He also took large doses of a diuretic that failed to eliminate excess fluid in his body. After about three weeks of weakness and being bedridden, he listened to his wife’s pleas to enter a hospital. Minnoch was admitted to the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle in March 1978, suffering from heart and respiratory failure. Firefighters were forced to remove a window at his home and place him on a thick piece of plywood. By now Minnoch was unable to move or speak. It took over a dozen firemen, rescue personnel, and a specially modified stretcher to transport him to the hospital. There, he was placed on two beds pushed together, and it took thirteen attendants to roll him over. 

At the hospital, Minnoch was diagnosed with a massive oedema, a condition in which the body accumulates excess extracellular fluid. Due to his poor health, measuring his weight with a scale was impossible. However, endocrinologist Robert Schwartz estimated his weight to be about 635 kilograms (100 stone). According to Schwartz, he was “probably more than that. He was by at least 300 pounds the heaviest person ever reported”, and “probably the most unusual thing about Minnoch’s case was that he lived”. He reached a peak body mass index (BMI) of 186kg/m² and spent several days on a respirator. His doctors described his medical state as “critical”. Schwartz said Minnoch displayed symptoms of Pickwickian syndrome, where insufficient breathing causes one’s level of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream to rise. 

Minnoch remained in the hospital for two years and was put on a diet of 1,200 calories day. When discharged from the hospital, he weighed 216kg (34 stone), having lost 419kg; (66 stone), the largest human weight loss ever documented at the time. He hoped to eventually reach a weight of about 95 kilograms (15 stone), stating, “I’ve waited 37 years to get this chance at a new life”. Despite this, he soon started to gain weight again. He was readmitted to the hospital just over a year later in October 1981, after his weight increased to 432kg (68 stone); he had managed to gain 91 kg (14 stone) in just seven days!!!

He died 23 months later on September 4th 1983, aged 41. At the time of his death, he weighed 362kg (57 stone). According to his death certificate, Minnoch’s immediate cause of death was cardiac arrest, with respiratory failure and restrictive lung disease as contributing factors. He was buried in a wooden casket made of plywood ³⁄₄ inch thick and lined with cloth. The coffin took up two cemetery plots, and eleven men were needed to transport his casket to his burial place at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. 

Last Week’s Birthdays

Rita Ora (33), Kristin Bauer (57), Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (35), Christina Applegate (52), John Larroquette (76), Kristian Nairn (48), Bruno Tonioli (68), Sarah Hyland (33), Katherine Heigl (45), Colin Hanks (46), Stephen Merchant (49), Denise Crosby (66), Billy Connolly (81), Conleth Hill (59), Dwight Schultz (76), Kayvan Novak (45), Michelle Gomez (57), Miley Cyrus (31), Scarlett Johansson (39), Mark Ruffalo (56), Mads Mikkelsen (58), Jamie Lee Curtis (65), Terry Gilliam (83), Goldie Hawn (78), Alexander Siddig (58), Björk (58), Sean Young (64), Ming-Na Wen (60), Joe Biden (81), and Bo Derek (67).

Another quiet week, I believe it might be time to send out the Flying Monkeys!  

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Elinor Otto, 104, American factory worker, an original Rosie the Riveter. 
• Anna Scher, 78, British-Irish drama school founder.
• Dex Carvey, 32, American comedian, drug overdose. 
• George “Funky” Brown, 74, American drummer (Kool & the Gang) and songwriter (“Ladies’ Night“, “Celebration“), lung cancer. 
• Dame A. S. Byatt, 87, British author (Possession, The Virgin in the Garden, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye). 

In Other News

Pete Doherty has admitted that years of drug and alcohol abuse have taken their toll on his body, telling documentary presenter Louis Theroux: “Death is lurking.” The Libertines frontman, 44, was notorious in the Naughties and 2010s for his drug-fuelled public antics, and was arrested multiple times for possession. Now mostly sober, Doherty is one of the subjects of new BBC series Louis Theroux Interviews…in which he discusses his colourful past and his new, quieter life in the small town of Etretat, Normandy. At one point, while the pair sit in his studio, the musician got up to take a swig from a bottle of blackcurrent rum, then proceeded to cough and clutch his chest. “Why has your voice gone like that? Are you OK?” Theroux asked, as Doherty leant over the table and appeared to groan in pain. “Did it go down the wrong way? What’s happening? How’s your health in general?” Theroux asked, once Doherty had settled back down on the sofa. “You are looking at a very sick man,” Doherty replied. “I’ve battered it, haven’t I, I’ve fucking caned it. The heroin and the crack… I surrendered to that, and then it was cocaine and the smoking and the alcohol, and now it’s cheese and the saucisson, and the sugar in the tea. It’s all gotta go. They told me a little while ago if you don’t change your diet then you’re gonna have diabetes and cholesterol problems,” he continued. “Death’s lurking, you know what I mean? That’s why I carry that stick.” Doherty seemed doubtful that he will live to see his daughter, Billie-May, grow up, telling Theroux he would love to hear her say her first words. “Maybe watch her grow up and start a family of her own. That’s 25 years,” Theroux suggested. “That’s a stretch though, isn’t it,” a doubtful-looking Doherty responded. Asked what he would tell someone curious about experimenting with drugs, he remarked: “My life in using was so chaotic and the consequences of it… you’ll be in prison and you’ll fuck your body up, and you’ll be skint, and you’ll lose your family and you’ll lose everything you love. Is it really that good? That’s beyond curiosity, that’s a right mess. I still get tingles thinking about it, but I’m able to talk to you rather than running off and scoring,” he told Theroux. Doherty also revealed he currently takes blockers that would prevent heroin from taking effect: “I like to think I could do without it, but that level of trust has to be earnt, doesn’t it,” he said. “At the moment I think I’m still reeling a bit – it’s almost like I’m still in shock from having got clean. Maybe in 10 years I’ll be able to talk with pride about being clean.”   

Shane MacGowan’s wife Victoria Mary Clarke has shared some heartfelt words for fans of the Pogues star as he continues receiving hospital care. The singer behind the Christmas anthem “Fairytale of New York” was diagnosed with viral encephalitis, an uncommon and potentially life-threatening condition that causes the brain to swell, last December. He has repeatedly been admitted to the hospital, with Clarke providing occasional updates. In June, MacGowan, 65, was admitted once again and has received inpatient care ever since. On Tuesday, Clarke shared a new image of MacGowan wearing a hospital robe and assistive breathing apparatus, while thanking his Pogues bandmates Spider Stacy and Terry Woods for visiting him. “I just wanted to say a massive thanks to everyone who has been messaging me and @ShaneMacGowan and thank you @spiderstacy and Terry Woods for coming to visit him,” she wrote alongside the picture. “Love and prayers for everyone who is struggling right now. Hang in there!” Clarke, a journalist, has been in a relationship with MacGowan for decades. They married in 2018. Last month, she shared her gratitude for improvements in MacGowan’s condition, as well as her hopes that he’d be discharged soon.

