SLIDING DOWN THE BANISTERS OF LIFE

About the Book

This may be a book about an ‘ordinary’ life but it is more than that, much more. Firstly, if Basil Jay’s life has been ‘ordinary’, then the Bugatti Veyron Super Sports is a family saloon. In his life he has been described as many things. A Surveyor, a Businessman, and an Entrepreneur. A Musician, a Poet, a Writer and a Thespian. An Adventurer, a Chancer, a Receiver of Stolen Goods, an Alleged Money Launderer, a Tax Fugitive (as denounced in the Houses of Parliament). But most of all, a Husband, a Father and a Grandfather, and finally an ex-patriot living in a hot and balmy exile where he was effectively forced by an unrelenting tax inspector at the end of the nineteen-eighties (an action for which Basil is now able to offer his heartfelt thanks). He has been locked up for a killing in Afghanistan, witnessed a ritual stoning for adultery in Ghazni, held up by gunmen in the Khyber Pass, accused of drug smuggling in Pakistan, and spent almost five days, in a Turkish Bath in Istanbul whilst being coerced (unsuccessfully) to front a £300 million shakedown inTurkey – just an ordinary life. Basil uses his fascinating life as the thread with which to lead the reader through the six decades of the twentieth- century that followed the second world-war. The bombed ruins of the FORTIES, the austerity of the FIFTIES, the music and burgeoning promiscuity of the SIXTIES, the hopes of the SEVENTIES, the aspirations of the EIGHTIES, the political incompetence – but strange peace of the NINETIES, and into the so called, ‘NEW DAWN’ of the Third Millennium. Basil is an able guide, there is not a decade where he has not been in the thick of the social, political, or business action. His story is the story of an ordinary man, living an ordinary life, but getting into the most outrageously extra-ordinary scrapes,(almost all of them of his own making). It is a living, and a social history written in the honest and hilarious style for which Basil Jay has become known. It is a read which can be thoroughly recommended

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