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.

New Year's Eve I

The worst new year's eve that I spent I was peeing behind a bush in Kennington Park, behind the tube station, as the clock struck midnight. Or perhaps it was 2002 when Lisa and I had a terrible, terrible argument. I'm not sure, new year's eves have never been very special for me with the exception of 97/98.

Howard, Percy and myself went to Hamburg to stay with Sonja's friends, and ex flatmates, Sandra and Silke. Sonja had been living in London and was right in the middle of my circle of friends. She was engaged to Howard a few years later but they never married in the end. She now works as a journalist in Berlin.

We all had lots of fun. Howard, Percy and myself found some lovely, top quality, grey, curly wigs in a wig shop that suited us and which we wore for the week. I also remember Howard dressed in a nurses outfit standing on the balcony in the freezing cold attracting trade from the visitors to the Reeperbahn red light district outside, using a little, plastic, red, toy megaphone. We all found this very funny. He must be good with resisting the cold because, one night, he couldn't manage to work the key in the lock and passed out, drunk, in the stairway on the stone steps but was none the worse for it the next day. Silke played me Neu! '78 (I was overjoyed, I thought that only Neu! 1 and 2 existed.)

Howard and I took a flight back on new year's day. We were drinking cheap vodka from the bottle and by the time that we arrived by bus to Stamford Hill we were quite drunk.

A five year old girl on the bus thought my wig looked amusing, we all got off at the Stamford Hill crossroad, the girl, her mother and myself. I offered the girl some Turkish sweets that I had in my pocket, her mother, naturally, pulled her away, and I got quite upset and began to shout nonsense about how the mother was setting a bad example through her lack of trust. Ten minutes later and I felt ashamed of carrying on so.

When we got upstairs Howard made a little mini bar in the hallway with a sheet of glass, a couple of bricks and all the bottles of cheap spirits that we had brought back with us from Germany.

Because we had flown on an all but empty New Year's Day flight, British Airways hadn't bothered to use fresh food, I am guessing, and recycled cold meat from the day before (my vegetarianism lapsed for a couple of years at this time). Howard and I got food poisoning and we both woke up that night feeling so ill. I felt like I was going to die, the soft spoken Algerian students downstairs had decided to throw a party and the sub bass made me feel so very awful. The first time I rushed to the loo with my diarrhoea and vomit I discovered that the ceiling in the hallway had collapsed from a burst pipe, and I was treading barefoot on sodden plaster mixed with pigeon droppings, feathers and dirt. The burst pipe meant that the toilet would be blocked and we were both so ill for a couple of days. It was horrid.

Alopecia

Howard was living with me in my second Stamford Hill flat in 1997. I had given myself a haircut, chopping a huge head of hair down to a half inch. I placed all of the hair back on top of my head and went down to the street. I feigned panic, as I stood in the middle of the road before the busy bus stop there, and pulled clumps of hair from my head which were caught by the wind. The passive onlookers couldn't have cared less.

It sounds rubbish, and it probably was, but, at the time, we thought that it looked good on the video that Howard filmed.

Vitamin D3

Well, I got really depressed during the winter of the year when I lived with Jane on Camberwell New Road. I had fallen into a nasty sleeping pattern. Sleeping all day and missing sunlight and lectures, and not being able to sleep at night.

A time came when I had not seen any sunlight for a whole week and I felt that it was making me ill. I went to a health food and nutrition shop that I knew of on Stoke Newington Church Street.

I asked if any vitamin would be a good substitute for sunlight. Of course the answer is yes, vitamin D3 is what your body will want for when you see no sun. Unfortunately the assistant told me that there was no such substance but that vitamin C might help.

What's really irritating is that vitamin D deficiency is thought to be a causative factor with the onset of MS and I can't help but wonder whether a season without sunlight might have contributed to my annoying illness.

The Train To Liverpool

When I was little I used to go to Liverpool to spend a week or two with my Grandparents every now and again. My mum would put me on the train asking some responsible looking woman to look after me. I'd always spend the whole journey in the intersection between the carriages with my head stuck out of the window. I loved it.

On my return journey my grandparents would do the same, choose someone to look out for me. They obviously thought that working men, like my grandfather, were the most responsible and so, on more than a couple of occasions, I found myself playing cards with Liverpudlian builders who made lots of trips to the buffet car for lager and were smashed by the time we pulled in to Euston Station.

