The Four Musketeers – Blood and Porridge

July 22, 2023

People who stunted my development

© The Mirisch Company / United Artists

I read recently that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – better and less grandiosely known as the folk who dole out the Oscars every year – are currently considering creating a new Oscar that will honour the work of the movie industry’s stunt performers. A yearly award for the film featuring the best stunt-work looks a real possibility thanks to the efforts of Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick series (2014-23). He commented last month, “We’ve been meeting with members of the Academy and actually having these conversations… Everybody on both sides wants this to happen. They want stunts at the Oscars. It’s going to happen.”

Also creating a buzz lately about stunt-work – proper, practical stunts carried out by real people, as opposed to artificial action-sequences created with cartoony, shit-looking Computer-Generated Imagery – has been the trailer for the new Mission Impossible movie. This is framed by a stunt involving the world’s most famous scientologist in which he deliberately barrels off a very high cliff. The last person to do this so spectacularly was Roger Moore – or more accurately, stuntman Rick Sylvester – in the pre-credits sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me (1978).

Anyway, now seems an opportune time to dust down and repost this piece about my favourite practitioners of the art of stunt-work, which originally saw the light of day in 2018.

In my boyhood, there were no personal computers, video games or Internet to keep me inside the house. For amusement, I had to go outside and play in a variety of locations that, thinking about it now, were a wee bit dangerous – at roadsides and riversides, in derelict buildings and old sheds, and on any roof or in any treetop I managed to climb up to. I suppose many kids in the 1970s played in places like those, but I had an advantage. I lived on a farm, which was full of machinery sheds, hay-sheds, grain stores, slurry pits, silage pits, workshops and outhouses. It was also right next to a river and a busy road. Perhaps it was this potential for injury and death in my play-area that prompted me, like most pre-pubescent males in the 1970s, to resolve that when I grew up I was going to be a film stuntman.

Accordingly, when I went fishing one day at the age of nine and fell off the riverbank, into the river, the way I recounted the mishap to my school-mates later made it sound like how Paul Newman and Robert Redford had famously jumped off the cliff and into the river in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). This feat of derring-do had actually been performed by the stuntmen Howard Curtis and Micky Gilbert. To be honest, the bank I fell off was only two feet above the water, and the water itself was only three feet deep, but in situations like these you’re allowed to use your imagination.

In fact, I became much less enamoured with action-movie stars when it occurred to me that, most of the time, they didn’t perform the breath-taking stunts featured in their films. Those were done by unsung stuntmen and stuntwomen, who therefore were the people I should admire. If I’d been on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, with my autograph book, I think I would have ignored Harrison Ford and made a beeline instead for stuntmen Vic Armstrong and the late Terry Richards. And that’s a big reason why I despise the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day, which made heavy use of CGI during its action scenes. It seemed a betrayal of all the stunt-work that’d distinguished the Bond movies during their previous 40-year history and an insult to all the people who’d contributed to that stunt-work. (By my count, Armstrong and Richards both worked on six official Bond movies, and each had one ‘rogue’ 007 production to their names too – Armstrong with 1983’s Never Say Never Again, Richards with 1967’s Casino Royale.)

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favourite stunt performers throughout history….

© Walter Wanger Productions / United Artists

Born to a US ranching family in 1895, Yakima Canutt became a world-champion rodeo rider and by 1923 was involved in the fledgling motion-picture industry, inevitably playing cowboys in westerns. However, he’d had his voice ravaged by flu during a two-year stint with the US Navy and he realised he couldn’t continue as an actor when silent films gave way to the talkies, and so he started to specialise in stunt-work. Canutt ended up as stunt double for John Wayne, who claimed to have got many of his famous cowboy mannerisms – the strut, the drawl – from him. As a cowboy, after all, Canutt was the real deal.

His most famous stunt is one he performed in 1939’s Stagecoach, in which he leaps onto a team of horses pulling the titular stagecoach, falls between them, gets dragged along and then disappears under the stagecoach itself. This inspired the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is dragged beneath a German truck. Canutt later became a second-unit director and staged the chariot race in 1959’s Ben Hur. And despite sustaining injuries that required plastic surgery on at least two occasions, he lived to the ripe old age of 90.

