Ladonia and Nemis

In the spring of 2001 Lisa's father drove us to the principality of Nemis in Ladonia, which had declared its independence from Sweden only six years earlier. The drive from Lisa's home town of Malmö to Ladonia, also situated in Sweden's Southern Skåne province, took a few hours. Lisa's father was a very enthusiastic, highly knowledgeable man with something of a short temper. I wish that I had had a chance to talk with him more.

Nemis was approached from the nearest road by foot, a hike over a steep, woodland hill. It is a sculpture made from drift wood which the artist Lars Vilks had begun to construct in 1980 and is evolving still to this day. Consisting of huge towers connected by walkways, it was quite an adventure clambering up them. Afterwards we swam in the ocean before we realised that lots jelly fish had the same idea.

This is one of the few occasions that I met with Lisa's father. He and Lisa's mother were no longer together and only this once did a visit to Sweden for both Lisa and myself involve meeting up with him. The first time that I did so was shortly before Lisa and I had our first show with the band Miss Mend in the Hope and Anchor pub in Islington but I was too nervous to speak with him or anyone else. Another occasion was our trip to Nemis and the last time we met he visited us at our flat near Liverpool Street.

Neither Lisa nor I liked cannabis but, I think because someone had forgotten it, a huge lump of the stuff had been hanging around the flat and Lisa's dad fancied trying it out again after many, many years. We got very stoned and I gave him a bowler hat which I had bought years before in Cambridge and which he wore for his journey home to his hotel at the end of the evening.

The next time that I saw him he was no longer living and so it was a very sad occasion. He had ignored indigestion for many years but it turned out to be the symptom of a problem far more serious than he could ever have anticipated. Lisa had been visiting him at the hospital in Lund for some weeks and he died of inoperable cancer the very morning I had arrived to visit him myself.

Presents To Myself

A couple of years ago I found that my short term memory just disappeared. I found myself living like a goldfish. I would remember something that I had to do one second only to find myself having completely forgotten that something another. I'd send myself emails to remind me to do things and leave notes to myself lying around.

I conduct all of my shopping online and so every time the postman arrived the contents of the parcels that he had for me were a complete mystery. Not only that but I would forget having ordered those things in the first place and so these parcels were a terrific surprise. Every day was like a birthday, only a very special birthday where I was guaranteed to receive presents that were sure to surprise and delight, presents that I really wanted and needed. I would always feel so very grateful to myself for having been so thoughtful.

I considered sending myself anonymous letters of encouragement but I hadn't time to get around to it because, after a month or two, much to my relief, my short term memory became strong again, just as if nothing had ever happened. It was a strange experience, that's for sure.

Climbing The Primary School

Howard and I sat on the roof of the primary school in Godmanchester, looking at the village in the dusk. We were seventeen years old.

I had been taught how to climb the building by some older boys a few years earlier - the boys that I mention in the entry 'Curly Hair.' I was walking with them from the pub where I would go called 'The Waterloo' in Huntingdon town centre to the village of Godmanchester. Everyone looked like they were members of the Sarah Records band 'The Sea Urchins,' wearing drainpipe jeans and pointy Chelsea boots. The Waterloo has since been completely redeveloped but then it was quite a dark, dangerous and, to me, magical place

They decided to climb the primary school. They had done it many times before but I thought they were joking at first and I felt unprepared when I realised that they were not. I was drunk and I wasn't that used to drinking, I was only fifteen. I remember at one point wondering if I'd make a particular jump. You see, it involved climbing one structure, jumping to another, climbing a drainpipe, swinging around, dropping, climbing. It was very involved, it seemed dangerous. They guided me but still it felt a little out of control.

I took part in a climb two weeks later. I felt more at ease this time. Gary fell through a sky light. It was a great shame to vandalise a primary school and it took a lot of effort for them to retrieve him.

Anyway, on this occasion that I am recounting I was sober, as was Howard who had never climbed the school. He questioned the need to but admitted, once we had scaled the building, that it was worth it and the view was beautiful.

This was during the two or three months when I was staying at Patrick's house and at this time, as I have mentioned before in this collection of reminiscences, I was taking LSD every few days. Howard and I had each taken a 'purple om' acid tab a short while earlier at Patrick's house and we sat there in the dusk, enjoying the view until we thought it best to climb down while we could without difficulty. This was the first and only time that Howard took acid. I tried to persuade him not to but he insisted on returning home before the LSD began to really take effect and he would spend an unpleasant night lying in bed at the house that he shared with his parents, tripping.

I have a pleasant and strong memory of sitting with Howard on the roof of the school as dusk fell.

Tim's Briefcase

We were studying Brownian motion in school. Some experiment or other which demonstrated the model led me to contemplate determinism, I extrapolated the cause and effect, the predictability, of one molecule encountering another to a person, to the world, to the universe and to the whole of creation.

Tim and I would sit together at a bench. He dismissed my thoughts, after all he was a fervent Christian and in my conception of things there is no place for a soul.

I have thought about determinism ever since. I believe it is a philosophy with many followers but I am not sure and keep meaning to buy a book about it. It is amusing to apply the notion of predestination that it implies to morality, to social behaviour. The concept of free will collapses only to be reinstated when it's understood that it's nothing more than the way we live, a reflection of the way in which we think, and therefore retains all of the qualities that it always had, at least almost all of them. In other words, it doesn't matter if you see any given action as the result of a myriad of electrical impulses in the body, exchanges between cells of proteins and enzymes and all of the other, near infinite number of processes both within and externally, or as a result of a 'conscience choice,' it's all the same.

I wrote a song about it, as a matter of fact, called 'Impulses and Motivations.' I have made a video as well, which will be on Youtube one day, but it is taking forever to find the right people at the right time to finish it, it has been well over a year. In fact, I only have ten more seconds of footage to film but I am very pleased with it. It features bees and Dino hatching eggs and spiral staircases and ominous trains and everything.

Tim, who now works with Microsoft, a young Tory and an ardent Protestant, was haughty and pretentious. He was one of the only boys in our comprehensive school who would use a briefcase and on this particular day, the day of the Brownian motion class, I was whiling away time by changing the combination of the lock on it. I had discovered that you could feel which number was the correct one very easily but, unfortunately, it turned out that my method wasn't foolproof. Tim had a tantrum when I realised that the case was locked but I didn't know the correct combination. For my carelessness I had to carry the case all the way home in the summer sun, a journey of two miles, it became heavier and heavier. Finding the correct combination of the nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine possibilities took forever and made my fingers sore.

Dolly

I had a Dolly Parton video which wasn't on Youtube, she is singing 'Love Is Like a Butterfly' live on some TV show, so I uploaded it for the benefit of mankind. My way to say 'thank you.' Now I get an email once or twice a week telling me that a new comment has been posted on the page. Things like 'we love you Dolly' and 'I have loved Dolly ever since I was a little girl.'

Nelson Mandela

I once told Jane all about Nelson Mandela when she admitted that she had no idea who he was. It was a complicated, long story involving Nelson, the Dutch man, rowing all the way to Africa in only a small kayak. It was especially surprising that he was adopted by Africans as a leader since he was a white man. He fought Robert Mugabe who assembled an army of mercenaries. He was victorious and united Africa.

One day we were sitting in her lovely house and her father mentioned Nelson Mandela after South Africa had been discussed on the television news, 'but I bet you know nothing about him' he said to Jane, smiling, to which she happily declared 'oh, but I do' and then recounted the story to prove it. Sorry Jane.

Gambling Addiction

When Lisa and I had only just moved to Whitechapel we were walking down Whitechapel Road and, passing the amusement arcade 'Carousel'. I told her never to let me set a foot in there because only two years earlier I had sought treatment from psychologists for an addiction to playing slot machines. We hurried past and I explained that I didn't trust myself to even set eyes on the place and how I had to fight my feeling that that environment felt so enticing, warm, so right.

A year later and we found ourselves bored, waiting for a flight to Malmö, Sweden to visit Lisa's mother and her husband. I suggested playing a slot machine to kill time but she told me off anxiously, she seemed shocked by the suggestion. I had no idea why. I had forgotten telling my innocent fruit machine addiction lie you see, I never imagined that she would take me seriously anyway.

My ES250/2

I'd never much cared for motorbikes until I saw one of Joe's MZs. It was built from brand new parts and stood, never having seen oil nor petrol, in his living room. Red and black, it looked so cool that I decided then and there that it was my destiny to ride a bike just like it.

A while later, after having owned a smaller MZ for a couple of years, (the plan was to then pass my motorcyle driving test) I was sitting on the train to Milton Keynes in order to buy my new MZ ES250/2.

I was met at the station by a fat, taciturn biker. The bike had been standing for years but it seemed to ride just fine. I bought it for £400. As I say, I intended to pass my motorcycle driving test but had not yet at that moment. This meant that it was illegal for me to ride a 250cc bike but I planned only to take it back to Whitechapel and keep it there until everything was above board.

I was concerned that it had been standing for so long and I was concerned that I hadn't a valid driving licence nor insurance and the bike had no MOT certificate. The sky was a blanket of low grey clouds, stretching in all directions for as far as the eye could see, threatening rain. But how peculiar it was to ride the bike. It felt so different to the one that I was used to. And the headlamp shell was fixed which gave a strange impression, as though the handle bars were static.