Lairds and Ladies

Kenny McA was an ageing drunkard who used to always be in a pub beside oval tube. He was quite lithe though, Kenny could never stay still. I'd go in now and again and he'd cadge a drink off of me. He was emphatic and warm and always used to repeat how 'lairds and ladies' lived in his block of flats.

He lived in an unremarkable block of council flats and so I dismissed this claim. But I never actually checked and, to this day, I do not know for sure if a certain block of council flats opposite the Oval cricket ground is not populated by lairds and ladies dressed in their finery playing piquet and retiring to drawing rooms.

Plastic Protecters

I had a friend at school when I lived in Bracknell. I must have been eleven or twelve years old.

I don't remember anything about him except that he loved the Pet Shop Boys. I have never cared for the Pet Shop Boys but this mystery friend had me watch Pet Shop Boys videos on the one occasion that I visited his home, I had no say in the matter.

I do remember a few details about his house though. I have a vague recollection of his mother being overbearing. The sofa was relatively new and had a clear plastic cover over it to protect it from staining and ageing. Yeah, I realised then that his parents must have had some problems. This suspicion was confirmed when I took a little trip to the bathroom. The carpet all the way down the hall was protected by a length of clear plastic.

They had no pets, that wasn't the explanation, the son son told me that his parents hated things getting dirty and that the plastic coverings were permanent fixtures.

I wonder what became of him? Having such fucked up parents I dread to think.

Billie 'One Eye' Wilson The Pirate

Billie 'One Eye' Wilson was a pirate who sailed with the infamous Captain Morgan and he was also my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather. It was Billie's idea to get out of pirating and into the rum business, hence the birth of 'Captain Morgan's' rum.

I have an ageing, yellowed parchment somewhere or other, a deed signed by the Captain himself which entitles me, as a direct descendant of Billie Wilson, to a free bottle of rum whenever I present it at the factory but I have misplaced it. I think it is under a stack of papers on my desk.

Bookmaker's Shop.

Jane was also from Huntingdon and I went out with her around the time that I went to university. I knew her family was from Dalston in London.

Well, a couple of years ago I moved to Dalston. Opposite my flat is a derelict bookmaker's shop which bears the same name as my friend Jane. I mentioned it to her and it turns out that, although her immediate family thought that it had long since disappeared, this was the bookmaker's shop which had been owned by her grandfather in the 60s. The place where a man who was robbing the shop shot her poor grandfather dead.

What a coincidence!

Stealing From Tesco's

When I was sixteen I held a part time job in a supermarket for a while. The staff room there was grubby and depressing. The supermarket was in a village attached to an industrial park in the middle of nowhere and it took an age to get there by bus. I was to become part of the alcohol section and I quite liked that, it wasn't too monotonous and I enjoyed the company of the old man and woman who I worked with but at first I sat on the checkout. I'd give pensioners who looked poor lots of free stuff which, I suppose, is stealing but it didn't feel like it. Besides, I'm a firm believer in the redistribution of wealth and you have to stand by principles.

There was nothing good about working there except for a great chip shop opposite the bus stop but even that wasn't enough to persuade me not to leave after a couple of months.

A Cat Who Acts Like A Dog

There is a man with a cat who behaves like a dog living in central London, or perhaps I should say there is a cat who behaves like a dog with a man living in central London because, apparently, the cat always leads the way wherever they go.

I have never seen him myself but Consuelo has twice, and perhaps you have too because he sells The Big Issue magazine, a publication sold by the homeless, all over town.

Consuelo came home one day last summer and told me about a man who walked down Oxford Street with a tabby cat on his shoulders. Two weeks later she found herself walking behind them down Endell Street, this time the cat was trotting along a few paces in front of the man. She caught up with him after the pair had walked onto a side street. She made excuses “I just couldn’t let you out of my site without asking about the cat.” The man shhshed her, whispering how the cat, who was squatting on a patch of grass, was going to the loo. In a short while they were free to speak openly without fear of disturbing it,

She guessed him to be a junkie with looks possibly older than his age. She said that she found him to seem a little aggressive

Consuelo is very charming and the man was only too happy to tell her their story. He had rescued the cat from a fight with a fox. The man nursed it back to health but found that, from then on, it followed him everywhere. He was scared for the cat being knocked down on the street and bought a lead but found that the cat would lead him. It’s true apparently, if you see the pair on the streets of London the cat will be leading the way.

The man’s eyes flashed and he asked, quite out of the blue, if Consuelo might buy a copy of The Big Issue. Consuelo, unluckily, had no change about her but the man took her to be lying and walked off, complaining.

