On Mon 1 Feb at 12:59pm Lewesian Yankjourno wrote:
A few items in question that stand out,that are particularly distinctive are framed black and white period photographs from the 1910 Mexican Revolution, and prints of WW2 Ghurkas in North Africa, Burma, and Italy (one is a six pounder anti-tank gun crew, another of an infantry assault with kukris drawn), as well as an earlier one of an Edwardian Ghurka on the NW Frontier standing at attention with his Lee Enfield rifle bayonet affixed) , from my personal collection, the latter from original negatives from the IWM archives I secured access to, when I was a radio correspondent in Finsbury square long ago. It is also worth mentioning an item of huge personal, value, a black "duster" (a long, American buckaroo riding coat) from Schaeffer Outfitters with custom Native American Shoshone and Sioux beadwork, buckskin fringes and deer antler butttons, a gift to me from Indian friends in the US when I was in youth both a bona fide working and rodeo cowboy. It is the one item that is most painful to have lost to theft.
There are may more lesser items that Giles St Clair (a chronic alcoholic, thief, inveterate liar, and false, former friend) stole from me, If you know him personally you should ask him why in the last few years his music CD collection increased so significantly, the Billie Holiday ones are just some among them, Lee Morgan too. And if you have seen him wearing a waterproof green Cabela's jacket with a black lining including special glove attachments, that was mine too, as is a pink oxford shirt. These are relatively minor items and mentioned only as part of the evidence trail. He no doubt sold off many of my other possessions for drink, to include many books, (I have a quasi photographic memory and a heavy paperback copy of Achtung Panzer by Heinz Guderian was one, as I am a military historian too.)
As to the backstory, I am a veteran, American former US network war and foreign correspondent (trained by the BBC originally) , who lived in Lewes a decade ago or so (where I still have a close group of friends and elsewhere in the UK, to include many former soldiers in HMF I was with in the field) but it was a time of hardship, loss, tragedy and traumatic change, as my former life as I knew it imploded, to include divorce from a lost English Rose. I left Lewes after my last wartime stint as correspondent in Afghanistan, after also settling the debts I accrued, when I was temporarily impoverished due to X and Y factors beyond my control, so I left your lovely town with a clean slate.
As I left to resettle elsewhere in Northern Europe, Giles, likely with larceny on his mind from the outset, offered to indefinitely store my belongings in his empty storage locker at his home for free, as he stated he had no use for it. Not long ago, some two years ago, precisely when he was asking here about running a pub tab, he started extorting money in order for me to claim my belongings.
I refused to surrender to his blackmail, reported him to the East Sussex Police (who did not care to intervene as they regarded it a private matter, but I was advised to collect hard evidence of theft or transfer of stolen goods, which is why I am writing) and came to collect my possessions and shipped them. He offered no apologies and just a drunken idiot smile, and only when I unpacked did I notice how he had pilfered many items, including gifts from US Marines when I was with them in Tikrit and a wedding gift of very old British and Indonesian stamps from my family. I expect many of these items made their way into the second hand market in Lewes and Brighton.
I would be most grateful if you have spotted either the duster or the vintage photographs and if they are in your possession. I can come to terms to reclaim them, as you weren't aware they were stolen goods, and moreover if Giles sold them to you or the vendor, then I have the hard proof to file formal charges against Giles.
I have debated whether to write it at all, as it is likely the most painfully boring post ever presented here ,and for that I apologize. I do so to expiate the offense that Giles feels he got away with, his chicanery, theft, lies, and manipulation, with no opprobrium and no consequences, after his deception and abuse of my friendship. If nothing else happens I consider it is entirely correct to subject him to public shaming.
I believe in forgiveness but only when there is sincere repentance. I consider it most foul, he took advantage when I was at my lowest ebb, having befriended him earlier, looking past his alcoholism to see the human being within, with generosity of spirit and trust he repaid poorly.