On This Day

• 1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum (the “Ocean of Storms”) and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.
• 1994 – In the United Kingdom, the first National Lottery draw is held. A £1 ticket gave a one-in-14-million chance of correctly guessing the winning six out of 49 numbers.
• 1999 – John Carpenter becomes the first person to win the top prize in the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.

Deaths

• 1703 – Man in the Iron Mask, French prisoner.
• 1988 – Christina Onassis, American-Greek businesswoman (b. 1950).
• 2011 – John Neville, English actor (b. 1925).
• 2017 – Charles Manson, American cult leader and mass murderer (b. 1934).

Last Meals

Just before 8pm, prison guards swarmed into the ‘death cell’ holding inmate Kenneth Smith and summarily prepared him for execution. He’d been on the phone to his wife Dee as they both waited to hear any updates on legal efforts to delay his death warrant for that day.

‘We need the phone, Kenny,’ one guard told him and he quickly said goodbye to her for what they both assumed was the last time.

The 10-strong squad of guards put handcuffs and leg irons on him for the short walk to the nearby execution chamber of the William C Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, where he was to die by lethal injection.

It was November 17th last year and, after decades of legal wrangling, the convicted killer who’d found God during his 33 years on Death Row had resigned himself to dying that night.

Over the next four hours, he’d need his faith as never before. For he was to endure what he says was searing physical pain and unbearable mental torture as bungling executioners fumbled hopelessly in their efforts to attach two intravenous lines to his body, and then ran out of time to kill him before his death warrant expired. 

Smith, 58, is in the extraordinary position of being able to describe what it is like to be executed in the U.S. — because he survived.

America’s ‘double jeopardy’ rule forbids the justice system trying a defendant twice for the same crime, but there’s nothing in the U.S. constitution to say they can’t try to execute them twice.

And so Smith is now fighting the Deep South state’s plans for him in January to become the first person in America to be executed by a new, untested method — forcing him to breathe pure nitrogen until he suffocates.

Proponents and critics argue over whether the process, known as ‘nitrogen hypoxia’ — sometimes used to kill pigs — is painless.

Opponents say killing Smith in this way is ‘astonishingly reckless’ and the equivalent of ‘human experimentation’. His lawyers claim the method would breach the U.S. constitution’s ban on ‘cruel and unusual punishment’.

Without doubt, Smith’s horrific ordeal during last November’s botched execution was inordinately cruel, whatever his crimes, and will form an important part of their case.

In a rare interview from prison this week, Smith told the Flying Monkeys that with the first anniversary of his bungled execution approaching, memories of that night have been flooding back. ‘I’ve tried to keep it out of my mind for the past year but I’ve been reliving this shit for the past week. I’ve been sick to my stomach and not eaten. And I’ve been struggling with depression and nightmares — I’m in pretty bad shape,’ he said.

The lethal injection execution of a close friend and fellow Death Row inmate there on Thursday had compounded his misery, he said. 

Astonishingly, given his circumstances, Smith revealed that one of his executioners a year ago had actually reassured him after they gave up trying to kill him that lethal injection was a much better way to die than being gassed. 

‘He was trying to comfort me and we got into this bizarre conversation. He said: “Oh, you know, man, if you got to go, this is the way to go.” Lethal injection, he said, is painless. And he said that gas is suffocation and that nobody knows what is going to happen. I’ve not been able to get that out of my head.’

Given what happened a year ago and the fears over using nitrogen, he sees little hope that his second execution attempt is ‘going to end well’ and was ‘absolutely terrified’. He added: ‘I have to deal with that and I have to find a way to comfort my family.’

In 1988, the father-of-four admitted murdering 45-year-old Elizabeth Sennett in the northern Alabama town of Sheffield.

He and another man, John Parker, were paid $1,000 each by her husband, Charles Sennett, a local church pastor who was having an affair with another woman, to kill his wife so he could collect insurance money.

Told to make it look like a robbery, the then 22-year-old Smith took home the Sennetts’ video recorder — a crucial error that led to his conviction.

Smith is being held at the Holman prison deep in  the thick marsh forests of central Alabama where, on the scheduled day of his execution, the warden laid on extra security with dog patrols around the perimeter.

Smith spent much of the day with his family and friends in Holman’s visitation area as his lawyers went through the process of last-minute legal appeals.

He had a last meal — his choice of fried catfish and shrimp — before being visited one last time by a local lay minister who has been his spiritual adviser. 

As the door of his cell is made of metal bars, that important final meeting was disrupted, Smith said, by the guards noisily feasting on sandwiches, crisps and fizzy drinks outside. But by the time they came to collect him, he had been alone for several hours. He told them he wasn’t going to fight them. ‘We know you aren’t, Kenny,’ one replied.

He would undoubtedly have resisted rather more vigorously had he known that, two minutes before he was taken into the execution chamber, an appeals court had actually agreed to stay his death sentence. 

Given Alabama’s alarming history of botched lethal injection executions, the judges suspected the team in charge of connecting him to intravenous tubes for the killer drugs would have ‘extreme difficulty’ in accessing his veins and he would consequently suffer ‘super-added pain’.

For some still-unknown reason, the message to hold the execution never got through and Smith was strapped ‘painfully tight’ to a gurney by his arms, legs and feet. There he remained for two hours, immobilised and unaware of the legal wrangling behind the scenes. All the while, two men and a woman, clearly officials, silently observed him — one clutching a file and the others armed with notepads and pens.

Feeling that his circulation was being cut off by the straps and worried that his family witnesses — his wife, son and daughter-in-law — hadn’t arrived, after an hour he asked the three guards in the room what was happening. They said they didn’t know either.

According to a court filing by his lawyers, Smith ‘started descending into hopelessness and despair’.

He was convinced he was going to die without his loved ones there to see him go. In fact, it appears the delay was because senior state officials were waiting to see if the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the appeal court ruling — even if that meant keeping Smith in agonising suspense strapped to the gurney.

At 10pm — 23 minutes before the Supreme Court did indeed approve his execution, three unidentified men wearing blue, red and green sets of surgical scrubs, entered the chamber wheeling a medical trolley. They were the team that would inject him with the cocktail of drugs — midazolam hydrochloride, rocuronium bromide and potassium chloride — that would theoretically first sedate him and then stop his heart.

‘Blue Scrubs’, who Smith remembered seeing chain-smoking outside the prison after previous executions, tied a tourniquet around Smith’s upper arm and started sticking a needle into him. When Smith protested that he was painfully stabbing into his muscle, Blue Scrubs told him: ‘No I’m not.’

After that attempt failed, it was the turn of Green Scrubs on Smith’s other side. Smith claims one of the three officials was taking photos on his phone, while Green Scrubs began slapping the inmate’s right hand to find a vein.