It was the first time that I rode on a motorway, yet another thing that I was prohibited in doing without a full motorcycle licence, and the feel of the bike, the ominous clouds and the illegality of it all made me very uncomfortable. And then the engine started to sound odd. It sounded slightly scratchy and clunky and the noise grew worse. I knew that a two stroke engine, as the oil mixed with the petrol aged. was liable to have bearings become pitted when left standing. At first they bear up but, as the work of the engine wears them, they begin to break up. I knew this because it had happened to me driving once from Southend to London (a disastrous adventure which is a story in itself) and it would actually prove to be the case. It was some consolation that I was just arriving at services. I rode the bike around the garage forecourt there and it was obvious that there was no going on.

A kind lady at the Little Chef restaurant allowed me to store the bike in a small bin area in their car park, a sort of open air wooden shed. My father bailed me out, as usual, and he hired a trailer with which we picked it up. Weeks had passed and they were beginning to think about getting rid of it they said.

I loved it so much. People remarked on it wherever I went, tourists took photographs standing beside it and people from the former East Germany would shout 'MZ, MZ!' as I passed. It is, by far, my favourite thing that I have ever owned. It is standing at my parents' house. So if anybody wants to buy a motorbike.. It would be sad to see it go but perhaps one day I will be able to ride it again and I will buy it back off you. It has a nice registration plate number, huh?

Consuelo And I Swapping

As Consuelo arrived in London to be with me my MS got so bad that I found it difficult to leave the house. The stairs became unmanageable at our Liverpool Street flat. At the very beginning we did see the Mount Cherries play at the Bethnal Green Working Men's club (The Projects, incidentally, were the first band ever to play there when they decided to cash in on having a stage in such a good location,) The Monks at the Dirty Water Club and something or other at The Spitz, Monade, I think. The Mount Cherries were terrific, what a shame they split up! Their singer Dora had a great voice and they all always had lots of fun on stage, there were many of them, they were a gang.

And so at this time, because we liked the same kinds of bands and the same sorts of locations, Consuelo began to go to all of the same places that I used to go to. It felt strange to greet her when she came home from a night out and she'd say that she ended up at such and such a place, ask if I'd heard of it and I'd recall fun times and say 'oh yes, I used to go there lots.' Then we moved to Dalston, the plan was that we would be going out together all the time, but my doctor prescribed me a pill which made me feel so dark and ill that I didn't want to be around the people that I used to spend time with, despite the elevator and no staircase to contend with. Consuelo would propose places to go and things to do but  I would always turn them down. I've mentioned this elsewhere here, I think the entry was called 'reclusiveness.'

And then, just at the same time as Consuelo decides that she has had enough, I realise that the medication was the cause of my troubles. I have also mentioned this before and how I felt better and started to go out again. And now it's me going to these places and spending time with these people. I only mention it once more because it strikes me as such an odd, unfortunate progression of events, how we swapped like that.

Tanya

I placed an advert requesting English/Russian language exchange in an English language school on Oxford Street. I would have been twenty five at the time and so there was quite an age gap between myself and Tanya, who answered my advert, who was aged around 40. Of course, I didn't pay much attention to this, after all it wasn't a date, we were meeting for conversational practice.

She decided better of my idea to use one of the class rooms and suggested instead that we find a pub. We compromised and set off for a cafe. It struck me as a little odd that the first thing that she had me do, after walking down to the street from the language school on the fourth floor, was wait for her as she bought knickers in a small lingerie shop on the corner. She spent some time holding panties up against her body and assessing herself in a mirror before buying a red g-string.

We met a half dozen times, she was only in London for a fortnight, extending a business trip in order to take her language course. Each meeting would end with me turning down an invitation to accompany her to the pub. Late afternoon is not late enough for pubs.

It was only at our final meeting that I realised that she was interested in seducing me. I agreed to go and sit in a pub with her. I think that we ended up in the tourist pub The Cambridge, where Old Compton Street meets Charing Cross Road. She tried to get me drunk, with some success, and then asked me if I'd like to see her hotel.  I wondered if Lisa would approve of me sleeping with a pretty, friendly Ukrainian woman but I knew that she wouldn't and I am a faithful person so, much as I'd have liked to have taken up the offer of hotel room sex, I went home instead. Still, I have her number written in the front cover of a Russian/English dictionary and an invitation to give her a call should I ever find myself in Kiev.

My Grandfather

I loved my grandfather on my mother's side dearly and we were very close. Looking back I suppose he would behave slightly oddly, although I never really noticed, after all, I was very young.

He was a man of habit. In the morning, if it were a winter's day, he would fetch coal and kindling wood for the fire and arrange them in the hearth in preparation for the evening. He would conduct his chores around the three meals in the day which my grandmother prepared for him, perhaps visit the shopping centre there in Huyton, Liverpool and then he and my grandmother would watch television after the fire had been lit. They would drink tea from a teapot, with three biscuits and then later coffee prepared with hot milk. Occasionally the two of them would drink shandy prepared with only a half a can of lager between them.

But there is nothing peculiar about this. Some of his ideas might have seemed strange to some people though. He would declare that all motorcars ought be banned,  despite the fact that he himself drove (and not because he was concerned about pollution but because roads were too crowded in his opinion), he argued for the abolition of inflation (which could perhaps be supported by valid arguments but he was unaware of them), that all communists should be hanged (he would declare, out of the blue, that the Russians were very cunning but, nevertheless..) He would chuckle to himself  'it's a funny old world.' As he pottered around the house.

I think he felt, and quite rightly, that he had been dealt a poor hand in life. He could have been a skilled engineer, he was very practical and was fascinated by industry, the workings of engines and how things were manufactured. He succeeded at school and won a scholarship to university but my great grand mother insisted that he go and work and bring money home. So, as a teenager, he went to Liverpool Docks and found a job as a deck hand. He would later become a steward on the Red Star Line of cruise ships. He said he almost got a job as a cook but they were only taking on cooks with cookery books. It was common to hear a foreman shouting, so my grandfather told me, affecting a strong Lancastrian accent 'cooks with books' at docks because cooks were always in demand.

My grandmother and he were close and held each other in high regard but they were not loving. He never gave my grandmother a present, he never surprised her. I am guessing that he suffered from depression.

When I was thirteen or fourteen my parents decided for him that he should replace his old blue Ford Escort with the Vauxhall Astra that they had been driving for a few years. They had made the offer of buying my grandparents a new car a few times previously but he had always turned it down. He loved his car and it's engine and modern cars are so much more difficult for enthusiasts to tinker with. My parents surprised them with the gift of a new car, my grandmother was delighted. My grandfather, for fear that the neighbours might think that they had been abroad, covered up the GB sticker with black tape.

I'm Smooth As Vanilla 'Cos I'm Ice On The Mic

When Howard and I lived in Stamford Hill we'd go lots to the old man's Wetherspoon pub in Stoke Newington, The Rochester Castle, because it was cheap and we had little money. We'd have no fun at all and then we'd go to the Jolly Butchers up the road which, in those days at least, had the potential of odd, aggressive people forcing themselves on you. They had a lock in most nights, so we would go there and have no fun.

On one occasion we met a rapper (that was his description of himself) in the Rochester Castle. He insisted on teaching me his favourite rap. I found this very amusing and we all had lots of fun getting drunk and then he decided to take us to a local recording studio, we were to improvise a rap together.

Fortunately the studio was just closing and didn't want anything to do with him since he was drunk. But then an amazing thing happened. On the corner of Evering Road and Stoke Newington High Street he christened me with a gang name using something that he found on the road in place of a sword, with three other gang members present to bear witness.

I woke up the next morning with a real hangover. Honestly, hangovers don't usually bother me but this one was notable. But I had forgot my gang name!! I remembered the ceremony well, but my special gang name, to which I was now entitled, well, it was gone, forever.

I do remember the rap that he made me learn over pints and pints of lager though:

'I'm smooth as vanilla 'cos I'm ice on the mic,
weaving in and out like a flying kite,
but there's death on the block 'cos dope's on the scene,
sucker gettin' iced 'cos the gansta leads'

More of a poem than a rap, huh?

Shrinking Primary School

I rode my motorbike to Stanmore, in North London, a long time ago. It was the smallest, the first, of the two motorbikes I would own so it must have been around 2002. The motorbike was a blue MZ TS125 by the way :)

I went there because I had spent the first seven years of my life there and I felt, on a whim, like taking a look at the place again. I passed 'Mike and Angela's' newsagent which, of course, was renamed since, in my seventh year, Mike killed Angela to punish her for infidelity.

I saw the entrance to Stanmore Common where the family would pick rose hips for mum to make jam. I stood outside my old house, which had shrunk, along with the open spaces and the playground around it.

The most astonishing bit of shrinking had occurred at my primary school.
The hill in the playing field there, which I remember being so mountainous, which I remember exhausting myself running up, was two foot high.

I looked the school up on youtube today, and only one result came up, a choir recital in the school hall. I was surprised to see the same piano standing there, all these years later, although that's hardly surprising, is it?

Bianca Tinned Tomatoes

One day I was shopping in Whitechapel Sainsbury's a short walk from my flat in the old schoolhouse there, when I noticed that Patsy Palmer was pushing a trolley down the aisles. It made sense, it was, after all, just around the corner from The Blind Beggar' and I could easily imagine her and the Krays sharing a joke over a pint of lager there.

I had followed her from a distance before I carried on and picked out my stuff, not because I was impressed by her or her celebrity, but because of  people’s faces when they realised they were looking at Bianca from Eastenders, in the flesh. Jaws dropped in awe.

I was very pleased to see that Sainsbury's were stocking a cheap brand of tinned plum tomatoes called 'Bianca.' I filled my basket with a dozen cans and went in search of Patsy. I caught up with her near the bread counter, She had left her trolley standing so as to push through a small crowd there and choose her bread. I put the tins in her shopping trolley, it took some time to conceal them all but she was waiting for a loaf to be sliced. I hope that she found the tinned tomatoes to be a pleasant surprise at the checkout.

