Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:13PM

1 Tales from the Halling Valley

From Tasmania's Tamar Valley

My ancestry is mixed English, Scottish and Scots-Irish. I'm English through my father, the well-known violinist Patrick Halling, born in Rowella in Tasmania's Tamar Valley to an English mother. While his paternity remains uncertain, he was raised the son of a Dane, my namesake Carl Halling, more of whom later. His mother my grandmother was always known to my brother and I as Mary, but she'd been born Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London where her family had been based for many years sometime around the turn of the 20th Century. I'll discuss the Scottish and Ulster-Scots side of the family later on in the story, but for now I'd like to concentrate on my dad's ancestry.
Around 1984, I surreptitiously taped the nostalgic ramblings of my great aunt and Mary's younger sister Joan Parrish who together with her Yorkshire-born husband Eric had come to my parents' house for lunch. Eric and Joan had only recently become friends of the family, together with her son Chris Parrish, Chris's wife Janet, and their three children. Many years later, Mary's niece through a brother who'd emigrated to the US dropped by the house for dinner. A resident of upstate New York, to my eyes she bore a striking resemblance not just to Mary and Joan, but to my my uncle and aunt, Peter and Suzanne. She also looked a little like Peter's daughter my cousin, Kristina Vals-Halling, known as Kris. I'll be referring to them all in due course of time.

According to Joan's testimony recorded that day, her maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, name which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which had dominated the south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or discarded branch. The Norman French were of mixed Viking, Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock, and their territorial conquests included England, and so Scotland, Ireland and Wales and southern Italy and the island of Sicily. The Norman conquest of England began in 1066 AD with the success at the Battle of Hastings of William the Conqueror which resulted in Norman control of England, and the introduction into the country of the Norman aristocracy. In other words, the Normans replaced the Anglo-Saxons as the ruling class of England and became part of a single French-speaking culture with lands on both sides of the channel. The Norman conquest created one of the most formidable monarchies in Europe as well as a highly sophisticated governmental system. It also changed the English language and culture forever while producing a sporadic but fierce rivalry with France, who became her bitterest enemy, remaining so for centuries. In his 1842 poem "Lady Clara Vere de Vere", Alfred, Lord Tennyson makes the valid point that "Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood." This of course inspired the classic 1949 black comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets", produced by Michael Balcon, directed by Robert Hamer, and with photography directed by Douglas Slocombe, all legendary stalwarts of the Ealing Studios of the post-war years.

The Butler saga had begun in 1177 when one Theobold FitzWalter, who'd accompanied Henry II into Ireland, was created Chief Butler of Ireland, although the earldom of Ormonde was not created in the Peerage of Ireland until over two hundred years later in 1328. This for the benefit of James Butler, son of Sir Edmund de Botillier and Lady Joan Fitzgerald, who went on to marry Alionore de Bohun, granddaughter of Edward the 1st of the Norman House of Plantagenet, and the so-called “Hammer of the Scots”.
The fifth earl of this creation, James Butler, born in London in October 1610 became the Marquess of Ormonde in 1642, then the Duke in the Peerage of Ireland in 1660, finally becoming Duke of Ormonde in the Peerage of England 22 years after that. He was the first of the Butlers to assume the Protestant faith, which set him at odds with the remainder of Ireland's Old English ruling class which was resolutely Catholic. If the Old English families such as the Butlers, the Burkes and the Fitzgerlads had been more Irish than the Irish themselves, the New English who'd replaced them as Ireland’s ruling class by about 1700, were markedly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.