With each jab, the condemned man told his lawyers, he ‘could feel the needle going in and out and moving around under his skin, causing him great pain’.

Smith has since said that the ceaseless jabs became so ridiculous they turned into farce, especially when Green Scrubs eventually asked Smith to squeeze his hand to make the vein stand out better.

Smith says he had been a compliant prisoner for 35 years but that was too much.

‘I am fucked if I am going to participate in my own execution,’ he said in a recent interview.

And all the while, he says, everyone in the room ignored his pleas that he was in pain, especially when their needles regularly jabbed his muscles.

By now, he says, he’d entirely lost the composure he’d desperately wanted to maintain for his family witnesses and for expressing his final words.

Witnesses, including families of both the victim and the condemned, are allowed to watch an execution through small windows but the curtain is pulled back on the bleak scene in the chamber only when the lethal drugs are about to flow into the body.

Smith’s family, in fact, never got to the prison, instead waiting on tenterhooks at a nearby casino hotel for an official van sent to collect them — which never came.

Compounding his distress, Smith noticed other members of the prison staff — for reasons he could not fathom — were now photographing him on their phones.

Unable to find a second usable vein even after examining his feet and scanning his arms with ultraviolet light, the hapless executioners asked the guards to tilt the gurney so Smith’s feet were pointing upwards, leaving him in an inverted crucifix position.

Everyone but his guards exited the chamber, leaving Smith like that for several minutes in a deeply uncomfortable position. He believes the intention was to get blood to run towards his head so he could be injected in the neck. 

When the IV team returned, Red Scrubs — the leader — was wearing a mask and plastic face shield which Smith’s lawyers believe was to  protect him from spraying blood. They unbuttoned the prisoner’s shirt and the man plunged a huge new needle — bigger than any Smith had ever seen — under the inmate’s collarbone.

He was looking to attach a so-called central line (or central venous catheter) which is much longer than a regular intravenous line and goes all the way up to a vein near or inside the heart.

The pain became excruciating and it felt like he was being stabbed with a knife, says Smith. He shouted for them to stop, but a prison official responded by twisting Smith’s head to one side to provide a better entry point for the enormous needle.

‘Kenny, this is for your own good,’ he assured Smith. According to court papers, the inmate ‘forcefully expressed disagreement with that statement but did not resist’.

As his body writhed and shook uncontrollably, his shower shoes came off and fell to the floor.

At one point, Blue Scrubs snapped at him: ‘You can’t feel that,’ convinced he had been successfully anaesthetised.

‘I kept telling them, “Call the fucking judge. My case number is 2:22-CV-497. Somebody in this fucking room call the judge or my lawyer,” said Smith. But nobody did. He recalls Red Scrubs repeatedly jabbed him in the chest with the large needle — 10 times, he estimates — causing such pain that he could ‘hardly breathe’ and felt he had wet himself. The jabs, he said, ‘felt like an eternity’.

He told the Flying Monkeys: ‘By the end of it, I wasn’t thinking about prayer. I wasn’t thinking about God or heaven or none of that. ‘I was thinking, “please get that out of my chest”.’

But eventually they did stop and again everyone else left except the guards, leaving Smith still strapped to the gurney and ‘terrified’ as to what they would do next. He wasn’t to know they had run out of time to carry out the death warrant before a midnight deadline.

The IV team later came in to clear items that had fallen to the floor.

Green Scrubs asked him if the pain had gone. ‘No, sir,’ he replied.

The executioner stood over him and said: ‘Everything is going to be all right . . . it’s over with.’

Given there was still a needle sticking in his arm, Smith hardly felt reassured.

But, now his 90-minute ordeal was over, the IV team’s demeanour completely changed: Green Scrubs offered him some water and, holding his hand, told him he would be praying for him.

Why had he survived, he asked. ‘Legal stuff,’ said Green Scrubs who then made his extraordinary assurance about the merits of lethal injection over nitrogen.

Smith was so unsteady he had to be supported back to his cell by a prison guard on either side. They spared him the leg irons but still put him in handcuffs.

He said later that he was left ‘trembling and sweating . . . shocked, disoriented and experiencing post-traumatic stress’.

The identity and qualifications of the would-be executioners have never been revealed, though senior officials insisted some present had ‘medical’ training. Smith believes the pair in green and blue scrubs were Emergency Medical Technicians — essentially ambulance crew.

Alabama’s governor, Kay Ivey, blamed the failed execution not on incompetence but on last-ditch legal efforts to stay the order. But ‘attempting it was the right thing to do,’ she insisted.

However, she immediately ordered a moratorium on executions and a ‘top-to-bottom review of the state’s execution process’ so Alabama ‘can successfully deliver justice going forward’.

Smith, who says he continues to suffer lingering pain and post-traumatic stress disorder, is suing the state over its lethal injection procedures.

His lawyers have accused officials of moving him ‘to the front of the line’ for execution by nitrogen hypoxia in order to foil his potentially embarrassing legal action.

Steve Marshall, the attorney general for Alabama, has countered that Smith’s victim’s family ‘has waited an unconscionable 35 years to see justice served’.

Meanwhile, critics say the state has been worryingly opaque about how it will kill with nitrogen, beyond revealing a plan to forcibly place an airtight mask over the prisoner’s face.

Having a year ago been ‘resigned to meet my maker’, Smith told the Flying Monkeys he is now determined to live and defeat what he calls the ‘evil system’ that wants to execute him.

What happened last year had convinced him ‘that I’m here for a reason’, he said. And after 35 years and that awful night last November, he said he felt he had been punished enough for his crime.

Smith is, of course, aware of what can go wrong and says he is ‘absolutely terrified’ by the prospect.

And though he is no longer resigned to dying and convinced some higher power intended him to live, he may yet be one of the only Death Row prisoners who has to choose a last meal for a second time.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Jodie Foster (61), Meg Ryan (62), Adam Driver (40), Terry Farrell (60), Robert Beltran (70), Owen Wilson (55), Linda Evans (81), Delroy Lindo (71), Martin Scorsese (81), Rachel McAdams (45), Tom Ellis (45), Danny DeVito (79), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (65), RuPaul (63), Missi Pyle (51), Maggie Gyllenhaal (46), Martha Plimpton (53), Beverly D’Angelo (72), Jonny Lee Miller (51), Ivanna Sakhno (26), Olga Kurylenko (44), Paul McGann (64), Russell Tovey (42), Sandahl Bergman (72), Gerard Butler (54) and Whoopi Goldberg (68).

