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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Name Change

Howard went to the same school as me, although we didn't become friends until after I had been expelled for having some cannabis. This is a ridiculous story that I will tell another time. I didn't even know how to roll a joint.

One day we had nothing to do. We spent a while in the pub the Waterloo and then felt frustrated when we saw that the chip shop was closed for the afternoon. I noticed that the building beside it was a solicitors office and, since I was entitled to legal aid, I proposed that changing my name by deed pole would be a worthwhile way to while away some time until the chip shop opened.

Mrs Freeman, the solicitor could see me straight away. But I hadn't thought what name I should change mine to. Howard and I came up with a few ideas but none fitted and the solicitor had no suggestions at all. I decided to get rid of my surname altogether and have only a forename, I have never cared much for the name Wilson. The solicitor said that she would check the legality of having only one name and that she would contact me.

Coincidentally, the solicitor was the mother of a boy who went to the same school as Howard, my old school. Steve had thuggish tendencies and now, I think, works for the Metropolitan Police. A year previously, while we were all at the 5th form school ball, Howard made a funny come back to some insult or other that Steven had dished out and Steven, lost for words (he wasn't so bright) punched Howard in the face.

After a few days passed, Mrs Freeman telephoned and asked me to return to the office and sign some documents to finalise the changing of my name. I did so and she issued me with letters to post to my bank, the passport authorities, the vehicle licensing agency and so on.

I told my parents and was surprised that they took offence to me joining the likes of Sting, Prince, Madonna and Cher. They appeared to be genuinely hurt by such an idea as leaving my family name behind and so to avoid upsetting them I never posted my letters but have them still today, somewhere or other.

I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day

Howard and I spent the last of our teenage years doing nothing. Nights in the Royal Oak pub playing pool, visiting awful nightclubs in Cambridge and meeting no one. We had absolutely nothing to do.

Here is a good example of a typical night. We were in some bar in the middle of nowhere, a social club it looked like, fifties design. It was empty. Christmas was coming so I spent all of my money setting the jukebox up to play 'I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day' by Wizzard twenty times in a row. Of course the selection was only made, and it only played, once. We had no money but stole a bottle of wine, leaning over the bar.

There, that's a typical evening. Sometimes we made little films with Howard's dad's video camera but we usually just sat in a pub somewhere.

Happy Birthday Howard!

Renting a Room

Howard and I decided one day that it would be fun to rent a room out in Jane's flat on Camberwell New Road.

We put an advert in the Loot classifieds paper, advertising the room at the bargain price of ten pounds, and then showed applicants a temporary shelter made of sticks and a bed sheet on the roof. We had lots of fun, we were very young after all, but the advert was very popular, the telephone would not stop ringing, so we soon grew bored and went to the pub. We left the other flatmates to deal with it, which was very impolite of us since, like I say, the phone did not stop ringing. Very stupid..

Superstition (Stuffed Birds II)

I was sitting in the back room of the Golden Hart with Howard and Lisa soon after I'd made the discovery that I'd had the bad luck to have MS. I suddenly became superstitious and threw away a coin that I'd been carrying around with me. It was an American penny that I had found on a London street, Abraham Lincoln had been brutally disfigured by someone with a chisel. The coin looked malevolent and I felt sure that it was responsible for my illness, I was quite drunk so it was an easy mistake to make.

Superstition is unusual for me, an atheist who understands the world through a philosophy of determinism, denying people the free will that they mistakenly trust in. I surprised myself when I became much more superstitious over the following year, and coincidental events seemed to justify this. I even started drawing tarot cards to help me make important decisions.

I realised that it may not have been the cent coin alone that was bringing me bad luck. After Lisa had given me a seagull for Christmas, which I received shortly after I threw the penny away, I bought a stuffed magpie. Not a thing for a committed vegetarian but it was very old and quite magnificent. Shortly after I got the magpie Lisa left me. I remember that other misfortunate events occurred, although I can not recall now exactly what they were. I bought another magpie from ebay ('one for sorrow, two for joy') which, according to a note that came with it 'was found dead in the Christmas of 1931 in the churchyard.' It looked like a dead bird that you might see on the ground, turned upside down and mounted on a plinth.

Directly after I acquired this second magpie I met Consuelo, which seemed to validate my superstition.

Consuelo hated the stuffed magpies and had me sell them on gumtree. Incidentally, a computer error made it impossible to erase my advert for about two years, and I received emails almost daily asking if they were still available. Strangely, almost all of the enquiries were from women. Fortunately, my superstitious tendencies disappeared with the stuffed birds. I wanted to get a tattoo of a single magpie over my heart to prove it but tattoos aren't really my thing and, besides, I have an overwhelming, irrational fear of needles.

