Eric Clapton

I just happened to check the Olympic medals total - and though I do not care much about the winter Olympics and have seen little of it, still, my jaw dropped: Germany first, Norway second, Canada THIRD, United States FOURTH, France fifth, Sweden sixth.

How is this possible, when we have a tenth the population of the U.S.? Still, there it is. My nationalism surges. Woo hoo! Go Canucks go!

It's still winter here. Much snow and ice. I was going to go to a spectacular documentary called Spettaculo today, and didn't. Hard to get out. It's time for snoring in the cave.

Watched a documentary about Eric Clapton on TV, however - mon dieu, what a life. Through the crazy Sixties, a brilliant young man addicted to black American blues, unusual in England; the tragedy of his obsession with Patti Boyd, who happened to be his best friend George Harrison's wife - how he wrote an entire album for her, including the famous "Layla," and still she did not leave her husband. By the time she did, Clapton was an alcoholic and drug addict, so their time together was misery. And then he got it together, got sober for his beautiful baby son Conor, only to have the boy fall out of a window of a New York high rise and die. The grief is unbearable, only he bears it as he does best, with a hauntingly beautiful song. Finally he emerges, sober and happy with a wife and new family, and a clinic he has established for addicts.

What they make clear is that Clapton was haunted by his past. At the age of 9 or 10, he learned that the woman he thought was his mother was in fact his grandmother; his mother had left the baby behind and gone to Canada. She returns infrequently into his life and does a horrible job, leaving him wounded and angry. Voila - a young man who spends his life making love to a guitar and adoring inaccessible or inappropriate women. Until, at last, he doesn't.

When I saw the Beatles in June 1965 in Paris, the warmup act was the Yardbirds. But Eric Clapton had just a few months before quit. I saw the talentless Jeff Beck and Jimmy Paige instead. LOL.

All this is forefront in my mind because I had a meeting today with fellow Macca lover Lisa Roy at the Miles Nadal JCC. We so enjoyed working together on the powerpoint presentation and talk I did there last November about my great-grandfather that we're doing it again - this time about my life as a Beatlemaniac, in conjunction with my memoir. I am talking there May 24, and there WILL BE MUSIC.

Tomorrow my friend John comes and starts smashing through walls to see what's there. The beginning of the long journey to something new in this house. Going under.