I think we can all be forgiven for not knowing anyone on this weeks death list. Quite a feat really, considering the amount of killing going on around the world…  

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Pat E. Johnson, 84, American martial artist, stuntman and actor (Enter the Dragon, The Karate Kid, Mortal Kombat). 
• Sean Martin, 26, English musician (The Night Café). 
• Frank Borman, 95, American astronaut (Gemini 7, Apollo 8), stroke.  
• John Nuttall, 56, British Olympic long-distance runner (1996), heart attack. 
• Johnny Ruffo, 35, Australian singer (“On Top“) and actor (Home and Away), brain cancer. 

In Other News

A skull that was on sale in a thrift store as a Halloween decoration turned out to be the real deal, after an anthropologist recognised it as belonging to a human. The anthropologist, who happened to be shopping in the store in the North Fort Myers area of Florida, spotted the human skull casually on display waiting to be purchased in the Halloween section of the store. Recognising it as the real article, authorities were called to the store. Lee County Sheriff’s Office said that detectives responded and recovered the skull, later confirming that the item was indeed human. The store owner told police that the skull had been found in a storage unit that they had bought years ago. While the police do not believe the case is suspicious, they will be working with the local medical examiner’s office to conduct further tests on the skull. In Florida, it is illegal to knowingly sell or buy any human organ or tissue for valuable consideration; this also includes bones. In September, another human skull was found by store employees in a Goodwill donation box in Arizona. That skull, which had a false eye in its left socket, was seized by police, but they concluded it was not associated with any crime. 

Tributes have poured in for Raymond Calvert, Britain’s oldest father who passed away aged 91 after having a baby at 78 with his 25-year-old lover. The former shop owner became a father for the seventh time in 2010 when son Jamie Rai was born to partner Charlotte, who was 54 years his junior. The pensioner described the little boy, who weighed 7lb 1oz at birth, as a ‘gift from God’. Mr Calvert passed away on December 1st last year, at Royal Preston Hospital on following a fall, with his family left ‘heartbroken’. His funeral was held just four days before Christmas at Skipton Crematorium. His former lover Charlotte, now 38, who took his surname but never married him, currently lives with their son Jamie Rai, aged 12, in his cottage in Colne, Lancashire. After the birth of his seventh child, he told the Flying Monkeys at the time: ‘I am the most fortunate man in the world. It makes me feel 10ft tall. The baby was planned and I did not use Viagra or anything like that. I didn’t actually think at my age that it would be possible to have a child, but he’s a beautiful little fella. I feel blessed. I look at that baby and I think, ‘He’s so bloody healthy and good-looking – how did I make that?’’ Mr Calvert has six other children who are all older than his partner and range in age from 51 to 64. He raised them alone after his wife died 41 years ago. He told the Flying Monkeys he first met Miss Calvert following a three-year relationship with her mother. She was 16 at the time and joined him on caravan holidays with his children. The pair only saw each other occasionally until she became friends with his daughter Denise. Five years later, romance blossomed. Mr Calvert, from Winewall, Lancashire, told the Flying Monkeys that the age gap was never an issue. He said: ‘As time went by, Charlotte said she wanted a baby – and that she wanted it with me. I was delighted when Charlotte told me she was pregnant. It was a wonderful, wonderful feeling.’ Raymond noted that he’s always gone out with women who are 20 to 25 years younger than him. Charlotte left school with three A-levels and was on a childcare course before falling pregnant. Recalling the moment she realised she wanted the baby, she said: ‘I realised it would be nice to have a baby with Raymond. He has such a lot of nice qualities.’  

Brazilian singer Darlyn Morais died on Monday of complications from being bitten in the face by a spider! Morais fell ill after he was bitten by the spider at his home in the northeastern city of Miranorte on October 31st. His 18-year-old stepdaughter also suffered a spider bite and is currently hospitalised and in stable condition, Morais’ wife Jhullyenny Lisboa told our Brazilian Flying Monkeys. Lisboa said that Morais experienced body fatigue and that the colour of the bruise on his face started to change as a result of the bite. Morais developed allergic reactions later during the week and visited a hospital in Miranorte, where he was treated and discharged Friday. ‘He felt weakness in his body and his face started to darken on the same day,’ Lisboa said. ‘He went to the hospital and was admitted to Palmas General hospital this Sunday.’ Morais immersed himself into the music world at the age of 15 and sang forró, a popular genre of music in Brazil’s northeast region that is based on a combination of the accordion, zabumba and metal triangle. His small, three-man band included his brother and a friend. Morais, who had six-year-old girl and one-year-old year boy with his wife, was planning planning a live show in January 2024 that was going to be recorded  and released on DVD. 

On This Day

• 1961 – Terry Jo Duperrault is the sole survivor of a series of brutal murders aboard the ketch Bluebelle.
• 1970 – The Oregon Highway Division attempts to destroy a rotting beached sperm whale with explosives, leading to the now infamous “exploding whale” incident.
• 1990 – Tim Berners-Lee publishes a formal proposal for the World Wide Web.
• 2021 – The Los Angeles Superior Court formally ends the 14-year conservatorship to pop singer Britney Spears

Deaths

• 1981 – William Holden, American actor (b. 1918).
• 2014 – Warren Clarke, English actor, director, and producer (b. 1947).
• 2018 – Stan Lee, American comic book writer, editor, and publisher (b. 1922).

Last Week’s Birthdays

Ryan Gosling (43), Anne Hathaway (41), Wallace Shawn (80), Max Grodénchik (71), Neil Young (78), Leonardo DiCaprio (49), Stanley Tucci (63), Demi Moore (61), Richard Dormer (54), Calista Flockhart (59), Taron Egerton (34), Hugh Bonneville (60), Neil Gaiman (63), Tracy Morgan (55), Robert Duncan McNeill (59), Lou Ferrigno (72), Tara Reid (48), Parker Posey (55), Gretchen Mol (51), Matthew Rhys (49), Richard Curtis (67), Jack Osbourne (38), Gordon Ramsay (57), Adam Devine (40), Emma Stone (35), Ethan Hawke (53), Rebecca Romijn (51), Sally Field (77), Thandiwe Newton (51), and Nigel Havers (72).

Not a lot to say this week, so let’s crack on!  

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Trevor Hill, 98, British producer (Children’s Hour, Round Britain Quiz, Sooty), director and writer. 
• Jaak Broekx, 109, centenarian, oldest man in Belgium. 
• Tyler Christopher, 50, American actor (General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, The Lying Game), cardiac arrest.  
• Ken Mattingly, 87, American astronaut (Apollo 16, STS-4, STS-51-C). 
• Brian Brain, 83, English cricketer (Worcestershire, Gloucestershire). 
• Bobby Welch, 94, British criminal (Great Train Robbery). 
• David Berglas, 97, German-born British magician and mentalist. 