Bud Ekins was a champion motorcyclist as well as a stuntman. It was he – not Steve McQueen, as was believed for a long time – who rode the Triumph TR6 Trophy motorbike near the end of 1963’s The Great Escape, when McQueen’s character, pursued by half the German army, attempts to leap the giant fence that separates him from Switzerland. (The famously petrol-headed McQueen did ride the motorbike during the preceding chase and was keen to perform the jump himself, but the filmmakers talked him out of it.) That alone earns Ekins a place in my Stuntmen Hall of Fame, but he went on to do lots of other cool stuff. He worked with McQueen again in Bullitt (1968), driving that film’s iconic Ford Mustang 390 GT, and he was also involved in Diamonds are Forever (1970), Race with the Devil (1975), Sorcerer (1977) and The Blues Brothers (1980).

Every time I’m on board a cable car and spot another cable car approaching from the opposite direction, I wonder if I’ll see Alf Joint perform a suicidal leap from the roof of one car onto the roof of the other – for Joint was the stuntman who doubled for Richard Burton in 1967’s Where Eagles Dare when Burton’s character had to hop cable cars close to the fearsome Schloss Adler, the mountaintop stronghold of the SS. Like many a great British stuntman, Joint’s CV is a roll-call of Bond movies (he made two), Star Wars movies (one) and Superman movies (three). He doubled for Eric Porter, playing Professor Moriarty in the acclaimed 1980s TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, when the character plunged to his doom at the Reichenbach Falls; and for Lee Remick in The Omen (1976), presumably during the sequence when Remick is pushed out of a hospital window and crashes through the roof of an ambulance passing below.

© Winkast Film Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I also remember Joint performing a memorable stunt during the adverts for Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, which ran on TV from 1968 to 2003 (though I hear they were revived a few years ago). These featured the Milk Tray man, a Bondian character who kept risking life and limb in order to deliver boxes of the chocolates to a beautiful lady, with the tagline being: “And all because… the lady loves Milk Tray.” I can’t recall if it was the same lady receiving all the chocolates in all the adverts – if it was, the poor woman must have developed type 2 diabetes by 2003. Anyway, Joint did the Milk Tray man’s dive off a vertiginous cliff, into a shark-infested sea, in perhaps the most famous of these adverts in 1972.

Also involved in Where Eagles Dare was Eddie Powell, a stuntman who seemed to divide his time between James Bond movies – he made ten official ones, plus Never Say Never Again – and Hammer Films, where he was a stunt double for Christopher Lee in movies like The Mummy (1959), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976). For that last film, he also did a ‘full body burn’ stunt during a scene where satanic forces cause Anthony Valentine to spontaneously combust inside a church. In addition, Hammer gave him a few acting credits, predictably eccentric ones, such as the lumbering, bandaged monster in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and the half-man, half-beast Goat of Mendes conjured up at a witches’ sabbat in The Devil Rides Out (1968).

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

Later in his career, Powell performed stunts as the titular, drooling, acid-blooded, multi-mouthed beastie in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). For instance, he took part in the first film’s engine-room scene where the alien swoops down on the hapless Harry Dean Stanton.

Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t mention William Hobbs here as he wasn’t exactly a stuntman. He was a fight choreographer, more precisely a sword-fight choreographer, and his work enlivened many a swashbuckler over the years. He directed the swordplay in The Three Musketeers (1973) and Four Musketeers (1974) and presumably had the difficult task of restraining Oliver Reed, who from all accounts threw himself into the movies’ fight scenes with the enthusiasm of a blade-wielding Whirling Dervish. He also worked on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), for which he devised the samurai fights. I generally can’t stand the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production of Flash Gordon, but the sequence where Sam Jones fights Timothy Dalton on a platform while spikes erupt at random points and at random moments through its floor, again overseen by Hobbs, is one of the film’s few good parts. Near the end of his life he was still working, on TV, arranging fights for Game of Thrones (2011-19).

