As you know I often have a song going through my head and, when it comes to music, I have some guilty pleasures. One of these is John Denver. I suppose as a so called serious music lover I shouldn't like Denver and certainly I don't embrace much of his music. But there are certainly songs of his that resonate with me. Songs like Annie's Song for obvious reasons.
And the one that has been going through my head for a few days is "Flying For Me"
"Well I guess that you probably know by now
I was one who wanted to fly
I wanted to ride on that arrow of fire right up into heaven
And I wanted to go for every man
Every child, every mother of children
I wanted to carry the dreams of all people right up to the stars."
There's a story behind this song. Does the name Christa McAuliffe mean anything to you? Probably not.
McAuliffe was a teacher who was killed when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up shortly after take off. There were 11,000 applications for that trip to fly into space. One of the others was John Denver. McAuliffe was aiming to teach a couple of lessons from space. NASA hoped that sending a teacher into space would increase public interest in the Space Shuttle programme. Sadly it probably had the opposite effect.
Seventy three seconds into the flight at an altitude of 48,000 feet the shuttle broke apart, killing all seven crew members. This was back in 1986 when McAuliffe was 37 years of age.
Part of the tragedy of this event was the fact that many schoolchildren were watching the event live and must have been severely traumatised.
Denver's song title is poignant as he says "they were flying for me." He ends the song with the following:
"Given the chance to dream, it can be done
The promise of tomorrow is real
Children of spaceship Earth
The future belongs to us all."
There was a huge amount of irony in the fact that John Denver (real name Henry John Deutschendorf) was himself killed in an air crash in 1997.
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Just a few days after the death of Jimmy Greaves we have lost another hero of the 1966 World Cup winning squad. Roger Hunt has died at the age of 83 and that just leaves three of the squad still alive. I wonder if you can name them.
They are Sir Bobby Charlton, Sir Geoff Hurst and George Cohen. Surely every member of that squad should have been knighted. It still remains the only time that an England football team has won a major international tournament.
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More photos today of our awayday to Lavenham and the Beth Chatto Gardens.
Beth Chatto was an English garden designer and author probably best known for the gardens which surrounded her own home at Elmstead Market in Essex. She firmly believed that plants would thrive providing they were placed in the right circumstances. Her mantra was "The right plant in the right place."
She regularly designed gardens and won 10 consecutive gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show.
The remarkable thing about her garden in Essex is that the soil was considered too dry in places and too wet in others. The whole area had been allowed to grow wild until Beth decided otherwise and today the results are there for everyone to see.