In Other News

Michael J. Fox has revealed he’s not afraid of death in a candid interview about his health. The Back to the Future star was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1991, and in a recent interview on Thursday, he has discussed his relationship with death, saying he ‘doesn’t fear it’. Parkinson’s disease is a condition in which parts of the brain become progressively damaged. The main symptoms of the condition usually revolve around movement, with the person experiencing tremors in the hand or arm, slowness of movement and muscle stiffness. In his documentary, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, the star recalled the first time he noticed the signs of the disease. He recounted waking up one morning to find his pinky finger twitching uncontrollably, and described the finger as ‘auto-animated.’ However, Fox didn’t open up about his diagnosis until several years later in 1998. In the documentary, he also added that ‘no one outside of the family knew’ about his diagnosis. And now, in an interview with the Flying Monkeys, he’s discussed his ‘complicated’ view of Parkinson’s. He said: “It’s very complicated. I’ve said Parkinson’s is a gift. It’s the gift that keeps on taking, but it has changed my life in so many positive ways.” The 62-year-old previously spoke about how life was ‘getting harder’ since his diagnosis – with him breaking bones in his body and almost losing a finger due to an infection. He’d told us in April that he didn’t think he’d live to be 80. “Its banging on the door. I’m not gonna lie. It’s gettin’ hard, it’s gettin’ harder. It’s gettin’ tougher. Every day it’s tougher. But, that’s the way it is.” he said. Adding: “You don’t die from Parkinson’s. You die with Parkinson’s. So I’ve been thinking about the mortality of it … I’m not gonna be 80. I’m not gonna be 80.” However, it seems that Fox has accepted the possibility of death. “One day I’ll run out of gas,” he said. “One day I’ll just say, ‘It’s not going to happen. I’m not going out today. If that comes, I’ll allow myself that. I’m 62 years old. Certainly, if I were to pass away tomorrow, it would be premature, but it wouldn’t be unheard of. And so, no, I don’t fear that.”  

Linda Nolan has bravely opened up about her fear amid living alongside incurable cancer and shared her memory is beginning to deteriorate. The Nolan Sisters singer, 64, was first diagnosed with cancer nearly 20 years ago. She’s had incurable secondary breast cancer since 2017 which has since spread to the brain and caused her to experience hair loss for the fourth time in her life. Writing in her latest column this week, Linda reveals her nephew and his family are moving overseas – something that has proven to be difficult and bittersweet for the singer, as she knows she may never seem them again. “You’re over the moon for them and yet, when I say goodbye, I know I might not see them again,” Linda writes. “That’s the elephant in the room.” Linda continues to share with readers her fears about living alongside her cancer diagnosis, admitting: “I’m not going to panic because, if I panic, cancer wins.” She realises she needs “to be realistic” as “the reality is, my memory seems to be getting worse.” She adds: “My memory has been lapsing for a while. You can imagine the comments about my age… But I didn’t, because deep down it doesn’t feel right. As I said, I won’t panic. My balance is still better than it was, I’m not having headaches. I have some scans arranged and I’ll wait for them. Alone sometimes in my bedroom I’ll just lie there and think I wonder if I’ll be here in a month? Will it all happen very quickly?”   

Comedian Mark Steel has shared an update with his followers, sharing that he’s now using a tube to feed himself through his nose. Last month, Mark announced he had been diagnosed with a cancer that “can be got rid of”. At the time of sharing his news, he said he had noticed that his neck was “looking much bigger than normal”. Now, he has shared an update with his online followers regarding his condition. Taking to Instagram, Mark was seen in the kitchen of his home and said: “Now, because of something to do with an epiglottis which has gone wrong during some surgery for the time being, I’ve got to feed myself through this tube, with this peculiar drink.” Demonstrating how the contraption worked, he added: “It goes in there and I’ve learnt how to do it, I have to do it every three hours. “And this is me eating, this is me having a meal. I’ve never felt so English. I’ve had a couple of people come round while I was doing it and I was thinking ‘Oh it’s quite rude not to offer them any, ain’t it.’ All I’ve got to do is fix you up with a tube that goes down through your throat and oesophagus and into your stomach and then get the syringe, you’ve got to flush out the pipes first, lock that off, there’s all techniques to doing it, squirt it out, pump it into your tube and directly into your stomach. It’s no trouble honestly, honestly, there’s plenty to go around, I felt really, I’d had a couple of mates round and I felt really bad, you can’t eat and not offer your guests any food.” Mark added: “They don’t tell you that do they? When they say you’ve got cancer.” His upload which has raked up hundreds of likes was soon flooded with support.  Having visited his doctors for an initial check-up, Mark was sent for a biopsy on his ever-growing swelling. Following his biopsy, he was told he would hear back from them within a week. However, there were no updates after almost 14 days and the hospital explained they lost the biopsy in transit. Not long after, he received a phone call about his cancer diagnosis. Mark said: “Then a completely new person called me, and said I had to go in for a repeat biopsy the next day ‘to see what stage of cancer you have’. ‘Hang on,’ I said, ‘No one has said it’s definitely cancer, are you saying it’s definitely cancer?’ She paused. ‘Yes. Had no one told you?'” Despite this, he urged his blog readers to be polite to NHS staff due to their increased workload and “appalling” salaries.

On This Day

• 1605 – Gunpowder Plot: Guy Fawkes is arrested in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, where he had planted gunpowder in an attempt to blow up the building and kill King James I of England.
• 1925 – Secret agent Sidney Reilly, the first “super-spy” of the 20th century, is executed by the OGPU, the secret police of the Soviet Union.
• 1940 – Franklin D. Roosevelt is the first and only President of the United States to be elected to a third term.
• 1983 – The Byford Dolphin diving bell accident kills five and leaves one severely injured.
• 2006 – Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, and his co-defendants are sentenced to death.
• 2007 – The Android mobile operating system is unveiled by Google, causing 16 years of frustration.

Deaths

• 1987 – Eamonn Andrews, Irish radio and television host (b. 1922).
• 1991 – Robert Maxwell, Czech-English captain, publisher, and politician (b. 1923).
• 2020 – Geoffrey Palmer, English actor (b. 1927).

A dinner party for dead guests

My friends came to a silent supper with their dead friends and relatives so that we could grieve our loved ones together.

I don’t normally feel worried about having my friends over for dinner. Usually, I’ll be covered in splashes of soup and partially dressed when they arrive, but tonight I feel nervous.

Figuring out who to invite was complicated. Not only did they have to be available at short notice, but they had to be up for it, open to something different. Because this evening everyone has been asked to bring a plus-one … someone who has died.

As my living guests begin to arrive, bringing in the dark and subtle nip of the October air, I have the strong sense that they are not alone. I take their coats and ask them for the photo of their guest. Out of their pockets come snapshots. Smiling portraits, a moment of laughter on the stairs, a child on the beach, the ruffled ears of a French bulldog, a matriarch blurred by clouds of cigarette smoke.

In the other room, it’s quiet. The table is laid with candles, autumn leaves from the park and bright flowers, and there are twice as many plates laid at the table as there will be people in the room. I put each photo in its place. Because this is where we will serve food to the dead. We will eat, sometimes in silence, but we’ll talk and remember and, probably, cry. This is a silent supper. A feast for the dead.