Actually, you can see Hobbs in action in this instalment of the long-running TV show This is Your Life (1955-2007), rehearsing a gruelling-looking swordfight with Christopher Lee just before Eamonn Andrews surprises Lee and shepherds him off to a TV studio for a star-studded retrospective of his career. (I usually found This is Your Life tacky and maudlin, but I thought this one was fascinating because, besides Lee and Hobbs, it corrals such movie legends as Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and the afore-mentioned Oliver Reed together under one roof.)

© Troublemaker Studios / Dimension Films

And now for a lady, the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who doubled for Lucy Lawless in the Xena: Warrior Princess TV show and for Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) involved a stunt where a shotgun blast hurled Bell backwards – this did so much damage to her ribs and wrist that she spent months recovering from it. But there were clearly no hard feelings between Bell and Tarantino because for his next movie, 2007’s Death Proof, he cast her as herself. She plays a movie stuntwoman – called Zoe Bell – who turns the tables on Kurt Russell’s car-driving serial killer. Tarantino shares my disdain for CGI and insisted that all the vehicular action seen in Death Proof was the real deal, including a ‘ship’s mast’ stunt where Bell straddles the hood of a speeding Dodge Challenger R/T with only a couple of straps to hang onto. Since then, she’s done more gigs for Tarantino, as a stuntwoman in Inglourious Basterds (2009), as an actress in Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2016), and as both in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Finally, no roundup of my favourite stuntmen would be complete without mention of Vic Armstrong, who’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s busiest stunt double. His brother Andy, his wife Wendy, and a half-dozen members of the younger generation of his family all work in the stunt / special-effects business too, which must make the Armstrongs the Corleones of the stunt-world.

As well as seven official and unofficial Bonds, his filmography includes three Indiana Joneses and three Supermen, plus a Rambo, Terminator, Omen, Conan and Mission Impossible. He served not only as Harrison Ford’s stunt double while he played Indiana Jones, but also in Blade Runner (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Frantic (1988) and Patriot Games (1992). Indeed, back in his youth, his resemblance to the star was so striking that Ford once quipped to him, “If you learn to talk, I’m in deep trouble.”

© Titan Books

February 21, 2023February 21, 2023

When Raquel ruled

© 20^th Century Fox

From the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Raquel Welch was probably the cinematic sex symbol as far as unreconstructed blokes in the Anglosphere were concerned – blokes who were a bit intimidated by the exoticness and general foreignness of, say, Brigitte Bardot or Ursula Andress. Welch, who sadly died last week at the age of 82, was Chicago born but raised in San Diego. Her time in the latter location seemed to imbue her with a healthy, clean-cut Californian glow that was an obvious physical advantage to her in her film roles. Cerebrally, though, she didn’t win a lot of respect from her (mostly male) peers. This sorry state-of-affairs was epitomised by some advice that Don Chaffey, director of One Million Years BC (1966), offered her early on in that movie’s filming. Her function, he explained, was not to think, but merely to run from one rock to another.

I should say that when Raquel Welch was at the height of her popularity, I was too young to actually fancy her. Instead, I just remember her as a talismanic presence in a number of movies that I found incredibly enjoyable at the time and that have stayed in my memory during the decades since. Here are my half-dozen favourites that showcase the late, great Ms Welch.

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

In this science fiction epic, Welch plays Cora Peterson, technical assistant to a brain surgeon (Arthur Kennedy) and member of a medical team who are miniatured in a submarine and injected into the bloodstream of a seriously injured scientist. Why? Well, there’s a blood clot lodged deep in his brain that can’t be reached on an operating table, and the only option is to have miniature people inside him zapping the pesky clot to buggery with a laser beam. Which makes sense.

© 20^th Century Fox

As the scientist is a leading expert in the field of miniaturisation, which apparently is being developed on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it’s no surprise when it transpires that the Soviets have put a secret agent on board the submarine to sabotage the mission. Neither is it a surprise when this secret agent turns out to be a character played by the reliably-twitchy Donald Pleasence. Actually, Pleasence’s death-scene, in which he falls victim to a hungry white blood-cell, is worth the price of admission alone.

