As I recall, the morning of December 9 1980 was bright, crisp and clear. I headed out from home in a good mood, planning a little Christmas shopping.

Then I saw the newspaper hoarding and stopped in my tracks, with the day suddenly not pleasant at all. I remember that I bought a paper and looked at the front page, but really I needn't have bothered. The hoarding had said everything that mattered in four stark words:

'BEATLE JOHN SHOT DEAD'.

I went back home in a state of shock, and switched on the radio. The BBC pop music channel, Radio 1, had abandoned all normal programming for the day, and was playing non-stop Beatles and John Lennon records. I listened, and soon I was weeping bitterly.

Why did his loss matter to me so much? I did not, of course, know Lennon personally. He wasn't my favourite artist. He'd just released 'Double Fantasy', a comeback album that I regarded as weak and sentimental. I was a few years too young to have seen and appreciated him at his best, with The Beatles and in the early-Seventies burst of creativity that produced his classic solo albums 'Plastic Ono Band' and 'Imagine'.

Yet for me, as for so many others, Lennon was a symbol of hope; an icon of a time when young people around the world had, however naively, dared to dream of a world without war, where people could live for love.

He was a deeply flawed and troubled human being... we knew that because he'd graphically documented his problems on records like 'Cold Turkey' and the 'Plastic Ono Band' album. We knew that he could be cruel and vindictive - we'd heard 'How Do You Sleep?', his infamous attack on Paul McCartney. His political vision was vague, impractical and sometimes somewhat hypocritical: 'Imagine no possessions', sang the millionaire.

Yet none of that really mattered too much, because he so eloquently expressed the dreams of generations. His song 'Imagine' is a kind of secular hymn: it may urge us to 'imagine no religion', but it is above all an expression of faith. It's a song that speaks to the part of ourselves we have to repress in order to survive in an often brutally competitive world; the part that would like to trust and have faith in people.

Lennon's very public personal life also provided a source of inspiration in the area of gender politics. In the Sixties, he kept his first wife Cynthia firmly in the background whilst taking full advantage of the unlimited supply of easy sex that Beatlemania made available to him.

But the later years of his life were dominated by his far more equal partnership with Yoko Ono, which eventually led to his retirement into seclusion as a 'house-husband' between 1975 and 1980. By leaving the world of music behind for five years to bring up his son Sean, Lennon rejected traditional masculinity, demonstrating a gentler way for a man to live. He had only recently re-emerged into public life when he was killed.

Many said at the time that Lennon's death felt to them like the end of an era. Certainly, it came at the beginning of a horribly depressing decade for anyone who had identified with Lennon's ideals. He died at the beginning of the Eighties: the time of Reagan and Thatcher, when the prevailing social ethos was: 'Imagine lots of possessions, and trample on all the people who stand between you and them'.

Yet dreams do not die as quickly as people. The Nineties saw merciliess monetarism become unfashionable; and as 1999 came to a close, 'Imagine' returned to the UK chart after winning a 'song of the millennium' poll. Clearly, there must have been millions who hadn't been born when Lennon wrote and recorded 'Imagine', but who nonetheless found its words inspirational.

In another optimistic song, 'Instant Karma', Lennon defied mortality with the words: 'We all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun'. And now the music he made over 30 years ago with The Beatles is once again topping album charts across the world, thanks to the new compilation album, '1'.

John Lennon's legacy most certainly does shine on, 20 years after that dreadful December day.

And now, two firsts: this column praises a politician, and expresses pride in its homeland. The UK government has made a noble gesture that I sincerely hope will be copied around the world. It has announced that it will stop demanding interest payments on debts owed by some of the poorest nations on Earth.

41 nations appear on the list of most heavily indebted countries compiled by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and interest payments on their debts have devastated the economies of those countries. 20 of the 41 countries had already been granted debt relief by the IMF and World Bank... but 21 are still being forced to make payments that they cannot remotely afford.

For the past four years, the pressure group Jubilee 2000 has campaigned for the debt repayments to be cancelled. Their campaign ends at the end of this year: and at a farewell rally in London on December 2, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) Gordon Brown had some good news for them.

'Neither you nor I will want the richest countries to benefit any more from the debts of those poorest countries. From this day the British government will renounce our right to benefit from the historic debt owed by all 41 countries.'

There's only one condition, and it's a sensible one: the money saved must be spent on poverty relief rather than on weapons. 11 of the 21 countries are currently at war. Britain will still take payments from the 11, but the money will go into a trust fund, and will be repaid when the nations are no longer at war.

Of course, Mr. Brown's initiative will make little difference unless other nations follow suit. There are hopes among campaigners on the debt issue that Bill Clinton will use his last days as US President to make a similar gesture, and that really would be welcome.
What is certain is that next year another organisation, Drop The Debt will take over from Jubilee 2000. What better New Year's resolution could there be than to support its campaign?

The title of this column is an homage to one of my very favourite writers: the very great Bill Bryson. He is the author of a series of wonderfully funny travel books about his journeys around the USA, Europe and Australia. All of them are gloriously entertaining narratives that offer rich descriptions of the places visited and the characters encountered, and all of them leave me with the feeling that Mr Bryson must be the most marvellously entertaining company. Among them is a book about Britain, published in 1995 and entitled 'Notes From A Small Island'.

Bryson is a native of Des Moines, Iowa, USA, who moved to Britain in 1977. In 1994 he decided to go back to the States. 'Notes From A Small Island' describes a kind of farewell tour of Britain that he undertook before returning to America; and among the places he visited was my home city of Bradford, West Yorkshire. On December 16, he's returning to Bradford to film a documentary about his work for the BBC. Cameras will follow him as he tours the city, with Bradford's Lord Mayor Stanley King as his guide. He'll be getting the full VIP treatment from Bradford's local authority.

And that's pretty remarkable... because this is what Bryson had to say about my home city in his book:
'Bradford's role in life is to make every place else in the world look better in comparison, and it does this very well. Nowhere on this trip would I see a city more palpably forlorn... nobody wants to live in Bradford, and who can blame them?'

And yet, are we Bradfordians bitter? Do we plan to boil Bryson alive in a vat of the curry for which the city is justly renowned? Hardly.

Councillor King has described 'Notes From A Small Island' as
'a brilliant book'

and added:
'I laughed until I cried. Even the attack on Bradford was done in a humorous way. But I shall certainly be showing him the other side of the city. I'm not going to try to talk him out of what he said, but to show him that there are two sides to every coin.'

So, how good a writer is Bill Bryson? He's so good that he can damn a place as the absolute epitome of hell on earth, and then be given a civic reception when he returns, because to read him is to love him. If you've never encountered any of his books, I implore you to get hold of one at the earliest possible opportunity.

Not to do so would be... well, palpably forlorn.

Ormondroyd

04.12.00. Front Page

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