Dennis Nordern

Once I was walking with Jane through Soho, down Berwick street. Just where the market stalls begin we bumped into Dennis Nordern, host of television's 'It'll Be Alright On The Night.'

I remember that it was Victory in Europe day and so, for some reason or another, I was carrying an old World War Two British Tommy helmet. I got so sick of the sight of the thing I was to give it away in 2005 via an ad on Freecycle. A very grateful Italian student inherited it.

At first Dennis seemed quite open to the idea of finding a photobooth and having passport photos taken with us but, to be honest, I'm not sure that he was that aware what was going on around him. He soon became agitated and insisted on parting company. I had promised him that he could wear the helmet in the photos which had appealed to him at first but now he became disinterested. I dragged him by the arm but the commotion that he made was attracting the attention of passers by so, reluctantly, I released him.

Huntingdon Library

The library in Huntingdon was a beautiful disc shaped building which now, or so I'm told, has been demolished for some reason.

I remember standing in there, with a book in hand, fretting as an eighteen year old that I hadn't yet written a novel, this fact made me anxious. I was a great reader in those days and would get through two or three books a week.

I also remember visiting one day to find out why my breath had been smelling, on the odd occasion lately, of pear drops or nail varnish remover. The librarian pointed us to a shelf of medical reference books, located on the first floor, when I outlined my problem to her. In the end it would be the Encyclopedia Brittanica which revealed the cause of my condition and I discovered that my body was experiencing a bout of ketoacidosis following binge drinking (we had been drinking an astonishingly large volume of whisky, vodka and beer.) I was a little concerned so I put it to the back of my mind and life continued as normal. since I was young and adaptable the episode was soon nothing more than an amusing anecdote.

The Watermark Club

In the early 2000s the Watermark club opened in Shoreditch. It was close to the Dragon Bar, or somewhere in the direction of Liverpool Street? All the cool kids went there and everyone took lines and lines of cocaine. They all had a high opinion of themselves, it was nightmarish. After a couple of years it was closed down for not having a late license but opening all night.

My Mum's Lost Ring

Meg, my mother, came home from work one evening panicking. She had just discovered that she had lost her ring. A 'keeper' ring that Scots women wear traditionally below the wedding ring. It had belonged to her great grandmother.

We retraced her steps, in the deep snow, all the way back to the centre of Bracknell, and all the way back home, searching the poorly lit path for the ring which never presented itself. My mother was very upset for days.

Killing A Bag Of Chips

In the winter of 2003 The Projects were on tour with Broadcast. Trish had heard our 'Entertainment' 7" and taken to it and so they invited us to support them at the University of London Union. I am surprised that they liked this show, I was just listening to a dictaphone recording that I made and the songs are all played extremely fast, so fast that it sounds wrong, They all begin at the right speed with, perhaps, a keyboard intro or the guitar and then the drums come in and everything is 20% faster. Mark, the drummer in those days, did have a tendency to play quickly. but, I think perhaps he was nervous on this occasion. I remember it being unpleasant. On the tape the rest of us are all having difficulty keeping up with the drums. But Broadcast did like it and so they invited us to join them for the UK shows in their world tour that year.

We had a lot of fun, I think we played good shows. I hand block printed lots of sleeves for tour CDs which had a Matt/Simon remix on them. They looked pretty and they sold well. I made some T Shirts with an image of a giant hand reaching down from the sky and picking up a tower block. I thought they were good but they didn't sell quite as well.

This was the first time that my MS really showed, although I believed it to be a trapped nerve at the time. After the opening show in Nottingham I was jogging out to the van with a drum shell and my legs suddenly seemed to not be running as quickly as the rest of me and I fell flat on my face. Broadcast, packed up and waiting for a straggler in their van, were all watching and thought that I was blind drunk.

Martin, from Duophonic, Broadcast's manager was with us the whole time and it was good to get to know him. He's a very nice man. We didn't talk too much to Broadcast although, after the last show, James said that he would miss us and that he wouldn't mind coming to London with us because Birmingham was a bit slow. Lisa and James were to email each other regularly for some time.

There was a very exciting incident en route to Aberdeen but I think that deserves it's own post. As does the van break down. As does the most depressing birthday I ever had. As does Broadcast's unhinged session drummer attacking Mark. Five more posts, that's good. I'd write about these things now and here were I not so lazy.

One moment that does stick in my mind occurred during a sound check one evening, perhaps in the beautiful choral hall in Brighton where we played. Trish was running through scales, she has an exceptional voice, it really was beautiful to hear. She then announced over the microphone (in reply to somebody out of ear shot I suppose) that she 'could kill a bag of chips' in a thick Midlands accent. I know, things like that aren't supposed to stick out but I am allowed to find a Birmingham accent amusing because that's where my dad's from.

I was sitting waiting in Accident and Emergency in Homerton Hospital in January when Dino sent me a text message conveying the sad news of Trish's death.

Speed Addicts

I attended the regional college to study for my A levels when I was seventeen. I was only really good friends with Tom. He got along well with a group of speed addicts who lived in the nearby town of St Ives. One of them, I forget his name, seemed like a good and thoughtful person were it not for this terrible mean streak that he had in him. He had a vendetta against a senior policeman and was forever threatening that he would kill him. I seem to remember that he had some hold over him, having some knowledge or proof of corruption. I seem to remember hearing about some episode where he was trying to run this detective off the road, chasing his car with one stolen.

They would all spend their time at Danny's flat, there was a group of a half dozen speed addicts sleeping there for a few hours each afternoon. He was very skinny and was constantly taking vast quantities of different drugs. The flat was absolutely bare, save for a yellow NHS sharps bin and graffiti all over the walls, executed with a permanent marker, depicting Disney characters shooting up drugs.

It was really ugly and pathetic and I couldn't see why Tom gave these people a thought. I suppose he was impressed somehow.

Learning Russian

I was a very poor student. I went and studied literature at King's College London but I ended up trapped in this awful sleeping pattern and spent half the days in bed. Still, I had a unique approach to exams and essay writing which allowed me to scrape through with a 2:1, but I think that's a different story.

At the end of the second year things were beyond salvaging though. I only turned up at some of the classes after the mid term break and the professors would wonder just who I was and, quite rightly, complain about me. I had missed deadlines, I'd failed to read the books that I should have read and I felt completely unprepared for examinations. I asked for a year out in which to complete my coursework and, at the end of which, to sit that year's exams.

I have always, especially in my younger days, been attracted to junk shops. There was a second hand furniture shop, which was only open for a year or two, at the beginning of The Holloway Road. It was a few doors down from the Wig And Gown pub where they used to hold pop pub quizzes I think, and in the basement of this shop there were always mountains of house clearance rubbish to sift through.

One winter morning, right at the outset of my year out, I took a look in there. There was a collection of Russian books, the collection, I was told, of a Junior Diplomat. They were all quite old and beautiful, the ones that attracted me the most were an impressive two volume world atlas from the turn of the Century. I returned the next day after having borrowed ten pounds to buy them but I was too late, they had been sold. But still, I left with a handful of novels, a couple of picture books of religious icons and a very old Russian Grammar for English speakers.

In summer I took the grammar to Springfield Park. The phrases that were used to illustrate rules and points were very odd and had a strange poetry, like the phrases spoken over the radio in Cocteau's film Orphée. I began to learn the alphabet. On the way home, by coincidence, I found a modern Russian language paperback for basic learners in the charity shop opposite my flat on Amhurst Parade. It was the very same book that a fellow pupil called Tim had brought with him to school one day. He was a ginger haired, big headed, supercilious, self righteous, religious, right wing boy with eczema. He now works for Microsoft and lives in California. In fact, I now remember that I sent him a pleasant message and a friend request a few years ago on Facebook both of which he ignored. Anyway, I asked if I might borrow this paperback Russian language book but he refused, snorting with derision saying in his reedy, slightly out of control way, 'You! You could never learn Russian!' So I bought the paperback. After a day or two I had the alphabet worked out (it's much easier to learn than I imagined it would be) and then I started learning the language proper.

I have been learning it ever since and now have a good grasp of the grammar, although I need to keep up practice to use the correct cases and genders when speaking. I do have a pretty wide vocabulary though. Unfortunately I left my copy of Pulkina's Grammar in a telephone box opposite Hackney Downs overground station. It had an impressive, futurist hardbound cover and I was disappointed that it's replacement, which I ordered from the Russian bookshop which was traded for only a few years from a shop on the corner of Denmark Street and Shaftsbury Avenue, had a very ugly, blue paper cover.

I have found that I really do love languages, which is odd because, as a child, I was never all that proficient. I've picked up a lot of French and German and  have taught myself a little Japanese and Arabic, but I need to have more discipline and put in time every day. I had a private tutor for a few months last year, Anna. She left to live with her boyfriend in Nottingham but she recommended an old college friend of hers, Natalia, who has since finished her studies here and returned to Novosibirsk. I enjoyed my Russian lessons and I should probably look for a new tutor. I felt very proud to be told that I was the most advanced of their students :)

Incidentally, if you have read, or watched A Clockwork Orange you already know plenty of Russian with the slang used there.

Sniffy

Today is a year since one of our two cats died. When I was thinking of getting cats I decided that the breed Russian Blue would be ideal because they don't have the same instinct as other cats do to check their territory regularly, so an owner wouldn't feel bad about keeping them in a flat. I put my name down for two kittens with a breeder. She telephoned me some weeks later and told me that the mother had poisoned them with her milk after something that she ate. To be honest, I couldn't really afford them.

