The papers are full of Charlton Heston’s death this morning; Ben-Hur was one of the earliest films I remember really wanting to see, it was heavily advertised in my comic at the time; for the chariot race, I’m afraid, rather than the hero’s presence at the crucifixion; the crucifixion I suppose I should say, because there were many others who suffered this Roman implementation of the death penalty. The striking image for me was Heston’s waving a gun, extolling the rights of Americans to carry guns for their own protection. Striking for me as someone who has never held a gun in my hand, and never wanted to or felt the need to. The US demand for the right to carry guns seems a weird human right to espouse; what does it say about a rich society that they need this? Is it solely looking backward to the frontier experience? If so, a backward-looking ‘right’ seems out of place in a a society that aspires to leadership for the free world. Do we really need to have a right to carry death-dealing weapons for our own protection? Is it necessary in that society? I have not felt like I needed it when I have been to the US, or in the grottier parts of the UK that I’ve been to as a visiting social worker.

Time Out London this week has a look at places where Daphne du Maurier lived in her lifetime, especially Hampstead, in recognition of Justine Picardie’s (2008) novel/biography Daphne (Bloomsbury). Daphne’s early years had a lot of loss and tragedy in them – the article asks if this is why her writings are so dark. He aunt was the mother of the five boys who became the Darling family in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. I saw this as a child in the conventional pantomime style production in London, and was astounded when I saw it in th 1980s in Mold, at Theatr Clwyd, by the stuff about motherhood which was obviously influenced by Freud’s writings which were coming out at the time. And protofeminist-like, Mr Darling is sent to the doghouse, literally: he lives in the kennel. Anyway it contains the famous death saying: ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’ And Daphne was into psychic phenomena, continuing-bonds-like apparently she describes a place as ‘one of those places where you feel the veil between the past and present and the living and the dead.’