Again according to Joan’s testimony, her paternal great-grandfather had been a humble coachman. He was however left a large sum of money by a grateful employer, an extraordinarily philanthropic act which introduced some wealth into the family. Joan's own father lived as a gentleman, which means he didn't need to work. His eldest daughter Phyllis Mary Pinnock was born, probably on the 12th of March, sometime towards the end, or following the turn of the 20th Century. She grew into an extraordinarily beautiful young woman, with dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and an exquisitely sculpted mouth. According to my father’s account, her first true love had been a beautiful young man by the name of David Wilson. David, who looked a little like the young F Scott Fitzgerald, was allegedly a scion of the Wilson Line of Hull which had developed into the largest privately owned shipping firm in the world in the early part of the century. Tragically, like so many of the country's finest young men, he was killed during the First World War. She subsequently married an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson, and they had two children in quick succession, Peter Bevan and Suzanne, known as Dinny. At some point between Peter’s birth and that of his younger brother Patrick, Phyllis went with husband to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, with the purpose of working as a tea planter. There she met the aforesaid Carl Halling. What followed next I can't say for certain but through family sources, I've been led to believe that at some point after becoming pregnant with her third child, Mary fled with Carl to the island of Tasmania, Australia, where my dad was born, although he was raised, as Carl’s son, in Sydney, new South Wales. It was in Sydney that Carl contracted multiple sclerosis, after which according to family accounts, Mary made a living variously as a journalist, and teacher. In the meantime, according to what Pat has told me Carl embarked on a desperate spiritual search in the hope no doubt that this would yield a miraculous cure. This search took in Christian Science, although prior to his illness I think, Carl had been a student of Eastern spirituality, which had resulted in his becoming fluent in Sanscrit. Presumably this is how he ended up working as a tea planter. Carl died immediately immediately before the second world war, at which point the family moved to Denmark, where Carl was buried. All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick as a violinist, Peter as a cellist and Suzanne as a pianist. By the time Pat was nine years old he was already the soloist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, with all his wages according to Pat being duly conveyed by Mary into the family account. Soon after Carl’s death, Mary and family set off for London in order that Pat and his siblings might develop their musical careers. Pat studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London, serving in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, and seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service, which had been formed in 1938 and lasted for three years, using converted Thames pleasure steamers as floating ambulances or first aid stations.

All Equal in the Eyes of God

Through my father Patrick, known as Pat Halling, I'm largely English, and proud to be so, although the Pinnock name itself is common in Cornwall and may therefore be of Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon origin. And yet, according to recent research, the inhabitants of the British Isles, whether English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh, have more Celtic, or Celt-Iberian blood, than anything else. Being of mixed English, Scottish and Ulter-Scots blood I am what could be called quintessentially British, although I self-identify as English. England was where I was born, and I feel a strong bond with people of Anglo-Saxon extraction, not just from England itself, but other nations where they are to be found, such as Scotland, Northern Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on; but not in an agressively nationalistic sense. After all, in the end, there is only one race, created by God, the human race, and we are all born equal in the sight of God whatever our race, colour or nationality.

Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:11PM

2 Born on the Goldhawk Road

Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:10PM

3 A Child's West London

Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:09PM

4 Gambolling Baby Boomers

Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:08PM

5 Innocence in Hamburg

Introduction

"Innocence in Hamburg", the second piece in a series of seventies-themed writings takes place in 1973 and 1974 in a variety of locations. Among these are London and its suburbs, the French city of Bordeaux, Murcia's Costa Calida, and the port of Hamburg, current capital of the German province of Schleswig-Holstein. It was first published (at Blogster) on the 26th of March 2006 as "A Dandy in the Land of Blue Denim 1". Allowing for further minor corrections, a final version was published at the blog.co.uk website in January 2008.

Toilers of the Thames

1973 was the year of my first voyage as an Ordinary Seaman with the RNR onboard the minesweeper HMS Thames. Late in the summer it set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. I was just seventeen years old. During the trip I made my best-ever RNR friend in the shape of a fellow OD Colin who called me only a few years ago from his east London home to talk about old memories, including the time we became trapped by a gang of mangy-looking stray dogs late at night in la Rochelle in 1975 while searching for our ship after a wild night spent with locals at a bar, then a night club. Although Colin and I already knew each other quite well by the beginning of the trip. Even more recently, another good RNR friend Taffy, who sailed with us to La Rochelle via the Ile de Re got in touch with me though Blogster. He could have knocked me over with a feather; after all the last time I'd seen him was close by to Waterloo Station when I was on my way to the Old Vic as an actor in the summer of 1980. Colin and his fiancee came to see the show, Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", shortly afterwards, but I can't say how long. However, he did mention having spoken to Taff, who was his best friend. But I digress. On with the story.

I also became quite friendly with one of the most unlikely pair of cronies I ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else. One half of the partnership was Jimmy, a tough-talking but essentially kind-hearted working class loner and ladies' man of about 23 who was rumoured to be a permanent year-long resident of HMS Thames. The other was a far older man, possibly in his mid thirties, but just as wildly convivial as Jim even though he boasted the super-posh accent and patrician manner of a City stockbroker or merchant banker.
Jimmy took me under his wing with a certain intimidating affection: "We'll make a ruffy tuffy sailor of you you yet!" he once told me, even though we both knew that that I'd never be anything other than the most pathetically effete sailor in the civilised world. There was one occasion below deck during some kind of conference when, after having been asked by an officer what I thought of minesweeping, I replied that it was a gas...another when the ship had been prepared for a major manoeuvre and everyone onboard had retreated to their respective allotted positions, when I was found wandering on deck in a daze only to casually announce that I was taking a stroll. Incidents like these made me an object of good-humoured banter on the part of Jimmy and others.