Yes, it’s all very silly. In fact, when he wrote the film’s novelisation, the respected sci-fi author and professor of biochemistry Isaac Asimov tied himself in knots trying to make its plot seem more scientifically feasible. But with imaginative sets representing the inside of the human body, and decent special effects depicting the movements of the cast and their submarine within this strange micro-verse, and capable direction by underrated filmmaker Richard Fleischer, it’s a piece of hokum that’s both entertaining and memorable.

One Million Years BC (1966)

To be fair to director Don Chaffey, running from rock to rock was pretty much all that Welch, as the cavewoman Loana, and John Richardson as her caveman beau Tumak, needed to do for the duration of One Million Years BC, whilst trying to escape the claws and fangs of legendary special-effects man Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion-animation dinosaurs. The film, made by Hammer Films, is even sillier than Fantastic Voyage. Not scripted with much attention to paleontological science, it depicts Welch, Richardson and the rest of the human cast existing alongside monster-lizards in the Calabrian Stage of the Pleistocene Epoch. Nonetheless, Harryhausen’s splendid work transforms it into pulp-art and its poster, with Welch standing imposingly in a fur bikini, became one of the great cinematic images of the 1960s. It’s the last poster, for instance, on the wall of Tim Robbins’ cell in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), sneakily concealing the tunnel that he’s digging out of the place.

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts

In the late 1990s, while I was living in Edinburgh, Ray Harryhausen appeared one day at the (now sadly defunct) Lumiere Cinema to give a talk about his movie-making career. I attended, and I recall the queue that formed afterwards at Harryhausen’s table as people got him to autograph items related to his films. Many of these were posters and video cassettes of One Million Years BC and I remember him demanding, “Did you buy these because of my dinosaurs or because Raquel Welch is on the cover in a fur bikini?”

Bedazzled (1967)

This being the late 1960s, it was inevitable that Welch would appear in a number of self-consciously groovy, achingly unfunny swinging-sixties comedy-movies, such as Leslie H. Martinson’s Fathom (1967) and Joseph McGrath’s The Magic Christian (1969). However, I do like Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled, a comic retelling of the Faust story with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Cook is the devil, trying to ensnare the soul of the hapless Moore, and he enlists the Seven Deadly Sins to help him. Welch, as Lust, is definitely the most fetching of the sins – not that she has much competition, considering that, for instance, Barry Humphries plays Envy.

By the way – a shout-out for Bedazzled’s lovely opening credits, orchestrated by Maurice Binder and accompanied by Moore’s brassy but also subtly-melancholic theme music.

© 20^th Century Fox

Bandolero (1968)

God, when I was a western-daft 10-year-old, I loved Bandolero. Directed by seemingly inexhaustible western-movie director Andrew V. McLaglen, it contained everything I could have hoped for – action, humour, bank robberies, ghost towns, a gang of outlaws, a rival gang (consisting of bloodthirsty Mexican desperadoes, the bandoleros of the title), a tenacious sheriff and his posse, and a climactic shoot-out where (nearly) everyone gets killed. The cast is excellent too. In addition to Welch, there’s Dean Martin and James Stewart as the brothers leading the outlaws, the ever-reliable George Kennedy as the sheriff, and a supporting cast of familiar faces like Andrew Prine, Will Greer and Denver Pyle. You even get a glimpse of former Tarzan actor Jock Mahoney, playing Welch’s quickly-killed-off husband.

All right, even at the age of 10, I knew Bandolero was pushing it a bit to have us believe that Dean Martin and James Stewart could be siblings. Still, it seemed more credible than another western I saw at the same time, The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), which posited Dean Martin and John Wayne as siblings.

Hannie Caulder (1971)

Another western and a rare beast indeed, a British-made western. It’s immeasurably better than other British efforts in the genre, such as Michael Winner’s dreadful Chatto’s Land (1972) or, gulp, Carry On Cowboy (1965). And unlike Bandolero, which had Welch as a damsel in distress, Hannie Caulder has her playing a proactive, implacable female Clint Eastwood-type, seeking revenge on the three outlaw scumbags who raped her and murdered her husband.