I also was fond of his disabled wife Maggie, who was only ever kind to me. I full well understand he drinks because his life is rather pathetic, but that does not exonerate him. I even resent that he compells me to write this,which is neither something I will admire in my own personal annals, but I do so to seek closure, in simply voicing the injury done, knowing likely there is no recourse and no happy restititution. Just needed to get it off my chest as some form of moral justice and cleansing ,if it isn't cheering for me either.
If anything, take this as a de facto public service and entrust nothing to Giles and do not become his victim either. The man speaks with a forked tongue and has the ethical framework of an invertebrate.
Prior to the pestilence, Giles held up a corner of the bar at the Rights of Man, and the publicans there should be aware to use your own colloquial argot, what a rotter he is, that current and former staff at the Black Horse and Royal Oak can confirm, as well as others.
If you confront him and you're familiar with visual tells that reveal mendacity and other body language giveaways, you will readily discern his denials carry no water, especially if he is in his cups. Just look in his eyes lucidly, and the liar will reveal himself without much sleuthing necessary.
Unless given cause to take positive action to reclaim lost good, likely long gone and untraceable, at some point when not necessary to wear a HAZMAT suit to do so I will return to visit my mates and the South Downs, and dear Lewes. You all know who you are and I wish you well and may you all be spared the ravages of COVID-19 in this dystopian time for all humanity. "Keep Calm and Carry On."
PS Any help with my query will be greatly appreciated and in contrast to Giles devoting himself to a career as a professional piss artist, I am now a professor in practice, a human rights investigator and activist confronting genocide and war crimes and adviser on strategic affairs with letters of recommendation from five armies, including your own.
Thank you for hearing me out. On my oath I shan't repeat this dull tale.
On Tue 2 Feb at 3:07pm Lewesian Yankjourno wrote:
PS2 Apologies for the typo. In my penultimate paragraph I meant of course "lost goods." I was missing the S as I typed at speed. Colleagues regularly complain I type faster with four fingers "than most people speak." Sometimes it comes at a price.
This is a result of brutal wire service training in London, where as a junior reporter I was the only Yank in the newsroom save for the bureau chief. This left me at the mercy of a wolfpack of brutal former Fleet Street editors, the bulk of them former public school boys in a permanent state of arrested adolescence, who used me for target practice, as they couldn't the American governor we shared. Missing a deadline or even a minor spelling or syntax error was potentially a sacking offense.
I just wanted to correct myself, as unlike the odious and unhinged 45th President of the United States, whose elephantine arse recently vacated the White House to the great relief of all rational humanity, I do muster a functional command of the English language beyond the fourth grade level, attained by Orange Caligula.
Once more my regards to Lewes, the South Downs, East Sussex and the mother country, this Anglophile Yank will ever love, though I am proud I have an ancestor, a Colonel in the Continental Army, George Conger, on Washington's staff witness to Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown.
But don't take that badly since your "lobsterbacks" did torch the White House in 1814 and happily ever since the "Special Relationship" has ensued and long may it be so, in our Sui generis bond. What better epitomizes this tribal linkage than the visionary British and American son, we share in Tom Paine?
On Tue 2 Feb at 6:59pm Nevillman wrote:
I'm sure you don't expect anyone to respond to this but it's up to you what you write and presumably the person you write about has the right to reply or sue. Unlike many, I did read it and note that are famously fast at typing but make occasional mistakes. You have made one in the last word of the last sentence where you have misspelt Pain. Tom Pain does indeed epitomise our tribal linkage. Visionary might not always be the word we would pick though.
On Tue 2 Feb at 11:12pm Basil wrote:
This sad drivel - the kind of thing lonely people write after a long night on the sherbert - should be removed.
On Wed 3 Feb at 9:45am Mark wrote:
I don't think that it's a spelling error, Nevilleman. He's referring to Tom Paine rather than the Tom Pain who spouts drivel on this forum.
On Wed 3 Feb at 10:17am Lewesian Yankjourno wrote:
"This sad drivel - the kind of thing lonely people write after a long night on the sherbert - should be removed."