A couple of years later Pat from the Russian Blue Protection Society telephoned out of the blue. They had two four year old cats that needed rehousing, their owner had had a breakdown apparently and they needed a new home urgently after another potential owner had let them down. The old owner was a church goer and so the cats were staying at her vicar's house in Harlow New Town.

We took the train from Liverpool Street, Lisa and I, and the vicar collected us from the station. The cats were very frightened, they were shut in a strange room with five others living in the house beyond. Knowing them now, they are such scared cats and cry and cry as if they are travelling to their execution whenever they take the shortest trip to the vet's, I should imagine that the experience was terrifying for them. Lilly and Leila, or Boots and Sniffy as they were to become, cowered in their box. But then Sniffy ventured out, walked right up to me and started purring. The vicar was surprised and explained that although Lilly (Boots) had occasionally shown an interest in him, this was the first time in all the days that they were boarding at the vicarage that Leila (Sniffy) had done so. Since Sniffy had chosen me I felt obliged to take them home. They didn't stop mewing throughout the whole journey but Lisa and I felt proud to have two such beautiful cats.

So Sniffy lived with me for eight years. I don't think she liked me all that much although she did give me some affection now and again. Consuelo certainly got along well with her when they met and they had an understanding.

Sniffy had always been a bit ill. I took her to the vet again and again but they never knew why she had this persistent sniff and blocked up nose. It all but disappeared after Consuelo started giving her bottled water though, strangely enough. Then she got cystitis but the vet's treatment didn't work. I should have taken her back to see him sooner. She was losing weight.

When we did go, the vet didn't know what was wrong, she took three trips to the surgery on Dalston Lane and had x-rays and blood tests. So we took her to the surgery off Mare Street and it turned out that she had cancer, then she didn't, then she did again after Consuelo took her to North London on the tube for an ultrasound scan. Consuelo was very dedicated to Sniffy.

The vet there was a charming man called Brian. I was telling Sniffy's story to Amber in the pub one night and Amber recognised the vet. Her and her boyfriend Andy know him as 'Sex Brian' on account of the fact that he was very sexy and telephoned her at all hours to give her updates on Chanel's health when Chanel was in his care.

Although Consuelo moved out last year in the autumn she spent most of summer in Spain too. I spent weeks alone sitting with Sniffy in the living room, because she would insist on sleeping on the table there, keeping an eye on her so that she could get to her food, to her tray and then back onto the table. She was too weak to manage it herself. In her last days I began to gave her a supplement, iP6, because it has had very positive results reported in animal models of the type of cancer that Sniffy suffered from.  The doses that I gave her, mixing the powder in the water, were, on reflection, too high and I do hope that my administering it didn't contribute to her death. iP6 chelates iron and can therefore perhaps cause electrolyte imbalance of the heart (this seems to be my experience being both anaemic and prone to arrhythmia and having taken this supplement at some point although I can't remember why.) I feel sure that this is a possibility and I feel guilty, not only for being careless with the dose but also for not having investigated this and given it to her weeks earlier.

On one occasion Consuelo found her in the morning hanging from a chair. She had tried to jump onto it, not been able to and her claws had left her attached to it through the night. She was too weak to pull herself up or her paws out. How sad.

On the way back from the vet's after the final trip we stopped in London Fields and let her have a roam around. She was ever so skinny and slow so there was no chance of her escaping into the wild but we did have to hide her from an enthusiastic puppy at one point. We also let her explore the pavement beside the school on Mapledene Road. She just lay down and basked in the sunshine.

Yes, Sniffy was a very good cat. A little obsessed with food but a very good cat never the less. She was thoughtful and gentle. She died at home a year ago today, lying on the sofa. I have never seen anyone die and it was a bad experience. She choked, stretched out her neck and, after an age, let out this awful sigh and then keeled over. I couldn't quite believe it.

Hiroe kindly accompanied Consuelo to my parents' house in Huntingdon where Sniffy is now buried in the garden.

Les Autres

A week or two before Lisa and I began to date we were sitting on a crowded train in the height of summer travelling to Hackney Downs. The commuters were tired and stressed.

I was making Lisa laugh lots pretending to be French, talking out loud in broken French, about our fellow passengers, about how 'les autres' had to travailler and how les autres were tres fatigues et chauds dans leurs costumes. About how la vie etait difficile pour les autres but, pour moi, things were tres, tres facile.

It wasn't especially funny but I remember Lisa's laughter. I enjoyed that summer!

My Second Scar

Tremendous parties were thrown at Sandringham Road, a five bedroom flat in Dalston where many of my friends lived at one point or another. Parties that anyone and everyone would attend, parties to which ambulances and police cars would be alerted to. They were truly magnificent parties.

Late at one party, one that was thrown after Lisa and I moved out of the place in favour of our new flat in the old red brick school house behind Whitechapel tube station,  we were standing in the hallway chatting. I was blind drunk and leaning against the door of the downstairs bathroom, which was closed off and being used to store lots of junk because the plumbing was faulty. The door opened with my weight, I fell inarticulately and, having no reactions through drunkenness, cut my head, just below my left eyebrow. I bled a great deal, and I would not stop bleeding. Lisa chastised me for being drunk (at a party) and for refusing to go to Accident and Emergency. You can barely see the scar now but it is there.

My second scar is quite boring but I thought that it was only fair to mention it after having told the story of my first. The fourth scar was the scariest, by the way, but only because I am not very good with scalpels.

A Couple Of Things That Shocked Me

The first piece of information that shocked me was received when walking up Giant Tree Hill (the real name of the road) with my mother Meg. I was very young, I'm not sure how young, but young enough not to know about death. And it was at this moment that I decided to ask my mum what death was, no doubt in response to something that she had said. She explained that people go to the sky. I asked 'And then they come back?' because anything else was inconceivable but, it turned out to my surprise, they never came back. Never, ever. At first I thought she was joking, the thought made me feel sick and, all of a sudden, life was no longer the exceptionally pleasant thing that it had been.
 
I was then shocked a couple of years later to learn that plants think, at least that was the claim made on a Radio 4 program to which my mother was listening. This news bothered me, the implications were astounding and I thought of all those poor plants which I myself had murdered but my mother reassured me and told me that it probably wasn't true. My mum always had Radio 4 tuned in, and still does.

Shortly afterwards I was swinging on a garden swing in the summer sunshine and I contemplated the infinity of space. I had never considered it before but I found it very amusing to try to picture infinity. I clearly remember staring at a white fence and laughing to myself.

I must have been seven when I learned my third shocking fact because, by this time, we were no longer living in Stanmore, on the outskirts of North London, but in a Royal Air Force base by the village of Wyton near Huntingdon (we'd move away a couple of years later to Bracknell near Reading and then, when I was thirteen, we'd move, by coincidence, back to Huntingdon again.)

In Wyton the RAF gave us quite a grand house. I remember standing beside my mother in the cool of the pantry looking at a tin decorated with reproductions of the biscuits which had once been found inside. Each biscuit had a different naïve design adorned on it with colourful icing. I loved that biscuit tin.

My mother was berating drug addicts so I had to find out what drugs were. She explained, as best she could, all about hallucinations and I was terrified. To not only see something imagined, usually dragons my mother said, but to believe it to be real was almost beyond comprehension. And to think that people chose to put themselves through this terror!

Around the same time I listened to a radio play in the living room. I turned on the radio to find, surprise, surprise, Radio 4 and a story seemed to have just started so I sat on the carpet with my legs crossed and paid attention. It was about a man and a woman who were taken from their homes and tricked into being killed with poisonous gas when they thought that they were having a shower. The man seemed to know what was happening but reassured his true love that everything would be just fine forever. It was very sad and made me cry. My parents later told me that it was based on a true story and that this death had befallen a vast number of people. I felt dismayed. In fact, ever since, I have never felt so dismayed.

When I was ten I read a book about slaughter. I had also just been on a family holiday which my brother did not participate in leaving me to listen to his 'Meat Is Murder' cassette on my Walkman in the back seat of the car all the way to The Black Forest. Until then I believed that farm animals led pleasant lives and painless deaths. I announced my intention to become a vegetarian but I only lasted a couple of days. My mother complained, laughing at me, and my father beat me down with his more mature, if flawed, logic and it was not until I was nineteen that I became a vegetarian for real.

When I was twelve I learned late one night, on the little portable black and white TV set in my bedroom, that grown men trick young children into having sex with them and I was confused. I felt very sorry for the children too. The show went on to discuss whether or not these men could help themselves.

I think that those are all the things which shocked me when I was little and I haven't found anything shocking since.

Adelaide's Silver Room

I went around to visit Adelaide when she rented a room off Kingsland Road ages ago, perhaps 2002 or something, and I was really surprised to find that she had covered the interior from ceiling to floor and all the furniture in silver foil. It looked impressive.

100 posts

Oh, oh, I have written one hundred posts. I am two pages through an eight page list of things to write about and I add to the list every day or two so I have a few stories left to tell..

I have just started writing my novel again. I tried writing it before but, since I rarely read anything written later than the 70s, and since most of what I read was written in the 19th Century my style was odd and annoying. But I think writing these reminiscences and trying to keep language simple has straightened things out a bit.

I have every chapter outlined, more or less, in my head and the first is written. So, with luck, I will overcome my laziness and one day complete it. It is a science fiction book, but more in a Stanislaw Lem way than a George Lucas way.

Thanks for reading my inconsequential stories!

First Scar

I have six scars, I acquired my first when I was two years old playing with a tin can, or so I am told.