The crew spent its final night together in a night club in the port of Portsmouth, although it might just as easily have been Plymouth. The main attraction was a limp-wristed drag queen who tried desperately to keep us entertained by singing cabaret style numbers in a comic falsetto, and telling bawdy jokes in a deep rich baritone, only to be savagely heckled. At one point she turned her attention to me, or rather I think it was me. I was trying to hide at the time, it being one of those rare occasions when I was wearing glasses and I hated the look of myself in the cheap horn-rimmed specs that were the only pair I had in those days. Myopia always made me feel somehow defective, incomplete; so I refused to wear glasses except for when I really needed them until I was well into my thirties. "Ooh...you look pretty, what's your name?", the cross-dresser might have trilled. "Skin!" was what some of the sailors bellowed back, this being a nickname of mine, perhaps as in "a bit of skin" or something. It's all a bit of a blur to me now.
Before too long, the bearded sailor seated next to me had collapsed face down onto the table with a thunderous crash. Only a short time earlier, he'd performed the theme from "William Tell" on his facial cheeks while I held the mike for him. I'm not certain whether he ever appeared as a musician in public again, but he was certainly a star that night.

A Dandy in the Land of Blue Denim

Back onshore, I resumed my growing passion for louche and shady music, art and culture. Some time in 1974, however, I turned away from what I now saw as the old hat tackiness of Glam Rock, convinced that Modernist outrage had nowhere left to go. Instead, I turned my devotion to the more stylish glamour of previous eras and particularly the twenties and thirties. At some point in '74, I started using hair cream to slick my hair back in the style of F Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes parting it in the centre just as Fitz had done. I also built up a new retro wardrobe, which came to include a Gatsby style tab-collared shirt, often worn with black and white college-style tie; several cravats and neck scarves; a navy blue blazer from Meakers; a fair isle short-sleeved sweater; a pair of grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly, a pair of two-tone brown and white, or "correspondant", shoes; and a belted fawn raincoat straight out of a forties film noir.
As the seventies progressed I became more and more entranced by the continental Europe of recent times, and specifically its leading cities, as beacons of revolutionary art; and of style, luxury and dissolution. Certain key eras became very special to me, such as the 1890s, known as the Yellow Decade in England, and the Mauve in the US, Belle Epoque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and Weimar Republic Berlin.
There were those cutting edge Rock and Pop artists who appeared to share my European love affair, such as Sparks and Manhattan Transfer, and Britain's own favourite lounge lizard Bryan Ferry. Much of the latter's work with his band Roxy Music was haunted by the languid cafe and cabaret music of the continent's immediate past. What's more, some of Roxy's followers sported the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures in mid-seventies London. As for me, I wore my bizarre outdated costumes in arrogant defiance of the continuing ubiquity of long hair and flared jeans. In 1975, I attended a concert at west London's Queen's Park football stadium in striped boating blazer and white trousers, while surrounded by hirsute relics from the Hippie era. The headliners were my one-time favourites Yes, whose "Relayer" album I'd bought the year before; but my passion for Prog Rock was a thing of the past. I'd moved on since '71, that is, towards far greater love of darkness and loss of innocence.

Take to the Sky

It was while I was sitting Spanish "O" level in June 1974 in central London that I became deeply infatuated with a pretty slim Dutch girl called Maria. She didn't look Dutch, in fact, with her tanned complexion and long dark brown hair, she was Meditteranean in physical appearance, and even had the name to match. It was probably Maria who first approached me, because I was so unconfident around girls in those days that I would never have made the first move. Over the course of the next few days, I fell ever deeper in love, but I didn't have the courage to make my feelings known to her. This was so typical of me, to assume an attitude of diffident indifference when confronted by something or someone I truly desired. So, once we'd completed our final paper, I allowed her to walk away from me forever with a casual "I might see you around", or some other cliche of that kind.
For a week or thereabouts, I took the train into London and spent the days wandering around the city centre in the truly desperate hope of bumping into her. One time I could have sworn I saw her staring coolly back at me from an underground train, possibly at South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, just as the doors were closing, but typically I was powerless to act, and simply stood there like a lovesick loon as the train drew away from the station. In time of course, my infatuation faded, but even to this day certain songs will recall for me those few weeks in the summer of '74 that I spent in hopeless pursuit of a woman I didn't even know. They include Sweet Soul standards, "I Just Don't Want to be Lonely" by The Main Ingredient, and "Natural High" by Bloodstone, with its pathetic lines: "Why do I keep my mind on you all the time, and I don't even know you, why do I feel this way, thinking about you every day, and I don't even know you..."