I wrote a song for my band The Projects which features the birds and the coin and Lisa leaving me called 'Unhappy House.' It is a spiteful song but it was lots of fun to play live. The guitar part is very easy, you just hit the 'a' string and move your left hand on the fretboard at random if you fancy it. I used a tremolo pedal with my old fucked up Vox AC50, which doesn't sound quite so supreme now that I have replaced its faulty capacitors, and it was good!

Working in a Service Station I

When I was seventeen I worked for a while in a Shell garage for six months before they sacked me for incompetence and bad time keeping. In the daytime it was far too busy, I just couldn't keep up and people were forever driving away without paying for their petrol, and the night shifts were very dull indeed.

One time Howard dropped by in the middle of the night and persuaded me to let him roll a joint in the back room.

It was typical of my bad luck that just as soon as Howard had said goodbye a local policeman, who would come in from time to time for a chat, drove up and decided to take the opportunity to share all of the many problems of his marital life with me. He wanted to tell me everything. I was concerned about the possibility of him smelling smoke from the back room, or him noticing that I was stoned, it was unpleasant.

You know, I don't think that I ever enjoyed smoking that stuff once but I always seemed to have been doing it.

Living City Plan

The first experience that I had of playing in a band was when Patrick, who was working as an engineer at The Strongroom Studio on Curtain Road, offered me an afternoon recording there in his free time before the pop group Spiritualised came in for the night. They had taken weeks, and would take weeks more, finishing an LP there. Lisa and I had worked out a few songs which we rehearsed a couple of times with Nick, Howard and Dino and then persuaded Joe to come along and play drums with us.

Recording was new to everyone except Joe who had seen it all before and who sat on his drum stool in between takes reading the paper. The results from The Strongroom weren’t that great. We didn't really know what we were doing after all.

Not long after came our first gig. It was downstairs at the Hope and Anchor in Highbury. The guitarist from Blur came but was turned away at the door since it was sold out. Is that note worthy? Probably not and it didn't seem so at the time either.

I made the mistake of taking some cocaine that Howard passed around. Aside from the fact that I don't like cocaine and I don't like people on cocaine and I don't like myself on cocaine and generally hate drugs, it proved to be a bad idea because it amplified my nervousness to the extent that I literally could not speak. My brother Adrian tried to make conversation and I had to run away, Lisa introduced her father, who was on holiday in London, but I couldn't reply to him.

After playing half a dozen shows I had no pre-performance nerves whatsoever, providing that I stayed away from Howard whose stage anxiety was so overwhelming it was contagious. It took me a while to realise this but, before I did, we'd always go to a pub together after the sound check. I'd enter feeling clear headed and leave, destined for the stage, a nervous wreck.

So, by the time we went to the newly opened Milo's studio on Hoxton Square (Howard knew someone who worked there perhaps) we had a name, Miss Mend, had rehearsed and had played a few shows. We hadn’t realised that we ought to have booked an engineer, it was a Saturday and for a while it looked as though we wouldn’t be able to get hold of anyone at the last minute. When we finally did get going it went smoothly. Listening to the record it seems like the studio must have had a great set up. At the time I really wasn't interested in the process of recording and just wanted to finish up and get to the pub but I’d love to know now what desk they used, what equalisers and compressors, which reverb unit.

Mixing the record was a pain. First of all we tried some people who had a studio set up below Proud Gallery (when it was located just off Villiers Street.) It was hot, cramped, humid and dusty in the cellar there, the environment was unbearable and the results were dreadful. In the end Clive Painter, who had recorded with the band Tram with whom we played many shows (we were label mates) mixed it at his home studio (where we would subsequently record our second single.)

Lisa sings the excellent A side, Living City Plan, and I one of the two songs on the B side. It really pains me that I sing with a slight inflection to some of the words like I’m pretending to be Stephen Pastel. Which, I am so sorry to say and it pains me on so many different levels to admit it, I probably was.

We were awarded 'Single Of The Week' by the New Musical Express but assumed this to be a fairly normal event for a new band, or I did at any rate, and so when the label Independiente summoned us for an interview at their Baron's Court office none of us put in any effort to impress them at all.

