Lord Browne, the former BP boss, lived with his mother Paula for the last 20 years of her life now he has paid her the ultimate filial tribute by making a £2 million donation to a Cambridge college in her honour.
The generous gift, made by the John Browne Charitable Trust, is to Murray Edwards College for women, enabling it to acquire a building, to be named Paula Browne House, in which undergraduates will both live and be taught.
‘So many people knew my mother, but very few were aware of her story until after she died,’ Lord Browne tells me. ‘This donation is a small way to remember her, in support of an institution with a mission that meant a great deal to her.’
Pets at Home A PERSISTENT thief who was banned from Bolton town centre stores has been jailed for 24 weeks after going on a crime spree. Guy Morrison, of Lavender Road, Farnworth, admitted stealing goods ranging from pet treats to alcohol from stores including Pets at Home, B&M, Morrisons and Machine Mart between November last year and January. At Wigan Magistrates’ Court he also admitted assault, using threatening behaviour and breaching a criminal behaviour order. Morrison was told: “Retailers require protection from you.” A further criminal behaviour order for two years was made banning him from entering any Bolton town centre shops or Burnden Retail Park stores and prohibiting him from possessing alcohol, whether opened or not, in a public place.
All throughout 2020 since March, anyway a song rattled around in my head: People Who Died, by the Jim Carroll Band. It was a minor hit in the early 1980s; maybe you know it. Carroll, the punk-poet author of
The Basketball Diaries, wrote it as a sort of tribute to friends he knew who died before their time. Some of them met wild ends: a guy killed by bikers, a woman who jumped in front of a subway train. Others left Earth via less dramatic but nevertheless heartbreaking routes. My favorite line goes:
Bobby got leukemia, fourteen years old / He looked like sixty-five when he died / He was a friend of mine. The chorus goes: