Here's a sweet, non-cheesy story. As regular readers of my (sometimes) sage words may have picked up, I'm a Bournemouth boy by birth. And those of us born or raised in that picturesque town on the South Coast keep part of it forever in our hearts--and not just Sega World on Westover Road. Another Bournemouthian, for so we members of the tribe call ourselves, is Alex James, the bassist from pop band Blur. In fact, Alex and I were at the same school at the same time. And he just presented his most recent radio program on Classic FM about the classical music heritage of the town.
For a place dismissed by James Bond in one of Ian Fleming's 007 novels as only being for retirees, Bournemouth has quite a cultural history. As James points out, authors like Shelley, Oscar Wilde and Tolkien lived there at various times. My family at one point owned a hotel where the great comedian Tony Hancock had grown up. My own school also sired a film star and a legendary newspaper editor.
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