My mother rushed me to the hospital, the pad of my forefinger on my left hand needed stitching up. My scar is circular so I presume that It was almost cut through although being less than a centimetre in diameter today I can't imagine how small it was on my two year old finger.

It would be good if I were an audacious criminal, proudly leaving my tell tale fingerprint at the scene of every crime.

Ellipses

I have been a fan of ellipses for many years, sometimes indicating aposiopesis (a trailing off to silence) but usually denoting a pause for thought. In the past I would use three dots... But then I fell for Consuelo and, before she came to London, we exchanged endless romantic text messages and emails. She too was a big fan of ellipses, but she only ever used two dots. At first the two dots made me feel uncomfortable and I instinctively disliked them... But, over time, I came to see how much more beautiful two dots are and I too found myself adopting the two point ellipses.. I think it expresses the meaning that I am trying to convey so much better.

Today is Consuelo's birthday. I still can't get over her leaving when we were so very close. Happy birthday cariño! Felicidades! xxx You know, I think about her all the time..

Shoplifting

When I was nine I stole a pencil eraser from a stationary shop in Bracknell. I was so nervous that I almost got a heart attack when I was caught. And the guilt that followed. I was a superstitious child and actually believed in God. I also believed that my stealing an eraser would displease him so much that there was a real chance that I would spend eternity suffering the torments of Hell when my days are done.

Since I was going to Hell anyway and had nothing to lose, when I was twelve my friend Simon and I stole lots of sweets from a corner shop in the council estate where he lived. We went back for more when we realised how easy it was and then again for a third time. We had so many sweets we couldn't believe it. I felt guilty because the shop keeper was friendly but still, free sweets, and lots of them, that sort of wealth corrupts. We were sitting marvelling at our booty by the swings in a dreary play area covered in graffiti when a bigger boy came and told us that he had seen it all. He demanded the sweets in order for him not to turn us in.

When I was seventeen I stole a Travel Monopoly set from Woolworths. Howard and I took a look at it while we were drinking tea in Starburger next door. The pieces were too fiddly so I took it back and swapped it for Travel Scrabble.

A few years ago I went to Denmark Street to buy some replacement volume and tone pots for my guitar. The shop was charging £12 for a couple of mass produced, Chinese bits of plastic. Encouraged by my own sense of outrage I let the packet drop from my hand into the closed umbrella held in the other and walked out of the shop. I surprised myself with my cunning technique and it put me in a good mood for the rest of that day.

These were the only four acts of shoplifting that I have committed in my life aside from my having to steal packing tape shortly before leaving Glasgow (I hadn't a penny.)

Birdboxes

I once made bird boxes and sold them to a shop on Columbia Road by the flower market to make some extra money while I worked at the Bricklayer's Arms pub. My father had made one and I copied it. These bird boxes were pretty with little features made out of tin cans, chairs outside the house, buckets, rakes propped against the wall, things like that.

They looked ok for bird boxes but making, and painting them with a hangover is a chore when your heart isn't in it. I always had a hangover in those days. After only manufacturing a couple of dozen I gave up.

The Drinkers In The Royal Oak

By the time I was finishing school and starting to attend sixth form college the dark and dangerous Waterloo pub was no longer popular and all the school children went to The Royak Oak in the village of Godmanchester. After a while Howard and I found ourselves in there all the time, playing pool in the basement room, even on empty weekdays.

Aside from the younger boys and girls many old men would be there, every day of their lives, getting drunk. They would sit at the bar, a dismal row of them. They were all slightly stupid, misogynist, racist, homophobic, uninspired and unambitious. One sticks out in my memory well, I think he was called Jim and he was a disgusting wretch. He was always drunk and he'd screech incoherently with a voice that was entirely hoarse like, as they say, sand paper. His skin was stretched taught over his flimsy, skinny body, he had a foul mouth, harassed girls and shouted abuse at boys.

He was a builder but I don't know when he found time to build anything since he was always in the pub.

Brothers who had worked on the plumbing of the family home that my dad worked on would always tell me, drunkenly, what a genius my dad was. They were amazed that he had carried out all of the electrical work and carpentry and most of the plumbing on the house himself, especially given that he was an amateur.

One Sunday afternoon I was sitting on the bench behind the place with Jane. All of a sudden all of the regulars ran out, announced that they were about to play 'flaming arse holes' and stood against the wall, pulled their trousers down, put toilet paper between their legs and used cigarette lighters to set the paper alight. They were unpleasant people. Jim declared himself the winner.

I overheard one of them, a stocky skinhead who I think was named James, boasting that he was a great arm wrestler as I was waiting one evening to be served at the bar. I told him that I was confident that I could beat him but he thought this impossible and dismissed me.

Later that evening Jane, Howard and I were standing out the back by Jane's green Morris Minor. We were in the habit of buying undrinkable, cheap 99p La Mancha wine from the local off licence when we were running out of money and drinking from the bottle. James the even heavier drinker walked past and I asked him if he was still too scared to have the arm wrestle, so he took me up on the challenge and we set about holding the competition on the bonnet of Jane's car. And I won. He stared at me momentarily and then punched me in the face. Honestly, the locals at the Royal Oak pub were a dismal bunch.

Computers

When I was little my friend Christian's dad had a ZX Spectrum computer. He had it in the study, it stood alone on a table with a small portable television and you were not allowed to bring drinks or snacks into the room. We played Harrier Attack and The Hobbit. I'm sure I walked past him on Commercial Street a few years ago but I was too amazed to say anything. After a couple of years I told my dad that all households would have a computer one day and requested that Santa bring me a ZX Spectrum. I was obviously paraphrasing TV's 'Tomorrow's World,' my dad disagreed but Santa brought me one all the same.

Quite a few years later, when I lived in Bracknell, my closest friend at the comprehensive school there was a boy named Andrew. He was a very good illustrator, always drawing cartoons with a Rotring pen. He was talented but very competitive. I would often visit his house in the nearby council estate at lunch time and we would play games on his ZX Spectrum. His mother always wore fluffy slippers and was always smoking. Sometimes Andrew would come round to my house on the weekend or an evening after school and she would still be wearing the pink, fluffy carpet slippers and be smoking a cigarette when she came to drop him off.

There were often photocopied sheets of racist/sexist/homophobic jokes lying around his room which his elder brother, I was told, would bring back from work. They weren't funny despite being distasteful. I remember one, which I needed explaining to me, went 'Q: Who likes eating pussy? A: You, me and Billy Jean King.' I didn't know who Billy Jean King was. He had a Sam Fox duvet cover, the page three girl who posed topless in The Sun. Her head was on the pillow case and a life size image of her topless body on the slip. It must have been almost like sleeping with Samantha Fox herself. The Projects once missed her by ten minutes in the rehearsal rooms that we used to use, incidentally.

One time his mother offered me a cup of tea and a doughnut. The mug was dirty and she wiped it with a dirty cloth, the doughnut was old and oily and had been squashed under lots of things in the fridge. I hid the doughnut in my bag when Andrew wasn't looking, pretending that I had eaten it.

As I say, he was competitive and reticent to give complements or acknowledge anyone's successes and so being friends with him was tiring and unrewarding, but he was an interesting and intelligent person all the same.

I lost interest in computers until University when I discovered the internet. An English Literature professor had explained 'email' to us (we were all amazed and had difficulty coming to terms with the concept) so I went to the IT room. I looked up Geordie Mick from Prolapse's page on the internet but I couldn't really work out how Netscape Navigator worked and it was all so slow that I gave up for a few more years.

Long after University, realising that I had a potential job opportunity, I followed in Howard's footsteps and taught myself how to animate using Flash, securing a job in the dot com bubble. I'll talk more about this job later, so much money was wasted on such a stupid proposition. I taught myself how to program games with software called DIrector and then later with Flash. I taught myself c++. Then I decided to turn my back on programming.

New Year's Eve II

When I wrote the post 'New Year's Eve I' I didn't mention New Year's Eve in Devon, sometime around 2003/4. It was the best New Year's that I have ever experienced.

Sophie had the great idea of renting a cottage in Devon. Back then Sophie was my close friend Mat's girlfriend. She was in a band called 'Wet Dog' and Rebecca from the band also came along with her then boyfriend Lee (who also played in Mat's Ghosts) and John from Mat's band had a room along with his girlfriend. Lisa and I shared the fourth room.

We were there for a week and we had lots of fun playing music and going on walks and getting drunk but mostly getting drunk.

The local paper delivered through the door warned on its front page of increased paranormal activity in the county. Some of us thought that this accounted for unexplained sounds in the night and for three quarters of all the eggs cracked to make omelette having double yolks.

We spent the early evening of New Year's Eve in the lovely town of Clovelly, where motorised traffic is forbidden and therefore there are no street markings or signs. We took a long walk down a steep hill from a car park to an unremarkable pub by the sea front John's girlfriend started screaming on the return journey because all eight of us were in her car and it brought on a panic attack. As the new year began we were dancing back in the cottage.

One night I sat up late watching a crap 'On The Buses' film. Lisa came down from the bedroom and asked me again to come to bed. She was concerned about how much I was drinking and became quite upset. Mathew appeared from the kitchen and Lisa punched him on the way out of the room. I'm sure it was my fault for not simply following her request and going to bed. I only mention it because it sticks in my memory but, if the truth is told, Lisa and I got along tremendously well the whole time. She invented a great Cookie-Monster-eating impersonation and I have the video to prove it.

Lisa and I were travelling home by train and they all came to see us off at the station, Mathew having bought some comedy teeth for all of them especially.


