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Day fifty three. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today back to the sixties and why the Spanish might face chaos\\xa0\\xa0

Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 53 Buzz Aldrin and Marshall Tito

It is day 53 of our Spanish Lockdown, phase zero hasn\\u2019t brought any real change to our situation here.\\xa0 Except Chris has been able to go to the pool supply shop that is now open.\\xa0 He came back with a boot load of chemicals, but the rules about car travel and distance continue and of course the beaches are closed unless you are walking along the beach.

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Phase 1 on Monday might not happen if we do not make the criteria \\u2013 based on number of deaths and infection rate.\\xa0 But if that phase starts, we will be in a similar situation as the UK is now.

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Spain can only dream of doing what Britain plans this Monday.\\xa0 The Spanish press has been full of the news that Britain as a country has had more deaths now than Spain or Italy.

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After having quite a simple childhood that lacked continental holidays with the only foreigners I came into contact were my Spanish Aunty Isobel and her sister.\\xa0 It is no wonder that going out to work was a bit of a shock, working at Marconi was really a bit of an extension to school, we were all white working class lads, not a single woman in our group.

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Britvic soft drinks was slightly different, a mixture of people worked there including the ferocious Zardar, I am not sure that was her real name.\\xa0 She was an enormous woman with hands like a navvy.\\xa0 Most of the men were scared of her, she could lift the bins full of broken glass, with just one hand.\\xa0 She came from the \\u201chappeest country in ze world.. Yugoslavia, and the most vundeful leader \\u2013 Marshall Tito, well I suppose it did take almost ten years after his death for civil war to break out in former Yugoslavia, so he clearly had a unifying control over the country.

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It wasn\\u2019t until I got into radio that I started to meet I suppose you would call more educated people, including the kind of colleagues who would smile and be your friend and whilst your back was turned would slag you off and steal your work.

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We had one such freelance at Essex Radio, I will call him Brad, that was a minor publicity agent who got himself some freelance work working on the Essex Radio Helping Hands Appeal.\\xa0 Before you know it he had managed to get out Italian Maintenance Man to get him a desk, a phone extension and an in and out tray.

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I shared a desk with the Junior Sports Reporter who was quite unusually a woman, she was kind enough to let me have a drawer and she had the top drawer, in return I purloined and electric typewriter for us both.

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Her name was Helen Rollason, she was a petite attractive woman, who could pass for a young looking Valerie Singleton.\\xa0 I used to joke with her that she should be on TV. \\u2018Don\\u2019t be daft.\\u201d She said, \\u201cWho ever heard of a woman presenting Grandstand.\\u201d

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Years later I helped her put together a professional demo for Radio 2, where she became the first woman to regularly present sports bulletins for the BBC, I was so thrilled for Helen when the day came when she also became the first woman to present BBC 1\\u2019s Grandstand.\\xa0 Her early death from cancer was an absolute tragedy, and I still think of those times now of sharing that desk.

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Back to Brad with his own desk,but had now run out of work as the charity appeal had ended.\\xa0 He was looking around for other things to busy himself with and decided that my job would be just the ticket.

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I engineered shows, playing commercials, records and producing features for Essex Radio.\\xa0 Brad decided to pick on the, you might say weakest, certainly the nicest man in the radio station our Sunday Radio Vicar Peter Elvey.

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So it was decided that Brad should engineer the Sunday Show and Special Religious Interview that went out every Sunday lunchtime. There is a skill to engineering or driving live radio shows, Brad did not have that skill and you would often hear records crashing into commercials, moments of dead air and missed microphones.

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Brad\\u2019s demise as an Engineer came one Sunday lunchtime when Peter Elvey had gone over to the United States to interview Buzz Aldrin about his Christianity and taking communion whilst on the moon. \\xa0

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Brad played out the tape, which needs to be timed to fit before the network news at one o\\u2019clock. \\xa0A mathematical skill I hated and used to check over and over again as the time got closer to the news.\\xa0

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Brad was full of bravado \\u2013 he had told everyone that this was one of the easiest jobs he had ever done.\\xa0 Brad also mistimed the Buzz Aldrin interview by a whole minute. For something so important you would make a decision to quietly drop the news bulletin, not Brad.

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Peter Elvey had got to his last and most important question to Buzz Aldrin.

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He said.\\xa0 \\u201cNow Buzz NASA didn\\u2019t want you to be open about your \\xa0Christianity, I know you took Holy Communion on the moon, and I just want to ask you what that was like.\\u201d

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\\u201cWell Peter I can tell you it was..

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Clip Essex Radio News Jingle

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Brad cut Buzz Aldrin off and that was the last time he did one of the easiest jobs he has ever done.

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Meeting a wide breadth of people at Essex Radio really opened my eyes to the world. It was the start of a pathway that has brought us both here living in a foreign country, trying to make sense of the way things are done here, I hope on Sunday that we get the news we are waiting for, a tiny bit more freedom, a chance to go and buy Marmite together and sit and have a coffee with friends once again. \\xa0\\xa0

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