Bill / Meyerstein Ward II

I wish I could write Bill’s full name but I shouldn’t. He has a great name, forename and surname beginning with the same letter, it evokes pastoral beauty, a field in full bloom.

I’d been admitted to hospital in order that doctors find out why my heart was occasionally racing. My time wasn’t taken up by being ill though, I was feeling absolutely fine and so the six weeks that I spent in the Middlesex Hospital near Goodge Street tube Station were boring but I did meet people whom I otherwise would not have met and, of them all, Bill had the best story.

After dark it was very peaceful in the ward, a soft light shone from the nurse’s station opposite my bed. Medical equipment would beep now and again, somewhere or other. When I walked to the bathroom on my first night I passed a man bathed in the light of a desk lamp, sitting on a chair, his head in his hands. His legs were terribly swollen, a side effect of drugs that they gave him I later discovered, and a nurse was speaking to him as though she were addressing a child. They were trying to drain liquid from his legs through a tube into a large plastic jar which sat on the floor and I found the sight horrific.

For the next week I'd see him there, occasionally lying in bed but mostly sitting, until he was moved to the other end of the ward and I didn’t really notice him again until a month had passed when he introduced himself with a “g’day mate.” He was feeling much better, he was up and about. He’d arrived from Australia a half year earlier, taken a job as a hotel porter and soon afterwards fallen ill. He had suffered seizures all his life he told me, but I can’t now remember exactly what had led to him being admitted to hospital, although I vaguely remember him telling a story of a medical emergency and unsympathetic managers at his workplace.

Bill was so incredibly enthusiastic. “Oh wow maaan, far out! That is amaaazing!.” I’d shown him the Sims computer game on my laptop (I was bored in there) and he was very grateful. He even thanked me a few times in the days to come for having shown him it. I’d share chocolate, or some cake with him and it would be, without a doubt, the best he’d ever tasted. He’d stare directly at you, his big blue eyes wide open, talking slowly and emphasising every syllable, full of enthusiasm. He described himself as a hippy, and, with his long droopy blonde moustache, I suppose that he resembled a hippy too.

We’d sit in the tiny staff kitchen, the nurses didn’t object, and have conversations on all topics. I learned a lot about his mother, who he was very close to, his teenage years in the 70s and the bands that he'd played guitar for. He was a kind and interesting man. His most interesting story was one which he confessed only to me, he felt that the doctors did not need to know.

He had been in the ward for a month before I arrived and during this whole time, and on into the first few weeks of my stay there, he had lived a frightening dream. Medication that they gave him affected his balance and gave him the sensation that he was on board a ship. Yet more medication gave him delusions. He believed that he had been kidnapped and imprisoned. The ship masqueraded as a cruise ship, the passengers on the decks above were unaware of the horrors which existed where he was, down deep below water in the lowest deck. He mistook the nurses uniforms for stewards uniforms and, with so many of the nurses originating in the Philippines, mistook them for Chinese nationals, suspecting that the cruise ship was bound for China. The blood tests that he received on an almost daily basis were in fact sedatives being administered, the pills he was forced to take were designed to disorientate and weaken him. The ship docked every week or two at some port and he was getting closer and closer to his destination and the terrifying fate that awaited him.

And then the doctors realised that the drugs were not working as intended and altered the treatment plan and so he finally got back to dry land.

Unfortunately, toward the end of my six week stay in the ward, he was diagnosed with an unrelated, but serious complaint. I do hope that he is ok, I really do wish that I kept in touch with him.

Radio Phone In

"You're our prank caller" the operator shouted, slamming the phone down. I'd been unmasked!

For a couple of years I had been telephoning a talk radio station, pretending to be various characters. There was a depressive milkman who had a dairy intolerance and a failing marriage. a rock star whose career ended before it began because of drink and drugs, an RAF veteran who saw ghosts and an unlucky man whose pet homing pigeons kept abandoning him.

I found it thrilling as I waited on hold, practising the comedy accent, going over the key points of the story, feeling the adrenaline of stage fright! I got pretty good at it though I must say.

The oddest time was when I telephoned claiming to have been a child chess prodigy who had suffered an infection of the brain. The illness resulted in an inability to play the game whilst having a match perpetually evolve in the back of his mind which he had no choice but observe. I peppered my story with chess moves muttered under my breath, 'knight to queens rook four', and so on. My flat mate Nick then decided to telephone and explain how he had endured an identical experience. After Nick's call the operator asked if he would mind him putting the two of us in touch. Nick hung up and we then received a call giving me Nick's (my) telephone number.