Later on in the summer I found myself once again in Santiago de La Ribera by the Mar Menor or little sea, this being a large coastal lake of warm saltwater off Murcia's Costa Calida in southeastern Spain, and the summer of '74 was one of the most blissfully happy summers I spent there. Every afternoon, we used to meet on the balnario or jetty facing our apartment on the Mar Menor which was more or less deserted after lunch, that's myself and my brother, and Spanish friends both male and female, to listen to music and talk and laugh and swim and generally enjoy being young and carefree in a decade of endless possibilities. To some youthful Spanish eyes back in '74-'76, I appeared as an almost impossibly exotic figure from what seemed to them to be the most radical and daring city in Europe, which of course London was. I played up to my racy image to the hilt, where in truth I was barely less sheltered and innocent than they were. All this was to change with Franco's passing, and the birth of the so-called Movida, which could be said to be the Spanish and specifically Madridian equivalent of London's Swinging Sixties revolution. During the Movida, Spain set about sophisticating itself to the extent that on my last vacation in La Ribera in the summer of '84, it was I who was in awe of the local youth rather than the other way around. They'd become so intimidatingly cool, dancing their strange jerky chicken wing dance to the latest New Pop hits from Britain. By then of course most of my old friends had vanished into their young adult lives, and my time as the dashing English prince of Santiago de la Ribera had long passed. I was yesterday's man, and I was sad about it, but I couldn't expect to be chased forever. Some people have to actually grow up.

An Innocent in Hamburg

I returned to London in late summer '74 with a deep tan and hair bleached bright yellow by the sun, and hanging long over my ears and down over my forehead. Within days I found myself on HMS President, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station. This entailed my passing through Waterloo mainline station, which wasn't tourist-friendly as it is today, with its cafes and baguette bars, but a dingy intimidating place complete with pub and old-style barber. There I was I was accosted by a hoary old Scotsman, a former sailor who kept going on about how good looking I was. He even told me that he loved me; but he was harmless...just a sweet lonely old guy who wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, which I was happy to do and then move on. It was all very innocent. I even went so far as to agree to a meeting with him the same time the following week, not that I had any intention of keeping it.
Only days afterwards, HMS Thames was on its way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port. Once we'd arrived, one of the NCOs, a Chief Petty Officer I think advised me not to wander alone in the city. I duly fell in with a group of about three or four, and on our first night ashore we set off on a voyage into parts of the city such as the red light district St Pauli with its infamous Reeperbahn, the so-called "sinful mile" which is lined with restaurants, discos and dives, as well as strip clubs, sex shops, bordellos and so on. On St Pauli streets and in St Paul bars I saw things I'd never even suspected could exist. It was all in such stark contrast to the pleasant outer suburbs to which a coach trip was organised at some point during our run ashore. We ended up in a park where I had my picture taken on a bridge by a reporter for the Surrey Comet; then a group of breathless giggling schoolgirls asked me to be in some photos with them. I of course said yes, ever happy to oblige, and it was a bit of an ego boost for me, as if I needed one. On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors remarked that I'd been a hit with the Hamburg teenyboppers, while another snapped back that it was only because I was blond and blue-eyed, Teutonic-looking in other words. Whatever the truth, there was something deeply moving about these sweet suburban girls and their simple unaffected joy of life, especially in the light of what girls barely older than they were subjecting themselves to in the sad lost northern Babylon of only a matter of miles away.
 

Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:06PM

6 An English Seaside Town

Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:05PM

7 The Sweetness of Wrens

Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:02PM

8 My Future Positively Glittered

Introduction

"My Future Positively Glittered" consists of two previously published pieces in slightly modified form, these being "My Future Postively Glittered", now divided into two sections ("Global Village Soul Boys" and "Hardly a Wunderkind"), and "Summer's End" (now "Summer of Fittleton"), whose first drafts were published at Blogster on, respectively, May 26 and May 29, 2006. In September a further piece, "An Evanescent Friendship", first published at Blogster on the 10th of June 2006, was added to the whole. Tentative final corrections were made in January 2008.

