KHO Keith Hayes Only

27/10/2024

Banging my head against a Brick Wall.

Friday night and the lights are low. In fact they are non existent. I switched the damn things off just milliseconds before Parkinson, sensing a lightning opportunity to wage mischief decided to remove my balance ability from me.
Incapable of preventing it, I allowed my body to swoon in a manner reflective of a dancer in Swan Lake and coast gently to the floor. Here it stayed, curled cozily in a foetal position as I gazed into the pitch black ether above me, savouring it’s mystery and profundity. No. It wasn’t like that at all. Decked out in nothing more than my under pants, I , arms flailing, fell heavily dropping to the floor as a sack of spuds would do. I have become so used to this situation striking unexpectedly that a sixth sense kicks in. I can’t stop the tumble but my body has learned to fall in a relaxed manner that allows me in a couple of seconds to hold a full scale debate on the downward pitch as to how I should position my body for the landing so there’s damage limitation.
Magnificent. I am on the ground relatively safely, unhurt.
Bang! I spoke too soon.
My head snapped back and cracked against the wall. Damn. That did hurt. Needing a little recovery time to assess the damage, I just lay there, thinking.
Nah. I’m fooling myself. I lay there because falling is the easy part. Getting up can be sheer hell. And so it proved to be on this occasion. Every attempt to turn over to a position from which I can get to my knees and right myself to a point where eventually I can stand again is thwarted by Mr.P. He’s in that mood where he’s decided my sins of the week must be paid for by lying helpless for a while. Indeed, Parkinson’s plays no favourites. The tribunal determined I should pay a penalty and penalty I must pay.
There is a brief moment when the notion tickles me that I am going to lie here forever. I can’t move, I can’t get up, I’m out of reach of my lifeline bell pull. Oh deary, deary me. Disaster. But we Parky sufferers are a tough bunch. Never give up, never surrender. Been through all this before. A little thinking time is called for and that I have aplenty. I’m not going anywhere.
Brainpower kicks in and I think back to the previous week when a programme presenter on Mid Sussex Radio read a piece I had written about my experience with Parkinson’s and asked if he could read it on his show. Flattery will get anyone anywhere with me. After a lifetime in television I’m a confirmed media tart. Roy Stannard heaped more glory on my head by asking for my choice of music that he could play as he read it. Wow. Icing on the cake and I immediately chose my favourite girl Tuva Semmingsen with her colleagues conductor Sarah Hicks and soprano Christine Andersen with The Danish Symphony Orchestra’s The Good, The Bãd and The Ugly.
That I should have a work of mine presented in such esteemed company was astonishing. These ladies had achieved over 150 million hits on YouTube. Roy did a marvelous job on his radio show and the production flattered the hell out of me.
Thinking back over this morale boosting event worked. There was a stirring in the limbs. Feeling began to return and hope that I might regain an upright position, recovery from my fall.
Then the icing on my Parkinson’s cake occurred.
There was Clint Eastwood in front of me. And the hero of the Good, The Bad and The Ugly was far from kind to me. In fact he snarled.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Get up”.
You don’t argue with a tough looking hombre wielding a six gun and I complied.
I didn’t exactly scramble to my feet. Not even a quartet of famous people can quite kick Parkinson’s in the bum that hard. But I renewed my efforts to get onto my knees, eventually struggled back onto the settee and returned to a sitting position from which I walked again.
But I didn’t put the light back on again and in the dark I could hear Roy laughing and giggling with Clint, Tuva, Christine and Sarah.
“That fixed the old coote. Lying there letting Parkinson’s get the better of him. Who the hell does he think he is?”
Don’t worry chaps and chapesses. I know who I think I Am. I’m the man who broke the back of evil Parkinson’s.
WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS.

22/09/2024

30/06/2024

It is still a big weakness of the social media system that in trying to protect, and properly so, copyright on behalf of users, the companies use a half baked system
Four major companies and one tiddler have all laid claim to content in some of our videos which have no music, taking a variety of actions.
Which of the 5 claimants is the real owner, if indeed any of them. Its distressing when trying to be a good corporate citizen to constantly face such accusations which are patently way wide of the mark. Some attention paid to this please FB,

27/06/2024

Lib Dem candidate James MacCleary faces questions on Mirador Television as a hopeful in the six person race for the Member of Parliament post for Lewes
Join him and Keith Hayes at 0900 Friday morning on Mirador Television YouTube or Mirador Television Lewes Facebook.

Mirador Television Lewes

05/06/2024

Growl like Mirador. On Facebook several pages Mirador Television…. Acerbic comments about politics. Mirador Television Lewes or Lewes Television Mirador.. same rant, same shout!!!

13/05/2024

Facebook and the major entertainment agencies have signally failed to take note of my public plea for them to consider reviewing and reforming their copyright policies. Objection to a post has been lodged which says it MAY contain material which belongs to them. But if that’s so, which of the four entities claiming the copyright is correct? This is also a valid question as one of these claimants has already released their claim. The piece claimed has already been thoroughly checked by other leading web sites, suggesting perhaps something amiss with the claimants checks, while in the meantime our post is allowed alteration by these entities on the basis it MAY CONTAIN…….
Seems some natural justice might be included in Facebook’s challenges.