Myself and Lisa visited my parents house shortly after it was released and my parents' friend Cliff was also at the house as a guest for dinner. He'd played drums in jazz bands throughout his life. He asked to hear the record, I had given a copy to my mum and dad and so I put it on the turntable. It upset him, he didn't think that it qualified as a real song he said, he said that it was not music. He got quite agitated so I changed the subject.

Car Wheel

When I was a teenager I didn’t think much about other people.

One night I was at a party in a village close to my home town. I can’t remember very much about it but I do remember it not being good. I was with a crowd of people that I didn’t usually spend time with. Seamus and Paul, Darren, who they called Spooner and Robert, who they called Pieface. Paul was later to get married to his co contestant after appearing on Cilla Black’s Blind Date. I liked Robert very much, he was thoughtful and good natured. He surprised me when I discovered that he wrote poetry. Darren had this amazing skill of reciting television adverts word for word, one after the other. In fact, the only thing that I remember about this night was him exercising his talent, staring straight ahead, grinning, reeling the adverts off in a monotonous voice. It was a good party trick, it really was.

I left in the early hours. I can’t remember him being at the party but somehow a boy called Simon came to be sitting beside me in my car, perhaps I picked him up en route? I’d first met him on the school bus a few years before and found him a little intimidating. He was very bright but quite introverted and surly. He was a non conformist. He had long hair. One time I copied him a tape of the band Spacemen 3, who I really, really loved. He wasn’t that enthusiastic although he did like a song called ‘Losing Touch With My Mind.’ A line on it goes ‘I'm shooting, shooting off my gun. It's too bad now babe, but it's a lot of fun.’ He explained that he empathised with that and imagined walking into a shopping centre and ‘going crazy with a gun’.

We were driving through the town when disaster struck! To avoid a fox trotting across the ring road, I swerved, hitting the curb. That put everything out of kilter and the car shot from one side of the (deserted) ring road to the other, and I pulled into a small car park in front of a small, single story 1950s building marked ‘British Red Cross.’

We stood under the stars staring at the car. ‘Well, the wheel’s fucked’ I decided. I announced my intention, after a quick think, to go and find a similar car and get a new wheel. I didn’t use the word ‘steal.’ I took the jack and socket spanner from the boot.

Dawn was breaking as we crossed town, walking through the estate there. Simon suggested that since it was now tomorrow morning we may as well give up. He would later say that he never believed that I was for real, but I spotted a similar car to mine and approached it with my jack. Goodness knows how my mind worked in those days, I would never dream of doing such a thing today. Like I say, I didn’t care about people when I was a teenager, although today even a sad story in the newspaper can make me cry with empathy. I have gone from one extreme to another.

I worked fast, and I soon had the bolts out of the wheel and the car jacked up. I was disturbed when the front door opened of the little terraced house in whose driveway I crouched. A ten year old girl dressed in a pink nightie, holding a cup of tea stood blinking at me. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Hello’ I replied. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked ‘I’m just getting this wheel off the car’ I explained. She stared at me momentarily as I worked, I just had to raise the car a little more so that the wheel would clear the pavement completely, and then she shut the door.

So there it was, I had the wheel from the car lying beside me, free to carry away and I knew that I ought to have run. But the jack, I had to get the jack, somehow I reasoned that if I didn’t leave the jack behind then I wouldn’t have done a bad thing. It was somehow an expression of how I often approach things in my life, where I will stake all risking everything. I reasoned that if I had the jack the business would be neatly resolved and therefore, somehow, I would be free of guilt.

It took forever to wind that jack down. I looked over my shoulder and saw Simon hiding behind the wall of a churchyard some way down the road. The possibility of finding myself explaining what I was doing to the girl's father was real and I contemplated abandoning the jack more than once. But I could not leave without it! Nobody else did come to the door and soon I was passing Simon the jack and spanner as we jogged down the road.

We returned to my car, changed the wheel (hiding the old one in what was perhaps an old coal bunker) but, of course, the car's steering was completely out of alignment. So it had all been a great waste of time.

Behind the car park and the Red Cross building was a funeral home (where, in 2005 I would see my grandmother lying, I wish I hadn’t been invited in to see the terrible sight of her lying there,) and behind that was a local landmark called ‘Castle Hill’. A small hill where there once, or so they say, stood a castle. When I was sixteen a friend called Russell and myself and a few others (including Jamie Lidderdale who is now a crooner on Warp records going by the name of ‘Jamie Liddell’) invented a great game after an evening in the Waterloo pub which involved hurtling down the hill in a shopping trolley. We returned to play that game night after night. Terrible really what you have to resort to when life can be so (actually, not seemingly) meaningless as teenage life in a small town is.