Summer of Fittleton

Throughout '76 I gradually sidelined the previous year's olde worlde elegance in favour of a far more casual look inspired by the decade of Brando, Presley and Dean. Occasionally I'd relapse, but for the most part I affected the classic uniform of red windcheater, white tee-shirt and straight-leg jeans as worn by Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause". His death had come a week to the day before I came into this world in late 1955, seen by many as Year Zero of the Rock'n'Roll era. I can remember one time in particular that I dusted down the old dressy image. It was in the dying days of the famed long hot summer of '76, and I wore top hat and tails and my fingernails tinted bright red like a ghost from old Berlin to a party hosted by a friend from Brooklands. It was mid-September, and I know this to be an absolute fact because I was supposed to have been at sea at the time, on the minesweeper HMS Fittleton. I think it was only a couple of days afterwards that Fittleton capsized and sank to the bottom of the North Sea following a tragic accident involving another larger ship, the frigate HMS Mermaid. It resulted in the loss of twelve men most of whom I knew personally, given that only weeks earlier I'd spent a few days on Fittleton with more or less exactly the same crew.
HMS Fittleton had been accepted into the RN in January 1955, although she wasn't actually named Fittleton (after the Wiltshire village) until almost exactly 21 years later. She set sail from Shoreham in Sussex on the 11th of September 1976 with the intention of reaching the port of Hamburg on the 21st of that month for a three day Official Visit, but never arrived. On the 20th she took part in the NATO exercise "Teamwork" 80 miles off the Dutch coast in the North Sea, after which she was ordered to undergo a Replenishment at Sea with the 2500 ton frigate HMS Mermaid, and it was during this exercise that the bow waves of the frigate inter-reacted with those of the sweeper to cause the two to collide.
For some reason I'd earlier decided to opt out of the trip by pleading sickness. It was a decision that came to haunt me...despite the fact that had I taken part in the RAS manoeuvre I'd almost certainly have been assigned what was known as Tiller Flat duty, as had been the case on many previous occasions during exercises of this kind. This would have put me below deck, making escape difficult although not impossible. In other words, I may or may not have survived the accident. Of the twelve who didn't survive I knew three quite well, and they were all men of remarkable generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition, what I'd call natural gentlemen, and it broke my heart to think of what happened to them. I so wanted to comfort my shipmates for their loss, to bond with them and be part of what they were going through. I wanted to have survived like them. I went over it all again and again in my mind, until I drove myself almost insane with regret and grief. Once more I'd taken the easy way out, but this time it wouldn't be so easy for me to forget or explain away.

Global Village Soul Boys

The totemic year of 1977 was a far darker one than those coming before it. It was after all marked by the Punk uprising, a musical and cultural movement which could be said to have fatally disabled Rock's uneven progress as an art form with its savage DIY ethic, which, fused with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity produced something utterly unique for the time. From its London axis, and yet with roots in the US, it spread like a raging plague throghout the year even infecting the most genteel suburbs. At first I remained unaffected, although I'd long incorporated elements of the Punk sartorial revolution into my own image, such as short hair, small-collared shirts and straight-leg trousers, but this indifference had entirely evaporated by the end of the year.
Dressed in an anti-hippie style of my own devising, I started attending a long series of parties in various parts of trendy west London throughout '77 as one after the other of my old Pangbourne pals hit 21. Of all of them I was perhaps closest with Craig, by then a budding oil tycoon, but they were all very dear to me, and still are. After all, we went through alot together. Craig shared my passion for the London party life and clubs filled to the brim with the fashionable and the beautiful. One of his closest friends was a fashion designer from the north of England who forged cutting edge images for some of the most powerful trendsetters in Rock music. Soon after the start of the year, Craig had ditched his tired old velvet jacket and flares combo in favour of supercool drainpipe jeans and winklepickers. Within a short time I too was sporting winklepickers, in fact, a pair of cream-coloured lace-ups which became my pride and joy. I went on to supplement these with black slip-on shoes with large gold sidebuckles, imitation crocodile skin shoes with squared off toes, and a pair of black Chelsea boots with cuban heels, all excruciatingly pointed. By the spring of '78 I think I'd junked the lot as a means of sparing my feet which had already started to be disfigured by this evil footwear, or so I imagined.