Admittedly, the tone of Hannie Caulder is badly fractured. The villains who behave so heinously towards Welch in the movie’s early stages are otherwise portrayed as a trio of comic bumblers in the tradition of the Three Stooges, and the humour feels jarring. But if you can get past that, you’ll enjoy a cast that’s even better than the cast of Bandolero. Essaying the villains are legendary character actors Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin and Jack Elam, Robert Culp turns up as a bounty hunter trying to help Welch out, and Northern Irish actor Stephen Boyd, one of Welch’s Fantastic Voyage co-stars, makes a cameo as a mysterious preacher. The fact that Hannie Caulder was made by Tigon Films, a company more famous for its horror movies like Witchfinder General (1968) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), perhaps accounts for producer Tony Tenser casting Christopher Lee as the gunsmith who provides Welch with the customised weapon necessary for taking down her antagonists. There’s even room for Diana Dors, a sex symbol from an earlier era, playing the mistress of a bordello adept at battering obnoxious customers with her frilly umbrella.

Almost inevitably, Hannie Caulder is much-loved by Quentin Tarantino, who cites it as an influence on his Kill Bill movies (2003-4).

The Three / Four Musketeers (1973-74)

This double-movie adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel was directed by Richard Lester, the man who helmed the two comedic Beatles movies in the 1960s. He’d even, at one point, considered making a film where the Fab Four played the musketeers. The Three and Four Musketeers are laced with many of Lester’s comic touches, often involving his regular collaborator Roy Kinnear, and Spike Milligan, who appears in the first film as Welch’s husband – surely the unlikeliest husband she was ever paired with onscreen. Welch herself shows good comic talent, for example, at the end of The Three Musketeers where she gets knocked over by a jousting dummy. At the same time, the films’ action sequences, orchestrated by the great sword-fight choreographer William Hobbs, look unnervingly realistic. They come across as haphazard, exhausting and, yes, dangerous. With Lester’s humour and Hobbs’ authenticity, then, the films shouldn’t work… But somehow, they do.

In my mind, however, what makes these the best cinematic version of Dumas’ book is the fact that they’re packed with 1970s cinematic icons – Welch as heroine Constance Bonacieux, Michael York as hero d’Artagnan, Faye Dunaway as the villainous Milady, Christopher Lee as the equally villainous Rochefort, Charlton Heston as the equally, equally villainous Cardinal Richelieu, Oliver Reed as the brooding and frankly Oliver Reed-like Athos… And so on. Welch appeared in a few more films afterwards, but none were especially memorable and her time as English-language cinema’s number-one female pin-up had evidently passed. But she could have done much worse than step out of the limelight with the Musketeers movies.

March 9, 2021April 4, 2021

The holiest relic in Peebles

I’ve not had time to write much on this blog recently because of my current work commitments. Unfortunately, in this era of Covid-19-imposed confinement, none of this work involves me moving away from the laptop on the desk in a corner of my bedroom. Moreover, because I’ve had quite a few short stories published recently under the pseudonyms of Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster, I’m also trying to keep momentum going with those and am devoting additional time to writing, revising and submitting short fiction.

In the meantime, in the absence of new blog entries, here’s a reposting of something I wrote for this blog in 2014. It seemed to get an enthusiastic response at the time and, indeed, I think someone made the entry into a poster that was put on the wall of – where else? – the Pub in Valetta. Alas, since this was written, Peter Cassidy, the then-owner of the Crown Hotel, has passed away. Meanwhile, I assume that the chair is still there.

