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.

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.

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!

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----

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.

Nerdy Emails

When I was little I loved a couple of of cartoon annuals, 'The Willy The Kid' books by Leo Baxendale, who I later found out invented 'The Bash St. Kids.' They were anarchic and chaotic and I was fascinated by the intricacy of the cartoon strips with their asides and little jokes. I had a new look at them a few years ago and they were still good.

I saw that the author had hidden some swear words in them. In each book there was a letter from Willy himself, full of spelling errors and scribbled out words. One example of a hidden word that I remember off the top of my head is 'count dracula' being mentioned, only it follows a scribbled out misspelling of 'cunt dracula.' I think that it's quite interesting that the author of a comic book for children hides swear words in it, no? Quite strange?

Well, The Projects toured the UK with Broadcast in 2003 and James and Lisa got on very well. As a result James remixed one of our songs 'Accidents Will Happen' and I also had a remix by Matt/Simon and I thought that a 7" with them both would be super. I sent Leo an email and asked if there was any possibility at all of him doing a quick sketch of the band in the style of Willy The Kid. He wrote back saying that arthritis had forced him to give up illustration in 2002, it prevented him from holding a pen properly. Isn't the inevitability of ageing the saddest thing?

I have also received a couple of other celebrity emails. I wrote to Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of the C++ programming language saying only 'thanks for inventing C++' to which he replied 'No problem!' I had just completed a perfect copy of the ZX Spectrum game 'Manic Miner' by Matthew Smith that I wrote in C++. I then went on to make a fast 3D engine (I was pleased with it, for those who know C++ it used only pointers, it was slightly clever.) I also had a brief exchange of emails with Matthew Smith. Rumour has it that he took too many psychedelic drugs after writing his smash hit 80s computer game and lost his marbles.

I wanted to go on to become a programmer at some place or other making playstation games but after a little while I lost interest and carried on with my employer on Charlotte Road in Shoreditch and later freelance, making crappy games for the internet.

I also had a brief email exchange with Gary Gygax, the inventor of the role playing game 'Dungeons and Dragons,' who died a few years ago. I wrote explaining that I had enjoyed the idea of role playing when I was a child, studying the books and adventures, but usually no one wanted to play it with me.

The Long Lane With The Noisy Dogs

I wasn't going to share this memory, but, well, today is Lisa's birthday.

Once, when Lisa and I were visiting my parents, perhaps some time in the very late 90s, Lisa decided it would be good to make love surrounded by nature. It was something that, she said, she'd always wanted to do and here we were, countryside all around us. We borrowed my parents' car.

I found this long lane that I knew of. A school friend once lived there. I addressed a letter to 'Kirsty, the girl who lives in the house on the long, long lane, with the noisy dogs, B-, Cambridgeshire' and it only took two days to reach her. I drove directly to the end of the road, far past the house with the noisy dogs, and from there we left the car and hiked though fields.

We found a spot that was entirely secluded, it was especially important to Lisa that it be so. We were sheltered, from the direction that we had walked, by bushes and behind us a rising slope blocked any line of sight.

But it turned out that the ridge supported a track and while we were making love a train slowly passed us by, not twenty metres away. We were completely exposed to the gaze of the bored passengers staring out at the boring, flat Cambridgeshire countryside. We waved to the people.

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!

The Meyerstein Ward I

In 1999 I was admitted to the Middlesex Hospital on Mortimer Street, off Tottenham Court Road.

I'd been having what I described to myself as panic attacks. The worst one, a week before, found me presenting myself at the NHS walk-in clinic in Soho feeling very ill and strange with a pulse rate of 220. They took me to the University College Hospital near Euston Square tube station. The ambulance doors flew open as we drove up Tottenham Court Road.

After not responding to any drugs that they imagined might snap my heart out of the rhythm that it had found itself in, they decided to give me general anaesthetic and shock it into resetting. I was sitting in Accident and Emergency with people all around me. The anaesthetist's mask was on my face and they were passing air through it in preparation for putting me to sleep. Meanwhile a junior doctor was checking my blood pressure with a cuff but it was very uncomfortable. I asked him to take it off and the senior doctor nodded approval. 'If he doesn't like it, leave it.'

The surge of blood that the removal of the cuff prompted, it having been so tight, reset my heart's rhythm. This was lucky because it would turn out that I had a scary allergy to suxamethonium and other volatile anaesthetics, and, there in UCLH A&E, or so I was later told, they might not have been able to save my life.

And so a week later I found myself being admitted to Meyerstein Ward where I would remain for two months. They didn't know quite what to do with me, I was just stuck there, feeling fine, eating chocolate, helping nurses make the beds, meeting people who came in and out of the ward. They didn't want to let me out of their sight, They said that I was at a high risk of dying. They weren't sure but they suspected that I was having dangerous episodes of ventricular tachycardia which was, in turn, threatening to degrade to ventricular fibrillation - the heart muscle losing all coordination.