It isn’t something I’d even have thought to do if I hadn’t been hanging out with witches for the series Witch for BBC Sounds and Radio 4. I’ve rarely felt comfortable or at ease talking about the dead or talking to someone who’s grieving, but for witches this seems to be different. Over the past year I’ve taken part in seances, been to an ancestor ritual and made an ancestor bottle for the spirit of a loved one. Most witches have regular rituals and altars for their ancestors and, of course, they have a dedicated season for remembrance. Witches believe that on 31 October, or Samhain, the “veil” is thin. It’s a skin between life and death that becomes more porous throughout October until, on this night, life and death can pour into each other – a lot like the world we see around us.

There are twice as many plates at the table as people in the room.

This is the idea we play with at Halloween when ghouls and night terrors come knocking at our door. There’s a playfulness and joy at the idea of the afterlife being present, but in reality it’s so far out of reach. This year, I’ve decided to search for meaningful ways to remember the dead.

I decided that hosting a silent supper – historically known as a “dumb supper” – could be a good start. Eating in silence and feasting for the dead has been part of life for centuries. In England, there used to be a tradition called “chesting”.

Prof Diane Purkiss, author of English Food: A People’s History, explains: “This was even more of an Irish wake than an Irish wake. It involved having a feast that was laid out on the coffin of the deceased person. A massive blowout meal with huge treats and sugary goo. It’s honouring the dead, but it’s also quite visceral because you’re doing it on the coffin and it almost brings them physically into the feast.”

A silent supper is one step further. “What you’re describing is a ritual around the scariest and most taboo thing, which is the dead,” she says, “and this is because witches have a very special relationship with them. I define a witch as someone who doesn’t see the dead the way other people do.”

That’s certainly true. Last year my friend, colleague and witch Tatum Swithenbank reached the age at which a much loved and needed auntie had died. So their coven held a silent supper. “Sometimes we just want a space to talk about the people who have passed and there’s not really any great comfort you can give in words,” they told me. “What’s better than listening in a neutral space? That was the power of it. I don’t think you have to be a witch or be practising to do that.” They ate cheese, skull-shaped pizzas and a pumpkin pie.

Feeling under-qualified to host my own silent supper, I ask for advice. “Making it dark, with only candles, really helps because people feel they are not as exposed,” says Tatum. “And it’s important to say something at the beginning. I acknowledged that grief is messy and complicated.” Another witch who loves a silent supper is Emma Griffin, who shares the ritual with her children. “It’s really nice for them to know their heritage,” she says. “We’ll have supper and talk about death, look through photos and also talk about death bringing changes. This year we are making food that my dad would like – meat and potato pie, mash and gravy.”

She advises me to make the space sacred and gentle. “I suggest giving people a dress code. When they come over your threshold, give them a little tea-light. Remember, it’s a celebration of life. And you want to burn myrrh,” she says, gently but firmly as she talks me through my first ever online myrrh purchase. “It will smoke a lot, so don’t panic.”

The most pressing question of all is what on earth am I going to feed the dead? “Traditionally, the dead seem to want luxury foods,” says Purkiss. “They tend to eat dessert first, you know, life is short, eat dessert first. The dead always feel undervalued and in a way it makes them shirty so you are trying to get them to a position where they feel you value them.”

So, before the event, I threw myself (and my partner) into planning a six-course feast, my guests constantly in mind, especially the dead ones. What would they want? What would we give them if we had the chance again?

I bring Grandma Suzette. The family rarely talks about her

Purkiss approves. “Isn’t that what we all want?” she says. “When someone dies, virtually the first thing you feel is, ‘Oh, if only. If only I’d done this, or if only I’d found the time’. And the whole point of the ceremony is to give yourselves the healing chance to show great aunt Sarah you did really care.”

On the night itself, I choose to bring Grandma Suzette, who I have never met. She died when my dad was a baby. The family rarely talk about her. As my own son turned one, the loss of her for my dad and his siblings, and for me, started to ring loudly in my body. I am desperate to grieve for her.

And that’s what we’re here to do tonight. There’s a lot of normal party noise in the kitchen, but when we enter the dining room, absolutely brimming with myrrh smoke, everything softens. First, we light a candle and welcome our dead guests to the table. It feels a little strange, but maybe it should be normal. After all, eating for – and even with the dead – was once a living tradition, one that’s been purposefully rubbed away.

“There was this way of seeing the dead as beings that you interact with,” says Purkiss, adding that Catholic death rituals, such as kissing ornately decorated bones of saints, or praying in huge ossuaries stacked with bodies, went out during the Reformation. “Protestants threw all of that out, partly because they thought it had become a bit of a scam and it probably had in some cases. But the phrase throwing out the baby with the bathwater comes powerfully to mind.”

And she might be right, because it’s only minutes into the evening when it becomes painfully, joyfully clear that everyone around the table needs this communion with the dead. The phrase “I haven’t allowed myself to grieve” comes up time and again. One friend hasn’t allowed herself to grieve for her mum for 11 years. Another drifted from someone she adored and never felt she had permission to mourn them. A pal describes her love and grief for her dog Buddy as tied up with her longing for a baby. We also share joy and memories. My sister brings my other hilarious, powerful granny. A friend shares the story of a grandad who brought him pure and uncomplicated joy.

The talking is a release, but so is acknowledging the empty places. “People did that a lot after the First World War,” Purkiss says. “They would lay places at Christmas dinner for people who had died. It makes sense.” There are three mini courses that we eat without speaking. We reflect or we write, and then we burn things we wished we could say to them.

As the courses continue to roll out, my guests talk about how much their plus-ones would have loved the feast, the wine. The chance to eat dessert again and again. We make them feel loved through food. Buddy the dog would have had a field day.

We eat too much, raise glasses of sweet mead to everyone, say the names of people out loud many, many times. We look each other straight in the eyes. No one shies away from death. By the end we all stink of myrrh, but it is as though something had shifted, for all of us. For me, I know how to talk about my grandma now, and I cannot wait to keep celebrating the people I miss in my life.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Famke Janssen (59), Tilda Swinton (63), Sam Rockwell (55), Robert Patrick (65), Elke Sommer (83), Armin Shimerman (74), Tamzin Outhwaite (53), Matthew McConaughey (54), Olivia Taylor Dudley (38), Ralph Macchio (62), Dolph Lundgren (66), Kate Capshaw (70), Roseanne Barr (71), Dylan Moran (52), David Schwimmer (57), Stefanie Powers (81), Toni Collette (51), Peter Jackson (62), Stephen Rea (77), Clémence Poésy (41), Fiona Dourif (42), Henry Winkler (78), Juliet Stevenson (67), and Jessica Hynes (51).

