The wife of The Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan has said he “wasn’t ready to give up” when he died.
Victoria Mary Clarke shared news of her husband’s death at the age of 65 in a post on Instagram on 30 November.
MacGowan, who is best known for the festive hit Fairytale Of New York, had suffered from several health issues in recent years, and earlier in November, was treated in St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin for an infection.
He was sent home weeks before his birthday, where he died of pneumonia, The New York Times cited Clarke, a writer, as saying.
Discussing his last days, she said she had been trying alternative therapists, hypnotists, health drinks and physios to try to help him.
Image: Ian Dickson/Shutterstock/@victoriamary
She said after first learning that her husband was coming to the end of his life, she thought she was “going to die”.
“He was putting up a really strong fight. He was trying very hard to breathe,” she told the Brendan O’Connor Show on Ireland’s RTE radio on Saturday.
“He wasn’t ready to give up. He wasn’t ready to stop fighting – but his body did it for him.”
‘Huge, weird contradiction’
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In a separate interview on the weekend, Clarke revealed that both she and Kent-born MacGowan – whose songs were influenced by Irish nationalism – loved the Royal Family, something that she said “people wouldn’t expect”.
“We both enjoyed watching programmes about royalty, we watched a lot of documentaries, obviously the funerals,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Image: The couple in 2017
“He cried when Prince Philip died, he cried when the Queen died, he cried when Diana died, he thought a lot about the Royal Family, but he was an ardent republican.”
She added that he had a “huge love of England and also of Ireland” in what she referred to as a “huge, weird contradiction”.
“Sometimes we would be sitting there doing the Telegraph crossword puzzle, and I would just be thinking ‘Gosh, there’s people out there who would be horrified if they could see you doing the Telegraph crossword’.”
Clarke then joined in calls to get the beloved Christmas hit her husband was best known for, back to the top of the UK charts.
“It should be the Christmas number one, it absolutely should. I’m very much in favour of that,” she said.
The announcement of MacGowan’s death was met with an outpouring of tributes, including from Bruce Springsteen, who said people would be “singing Shane’s songs 100 years from now”.
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Dublin rock band U2 also paid tribute, posting a drawing of the singer on social media, with the caption: “Shane MacGowan’s songs were perfect so he or we his fans didn’t have to be…”
On Friday, Clarke thanked people for their “love and support” after her husband’s death, posting a picture of the two of them appearing to dance.
“Losing Shane has been the thing that I feared most for a very long time, almost since we first got together,” she wrote.
“Some of the messages and gestures of support have been incredibly moving and unexpected, and I really, really hope that Shane can see how much he is loved by so many people of all ages and kinds.”
The post on Instagram gained more than 25,000 likes and over 1,000 comments.
It is “pretty surreal”, Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon admits, finding herself at the top of The New York Times bestsellers list.
When I meet the actress alongside her co-writer, best-selling author Harlan Coben, overnight the pair have learned that their thriller is now at number one.
He jokes: “I was texting her last night and saying you’ll now have to call yourself number one bestselling novelist, forget about Oscar winner!”
Image: Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben told Katie Spencer about their novel Gone Before Goodbye
As one of the most successful authors in the world, Coben has sold over 80 million books to date, while for Witherspoon this is new ground.
Not content with running a hugely successful production company responsible for a string of hits, as well as one of the most successful book clubs in the world, she explains she felt compelled to give writing a try.
“People want you to stay in your lane… as a creative person I think it’s impossible to just choose one kind of life.
“Creativity is infinite and who I was as a creative person when I was 20 is very different from the person I am now at 49.”
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Gone Before Goodbye, a thriller about a talented surgeon who finds herself caught up in a deadly conspiracy, is the result of Witherspoon daring to put her head above the parapet.
Image: Witherspoon says she felt compelled to give writing a try
Coben admits he was “a little wary” at first.
“I don’t co-write novels but when she made the pitch and started talking about it, I was like ‘dang that’s good, we can do something with that’.”
While countless celebrities work with ghostwriters, Coben says: “I said to her from day one ‘it’s only going to be you and me in here… no third person in here, I don’t do that’. So every word you [read] comes from Reese and me.”
Image: Coben has sold over 80 million books to date, while for Witherspoon this is new ground
Witherspoon explains: “He was like ‘if we’re going to do this, it’s going to have to be at a really high level because people going to expect a lot, so our bar was really high.”
“I said to her, in the beginning, novels are like a sausage,” Coben laughs. “You might like the final taste, but you don’t want to see how it was made and Reese got to see the full sausage getting made here.”
When it came to writing, Coben says they “fell into a rhythm right away”, working together in three-hour stints, “back and forth with a yellow legal pad – what about this? What about that?”
Image: Coben says they ‘fell into a rhythm right away’
Witherspoon says it “feels really deeply personal” to have their work now in print.
“Usually, as an actor, I walk into other people’s worlds and it’s already set up… but this was creating the whole world with Harlan and just from beginning to end feels very personal.”
While the story seems an obvious fit for being adapted to the screen, perhaps with a certain blonde actress in the leading role, Coben says that was never their intention.
“The biggest, biggest mistake novelists make when you write a book is to say ‘this would make a really great movie’. A book is a book, a movie is a movie, and we both focused on wanting this to be just a great reading experience.”
Given that their collaboration is already selling in big numbers, will the pair team up again to write a second?
Witherspoon says: “Let’s just see what people think of this one first.”
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Associate professor of neurology Dr Laura Stein told Sky’s US partner NBC News: ” The most well-described risk factors include a predisposition [family history of aneurysm], high blood pressure, cigarette smoking and inflammation.”
She went on to explain that most fatal ruptured aneurysms are in the brain, killing about one in three patients.
“When it’s a blood vessel that’s in the head and it bleeds, there’s a much higher risk of having a very bad problem just because the brain is enclosed in a fixed space,” Dr Stein added.
Low-risk aneurysms are monitored by doctors for growth or abnormalities, and there are a series of potential treatment options for those considered dangerous.
Elsewhere in The Kardashians clip, Kim admitted that her ex-husband Kanye West will be in her life “no matter what” because of the four kids they share together.