----Love In The Graveyard----

St Albans

I have the vaguest recollection of sitting in the back seat of the family car, I think we were visiting the market town of St Albans and we were travelling around a roundabout when 'Video Killed the Radio Star' came on the radio. I asked my dad to explain what it meant and he did his best. I remember really loving the sound of the singer's voice.

Later that day my parents bought me a red helicopter pilot's jumpsuit for an Action Man doll which pleased me because I had an ambition to grow up to be a helicopter mountain rescue pilot. Later on that day I found a scuffed yellow 'Status Quo' pin badge on the pavement and I asked my dad what it meant.

Then we stopped and watched Morris dancers. I asked my dad just what they were doing carrying on like that but I wasn't satisfied with his explanations.

I clearly remember everyone dressing in dark colours and looking very dowdy in the early eighties, just before we all went wild with primary colours. I remember all the cars looking very old fashioned.

Jack The Ripper

After I left my second flat in Stamford Hill I rented Dino's room in Sandringham Road while he was out of town. Lisa and I got together and I'd stay in her room for a few months until we moved to the old red brick school house on Durwood Street.

Every Sunday morning one of the local Jack The Ripper tours would turn up and the guide would outline the economy of the Victorian East End. He would then explain how the body of Jack the Ripper's first victim 'was found in a building which stood here.'

One day I was out the front of the school house messing around with the carburettor of my my first MZ motorcycle in the sunshine, a small blue TS125, and I noticed that the tour guide pointed to our flat when he described the crime scene.

Darren/Ken/Mixed Grills

Darren was a committed vegetarian, Ken was not.

I moved in to share Darren's Stamford Hill flat after Jane and I had split up. He is an enthusiastic music lover (now working as a promoter in his home town of Belfast.) Darren loved television and radio's John Shuttleworth. John has a neighbour Ken the impresario. Ken is slightly timourous, has a heightened sense of self importance and entitlement and has a squeaky high pitched voice. Deep down he is a good person though I think.

Darren began to impersonate Ken, and he did it perfectly. But Ken became something of an alter ego and it got so as Ken was threatening to take over, especially when Darren/Ken drank.

Darren and Alison became a couple, they moved to Brighton for a while. When I visited them we went to an indie gig that Darren was promoting I was ever so drunk on the return journey but Ken was more drunk and he was becoming quite boisterous. He was jumping up and down in the black cab and yelping. The cab driver stopped more than once and told us to get out but Alison reasoned with him.

We arrived at their house in Hove, close to the beach. As soon as the cab had come to a halt Ken was off. He hopped out onto the road, dashing down the street and away along the beach not to be seen again until the following morning.

Darren told me that, while we were living in Stamford Hill, Ken would nip down to the greasy spoon under our flat and enjoy a mixed grill now and again and I honestly don't know if it was a joke.

I haven't seen Darren (or Ken) for a long time and I look forwards to the next time I do.

Understanding Music II

The older I get, the better at coming up with songs I am. Not to say that they are necessarily any good, just that I have become more productive, writing twenty songs over the last two years, and have a dozen more ideas hummed onto a little recorder or recorded on my mobile that will slowly be realised. None of them have been released yet. Soon I hope! I aim to write a song a fortnight from now until I die.

Singing to your cat always suggests a nice melody, you might hear someone say an interesting phrase in conversation or read it in a book or hear it on the news or on a film. It might just pop into your head when you are thinking about a few other things. Write it down! It could make a great song!

Understanding Music I

My grandfather sat beside the record player and I played him various records from my parents' collection when I was five years old. I was amazed that he didn't like The Beatles since, as I explained, 'they were old too.' No, he didn't dig The Beatles (a trait which skipped a generation.)

I confessed that I thought that I was too young to understand music and it was true. I was attracted to the records, their colourful, stiff card covers and their uniformity, in much the same way that I gravitated toward the club biscuits, with their varying designs, in the grocery shop or my mother's collection of herb jars with their colourful plastic lids, but the music itself meant nothing to me.

In fact, the only 'grown up' song that I liked was 'Yellow Submarine' and the only children's record was 'Bobby and Betty Go to the Moon,' although I didn't like the musical 'B' side, only the story-narrated 'A' side.

I anticipated liking music and only a few years later I did. By 1980 I was listening to the Top 20 every Sunday evening as I lay in the bath. I clearly remember 'Call Me' being announced as No. 1 and I was happy! My first love was Debbie Harry you see, I fell deeply in love with her. Having no idea about romance and little knowledge of human relations, I dreamt of a town house with many stories, each story housing a different Blondie band member, me with my own story and with Debbie, the matriarchal figure, in the penthouse.

Around this time my mother enrolled me in piano lessons but I was completely unmotivated and without talent. When I was eleven, I borrowed a violin from the comprehensive school that I went to after two awful terms at a boarding school, but I showed little sign of musical ability.

Robin's Bike

Robin, a German boy who lived with Dino, Nick, Lisa and all the many other people who came and went at Sandringham Road, once had his bike stolen from outside of his college (LSE perhaps).

Once it had been recycled via the second hand bike market at Brick Lane the new owner, who attended the very same college as Robin, oddly enough and much to Robin's surprise chained it to the very same lamp post from which it was stolen.

Wheelchair Elvis

Driving home to Bristol with Jane, returning from a visit to Huntingdon, we decided to take a short detour to Bracknell, just to take a look at it. I'd lived there when I was eleven years old.

The morning streets were deserted as we wandered in the rain toward the town centre. I was telling Jane mundane reminiscences. Somewhere an Elvis record could be heard playing, as if through a PA. The closer to the centre that we arrived, the louder the music grew. It became clear that it was not the original Elvis but someone playing his tunes on an organ, over a loudspeaker.

Bracknell town centre, a concrete new town, is built in such a way so as its single office block facing the town square (where my mother once worked,) and an arcade of shops leading toward it, form a wind tunnel. And down this wind tunnel we walked, hand in hand, and the rain beat harder and 'Are You Lonesome Tonight' grew louder.

There he was, sitting in a wheelchair in the rain in the empty town square. Elvis. He had had large speakers welded to the sides of the chair and a synthesizer and an organ lay on its arms. He wore a microphone resting in a harness about his chest. I recall him wearing a dirty, ragged jacket and having dirt under his fingernails but I can't say that my memory might not have invented those details. Although I am no big fan of the king I do remember that this man was a very accomplished Elvis impersonator.

Curly Hair

Years ago you wouldn't see many boys walking around with huge mops of curly hair like mine but now it's not too uncommon.

But I wasn't original, oh no. When I was in the fifth form at school (that it now called year eleven) I'd hang around with the sixth form kids who smoked down in a patch of woodland near the school boundary. They all dressed like an indie band on Sarah records called the Sea Urchins with skinny black jeans and Chelsea boots and I copied them. Let's see, there was Rick (who took slightly too many drugs back there at some point but is now back on track and works in TV,) Neil (I have no idea what he's doing,) Simon (who played in a local band called The Charlottes and later in a band called Slowdive who were on Creation) and Ian. I really looked up to Ian. He was very quick, very smart and he had a great big mop of curly hair. So I let mine grow out. After a while I pretty much looked like him and for a short time we got along just fine, a barman at The Waterloo (a very dark and dangerous pub back then) took us for brothers and we were pretty good friends. Rick, Ian, Neil and myself would meet up at places if someone's parents were away and do 'buckets' (a method of getting so stoned that it's not actually enjoyable.)

It's no surprise that he grew sick of a younger boy looking like him and, since he had a mean streak, he became very unfriendly, quite nasty even.

I have no idea what he is doing now. I know that he went to Art School after he left the sixth form. I think my memories correct when I say that he began to dress a little like Sky Sunlight Saxon. I heard that, quite a few years ago now, he was working as a waiter in our home town.

It's odd, when I think back to many of those people who I knew from my home town and I compare them to my friends today they all seem up-tight and guarded, slightly manipulative even. Perhaps I am imagining it or perhaps the strain of living in a drab, dull, small town has this effect on people. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of Huntingdon.

My/Our New Record

I am so excited about the new record that I have just written, recorded. I am so excited and so eager to see it finished and released that I shall write about it.

It is the third (or fourth if you count an extended, extended player) LP attributed to the band but the second LP that I have made at home. For the last one I used mediocre equipment and I was learning as I went. Alex, who played the bass guitar, said of it that it sounded like a 'collection of B sides.' At the time that hurt my feelings, but it's the truth. There's only a couple of songs that could possibly be singles on it. It's a great record and the songs are actually better than B sides, but it is a little bit slow. I should have sped the songs up a bit. I sped up the drums before recording everything else for 'Unhappy House' and I was really tempted to speed all the songs afterwards, but I didn't. And then the year before last Pete from Spacemen 3 was around here for a few days using my studio to master his record (his house had been flooded and Randall from Mind Expansion Records put him in touch with me.) He said that he always speeds songs up a tiny bit. it's true, even speeding up by as little as a half percent makes a song sound more engaging and a bit tighter too. We released a single from the Words of Love record, 'A Million Crimson Roses' (an Alla Pugacheva cover) and I sped the B side 'Flamenco' (a Los Brincos cover) up by a whole percent. If you plan on doing this then use a program that uses the DIRAC algorithm. It's exceptionally good.

So this time I set about writing a record that was faster and catchier and I think it worked. It's fast enough not to need any speeding up. Half the songs are contenders for a single and I think that 'Elektrichka's Favourite Party Record' is destined to be a hit!

And there are great musicians performing on it, I'm very lucky. It's all finished except for vocals on a couple of songs but now the singer, Mira, is tied up directing a short film so it will be a couple of weeks yet.

