Mark Speight

What is considered to be front page news nowadays here in the UK completely blows my mind.

Last Monday, the body of a children's tv presenter was found hanging at Paddington railway station.

Mark Speight's story was extremely heartbreaking. Speight is one of the most well known TV presenters in the UK after presenting the long running childrens art show "SMart". He met his fiancee, Natasha Collins when she co- presented a show with him entitled "See it, Saw it" in 2000 and they were engaged in 2005.

On the 3rd January 2008, Speight phoned the police and ambulance after he found Collins dead in the bath after she had ingested a lethal cocktail of cocaine, vodka, sleeping pills and wine with 60% burns on her body from scalding water. He was subsequently arrested then released after police said he wasn't a suspect. The coroner gave a verdict of "death by misadventure".

He disappeared at the beginning of april and was found dead on the 14th.
He was depressed and signs point to the fact that he had commited suicide by hanging.

Speight loved Collins so much that he couldn't live without her.

There was hardly any news coverage on this. I don't think it even made a front page of any of the papers. Considering that there was so much media coverage when he was arrested, it would have made sense for there to be coverage when he passed. But this isn`t the case. And if you google his name, the only article that comes up is the one from the Independant while many appear from the inquest.

May he rest in peace.

BROWN GIRL IN THE RING...

If you are reading this blog, I imagine you know what I look like.

And you should know what Parminder Nagra (pictured below) looks like.. Who is that, I hear you cry? She is the English actress in ER and star of the film "Bend It Like Beckham". The English Actress of Indian descent.

When working as a receptionist, and when I still had black hair, everytime that damn film was shown on tv, I would get the "You know who you look like?" question from patients for a week. I would smile politely, and reply, "no, who?" pretending that I had no idea what was coming..
"OH that actress.. you know.. the one in that film?"
"Bend It Like Beckham?" I would ask, knowing full well that it was the answer.
"YES! THATS IT!" would always be their reply, always accompanied with a satisfied grin.

This happened a couple of times when I was in America as well, but people used the ER connection instead.

While "Thank You," was usually my substandard response, what I actually wanted to say was this:
"Yo. While I am quite flattered about the comparison, as I think the girl is a babe, I look nothing like her. The only similarity between myself and this girls looks are that we both have big eyes, are brown and have black hair. BUT my skin tone is different to hers, my face shape, eye shape, nose shape, in fact everything about my face looks nothing like hers. Like I said, she's a babe, AND she bags all the hot dudes in the show (minus the army medic dude. He wasn't my type), so, you know, awesome. But not all brown girls with english accents look the same.".

I never did though. One day....



On a completely different note, I have been singing "Brown Girl in The Ring" since I was a little kid, as it was a song that was on a Boney M tape that my father used to play to me when I was really young, and it was not till today that I knew where the song came from.