I knew that alcohol and coffee triggered these episodes and suggested simply cutting them out would solve the problem. They wanted to implant an ICD, an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator, in me. Something like a pacemaker only it gives you electric shocks to reset the heart in the event of an episode. They were quite new, these devices, and the prospect of implanting one really excited my doctor. I was adamant that I didn't want this thing in me but I allowed Lisa and my parents to persuade me otherwise. My doctor was very intimidating you see and had scared them into taking the stance that they did. I see it as emotional blackmail. Even the sound of her stiletto heels approaching from the distance was disturbing.

I had the horrible thing implanted in me and very nearly died due to my rare allergy to general anaesthetic, and awoke in the Intensive Treatment Unit on a breathing machine. Apparently they had spent all night trying to cool me down with ice, pumping it into my stomach and caking me in it, after the drug that will usually help in this situation did nothing for my case. They had told Lisa and my parents that I had a very high likelihood of having suffered organ failure and brain damage but when I came to the following morning I felt pretty good. I remember marvelling at the sun as it shone through the window and thinking how beautiful the script that the labels on the cupboards were printed in was. It turned out that this was, in part, because I had lots of morphine in my system. The view was an ugly one and the labels were scrawled in untidy handwriting.

I found out a few things about ITU. For one thing it is exceptionally peaceful in there, and very cold too. It takes you about four hours to get your voice back after they take the ventilator tubes from you. An enormous sensation of warmth and gratitude can be projected onto your nurse when you are high with morphine. Each patient has one nurse, and that nurse fills in a complicated A2 chart of observations but they don't let you take it with you, as a keepsake, when you leave.

I became engaged, without my knowledge, at some point during that night. Touchingly, Lisa had decided that, should I survive, we were to be married. When I woke up she was now described by doctors and nurses not as my girlfriend but as my fiancée. After it was clear that I was ok there was no more talk of marriage on her part and she slowly became my girlfriend again.

In 2004, by the time that it was obvious that it was doing me no good whatsoever, against professional advice, I had the ICD removed.

All along I questioned whether or not this problem had something to do with my being a vegetarian but I was told that this was not possible. It turns out that I was right all along. What a surprise.

I was anaemic!! Caffeine and alcohol were both triggers because they chelate iron from the body!! All I needed was some vitamin c and more lentils, or, as I had suggested, avoiding coffee and booze would have done the trick. My anaemia was triggering arrhythmia. It would have helped if I hadn't have eaten bar after bar of pure dark chocolate to while away the hours in the ward.

I met lots of people over those two months. A rocker took the bed beside me after Zara died. He had stories of dray horses in the tunnels that stretched from Camden Lock, having worked there as a child. I felt very sorry for Zara. She was Iraqi but had travelled from Iran where she was living at the time. She couldn't speak English, didn't know anybody in our country, although she was visited twice a week by a charity worker. I don't think that she appreciated the ward being mixed gender. Lisa and I bought her cakes though which she enjoyed. But worse than her loneliness, her consultant cardiologist was flippant, sounded to me like he was making things up as he went along, and seemed more interested in talking to the nurses about his holidays. He would always get her name wrong. Worse still, he killed her in her operation.

She had two tiny, mysterious scars just below the corner of her eyes that looked like tears.

Yes, when you are in a cardiac ward for some time you start to understand how high the death rate is. A girl whose bed was opposite me died during her operation as well. She was everso young, her boyfriend and grand mother were constantly at her side during the final week and they were very happy and optimistic. And Gary, a hardware shop owner from East London, complained that they had damaged his heart and had implanted a pacemaker that didn't work, that gave him arrhythmia. I would play chess with Mohammed, a friendly, bright fifteen year old. There was an old Spanish lady who spoke no English, had no visitors, and would shuffle around the ward expressing her anguish to herself in a pained voice.

Bill was my best friend on the ward, Bill and his conspiratorial cruise ship..

The Noise Of Public Spaces

Twice in my life I've been exposed to the recorded noise of a public space for hours on end.

I worked throughout 2003 as a technician at the commercial art gallery 'The Lisson,' where Lisa held a good job and where I should not have been at all, me being such a philistine when it comes to conceptual art.

At one time I was overseeing a video installation by Francis Alys and watched over, every day for three weeks, a single shot film of the Zocola square in Mexico City, filmed in real time, from the vantage point of a high building overlooking it. So every day I'd see the shadow of the huge flag pole in the centre of the square slowly draw its arc, and the people enjoying the shade that it offered shifting along with it. Ten hours a day for a month. The soundtrack of people shouting, the noise of the traffic, the kazoo-like instrument that would be played every now and then, drove me a bit loopy. I could hear it in my head for months afterwards.

In the summer of 2009 I became addicted to Anthony Gormley's 'One And Another' piece. I'd watch it streaming on my second monitor day and night. Different ordinary people doing their thing for an hour each on top of Trafalgar Square's empty plinth, day and night for months, the ambiance of Trafalgar Square constantly in my head. I just couldn't stop having it playing.