Owow, it's such a shame that I can't play it to you! I'm sure you'd love it!

Turning Up Out Of The Blue In Germany

I don't get scared that easily but I got slightly scared when I was twenty, on a bus in the middle of nowhere travelling through some German city (I forget which.)

Daniel had invited me along to his German TVPs tour you see. He didn't know Sexton or Liam so very, very well (playing as his backing band for the first time ever) and thought it would be nice to have me along too, we had been spending an awful lot of time together.

He gave me a crumpled up fax with the dates and venues on it and said that he would arrange everything with Andy from the band The Bartlebees who promoted the tour.

So there I was, in the middle of nowhere it seemed and I suddenly panicked slightly. I was usually absolutely relaxed about everything in those days but I suddenly realised that I had been a bit too relaxed. I had no contact telephone numbers, no map book, just a few lines of scribbled directions.

I found the place ok in the end. I couldn't work out why the snare drum was being hit on stage by Armin the drummer repeatedly, I'd never been to a sound check before. And I was surprised by the graffiti and general dinginess of the back stage area. Back stage in Germany is slightly dingier than back stage elsewhere, a reaction, I presume, to the general order and tidiness in Germany as a whole.

Of course Daniel had given Andy absolutely no warning of my arrival. I was very fortunate that there was a spare seat in the van. I think it was Liam who started calling me 'coach' to reflect my role. The Toerag studio set (where Liam was the recording engineer) all called me coach from then on - people like Bruce from the Headcoats, Holly and Debbie from the Headcoatees, and still do.)

I have a suspicion that the Bartlebees, Patrick Andy and Armin, thought that I supplied Daniel with smack too. Kenji was visiting from Japan to film the performances and Stefan drove, wearing a chauffeur's peaked cap.

The only time in my life when I have consumed more alcohol in two weeks was a year later when I returned to tour with the TV Personalities, this time playing bass guitar.

And so these tours and and The Projects touring Germany years later, along with my parents taking my brother and myself to Germany for most of my childhood summer holidays means that I have visited more German towns and cities than English ones. In fact, I think I've been to them all.

Gareth

Working in the Bricklayer's Arms in Shoreditch, around the time that Shoreditch was still a nice place, was a lot of fun. Dave the manager would give you cocktails and you could help yourself to beer, I liked the people that I worked with, it was an interesting bunch of people.

Emma started working there, she became a duty manager. She was slender, wore black usually, with her hair dyed black also, and was friendly and bright. One time she took a holiday back home in Sweden. I was working when she arrived back at Stansted and was confused as to where her boyfriend was since they planned that he would meet her there. I had to explain that he had gone into hiding.

Gareth was a painter. He painted in the style of Caravaggio he’d say and I suppose he did. He was, more or less, addicted to cocaine and would consume it habitually. He was very funny and very quick, perhaps a bit too quick. I’d often spend evenings with Howard and Gareth when Howard lived in Sandringham Road but it was quite tiring, I thought that Gareth turned everything into a competition of wit.

He was always hanging around the pub. He got some work decorating gold leaf behind the bar at the soon-to-open ‘Mother Bar’ above the 333 nightclub. He worked so slowly it became a joke. He worked for half an hour here, half an hour there, in the meantime drinking lots of free beer and nothing much was done. He had completed only a couple of metres after a couple of weeks and was sacked.

Well, it turned out that Gareth was stealing from the pub. He had found out the pub’s alarm code from Emma and, while she was on holiday, used it after the pub had closed.

Vicky, who owned the pub along with a few other locations, the Red Lion pub and the 333 nightclub, became aware that something was up so she had some thugs watch over the place and catch him in the act. For some reason or other Gareth had a hold over Vicky, he knew something about her business dealings that she didn’t want people to know and so he was beaten up and that was the end of it. He ran away.

Emma and he moved to Wales.

Free Electricity, Squirrels

Electricity was free at Amhurst Parade, Stamford Hill, well, the nice, young Algerian couple from downstairs paid for mine I think.

This was the second place that I lived at in Stamford Hill, the one that my friend Darren found After he had moved out Tony from Huntingdon moved in and then Howard. It was above a Hasidic Pizza Shop ran by a man who told me in confidence that he was not cut out to be a member of the sect and dreamt of leaving, although i don't know if he ever did. He supported Manchester United and would, secretly, visit a pub in Manor House now and again, incognito. An old Hasidic couple ran the grocery shop below my flat a few doors down and always gave me strange looks when I went in every day for peanuts. I'd walk on down to Springfield Park, a small park but my favourite in London, and feed the squirrels. The couple in the grocery shop roasted their peanuts themselves they would proudly let me know. Sometimes they were very burnt.

Another person with too much free time, an untidy middle aged lady, began to feed my squirrels as well. We would both eye each other suspiciously when we passed and began to arrive earlier and earlier in order to out-manoeuvre the other.

A couple of weeks before I moved out of the flat I bumped into one of the Algerian students on the stairs. "Isn't electricity expensive here?" she asked as she topped up the key meter. I agreed with her although I had never seen an electricity bill since moving in and had, just that moment, realised that she was probably paying for the electricity used by both of our flats.

I felt very guilty about this and lost sleep planning on coming clean but then I left. Poor Algerian couple! They were so polite and friendly! I should at least have left them a note!

2000AD

In the days when the year 2000 was unimaginably far away, when I was eight or nine years old, my brother and I collected the 2000AD comic.

We had pretty much all the issues from 200 on when I saw an advert in the local shop declaring the sale of the first one hundred and fifty, from issue one, for a ridiculously low price.

Adrian and I picked the comics up from two young brothers. But their father telephoned that evening and said that they had made a mistake and asked to reverse the deal. My father felt sure that there was no going back on the deal. I thought that we should, it was obviously a mistake in some sense of the word, but I kept my mouth shut because I was really happy to have an almost-complete collection.

Classmates At Sixth Form College

In the six form college I studied Psychology, English Literature and History.

Of my classmates I only remember three. Tom in my literature class, who loved Faith No More and mocked my adoration for The Pastels. We had common ground with Spacemen 3. He took a train to London with me one evening with me to see The Pastels play at the Islington Powerhouse once. Before the show we met a French girl who had been living in Glasgow and had moved there with the intention of stalking Stephen Pastel. Tom knew some bad lads, Danny's gang who were speed addicts and sometimes he acted very world weary and superior as though he was so experienced in the criminal world (and as though this was a good thing.)

There was a mature student studying History with me who was paralysed from the neck down following a holiday diving accident. An assistant would take notes for him. He seemed like he didn't really want to be there and I wondered if he always seemed so or only in History lessons.

The oddest of the three was this boy, average height and build, probably quite good looking with dark hair and always in a good mood. I remember him because at every history class, he would come in to the room and, putting on a bad American accent half sing 'Sit On My Face Bay-beeeeee' to himself a few times. It was odd, he had no friends in the class, he was just absent mindedly singing the same phrase to himself, before every lesson, as he arranged his pens and opened his books.

Consuelo's Crow

At the end of the summer of 2009, half a year after we moved to Dalston, Consuelo began to feed the local crow. She (Consuelo thought it a girl bird) lived in a tree opposite our balcony. Consuelo tried feeding it a few things, pan con tomate, jamon serrano, turon, empanadillas, paella, arroz Cubana but we finally realised that cat food chips were its favourite. It turned out that there were two crows, and now three. The latest edition is clearly the youngest, it has a high pitched caw. Only this afternoon I was sitting on the balcony sun bathing and the young crow started to caw incessantly from the Tall Tree in the Over-Grown Garden over the road, over the wall. It cawed non stop for half an hour until there was the sound of a branch breaking and all was silent.

After Consuelo left in the autumn of last year I kept up the routine. It got so that a crow would sit on the end of the balcony and call me demanding food, she would fly away while I put some out and return with friends to dine.

My neighbour in the penthouse flat wrote to me asking that I stopped feeding the birds as they were making a mess of his balcony and he was scared that one might swoop down and steal food from his plate whilst he ate outside (?) He also explained that the birds spread plant diseases (?)

In truth I had started putting out too much food, attracting starlings (which nest anywhere) and magpies and recently an aggressive seagull had been hanging around. I think that the seagull is to blame for the making a mess of my neighbour's balcony (and it might well steasl food from someone's plate). So I agreed that I would only feed our crows when winter returns, in moderation and only when she asks for food.

I hope that Consuelo's crow is happy to see her when she visits for a few days this week. I think that it might be the last time that we ever spend time together, although I hope not.

Crows are ever so clever. On Youtube you can watch crows in Japan who have learned to use cars to crack nuts on the road, beside zebra crossings for safety. When the green man flashes they walk out to snack.

Karen

I started going out with Karen when I was seventeen and we were together for only six months. I can't remember where I met her although I do remember that, although I was very fond of her at the beginning, by the end I was just using her house as a place to stay away from home - it was just the two of us there since her mother would spend her time at her boyfriend's.

I am surprised that we were together. Karen was a pretty, shy, insecure, homely and unimaginative girl. She lived on the rough Oxmoor Estate since her parents had split up, something which embarrassed her, and she was always explaining that she was used to living in a 'posh' house. She was addicted to tedious Australian television soap operas and I was forever having to sit through episodes. One day, after a couple of weeks of wanting to tell her that we were not suited, I took the opportunity of expanding the plot line of the edition of Home And Away that we had just watched to express my feelings. She could not believe that so-and-so and so-and-so had just split up but I explained that so-and-so felt the same way that I did.