Basil, I am bemused by your commentary. I can assure you I was entirely free of any lubricants when I wrote my missive and I will agree to some degree, as I was also self-deprecating in it, that it wasn't a communique worthy of the two US national journalism prizes I hold for wartime work in the Caucasus and on an indigenous tribe in Latin America, for ABC and CNN International respectively. Nor was it either worthy of past scribbling in my former front pages on your island's, Sunday Times, Independent on Sunday and Mail on Sunday, on the Moscow theater siege, Chechen War and Indonesian genocide. I can also relay that I lack no shortage of friends globally and am also happily married to a Nordic artist and not remotely sad nor lonely, but you're entitled to your own myopia and sclerosis.
Nevillman, Tom Paine is still Paine. As to what you elucidated, indeed I am not expecting a response and as stated, it was done when no other recourse has been available for any satisfaction. The poor character of the man in question is not a secret in many corners of Lewes and by reputable souls of far better probity and community standing than him. I sincerely doubt he would have either the courage or wherewithal to take retaliatory action, as coward is always consistent in conduct.
As legitimate self-critique, I wish I hadn't let it bother me so, and would prefer to have been more forgiving, but I repeat forgiveness comes only after a sincere mea culpa is offered and it was never forthcoming. The man is a scoudrel, a liar and a thief, like many chronic alcoholics, though we have all known high functioning alcoholics that do not undergo a moral collapse because of their drinking, the late great man of letters, Christopher Hitchens among them. I stand by all I asserted about Giles with no repentance whatsoever.
If my Native American duster shows up and someone has the courage to come forth, then all will be vindicated, if it wasn't pretty.
I doubt I will be here often, as I must now contend with an active war zone. Soldiers from four British Army regiments, can attest to the veracity of my parting statement.
I wish you well Lewes, now hasta lluego, a la prochaine, a la prossima. And yes, Basil, in my sad lonely life consuming late night sherbert, I speak four languages fluently and have a strong cognate understanding of a further three others. I have also lived in, visited or worked in some fifty countries, so I am not subject to provincialism.
Unless given cause to engage again, this may well be my last communique here,so Basil, you will get your wish and thus be happy. I reciprocate in kind in being content, henceforth being Basil free.
I still have a global audience well beyond these confines, but I am sincere in stating my enduring affection for Lewes.
On Wed 3 Feb at 11:34am Green Sleeves wrote:
"Ain't nobody got time for that"
On Thu 4 Feb at 12:35pm Mark wrote:
This lunatic with verbal diahorrea is the only vaguely interesting thing that's happened on Lewes Forum in months. Since it all shifted to Facebook. Whether or not it's real, I'm not sure. Earnest Hemmingway appears to have swept in briefly.
On Thu 4 Feb at 3:00pm Formerly AC-T wrote:
What a verbose load of nonsense.
I can only assume that this guy gets paid by the word, hence the need to use 100 of them where one would do.
On Thu 4 Feb at 3:12pm Horseman7 wrote:
It's highly entertaining verbosity. Perchance LYJ would get on well with Jennifer? This unhappiness must have occurred long, long ago as "East Sussex 'Police' (known as 'Constabulary')" hung up their truncheons in 1968.
On Thu 4 Feb at 3:18pm Mark wrote:
Yes ACT. The writing style is the giveaway. I read CNN for American news. The prose style is snappy, concise.
On Thu 4 Feb at 5:25pm David Stanley wrote:
Giles St Clair, sounds like a character from a Dan Brown novel.
On Thu 4 Feb at 6:48pm Hyena wrote:
The writing style reminds me of Saul Bellow (Not a compliment) Humboldt’s gift the most boring book I have ever read.
On Thu 4 Feb at 7:22pm Nevillman wrote:
Did you leave a copy of that book outside last summer hyena? I picked it up and read it and would say it is up there as the most boring. Thank you whoever it was anyway.
On Thu 4 Feb at 9:59pm Hyena wrote:
No not me.
On Thu 4 Feb at 11:46pm Tom Pain wrote:
Don't let the sun set on you here stranger, we have ways to hush your mouth. See that obelisk on the hill?.....