They’ll shoot anybody in USA. Just to prove it, someone gunned down Martin Luther King—the man that no one in their right mind would have wanted to shoot, but USA has no shortage of nutters.
    On the night he died, I had a blind date, arranged by Bernie Evans and his wife from the nurse’s billet that she inhabited. The girl was a rather sweet thing named Jodie Blackman, short and black-haired and with a sexy little crooked smile. She was very sweet, hardly at all the sort of girl who ought to fall into the hands of a mad animal just returned from Vietnam.
    We went to dinner and the movies on a double date and saw The Yellow Submarine which was ironic since it starred someone else that ought not to have been shot in American but was—John Lennon. On the way back, Bernie stopped for petrol and his wife (Julie?) went to the loo and I had Jodie Blackman alone in the back seat.
    “Show us yer tits,” I snarled at her.
    She whipped her top up for a glorious moment of perfect curves and startling nipples and then down again.
    I mauled her. “Is that all I get?”
    “You want more, ask more nicely,” she smiled.
    She kissed back and was very warm and allowed herself to be groped through he clothes. But that was all. Still it was enough to encourage me to ask for a second date.
    This time we went to the movies alone and saw The Fearless Vampire Killers, a terrible unfunny comedy but how could it have been otherwise when directed by such a humourless man as Roman Polanski. Really it was a star vehicle for his wife, Sharon Tate, who of course was soon to be slaughtered by Charles Manson and his female bloodslaves.  

We’re out there in Monterey again and a coastal ranch where the Tiffin family are doing it hard in John Steinbeck’s slight novel, The Red Pony. You can just tell that pony is going to die from the first page, and the boy (Tom) will learn valuable lessions in life, as will his father, whereas, naturally, there is nothing in the wide world you can teach his mom. Trouble is, dad becomes jealous when it seems his son has a greater attachment to the ramrod (a real cowboy) than to his dad, who suspects that ranchin’ was a big mistake and maybe they ought go back to the city. The doomed pony inadvertently sorts it all out.
    It makes you wonder about Steinbeck though—writing a three hankie job for boys who, of course, are not the least bit interested in such weepy stuff and anyway use their sleeves. It must have been far too long since Johnno was a boy, or maybe he thought he was really a girl, or that we all were. I’d be easier to hate if it wasn’t so bloody well written, but at least it’s short.