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.