I then 'phoned in pretending to be a Harvard professor who was holidaying in London and had happened to overhear the show. He was anxious to get in touch with the two patients as he was studying this very illness. The operator then telephoned me and Nick in turn, on the same number each time, giving us the professor's (same) number.

I was lying in the bath the next day in our blue bathroom when the telephone rang. It was the producer of the show and she wanted to speak to the professor. She asked him if he might appear as a special guest on that evening's show, provided that they could get the two other callers involved. I agreed and then they telephoned the prodigy but, after a few words, the producer realised that all three of us shared the same telephone number and asked me what was going on, (although it wasn't for another year until they banned me from telephoning in for good).

Go Faster!

Honestly, I'd never felt so sick in all my life.

The fair had come to Kennington Park and a really mean fair it was too, from the skinny, feral men who ran it, and drank every night that week in our local pub, to the run down attractions with their rust and peeling paint.

The pub opposite our flat, when Jane and I lived on Camberwell New Road, was called the Skinner's Arms. It served an ageing clientèle made up mostly of Irish people who must have been attracted by the construction boom in the 50s and now just spent their days in the pub. The landlord was a friendly, heavy drinker with a big puffy face that, with it's bumps, resembled a big, happy, shiny potato. Jane and I, and sometimes Daniel too who was spending a lot of time round at ours (he'd bring a copy of The People newspaper and spend the afternoon reading through it in the living room), would be the only people under 60 in the place. I went past it a short while ago and the building is now a nightclub.

There was a pool room in the back and, on the first night of the fair, I was playing pool with the fairground workers. I think I got into an argument. The next morning Jane and I were hungover and took a stroll in the park to clear our heads. We walked past the umbrellas ride and I asked the owner, who was busy with some maintenance or other, if he'd start the ride up for us.

So there we were, sitting, waiting in the umbrella ride on that gloomy damp morning, the only people in the whole park, the only people on the umbrellas. And as our umbrella slowly started to twist through the sir, I thought I'd try reading my paper, just to be silly. Perhaps that annoyed the ride owner, or perhaps it was something to do with the argument in the pub the night before, or perhaps he simply was a bad man, but he set the ride at full speed and disappeared. Gone to the newsagent's or for a cup of tea, wherever he went he didn't return for a half an hour. When we finally got off it took me a long, long time to get my balance back and I felt sick all day.

Sadists

I have had a few near death experiences in my life but the scariest times that I ever did have have been at the hands of doctors.

One occasion stands out. They had decided that there was a big problem with my heart (although it seems now to been a simple case of anaemia causing tachycardia) and wanted to find out how difficult it was to set my heart into a dangerous rhythm.

I am scared of needles and am squeamish so I was quite afraid to begin with. They transferred me from the Middlesex Hospital to The Princess Grace Hospital in Marylebone. The NHS must have been renting the place, it's a private hospital, and I got changed into my hospital gown in a small, wood panelled, private hospital room. I was terrified.

Being wheeled through the basement on my bed was unpleasant, there was building work going on and it looked as though the place had suffered bomb damage. In the cath. lab there was blood on the overhead light. The whole thing felt very much like a horror film and I said as much, asking for something to calm me. They explained that it was in their interests to have me as anxious as possible and ignored me from then on.

So, a cardiac catheter goes into the femoral vein and it is one that can administer electric shocks to the heart. They went through different locations, administering shocks of increasing magnitude. It was really awful. There would be a countdown of five beeps and then this awful electric shock. The fuckers, to think that it was anaemia all along.

Well, they induced tachycardia. They weren’t sure if it was the more dangerous tachycardia that originates in the heart's ventricles or an exceptionally fast normal, sinus rhythm, but they felt the need to give me a shock from the crash trolley all the same. Apparently I was lucky, I was told afterwards, that the burns on my chest weren't too severe.

So that was the most frightening moment. Perhaps because my heart would momentarily race after each shock.

I think that it is wise not to always trust doctors.

Hallow'een Costumes

Howard and I went to a Halloween party at some flat close to the Reliance pub on Old Street. We were so drunk I remember and we went as 'night' with costumes made out of a bin bag each, simple but effective.

