26 April 1910, 1986, 2005

It’s my 57th birthday today.

Why, thank you!

On the one hand, I don’t feel especially old, just slightly unfit and middle-aged as usual. On the other, it’s extraordinary to think that someone who had their 57th birthday on the day I was born would themselves have been born in 1910.

Such a person is the fantastically glamorous Chinese actress Ruan Lingyu, 阮玲玉, also known as Lily Chen, a major star of the Shanghai silent movie scene around 1930. Here she is in her 1931 hit Love and Duty, long believed lost until the early 1990s.

Sadly she was not able to celebrate her 57th birthday in 1967, because she died aged 24 in 1935.

Also born on 26 April 1910 and also very big in his own country’s movie industry, Tomoyuki Tanaka, 田中友幸, is generally recognised as the creator of the Godzilla franchise. His 1967 film King Kong Escapes features an evil robot double of King Kong invented – I am not making this up – by the sinister Dr Who.

The day I was born was also the 57th birthday of Swedish composer Erland von Koch. In 1967 he was appointed to the Order of Vasa, and also published the first version of his string orchestra piece Arioso:

The Bosnian writer Meša Selimović was also born on 26 April 1910. His most famous novel, Death and the Dervish, was published in 1966; he followed it up in 1967 with a potted history of Serbian orthography and language standardisation, Za i protiv Vuka.

The guy in the book cover is Vuk Karadžić, not Meša Selimović

See also Austrian composer Ernst Tittel, Dutch soldier and politician Herman Vos, Danish actor Else Petersen, Swedish actor Solveig Hedengran, and American psychiatrist Otto Will.

57 is of course three times nineteen, and I am reflecting on things that I did on my 19th and 38th birthdays. On my 19th birthday in 1986, I was working on an archaeology site in Germany, getting to grips with a profession that in truth I never really wanted to profess.

More notoriously, 26 April 1986 was the day that the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in Ukraine. I have worried off and on since then about the potential effects of the radiation cloud drifting across Germany as I did my outdoor work, but 38 years on I appear to have lived to tell the tale.

I celebrated my 38th birthday on 26 April 2005 by speaking at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Belgian Senate. Here I am with my new intern J (originally from Pittsburgh but of Ukrainian/Russian heritage) waiting in the wings:

J now lives in Kosovo, and I caught up with her 15 years later in 2019, by which time she was now 38, the same age as me in the photo above.

Incidentally I take the 38 bus from Central Station to my office in Brussels.

I will hope to come back to this post in 2043 on my 76th birthday, and review the careers of people born in 26 April 1891!

Andrée Tainsy, 1911-2004

A brief look at one particular year in the career of Belgian actor Andrée Tainsy, born in Etterbeek 112 years ago today, on 26 April 1911. She trained in Paris in the mid-1930s where she fell in love with the singer Jane Bathori, thirty-four years older; they stayed together until Jane’s death in 1970. Together they fled the Nazis to Argentina, where they set up a French theater in exile; back in Paris after the war, Andrée kept acting until the end of her life (she lived to be 93). She appears uncredited in Woody Allen’s Love and Death.

In 1967, the year that she turned 56, Andrée Tainsy was a well established character actor in France, and thanks to IMDB we know what TV shows she appeared in. Her big project that year was a French TV version of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, shown on 24 October, where she plays Hedda’s husband’s aunt Julie.

She also appeared on 18 July 1967 in an episode of a historical crime docudrama series, En votre âme et conscience, as Anne Dumollard, wife and accomplice of the nineteenth-century serial killer Martin Dumollard.

Here she is in video, in an episode of the show Allô police, shown on 20 June, where she plays a grumpy concierge (from 12:06):

https://youtu.be/0gxjhlRRwOM?t=726

I have a smaller picture of her from one more crime show episode that she filmed that year, as the dodgy nanny in a kidnap story from Malican père et fils, shown on 24 July:

I’m posting this because I was born on Andrée Tainsy’s 56th birthday in 1967, and today is my 56th birthday. I think she wore her years well, and I hope I have the energy to keep going until I am 93!

I think I prefer her to another figure born on the same day, Paul Verner, who became the second most important man in the Communist regime of East Germany. Here he is receiving a delegation of the Free German Youth in 1967:

More positively, the noted photographer Max Yavno was also born on 26 April 1911. Here is his photograph “California Street”, from 1967:

Also born on that day: minor Belgian politician Werner Marchand, Dutch-American artist Kurt Sluizer, Austrian archaeologist Gilbert Trathnigg, Corsican criminal Auguste Ricord, American ecologist Frank Edwin Egler, and Canadian-American journalist A.H. Raskin.

26 April 1911 was also the day that Albanian chieftains declared independence in the northern village of Orosh, and Australians rejected two referendums on strengthening their federal government. The F.A. Cup Final, replayed after a draw on 22 April, was won 1-0 by Bradford City, beating Newcastle United. Aren’t you glad you know that?