Certain towns and cities around the world can boast of having ancient and holy relics. In the Christian world, for example, Sienna has the mummified head of Saint Catherine in its Basilica Cateriniana San Domenico. Paris has what is alleged to be the crown of thorns worn by Christ at his crucifixion in its Notre Dame Cathedral. And in Rome’s Basilica di Santa Croce, you can see part of the index finger of Saint Thomas, the finger that as a sceptical disciple he poked into the wound in the side of the resurrected Christ to check if it was real. Some places have relics so special that they are said to have healing or protective powers. Naples, for instance, is lucky enough to have in its city cathedral the dried blood of St Januarius, which protects it from disasters like earthquakes and plagues.

However, my hometown of Peebles in the south of Scotland contains surely the most powerful holy relic of all. Because in the public bar of the Crown Hotel on Peebles High Street you’ll find the armchair of Oliver Reed.

This hallowed item of furniture, on which the legendary hell-raising star of movies such as Hannibal Brooks (1969), Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971), The Three and Four Musketeers (1973-74) and Tommy (1975) once rested his butt, is rumoured to have healing powers too. A pilgrim who reposes against its upholstery will, with time, be cured of certain pernicious ailments. He or she will be cured of sobriety, for instance. And common sense. And dignity.

The story behind the chair is that, in the middle of the 1990s, Oliver Reed found himself staying in Peebles whilst doing some location filming for a Scottish movie called The Bruce (1996), a quick, cheap cash-in on Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995), which had recently been cleaning up at the box office. I’ve never seen The Bruce, but from all accounts it’s terrible. Reed being Reed, of course, he soon managed to sniff out the pub in town containing the biggest number of what are euphemistically known as ‘local characters’, which was the Crown’s public bar. He then set up camp there for several days, much to the joy of the Scottish tabloid press.

At one point, the Scottish edition of the Sun published on its front page a photo of an inebriated Reed passed out against the inside of the Crown’s entrance door, while someone outside tried to push his way in. No doubt he was thinking, “What the hell’s blocking the door…? Oh… It’s Oliver Reed.” For some reason Reed was clutching a toy sheep at the time so the Sun’s headline was, inevitably, SHAME ON EWE.

During his sojourn in the Crown, Reed complained to the hotel owner Peter Cassidy about the hardness of his seats and then thrust a bundle of notes into the hand of a regular called Davie Lees and ordered him to go to the local furniture store, the Castle Warehouse, and buy the pub a properly upholstered, properly comfortable armchair. Davie obliged, and the armchair now resides against a back wall of the public bar, under a framed photo of a well-refreshed Reed posing with Cassidy outside the hotel.

Reed departed for the great pub in the sky back in 1999, when he expired during the filming of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (1999) in Malta. He keeled over and breathed his last in, appropriately enough, a Valetta bar called the Pub, after he’d taken on a squad of British sailors in a series of drinking and arm-wrestling contests. However, I have a feeling that the great man’s psychic residue lives on in that armchair in the Crown.

Just a few days ago, I’d arranged to meet my Dad for a meal in the Crown’s restaurant. As the Oliver Reed armchair is aligned with the pub’s front door, I sat down in it so that I could watch the door and spot my Dad as soon as he walked in.

Immediately after sitting down, I found myself possessed by strange urges – to drink 104 pints in one sitting and then climb up the nearest chimneystack naked whilst roaring, “I’m Santa Claus!”; to indulge in a nude fireside wrestling match with Alan Bates; to vomit over Steve McQueen; to smuggle an elephant over the Alps; to take the local rugby club on a drinking spree and then organise a naked cross-country run with them through the surrounding moonlit fields; to film a Musketeers movie and stab several stunt-swordsmen during the fight scenes; to insult Jack Nicholson about his height, Richard Harris about his toupee and Raquel Welch about the thickness of her ankles; to arrive drunk at Galway Airport lying on the baggage conveyor; to chase ace snooker player Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins around a house with an axe; and to get a bird-claw tattoo done on my willie, which I’d subsequently threaten to whip out and display to the cameras every time I did a TV chat-show interview.

But then my Dad came into the hotel, I rose from the seat and the strange spell was broken. So instead I ordered a half-pint of lager shandy and a plate of supreme-of-chicken with honey-and-mustard sauce, and later washed everything down with a nice cup of coffee. And then went home to my bed.