05/05/2024

Robert The Bruce … first Parkinson’s Consultant

I kept falling to the left as i struggled against my Parkinson’s to put my sock on this morning . As a journalist i’m politically neutral so i was not treating it as an indicator for the next election. As i rolled yet again involuntarily onto my side, vainly tugging at my sock, which had snagged onto my desperately ready to be cut toenail, I snarled at myself “Mr Keith”, I am always very polite when remonstrating with myself and especially refrain from calling myself mate….. (I posted myself on a dating site once with singular lack of success so the epithet stings a bit) “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.”
Aha. Everyone knows that quote. It is of course from 14th century Scottish War Lord Robert the Bruce. After a defeat by the Irish, he was on the run and hiding out in a cave on Rathlin Island. He had been soundly thrashed six times by the Irish and English and he had rightly assumed that no one would think of looking for him on the remote, god forsaken, windswept lump of rock that was Rathlin.
Hedging his bets, Bruce made doubly sure he wouldn’t be found by hunkering down in a cave, whose only other denizen was a spider. Bruce watched fascinated as the spider swung its thread to establish a web building platform six times before succeeding. Th arachnid inspired the warrior to pull his kilt around his knees, gird his sword around his hip, share a slug of dwindling supply of Scotch in gratitude, then tear off back to the Highlands and whip the butts of the English at the seventh.try to become King of the Scots.
By this time I am on my back, legs in the air, socks even more firmly snagged on my toes and all hope gone. It’s in this ungainly pose, lower cheeks now exposed to the morning chill, that ingenuity needs to kick in, to avoid being found as a skeleton in a few years time for some faceless coroner to rule i starved to death putting my socks round my ankles and exposing my bum to the sky.
Such time demands great thinking. So in seeking a solution, i latched on to the “try try try again mantra”. Memories flashed across my furrowed brow and i recalled i had seen the cave where The Bruce had lodged with the spider, some years before, on a visit to Rathlin. Today the island, which lies off the coast of Northern Ireland, equidistant between Ulster and Scotland, has 150 inhabitants and a flourishing tourist industry. Back then, it was 25 and lobster fishing. (Anything under a pound and a half got chucked back in the sea) In my day, if the weather turned you stayed on the island until it cleared.
As i lay ruminating, two other thoughts popped up that confirmed the spider determination was the answer to my dilemma. Richard Branson’s hot air balloon had fallen from the skies at Rathlin after his flight across the pond and my colleague on Mirador Television Stewart Dalby had written a successful novel while a fellow journalist in Northern Ireland “Friends of Rathlin Ireland”.
Apart from which, Robert the Bruce, while hero to hundreds of thousands of Scots was actually a bit of a nasty bath-steward. While using Rathlin as a staging post to attack Ulster, he had ruthlessly slaughtered the men and marched their women folk over a cliff to their deaths for giving aid and succour to the enemy.
Yes this was the sort of mirthless approach i needed to resolving my Parkinson’s problem. With renewed vigour and increased energy, i kicked and waved my feet and pummelled until virtue was its own reward and my socks unhooked themselves from my toenails.
There Robert,that spider rescued both of us. But because you were wearing a kilt, you marched off to be king, while i am looking for further inspiration for rescue. My kicking feet have now managed to get both of themselves into one leg of my trousers.

05/05/2024

Fight parky

02/05/2024

The Mayor of Lewes appeared for interview on Mirador Television yesterday and announced one of his mayoralty ambitions was to rescue Shelleys Hotel.
This grand old, elegant hotel has a rich history, its own ghost and is rotting away.
Mirador has had little time for local political ambitions recently, but this one resonates. On Plenty of Henty at 10 today we jointly launched SOS Save our Shelley’s and urge citizens who value our heritage to get behind Mayor Mathew Bird and our SOS and ride like our Mirador Knight to its rescue.
Mirador Television

26/04/2024

https://www.youtube.com/live/bYyjlwLPFLk?si=OnBX3xzBBmPq_Hgc

Good morning from Mirador

10/04/2024

The Lewes based television enterprise, Mirador continues to march ahead in building a first class media team with the addition of leading former ITN journalist Rosie Hayes.
Rosie’s career began at ITN, moving on to ATV, then SkyNews and BBCNews. Granted accreditation to work in Cuba she reported from most parts of the island where she also landed an interview with Fidel Castro. She came back from that assignment to work at BBC and its 24 Hour News channel. This was followed by an invitation to help Russia launch RT, an english speaking satellite channel in Moscow, across the globe. She now runs a feature and news agency broadcast channel on the web called YournewsUKtv alongside which she will broadcast as coanchor on Friday’s “Break n Egg” show on Mirador Television.
Mirador is an online broadcaster which is based in Lewes but plays to a global audience with a news and talk format run by a growing team of 12 UK and international journalists and experts, which has stood broadcasting on its head by daring to present its programmes from the Black Horse Pub in Lewes, defying convention in the manner Tom Paine did in the county town more than 200 years ago.