One day in late August, the day after her birthday actually, Consuelo and I went to visit the fourth plinth. In those days I was a complete recluse, rarely leaving the house, let alone my neighbourhood, so I surprised myself when I went along to the Tate modern and then to Trafalgar Square. I'd explain why I became so reluctant to leave the house at some point but it's a boring story that's quite involved so I shall leave it for some other time. Unfortunately it's only now that Consuelo has gone that I am starting to go out more and more. We could have had such a nice time! She was always trying to persuade me to go out but I just couldn't face it and now it's all I want to do!

We'd also ventured out the day before the visit to the gallery and the plinth, on her birthday to collect an amazing cake, and I think she thought it was the beginning of something new. But it wasn't. And it was all, my reclusiveness, because of that terrible awful pill that the doctor gave me!


Anyway, although the woman on top of the plinth was boring. Just giggling and taking photographs, it was lovely to be there. I just replayed it on their archive and we can be seen for a few seconds looking up at the boring lady.

Now I have to visit the Zocola Square in Mexico City. That would be something.

Incredible Coincidence

Matthew/Simon has had many different musical projects, he’s very talented. One was, and I’m not so good at categorising music, a club/electro/pop thing which he had Lisa sing on. To be honest, it wasn’t my favourite of all of his creations. He had written a couple of songs, ‘Body Heat’ being the title of one, and wanted to shoot some promotional pictures. I can't remember who the photographer was.

He had found a great location for the shoot with Limehouse Town Hall. It was semi derelict, being used as studio space for artists, and had an amazing sense of faded austerity. The whole building was deserted except for us and Rory, with whom Matt/Simon had made the arrangements in order to use the place and who, today, is a successful conceptual artist. We stood chatting for a while in a huge central hall surrounded by manikins that were in the process of becoming someone’s installation before Simon/Matt and Lisa got to work. I looked on as the band were tied up with rope, back to back, sitting on wooden chairs, at the foot of a sweeping staircase, complete with masking tape over their mouths perhaps (or this might be my imagination at work) to evoke a story line of kidnap.

The following year the band that I played guitar in, and do mostly all of the organisation for, The Projects, had to find a space in which to record our first LP. Amanda from the band Saloon had a portable mixing desk and her and Adam were to do the production once we had found a location. I thought of Limehouse Town Hall, I got Rory’s telephone number from Matthew/Simon and ended up leaving a message on an answerphone. He got back to me a week later, saying that it wouldn’t be appropriate.

In the end we used a rehearsal studio in New Cross that had once been a public library. The building was beautiful, sun streaming into the main room, making the wood panelling and wood inlay that adorned the place glow. The recording took a week, and throughout that week there was a heat wave and it was incredibly hot in the rehearsal rooms. We would have fans running constantly, switch them off for a take and then all be waiting for the recording to be complete in order to switch them back on again as quickly as possible. Just sitting in there forced you to drip with sweat.

It sounded great though I think, Amanda and Adam did a great job and we had the record mixed by Matthew/Simon.

In Spring 2004, the year following our recording and two years after Matt/Simon and Lisa’s photoshoot, I was walking home, crossing Aldgate triangle. A girl stopped me and gave me a flyer, it looked interesting, it was for an online art project, so I took it home. Months and months later I stumbled across it in my coat pocket, I was sitting at my computer so I entered the address written on the paper and was taken to a page with hundreds of tiny, clickable numbers on it, arranged in a square. It took me a few seconds to work out what was going on when I clicked on one of those numbers. From the speakers came, after the sound of an answer phone beep, my own voice saying ‘Hi Rory,’ explaining that I played in a band, that we needed a space to record in and that the town hall would be ideal. Goodness! Of all of the numbers, of all the messages I could have clicked on..

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.

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.

Routemaster Buses

I used to love standing on the footplate of a Routemaster Bus. I trained myself to jump on and off them at high speed. One way or another, what with me getting MS at around the time when they began to disappear from the streets of London, route by route, those days are over.

In August 2003 the skill came in very handy. A power cut had left most of London without electricity for a day and, of course, consequently without tube trains. At rush hour I was trying to get a bus from Liverpool Street Station to the centre to meet Lisa. Bus after bus came and went, they were all absolutely packed and there were hundreds of people clamouring to get on them. In time I jumped onto a Routemaster bus and hung from the pole. It was unbearably crowded. A businessman kept complaining to himself, slightly drunk as he was he thought that commenting on the unpleasantness of the situation and on the people around him was amusing. He was a nasty piece of work. I told him to be quiet when he began to pick on a lady who he described as 'little miss fatty' and, in response, he pushed me off the bus, which was travelling at quite a pace. My feet touched the ground running and I didn't break my neck.

I got to the centre eventually, drenched by the pouring rain, and Lisa and I dined at some restaurant on Villiers Street. I had pasta with mussels (I ate fish and seafood in those days, I was only half a vegetarian I'm sorry to say) and we argued (which wasn't unusual).

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.