Thursday, December 20, 2007

(218) We Need To Talk About... Creed

On July 30th 1991 I was with Cathy Forbes https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW4mu18KB4XQJXiwy8VQWdO2jpj1n72bOfamBkGUclTuZqDC8sDn3TEyFVeoZAbBfX3TAseGOk0vXwpLMHdJXwf_ePb42An1-BoZ525HzEr1LynxMo7PBDPwxu8OVGQekdths0EQ/s1600/307455_152314114859512_949905215_n.jpg in Eastbourne when she exclaimed that she had just spotted that a character in the novel she was reading was called Kevin Plaskett. The book was Creed by James Herbert and had been published the previous year. This was the first appearance of that character, even though by then she was already over 100 pages into it.
http://www.james-herbert.co.uk/creed.htm

On the morning of June 2nd 1993 I happened to think on the words of the hymn In The Deep Mid-Winter. It begins -

In the deep mid-winter
Frosty wind gave moan
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone.


I have been to Israel. It is a warm climate and the conditions at Christ´s birth as suggested by the above lines were hardly likely to be accurate. I even pictured myself back at school - the only place where I had ever sung that hymn - challenging a master that our preconceptions of these conditions had been shifted to fit our own cultural and geographical biases.

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Indeed, on March 2nd 2012 I would make a day visit to Jerusalem. We left from Tel-Aviv at 7:15 A.M with clearish skies, but at 8:40 A.M. it began to snow. I was told it snowed about once a year or even once every two years in Jerusalem.
And as we neared the Via Dolorosa I was to be struck by a snowball. (Honestly!)

On the evening of June 2nd 1993 I was travelling on the London Underground to Plaistow. I noted that a man standing opposite me was reading from Herbert´s Creed. I had thought that perhaps the author had taken the character Kevin´s surname from myself, as I had been British Chess Champion the previous year, when it came out (!?)
The passenger alighted after a few stops and I myself took a seat. I found myself seated next to a lady and two little girls. I noted that they were conversing in a mixture of English and French. At one point a girl asked the lady "Did Jesus speak English?" "No", she was told in reply. Shortly after that the same girl asked "Do people from different countries all think that Jesus spoke their language?"

At the beginning of April 2005 I was in the Café Capablanca in Torrevieja when Matti Kinnanen walked in and mentioned something to me about Grandmaster Kevin Plaskett now playing for this club. I introduced myself and corrected him about my first name. I assume he had made a confusion with Canadian GM Kevin Spraggett who was now resident in Portugal. Nobody had ever thought of me as Kevin before. I then commented that the only Kevin Plaskett of whom I had heard was a character in Creed. My wife made a small bet with me that his name was actually James Plaskett, and I took her on and won.

Whilst affirming the character´s name (he is a male prostitute) from a copy of the book in Bedford Library, I checked some details of the plot and saw that Joe Creed is a paparazzo who accidentally photographs a demon. On April 12th 2005 I was with my wife in the Café El Vampiro (The Vampire) about half a mile away from the Capablanca. Baseball was showing on a large TV screen. A player was announced from the Minnesota Twins. His name was Joe Crede.
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/players/6411
I had neither come across anyone else of that precise name, nor a Joe Creed.

On June 5th 2005 I played Kevin Spraggett in the seventh round of a weekend event in Albox, about 100 miles south of our home. I had been driven there by Matti Kinnanen. I won the game. It was only the second time that I had met Spraggett, the previous being when we had drawn a game in the British leagues in 2001. Afterwards I recounted to him some of the details of these Creed coincidences, and he said that he had a brother called James.
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Molecular Biologist Fred Grimmell argues that Intelligent Design cannot be a scientific concept because if something "... can´t be measured, or counted, or photographed, it can´t be science." 
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This 2011 film We Need to Talk About Kevin is based on a novel of the same name featuring the central character of a fifteen year old, mass-murdering psychopath: Kevin. His father is Franklin Plaskett. 
(Oh dear!) 
But Kevin has his mother´s surname (!) We Need to Talk About Kevin (film) - Wikipedia


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