Sun Burn

One summer's evening, when I lived in Jane's flat on Camberwell New Road I thought it would be a great idea to sleep on the roof, on a sun chair that was up there. I couldn't believe that I hadn't thought of it earlier, the summer had been so long and warm. Why sleep in a stuffy room, overheating, when you could enjoy the clear night sky? I woke up with terrible sunburn of course and realised why more people don't sleep on the roof. Still, with a parasol it could have been great.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

In the early 60s my mother, Margaret, was in charge of a small group of women monitoring global communications at GCHQ in Germany. She, like my father, was a member of the RAF at the time.

Imagine her surprise when they accidentally found themselves listening in to a call from Richard Burton, in the US, to Elizabeth Tailor who was in Cairo for the filming of the motion picture 'Cleopatra.' Apparently they were having an affair and no one else in the world knew, not the press or their family and not even Eddie Fisher, the singer to whom Taylor was married at the time.

Billie Crispie

One night last year Consuelo went out with our friend Hiroe to the Buffalo Bar. She telephoned me while she was on her way home to explain how, amazingly, Billie Crispie had also been in the club and that they bumped into him at a bus stop after the show and chatted for a bit. Apparently he was really nice and wore good shoes. Hiroe reminded him that they had already met in 2002 and explained what outfit she was wearing at the time, but that still didn't jog his memory. It turned out that Consuelo was talking about Bobby Gillespie but had got his name mixed up.

She often forgets and mixes up names. But I think that, on this occasion, she had an idea that she might have done so and was messing around a bit. I used to try and get her to take a niacinamide tablet every day, I am a little concerned about the small memory lapses.

I spoke to Bobby Gillespie one time. He was also watching The Make Up play at the Blow Up club, when it was behind Leicester Square. I explained to him that a friend of mine from school had just been made pregnant by one of his roadies and he told me to 'fuck off.'

Awkwardness

The flat in Sandringham Road in Dalston was a great place. Lots of people lived there over the two years in which our gang occupied it, including myself briefly, and fantastic, all night, chaotic parties were held. When I first visited the house it was Nick, Dino, Lisa and Robin who lived there.

I went to meet Dino and Nick and, to my dismay, I was being invited to the living room and everyone was there plus a few guests.

Nowadays I might be described as being extroverted but at this time I was really unsure of myself and unused to being in a group of people. I was tongue tied and mumbled and said things that, and I realised at the time, sounded odd.

Lisa recalled saying to herself 'oh my God, who on earth is this?' and thinking that I was one of the most awkward people she'd ever met.

My New Tie II

Consuelo would always come up with little surprises, she'd return home with something to wear from the West End or something to eat from the Japan Centre.

One day she bought me a tartan tie from a second hand shop while she was getting herself a dress. Of course, there are many tartans in Scotland, thousands they say. So how strange that she should get me an Anderson Tartan Tie. My family on my grand mother's side are Andersons from Aberdeen. Isn't that peculiar, Consuelo buying a tie, and of all the many designs to be chosen she chooses the tartan associated with my family? What a coincidence!

A week later we were in Selfridges and a man shook my hand, impressed with my tie, identifying himself as an Anderson.

I don't own many ties, by the way. One is my grandfather's, one the cursed tie that I mentioned yesterday, my tartan tie and a tie that I just bought this Christmas, just in case it might come in handy.

My New Tie I

I had a hangover the morning of September the tenth 2001, and was walking home from some errand or other down Wentworth Street. My Strype Street flat, with its lovely courtyard, was just around the corner. At the weekend, when the market was in full swing, I used to be awoken by the shouts (and the three Peruvian buskers) but on that day, a Monday, it was empty and there were only a few stalls set up.

Petticoat Lane Market may have been amazing in the Nineteenth Century but the modern version is not so good, it is like a big pound shop, and I never felt like buying a thing from there since, and until, this Monday that I am describing. I was hurrying home through the drizzle, my head down, and in the corner of my eye I noticed a stall on which there was a mountain of neck ties. Perhaps it caught my eye because it was so typical of crappy Petticoat Lane Market. An old, beaten up wood and steel stall with an unarranged heap of ugly ties on it, just piled up there like rubbish. But one tie (and they all had different patterns and designs) stood out, asking me to buy it, so I did.

It was a black silk tie with a slice of the New York skyline etched in silver thread right in the middle of it, the Twin Towers being the most prominent part of the composition. It was a tie with a picture of the World Trade Centre on it.

And the next day the towers fall down. I was sitting at home programming some dull game for the internet and was half listening to the radio. For hours I thought it was a fictitious drama.

Isn't that peculiar, buying a tie, unexpectedly and for no reason and of all the hundreds of designs? What a coincidence!