Back in the 1990s, my neice and I were at an exhibition charting the history of Porsche motors at London's Design Museum, when we happened across a prototype Volkswagen Beetle. As we read the blurb, we both stopped; looked at the car; and then looked at each other.
This was Adolf Hitler's VW, and there was the photograph of him sitting in it.
Such proximity to an artifact in which everybody's favourite fuhrer had actually touched was quite daunting. Such links to history are (and should be) daunting to us mortals, and in a folkloric way, a tangible path into the past.
The same neice had another Hitler moment, when told that the irascible old man that she had just served at the bar was actually the former Prime Minister Edward Heath, a man that had attended a Nuremberg Rally, and had at one point stood a few feet away from the forementioned shouty dictator.
I mention this because I had a similar moment this evening whilst cleaning the toilet whilst listening to Radio 2, where Mark Radcliffe was in conversation with LA hipster Sid Griffin, when the ex-Long-Ryder mentioned that he had shaken Neil Armstrong's hand.
Back in my muso days, a mutual friend introduced me to Sid, and we would have no doubt exchanged a hearty firm-but-fair handshake ourselves, and twenty years later I'm a little struck by the simple notion that I shook the hand of a man who shook the hand of the first man on the moon! To a kid of my generation, there is no greater historical totem.
Unless you count an old acquaintance of mine, also a former son of LA, who found himself urinating next to Nelson Mandela in a South London toilet. Yes, they shook hands. In a toilet.
Look, if you're going to meet a historical figure; pick your moment.
(The guy I actually envy the most, yet another LA resident, never met Neil Armstrong or Nelson Mandela—or Hitler—but he DID get to sit in the command capsule of Apollo 11 before it got sent off to the Smithsonian. Now that is cool.)
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