John Gibson: No need to travel to find a trench

Trenches, did you say? Did someone mention trenches?

Evidently they’ve been planning to revitalise trenches in Edinburgh’s outkirts that were used to help troops train and prepare to die at a shamefully early age in the First World War.

See here, we’ve got trenches galore bang in the centre of town, freshly dug for the infernal trams – close as you’d get to the real thing.

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It’s a long way to Tipperary, longer than it is to, say, Juniper Green. Anyway for realism, be sure to take a tin helmet and gas mask.

Roger and out

What can I say about rampant Roger Moore when we’ve met only once? He had this penchant for getting hitched to women who’d chuck teapots at him and clatter him over the head with a guitar.

In Leicester Square’s Odeon, in our one-to-one I was putty in his hands. I’ve exhumed the interview from the Gibpress Files, an occasional series, because Moore at 84 is in the news again, having been on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on ITV at the weekend.

Four times married and, some claim, the most ubiquitous of the Bonds, only one of his wives has survived.

Movies have been the story of his eventful life, and, so he claims, has domestic violence. The former 007 says he was beaten up by his first two wives.

He was charm itself with me.

Afterwords . .

. . . snatched a quick word with Lord John McCluskey on his way to his daily swim at the West End: ‘‘I’ve served a 60-year apprenticeship. I’m still trying to get it right but I’m hanging on in there,’’ breezed M’lud.

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