The shocking news this week is the passing of Matthew Perry. Although he had his personal  demons, I don’t think anyone expected to wake up this morning to hear of his death. As the outpouring of grief unfolds, we can at least look back at his career with great joy. 

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Dave Courtney, 64, English gangster, writer, and actor (Triads, Yardies and Onion Bhajees, The Dead Sleep Easy, Killer Bitch), suicide by gunshot. 
• Bill Kenwright, 78, English theatre producer (Blood Brothers), film producer (Broken) and football administrator, chairman of Everton (since 2004), liver cancer. 
• Richard Roundtree, 81, American actor (Shaft, Se7en, Speed Racer), pancreatic cancer. 
• Richard Moll, 80, American actor (Night Court, House, Batman: The Animated Series).  
• Adam Johnson, 29, American ice hockey player (Pittsburgh Penguins), neck cut during match.  
• Matthew Perry, 54, American-Canadian actor (Friends, The Whole Nine Yards), drowned. 

In Other News

The world’s oldest dog ever has died at the age of 31 years and 165 days. Guinness World Record holder Bobi, a purebred Rafeiro do Alentejo, passed away at his home in Portugal on Saturday. His death was announced on social media by a veterinarian who met Bobi several times. “Despite outliving every dog in history, his 11,478 days on earth would never be enough, for those who loved him,” wrote Dr Karen Becker. Bobi became both the world’s oldest living dog and the oldest dog ever in February, beating an almost century-old record for the latter title. The previous oldest dog ever was Australia’s Bluey, who died in 1939 at the age of 29 years and five months. Bobi’s grand old age was validated by the Portuguese government’s pet database, which is managed by the National Union of Veterinarians. The identity of Bobi’s successor to the title of world’s oldest living dog has not yet been revealed. Bobi lived his whole life with the Costa family in the village of Conqueiros, near Portugal’s west coast, after being born with three siblings in an outbuilding. Leonel Costa, who was eight years old at the time, said his parents had too many animals and had to put the puppies down, but Bobi escaped. Mr Costa and his brothers kept the dog’s existence a secret from their parents until he was eventually discovered and became part of the family, who fed him the same food they eat. Apart from a scare in 2018 when he was hospitalised after suddenly collapsing due to breathing difficulty, Mr Costa said in February that Bobi had enjoyed a relatively trouble-free life and thought the secret to his longevity was the “calm, peaceful environment” he lived in. However, he had experienced trouble walking and worsening eyesight prior to his death. Bobi was not the only dog owned by the Mr Costa to live a long life. Bobi’s mother lived to the age of 18 while another of the family’s dogs died at the age of 22.  

Comedian Rhod Gilbert has received his first clear cancer scan after undergoing treatment. The 55-year-old Welshman announced in July that he had cancer and was being treated at the Velindre Cancer Centre in Cardiff, where he had been a fundraising patron for a decade before the diagnosis. He underwent surgery for metastatic cancer of the head and neck, followed by sessions of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Gilbert told the Flying Monkeys discovering his cancer hadn’t spread was “the best day of my life”. “I was back on the road earlier this year, I got a call to say my latest scan had shown the cancer was in the areas they knew about, but it wasn’t in my lungs or my brain,” he said. The news was later followed by his first clear scan, to which Gilbert said: “The best thing was that the tumour had gone, and it was once again an ordinary blood vessel.” Days before his treatment was set to begin, Gilbert approached a documentary team to film his experience. “I was lying in bed on the Friday, with my treatment due to start the following Monday, I rang the team I knew – there was no broadcaster on board, it was all on spec – and I asked, ‘How would you fancy joining me on this journey?’ It was partly for me. I’d cancelled all my TV work and tours, and I wanted to have something other than ‘cancer’ in my diary. I knew I wouldn’t be well enough to go on stage or TV, but I thought I might be well enough to lie in bed and talk to a documentary team about how ill I was. I thought, ‘It will give me something to do’.” Gilbert said it all began when “a tumour popped up on my neck” on the day of a fundraising walk for the Velindre Cancer Centre, and the following months of treatment meant he “wasn’t well enough even to read or watch television”.  

Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin may have suffered a “cardiac arrest” on Sunday evening according to a statement posted on a Telegram channel which regularly says the war-mongering leader is terminally ill. The channel – General SVR – suggests all recent appearances by the Russian dictator, including foreign visits, have been carried out by a body double or doubles. It claimed that doctors had to resuscitate Putin before taking him to a special intensive care facility located within his official residence. “Doctors performed resuscitation, having previously determined that the president was in cardiac arrest,” reported the channel. “Help was provided on time, the heart was started and Putin regained consciousness.” There was no immediate response from the Kremlin to the claim but officials have previously strongly denied Putin, 71, suffers from health problems. The post on General SVR – which claims, without having ever provided any proof, to have an inside source on his entourage – continued: “At about 21:05 Moscow time, security officers of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who were on duty at the residence, heard noise and sounds of falling coming from the president’s bedroom. Two security officers immediately followed into the president’s bedroom and saw Putin lying on the floor next to the bed and an overturned table with food and drinks. Probably, when the president fell, he hit the table and dishes and knocked them onto the floor, which caused the noise. Putin convulsively arched while lying on the floor, rolling his eyes. The doctors who were on duty at the residence and located in one of the adjacent rooms were immediately called.” The channel alleged that “the president was moved to a specially equipped room in his residence, where the necessary medical equipment for resuscitation had already been installed”, adding that the president’s condition was “stabilised” and he is “under constant medical supervision”. It said: “We have already repeatedly talked about the deterioration of Putin’s health due to oncology and a number of other diseases. This case of cardiac arrest seriously alarmed the president’s inner circle, despite the fact that the attending doctors had already warned that Putin was very ill and was unlikely to live until the end of autumn. Recently, all official meetings and events have been conducted by the president’s double. After news of the evening incident, several people close to Putin contacted each other by telephone and agreed to hold consultations on Monday regarding possible actions if the president dies in the coming days.” Adding weight to the claims, footage of an unexplained late-evening dash to the Kremlin – the seat of Russian power – by Putin’s motorcade on Sunday evening, have surfaced. The president normally resides outside of Moscow and not in his official apartment in the vast government building. The channel is supposedly run by a former Kremlin lieutenant-general, known by the alias Viktor Mikhailovich. It claims his top apparatchiks and security henchmen control the activities of the doppelgängers. A recent Japanese TV report used AI to analyse Putin’s face, walk and voice in multiple appearances, and concluded that he does use body doubles. The head of Ukrainian military intelligence Lt-Gen Kyrylo Budanov has made the same claim, alleging the real Putin has not been seen since June 2022. He alleged last month: “The one, who everyone used to know, was last seen around June 26, 2022.” Putin was recently reported to have made trips to Kyrgyzstan and China, and to have been unusually active in travelling inside Russia. Last week he visited Perm, and held talks with his war commander General Valery Gerasimov in Rostov-on-Don after making a “detour” to visit the military headquarters. The channel says all these are by body doubles who underwent plastic surgery and years of training by Russian secret services to perform as Putin stand-ins. The claims were reported by the Ukrainian media.

On This Day

• 1618 – English adventurer, writer, and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded for allegedly conspiring against James I of England.
• 1901 – In Amherst, Massachusetts, nurse Jane Toppan is arrested for murdering the Davis family of Boston with an overdose of morphine.
• 1969 – The first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.

Deaths

• 1618 – Walter Raleigh, English admiral, explorer, and politician, Lieutenant Governor of Jersey (b. 1554).
• 1911 – Joseph Pulitzer, Hungarian-American publisher, lawyer, and politician, founded Pulitzer, Inc. (b. 1847).
• 2011 – Jimmy Savile, English radio and television host, nonce (b. 1926).

The Godfather of Bungee

The maverick godfather of bungee jumping, who took the world’s first leap clutching a bottle of champagne and without testing the rope, has died peacefully in his bed. 

Born in 1945 as the eldest of seven children, David Kirke birthed the worldwide phenomenon some 34 years later on April Fool’s Day, when, dressed in a top hat and fresh from all-night party, he and his friends decided to bungee jump from Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge. 

Describing Kirke as an “anarchic buccaneer” who was “Byronesque in thrall of living life to the full”, a friend of the family told The Independent that the septuagenarian “would have been shocked that he died quietly in his own bed”. 

But while undoubtedly his most influential exploit, bungee jumping was but one extraordinary stunt pioneered by Kirke and his friends in the name of good fun. 

Against the bleak backdrop of 1970s Britain, Kirke and several friends co-founded the Dangerous Sports Club, a group largely based in Oxford and London that gained notable attention in the ensuing decade for their daredevil activities, often donning top hats and coattails, and swigging champagne. 

The idea for their bungee jump had been inspired by a rite of passage on the island of Vanuatu known as “land diving”, which saw young men leap from high towers and use vines to break their fall before landing on the ground. 

While a demonstration of land diving for the late Queen during her visit to the Pacific island in 1974 went fatally wrong, that same year Kirke and his friends decided to attempt a similar feat, instead using elastic ropes used to help fighter jets land on aircraft carriers. 

“We hadn’t tested it, or anything like that,” Kirke told the Bristol Post in 2019. “We were called the Dangerous Sports Club, and testing it first wouldn’t have been particularly dangerous. 

“I was confident though. We had some very clever guys with us – Alan Weston went on to be head of development at Nasa – and they told me it was going to be okay, they had worked out the false extension curves of these ropes.” 

Being the first of his friends to jump that morning, while police officers staking out the bridge on the advice of concerned friends and family members had briefly “wandered off”, Kirke later recalled to ITV: “When the other guys came down, I thought, ‘whoopee, nobody’s dead’. 

“It was a sort of fairly casual easy-going recklessness. American novelists would call it the insouciance of youth, but there it was.”

While police arrested the group and took them to the cells, Kirke recalled that the “bemused” officers had “brought us in the half-drunken bottles of wine we’d left at the bridge,  and we were fined or something”. 

Soon afterwards, the Dangerous Sports Club carried out bungee jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and performed a televised jump from the Royal Gorge Suspension Bridge in Colorado. 

Never lacking in imagination, Kirke and the growing membership of the Dangerous Sports Club would go on to perform a host of mind-bending stunts in locations across the world.

These would include Kirke sliding down the slopes of Saint-Moritz on a grand piano and an aborted bid to fly a car across Tower Bridge’s open drawbridge.

“The DSC began when I went with a fellow Oxford graduate chum, called Ed Hulton, to Switzerland to watch the Cresta Run and the bobsleigh,” Kirke told The Flying Monkeys in 1998. 

“We’d previously built a hang-glider from a 1903 design, which had crashed and smashed to pieces so we wanted to try the Cresta and the bobsleigh. We found they were a bit exaggerated so we thought we’d start something new.”

Members of the group catapulted themselves off cliffs, jumped off Cheddar Gorge, and hang-glided into 5,000ft of cloud over Mount Kilimanjaro.

“It was all just a giggle. We were the first people to ever fly off Mount Olympus on a hang glider,” said Kirke, whose father was a schoolmaster and mother was a concert pianist.

“It was amazing. We were standing at the top of the home of the Gods and as I flew down I asked myself, ‘Is this better than sex?’ It possibly is but may not be quite as good as the best passage in a Joseph Conrad novel’.”

While the club’s membership peaked in the 1980s, Kirke and his friends continued to push boundaries. In 1986, he was sponsored by Foster’s lager to fly across the Channel tied to a kangaroo-shaped cluster of helium balloons, leading to him being prosecuted for flying without a pilot’s licence. 

In a more tragic turn of events, two of Kirke’s friends were charged with manslaughter and later acquitted over the death of 19-year-old Oxford biochemistry student Kostadin Yankov, who died in 2002 after volunteering to be launched from a trebuchet and missing the safety net.

While not personally involved in the case, Kirke told the Flying Monkeys in February 2004 that it was “an extraordinary test case, about the right to experiment, at personal risk, versus social responsibility”.

Himself a student of psychology and philosophy, Kirke said: “We’re interested in new things. You make a fool of yourself, your girlfriend leaves you, you lose money, but you may have advanced things a tiny little half-inch. It’s a vocation, strangely enough, not that different from a Catholic priest.”

On Sunday, a friend of the family told The Flying Monkeys: “David upturned apple carts, always. He wanted to do things that diverted and disrupted and stretched imagination. He dared and he sometimes dare-devilled and paid the price. 

“What was non-negotiable was loyalty to his friends, and an unmovable desire to make art and literature pivotal to adventure and life.

“He was an anarchic buccaneer who left the world suddenly but he bequeathed a high bar for stretching imagination and adventure; he was Byronesque in thrall to living life to the full. He would have been shocked that he died quietly in his own bed.”

Last Week’s Birthdays

Winona Ryder (52), Rufus Sewell (56), Cleopatra Coleman (36), Ben Foster (43), Richard Dreyfuss (76), Dan Castellaneta (66), Joaquin Phoenix (49), Annie Potts (71), Julia Roberts (56), Gwendoline Christie (45), Matt Smith (41), Caitlyn Jenner (74), John Cleese (84), Robert Picardo (70), Kelly Osbourne (39), Cary Elwes (61), Seth MacFarlane (50), Jon Heder (46), Tom Cavanagh (60), Keith Urban (56), Katy Perry (39), Glynis Barber (68), Nancy Cartwright (66), Kevin Kline (76), F. Murray Abraham (84), Ryan Reynolds (47), Emilia Clarke (37), Sam Raimi (64), and ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic (64).