For a man such as I haunted by a sense of inadequacy born of the obscure suburban roots I loathed, the trendy London look was interchangeable with Punk. Certainly like Punk it was adopted in defiance of the still ubiquitous Hippie, but it was married to a love of Soul rather than primal Garage Rock. It was common among the so-called Soul Boys, although I was not to discover this until later in the year when I started hanging out at Gravesend's Woodville Hall while at Merchant Navy college in nearby Greenhithe. Through one of the guys at college I found out about the Global Village night club under the Arches near Charing Cross. As well as a smattering of Punks and Punkettes, the Global was something of a magnet in '77 for working class kids who favoured the Soul Boy look, and who came from as far afield as Dartford and Kingston. It consisted of such elements as the wedge haircut, often streaked with a variety of tints including red and green, brightly coloured peg-top trousers or straight leg jeans, and winklepickers or beach sandals. The Soul Boy wedge was allegedly also favoured by certain followers of Liverpool Football Club who'd discovered a taste in '77 or thereabouts for European casual sports clothing while travelling on the continent for away matches. So, the Casual subculture was born, together with a passion for designer sportswear on the part of the working class youth of Great Britain and beyond which exists to this day. It is visible in every high street and shopping centre across the land.
For the greater part of '77, it was the Soul Boy look I aspired to rather than Punk. However, Punk began to seduce me from about January onwards, once I'd realised just how fantastical its sartorial vagaries actually were, and by the end of the year I was a devotee, remaining so until well into '79, when I defected to Mod Revivalism. But that's another story.

My Future Positively Glittered

By the summer I was working as a sailing instructor in Palamos on Spain's Costa Brava, while living alone on a caravan site. After a few months I lost my job, but stayed on in Palamos for several months, idling by day, while engaging by night in a constant almost Sisyphian round of alcohol-fuelled festivities in the city's bars and discos. It was as if I was driven by an unquenchable thirst for whatever lay just beyond my reach, a thirst possibly related to the desperate longing for fame as actor, writer, or Rock idol, that began to characterise my life from about the mid-70s onwards.
In '77 I was still ill-equipped for my ambition, given that few if any actors become truly succesful on the strength of their looks alone, which is surely why there are so many more truly beautiful male models than actors. I certainly had the looks, but little else. I'd not yet appeared in a single play, except for a handful at Pangbourne which had provoked some praise, and not a little hilarity. My roles there consisted of two elderly women, one of whom had to remain completely mute for the few minutes she was required onstage. This was in Max Frisch's black comedy "The Fire Raisers". The other was as a maid in a one-act play by the so-called Chelsea Shakespeare George Bernard Shaw called "Passion, Poison and Petrifaction". I also played a society beauty with short hair like Mia Farrow conducting some kind of illicit relationship with one of my best friends, Simon Miles, who went on to found his own cabaret club in the nineties called the Cupboard. My only male role was as an effeminate psychopath called Alec, in "The Rats", a little known Agatha Christie one-acter. In short, I was hardly a National Youth Theatre wonder kid. I'd written a few songs, but my guitar playing was still lamentably weak. My voice was good though, and incredibly versatile. In general though there was little proof up to this point in my existence of any real ability of any kind on my part. My future positively glittered before me.