At first she thought I was joking, then she started screaming, then she tried to hit me a few times and then she ran to the kitchen, shouting that she would take her life with a kitchen knife. I chased her, grabbed her, we fought over the knife for a while, she squirmed free and ran to the toilet, locking herself in.

"I'm going to overdose on pills" she announced, sobbing. I knew that it wasn't sincere and said so to her, I told her that she was just living her life as though it were a soap opera, and then I told the 999 operator too. I had to telephone an ambulance just in case because Karen had claimed that she had cut her wrists, although I knew that she probably had not. She had not.

Her bluff had been called when they announced, on the hospital bed, that they would pump her stomach. You could tell from the look on her face that she hadn't counted on that. I suppose that Karen maintained that she had swallowed pills, although it was proved not to have been the case, so as not to lose face.

A while later and a registrar consultant psychiatrist took me to one side. She expressed her desire to section Karen and have her placed in Broadmoor Hospital. I lived near Broadmoor, in Bracknell, around the age of ten. Occasionally a siren would sound to alert the local population to the escape of a potentially dangerous patient. I thought that the place was in existence to house the criminally insane but, the psychiatrist explained, there was a low security, a 'normal', wing there also. I told her that she was crazy to want to follow such a course of action, it would ruin Karen's life, Karen was impressionable and would act the role of mental patient so well that she would become one, and, besides, the whole thing had been a charade. The young psychiatrist listened to what I had to say and rejected it, declaring Karen to be a neurotic and a danger to herself and others.

I went to my car and retrieved some psychology tests that I had set Karen only a couple of days earlier. In my A level class we had been discussing Eysenk's personality test where each question relates to one of three axis; extroversion, psychoticism and neuroticism. I showed the psychiatrist the four tests that Karen had completed, scoring very low with respect to neuroticism (and the other two traits also) and this actually swayed her opinion and Karen did not visit Broadmoor but returned home instead.

I would later hear first hand what life in Broadmoor was like when I met Mad Bob but that is another story :)

City Road in Bristol

In the early 90s a young Jane and I were sitting in a café in our new neighbourhood in Bristol. I'd stayed for a while with Jane in her Halls of Residence, on the other side of Westbury Park, and now we rented a flat. A copy of the News Of The World tabloid newspaper lay on the table, the cover's headline was 'Britain's Worst Street Named,' and it turned out that it was City Road, the very road where we sat drinking tea.

You'd never have guessed, driving to view the flat with the estate agent (I remember that she was always startled) that it was such a bad place to be. Travelling there from the centre you leave the main road and pass the grand Brunswick Square, on to the pretty Portland Square and there, just around the corner was our new home in Cave Street. We didn't notice the police riot van that was sitting every day, all day on Cave Street, just in case. If we'd have gone for a walk in our new neighbourhood we would have seen that many of the houses still had metal screens on their windows even though the St Paul's riots had occurred over fifteen years before.

City Road, down which I'd walk to visit the nearest newsagents, was littered with drug dealers. I couldn't work out what their system was but every hour they would all disappear moments before a police van drove down the road. Perhaps, to avoid confrontation, the police chose to drive down the road at the same time every hour. The dealers became familiar faces and I began to say hello to the one at my end of the street. Now and again we would chat about life in St Paul's. He warned me that it was so terrible, and younger men so indifferent, that I would be mugged sooner or later if I kept walking down my route. He admitted that he wished that he'd never taken heroin.

Sure enough, after being there for a few months, I was mugged one night outside the bleak Department Of Health and Social Security office. I had gone for milk, the shop was shut, and returned with my twenty one pence.

I thought an insane woman was hugging me out of the blue but straight away realised what was going on when someone also grabbed me from behind. I struggled free, I was told to hand over my money, I threw the coins on the floor. A well to do looking couple were walking by on the other side of the street but ignored my call for help, threw a glance in my direction and hurried away.

The three young boys concurred to beat me up in the alleyway beside the DHSS office since I had nothing worth stealing, and one of them grabbed me from behind, attempting to drag me away from the road. I elbowed him and then either punched him or attempted to before taking an opportunity to run the short distance home.
Jane was out, with her friend Cookie I think. My heart was racing and I telephoned the police. The operator was really bad, really racist, telling me not to bother giving a description because 'they all look the same, don't they?'

For a few months I felt a bit sick whenever I passed gangs of teenagers. A couple of weeks after I was mugged, or almost mugged, a load of kids approached me and demanded a cigarette. I gave them one automatically, another asked and then another and I just couldn't say no, so I gave away the whole packet, and I was so broke in those days too.

Delma Asleep

Delma should have come clean and told us that she'd been pretending to sleep.

It was the morning after yet another party night at Patrick's house and Delma was lying on a beanbag. Patrick thought that she was sleeping and said as much in conversation. Howard pointed out that she was awake. So I asked her and then, with no response, she went from resting with closed eyes to pretending to sleep.

The three of us discussed what possible motivation she could have for pretending to sleep. Eventually she couldn't stand it any longer and performed a terrible act of someone awakening. "What, what, where am I?" she asked, blinking her eyes and looking around her, stretching, trying to fake a yawn. How we laughed! She was a bad actress, that's for sure but, when reminded of the episode in the future, she'd never admit that the act wasn't real. Oh Delma! You should have owned up.

Delma is now married to a US Marine and living on a military base somewhere in the Mid West in North America.

Various Things, LSD with Reem and Rubbish Stories

I lived for a while with my brother in a tower block near Portobello Road, at the top of Chepstow Road and then later in West Kensington before I moved to Bristol with Jane. I was very young and a layabout and it must have been a pain for Adrian and Aida to have me living there. I could say a lot about that place, I enjoyed it very much, but really this story is about taking LSD with Reem, Aida's cousin. And the story begins in the tower block because if I were visiting Sawsan, Soraya and Reem in their Earl's Court flat which I occasionally did, usually with Adrian and Aida but sometimes on my own, I'd take the long walk down to Notting Hill Gate, down Campden Hill Road to High Street Kensington and then down Earl's Court Road.

It puzzles me actually, I remember taking this journey often on my own, but I can't say for sure that I remember whether I was spending a lot of time with Sawsan, Soraya and Reem or just where I went.

We must have been pretty good friends though, Reem and I, because one winter's night we found ourselves on LSD following Marc Almond around a mini market on Old Brompton Road. At least, I think that she was on LSD too, I was for certain. You have to be quite good friends to find yourself doing this. We then followed the pint sized pop star, at a distance, as he walked to what we presumed was home for him, a block on Earl's Court Road not too far from the tube.

Then I found lots of vouchers for a high street jewellers on the pavement beside a bus stop that we were resting. They were ripped up but I felt sure that the ripped halves fitted together and picked up lots of them, just in case they might come in handy.

Days later I Sellotaped them together, presented them at a branch of the jewellers near Marble Arch and explained that a mugger had torn them from my hand and ripped them all in two (a plausible story?) I returned a week later, after they had confirmed that they were still valid, and exchanged them for ten Zippo lighters.

At the time I was earning money selling photocopied books of short stories on the street in Covent Garden. When I got going I sold lots and I could have made a reasonable living, people did like the idea, but the problem was that I was truly ashamed of the stories. They were awful. Empty, pretentious, badly written. Anyway, I sold the Zippos to a gipsy woman. She tried to sell me lavender while I was walking around with my story books, I sold her a load of Zippo lighters.

Soraya, Sawsan and Reem had to leave London in a hurry. They all studied here and their lovely house, and their college fees, were being financed by their uncle (or father in the case of Sawsan.) He decided to pay them a surprise visit one morning but it just so happened that they had thrown a huge party the night before and party victims were strewn about the place, it was a real mess. So back to Antwerp they went.

Smoker On The Underground

One time in two thousand and something I waited for a tube train which, when it arrived, poured forth billowing cigarette smoke with the opening of its doors. The carriage was packed full and yet a man sat sprawled on the bench, his long, lanky legs cut across the aisle taking up precious space, he held his head, hanging low, in one hand, that arm resting on his knee. He was unkempt but clean, dressed as a geography teacher of the seventies might, sporting a wool tie and wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. He looked profoundly sad and dragged heavily on a cigarette, beneath his feet was the ash and butts of half a dozen others.

Of course, smoking on public transport attracts complaints but everyone on the carriage was too polite and sensitive to show anger in case the man might burst into tears.

Living In A Tent

After Jane's first few terms at University we moved back to our home town for the summer before returning to Bristol and renting a flat. In the meantime my parents wouldn't take me in and I found myself homeless so Jane and I spent the summer months living in a tent.

It was a very pleasant summer that was spent in that tent. We usually set it up on Port Holme, Britain's largest water meadow they say, which was a very pleasant location. Sometimes we chose to put our tent close by, in a field on the other side of the river in the village where Jane's parents lived, the village where our favourite pub was, just on the other side of the river.

This location was quite busy in the morning with people walking their dogs and the occasional tourist taking a look at the picturesque sights. We were never moved on by the police which surprised me.

A friend of Jane's used to visit in the morning now and again. He was very good natured but was troubled. And his troubles had been heightened by his joining the army, which he had loathed and from which he had run away I think. It had got him started on hard drugs. He said that everyone in his unit took hard drugs and he battled the urge to seek out heroin daily, an urge that he'd sadly give in to a few years later.

One night there was a thick, low lying fog in the field that you could see over if you jumped. I had taken LSD and began to communicate with people on the other side of the field when I realised that they too had taken the drug. We shouted to each other and tried to synchronise our jumping so that we might find each other. After spending an eternity trying. and failing, to make contact with them in that vast, never ending, misty field I lost interest.