Well, I fell asleep on Castle Hill and awoke a few hours later with a very sun burnt face. That evening I had Howard return me to the scene of the crime in his car where I left the wheel at the end of their driveway with a post-it sticker attached which read ‘sorry.’

Incidentally, Robert Pieface and Darren Spooner also both crashed their cars that night on the way home from the party.

Mind Reading (Stuffed Birds I)

Lisa, Howard and myself sat in a cafe close to Spitalfields market one day in December 2003. Howard was visiting us from the U.S. where he had moved a few years previously. It was a great occasion, Howard's visit. We always have a lot of fun together and here, in the cafe, we were laughing and telling each other stories and having a good time.

Lisa had been Christmas shopping earlier that day and now she decided to try to guess what I might have got her for Christmas. I said that I thought that guessing was a bad idea, after all, what if she guessed right and spoiled the surprise?

‘But you could never guess what I have found for you.’ Lisa told me. She was convinced of that. 'Never, ever.'
‘I bet I can’
‘I bet you can’t’
‘I bet I can.’
Lisa whispered the secret in Howard's ear.
‘You will never,’ he explained, ‘guess what it is.’
'You've got me a stuffed bird.’ I said automatically.
'You told him!' she cried.

Lisa had seen an ancient, stuffed sea gull in the market that she knew I would like. It is a beautiful bird and I do hope that it wasn't killed by the taxidermist, but died a natural death. I have no idea how I guessed correctly. We had never discussed stuffed birds, I hadn't seen the seagull in the market, how I guessed such an obscure thing, with my first attempt, is a mystery.

Sadly, the gull became a moth factory. It has long since stopped producing moths and isn't in such bad shape but is in a plastic bag in my parents' attic nevertheless, which reminds me, I have to get it back from them.

Foreign accents

Lisa would have liked to have rid me of the habit of speaking with accents when we started to spend a lot of time together. It drove her nuts. On one occasion in 1998 we were walking past the shopping centre on Kingsland Road and I was chirping away, pretending to be a Frenchman. 'You're attracting attention!' she complained, 'people are looking!' I really didn't think that anyone was paying any attention, I thought she was joking, I didn't know her so very well at the time, so I persisted. This made things worse and then she really lost her temper. It must have been very irritating, after all.

Yes, I was quite good with accents I thought, quite convincing, and it was all down to practice and dedication. Howard and I, for example, were Australians for a whole fortnight, day and night,  while helping to construct a film set in Ealing Studios. From time to time I like to try out a Russian, German, Birmingham or some other foreign accent today still.

I also used to like hitch hiking, Glasgow to Cambridge being my greatest achievement. Once, when I still lived in Huntingdon, Tony and I were waiting near a slip road, having already hitched half way from our boring home town to London. Tony, no doubt, was wearing his long herringbone coat, and we would have been rolling cigarettes and chatting about the kind of things that we chatted about as teenagers, friends and music. I remember that Tony was standing half way up the roadside embankment and I was getting on his nerves with a French accent monologue when a car pulled up.

I got in the front passenger seat, Tony in the back, and I made the mistake of introducing myself as a French national. Unfortunately the kindly driver's daughter had only just been married that previous weekend to a Frenchman and so, naturally, he was very curious about France and pressed me on many topics. I had to fabricate a lot. And then we came to a near stand still in a traffic jam on the M25, Tony fast asleep on the back seat, me keeping up this damn French accent for hours and hours.

He was a very good man, our benefactor, he even bought us lunch at a motorway junction restaurant. I was relieved that he didn't notice me inadvertently slipping back into my natural accent when we were saying our good byes, when we finally got close enough to central London for me to be able to escape my French-accent nightmare by tube train.

Driving Instructor

When I was seventeen I stayed at my friend Patrick’s house over one summer while his mother was away. There we led a very care free existence and I took LSD a few times each week. I also decided to learn how to drive. I had a driving instructor who kept staring at my crotch on the occasions when we sat stationary in the car in order to discuss the highway code. It was a bit unnerving. He was a little creepy, although he was very good humoured, and I did like his company. My close friend Howard, coincidentally, had been instructed by the same man in the past and had experienced the same problem with the crotch staring. It was unclear whether or not the instructor knew that his pupil would be aware of it, or whether, in fact, he himself was not aware of it. He told me that at times, especially when we were on the dual carriageway, my driving frightened him a little.

A short, pleasant lady conducted the test when my time came and I passed.