57(ish) countries in 56 years

(Updated from here.)

I have been fortunate enough to travel to many places. In fact, the number of countries I have been to has generally kept pace with my calendar age. Today seems like a day to reflect on the places I have been, in seven-year cycles.

I was born in Belfast, and celebrated my 7th birthday in Washington DC. In the meantime I had also been to the Republic of Ireland, Italy, France and Canada, for a total of 6 countries before my 7th birthday.

By 1981, we had had family summer holidays in Bulgaria, Romania, Malta, Spain (with a side trip to Andorra), and we lived for a year in the Netherlands with side trips to Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Yugoslavia as it then was (Ljubljana and Zagreb), Switzerland and Liechtenstein. That got me to 19 countries by the time I turned 14.

By 1988, I had added only three small countries to the list – Monaco and San Marino in our 1981 family summer holiday, and the Vatican City while inter-railing with my then girlfriend in 1986 – for a total of 22 countries by the time I turned 21.

By 1995, Yugoslavia had split up, giving me an extra notch for the earlier visit to Zagreb and Ljubljana which were now in separate countries; I’d had a Nordic trip to Finland in 1990 with my sister, going overland via Denmark and Sweden with a side trip across the water to Estonia (then still part of the USSR); I went to Portugal with another girlfriend, and then to Cyprus on honeymoon when I married her, which all got me to 29 countries by the time I turned 28.

By 2002, I’d added what were then the other successor states of the former Yugoslavia – Bosnia/Herzegovina (where I lived in 1997-8), Serbia/Montenegro (Serbia in 1998, Kosovo in 2000 and Montenegro in January 2002), and Macedonia, now North Macedonia (first visited in 1997, and I love going back – my favourite of the Balkan countries). I’d also visited Hungary, Greece, the Czech Republic, Moldova, and Israel, with a foot into the territories not internationally recognised as part of Israel. So that takes me to 37 or 38 countries, as they then were, by my 35th birthday.

By April 2009, I had added the three South Caucasus countries – Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – also Russia and Ukraine, and the last South-East European gaps, Albania and Turkey, and Slovakia for extras. In addition, the independence of Montenegro (2006) and Kosovo (2008) gave me another two. So that takes me to 47 or 48 by the time I turned 42.

The following year added another four, as my trips to South Sudan (then part of Sudan) took me through Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. (I have never been to the northern part of what was then Sudan, so I get no extra point for South Sudan’s independence in 2011.) I went to Poland for the first time in 2013, and 2014 brought business trips to Iraq and Nigeria. So as of my 49th birthday, I had been to 54 or 55 countries.

The last seven years (especially the last three) have seen fewer additions to the list. I went to South Africa in 2017 and Latvia in 2018. So as of today, my tally is either equal to my calendar age, 56, or still one ahead on 57 if I’m allowed to count the Latrun salient and/or East Jerusalem. (I am not tallying the TRNC, or the Green Line, separately from the rest of Cyprus, for technical reasons.)

I still have not been to four European countries – Iceland, Norway, Lithuania and Belarus. I’ve never been to Latin America or the Caribbean, or to Africa outside Nigeria, South Africa and the eastern cluster, or to Asia apart from three countries in the Middle East, let alone the Pacific. But I hope I will have a few more years to put some of that right.

As I landed in Azerbaijan for the first time in May 2004 in the company of my then boss, I mentioned to him that it was my 41st country. He growled that he was roughly 100 ahead of me. I suspect that he still is.

Happy birthday to me (and A.E. van Vogt)

As the years go by it gets ever easier to identify people who share my birthday, down to the year as well as the day. The SF Encyclopedia has one such list, including Jon Pertwee’s father Roland (1885), Morris West (1916), Luděk Pešek (1919), Donald Cotton (1928), Charles Platt (1945), and the dubious case of William Shakespeare, who was baptised on this day in 1564 but traditionally born three days earlier.

However, this year I’m going to concentrate on the Canadian/American writer A.E. van Vogt. I’m not a massive fan of his writing (see a redemptive reading here), and he certainly backed the wrong horse by getting involved with dianetics, but the interesting thing for my purposes is that he was born on 26 April 1912, and was therefore celebrating his 55th birthday on the day that I was born on another continent; today I celebrate my own 55th birthday.

He did not write all that much after 1950, though he successfully recycled and expanded previous short fiction for book-length publication up until quite late in the day. He also got a $50,000 out of court settlement from the producers of Alien, after alleging that they had ripped off his plots.

I’ve been trying to find a photograph of him from around 1967, and have not quite succeeded – most surviving pictures come either from earlier, when he was more active, or later, when more people were taking photographs that ended up digitised. I think he’s in his late 50s, and not looking bad, in this one, which seemed the closest to the right date.

He lived to 2000, and if I make it to 2055 I’ll be happy. (I hope.) You can get his books here.