Incident in Ostend

My final voyage with the RNR, destination Ostend in Belgium, came towards the end of the summer. My best RNR pal Colin was sadly not onboard, but other friends were, such as Adam, a tall red-headed man of about 26 a little in appearance like the charismatic British actor Edward Fox, with a trace perhaps of Damian Lewis. That's how I remember him anyway. His early life had been marked by one tragedy after the other, and his warm and courtly manners masked a troubled inner life which he kept almost entirely to himself, together with the fearlessness of one who had little to lose. I remember a time when for some reason a drunken sailor started threatening me in a bar, and Adam placed his slim yet powerful body between me and my would-be attacker saving me from what might have been a vicious beating.
I can imagine that back in '77 there must have been those who wondered how two such refined and mannerly men such as Adam and myself were apparently content to serve as humble naval ratings. I'm thinking in particular of some of the young guys of a certain RNR Division liaising with us to and from the port of Ostend in Flanders, Belgium. There was one incident when some of these hard young seafarers were grouping in an Ostend street intent on fighting some locals who'd offended them in some way. Adam and I stood back from it all making it clear we had no intention of joining in, and one of their number, a waiflike young sailor of about 16 or 17, previously something of a pal of ours, turned to us with a look of utter confusion on his beardless face and said: "What's wrong with youse guys?", before joining his pals for the gathering riot. Adam just didn't see the point in fighting unless it was absolutely necessary, but he was anything but cowardly as I've already stated. What's more, according to what I observed and what he himself told me, he was more than averagely successful with the opposite sex, unconsciously imbued like me with the poisonous playboy values of the times. Yet, for his own reasons he chose conceal such toughness and virility as were so clearly his beneath a mask of gentlemanly reserve, and even languour. This secret fortitude would eventually see him being commissioned as an officer in the Royal Navy, which had been his destiny all along. But not mine. My time with the London Division, RNR came to an end in late 1977 with an incredibly positive character report, for which I remain grateful to this day. The RNR did all right by me and I honour them for it, and if military life had never been for me, it's a part of who I am whether I like it or not. My life story would be all the poorer without it. Minor edit: 7/3/13.

Wed, Jul 2nd - 9:52PM

9 Gilded Youth at the Guildhall

Wed, Jul 2nd - 9:50PM

10 Gone the Way of Cain

Wed, Jul 2nd - 9:48PM

11 Ice Spoke of the Spells

Wed, Jul 2nd - 9:44PM

12 From Paris to Golders Green

Introduction: From Paris to Golders Green

The various sections of "From Paris to Golders Green" provide a stark contrast between my psychological state during the first half of my time at Westfield College, London, where I studied for a BA degree in French and Drama between 1981 and ’85, and that during my final year. An exception being  "Paris Will Always be Paris", which treats on the intervening sojourn to the city of my Bohemian dreams.
“Gallant Festivities” was based on two pages of informal journal notes dating from 1982-’83. Consisting of two parts, the first refers to revels enjoyed in the wake of a performance at college of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in which I’d played Feste the Fool, a role very close to my heart in its combination of tenderness and causticity. The second was formed out of an assortment of diary entries from ‘83, some made in response to another night of merryment following the performance of a play, this time of Lorca's “Blood Wedding". Both evoke the carefree hedonism that marked my golden years at Westfield, a college then in its twilight time prior to being incorporated into Queen Mary on east London’s grim Mile End Road, far, far from the semi-pastoral beauty of Hampstead.
I like to see my first two Westfield years as symbolic of an entire decade given over to giddy excess, with disaster approaching just beyond the horizon. In a general sense this came in the shape of Black Monday the stock market crash of Monday the 19th of October 1987, which could be said to have put paid to the spirit of the eighties just as effectively as the Great Crash of 1929 had spelled the end of the “greatest, gaudiest spree in history”. As to myself in particular it manifested as slow psychic disintegration, process whose onset I tend to date from my arrival in Paris just days before my 28th birthday in autumn 1983.
"The Children of the Sun" is a highly modified version of a prose section from the former "Tales from a College that Disappeared", while "My Paris Begins" is an entirely new work, written in 2007. The second Paris piece, "A Paris Flaneur" was extracted from an uncompleted novel written sometime in the mid to late 1980s, and edited and versified before being published at Blogster in early '06. Further very minor alterations were made to it late last year.
"The Happy Highways Where I Went" is an entirely new piece serving partly as a bridge between the Paris section and the story's finale, "The Wanderer of Golders Green" (1985). This versified piece, formed from notes made in that same mid-decadal year, was to some extent the result of a long-established love affair on my part with Bohemian nihilism. Yet, as I remember it, my natural exaltation was being compromised as never before by terrible depressive attacks. I think I used booze and nicotine partly as a means of deadening myself to the fact that the possibility of fame was starting to furiously recede by '85, with the result that my passion for attention started assuming desperate proportions, and leading me more and more into dangerous situations in which alcohol served to quash my natural fears and inhibitions.
"From Paris to Golders Green" was first published in definitive form at Blogster in May 2008.

Gallant Festivities

It was my evening,
That’s for sure -
At last I’m good
At something -
27 years old
I may be, but…
“I’ve heard all
about you…”
“I have to meet
That guy…”
“Spot the
Equity card…”
“It’s your aura, Carl…”
I even signed
One of Phil’s friends’
Programmes -
“When are you going
To be a superstar?”
Said Luce
A few days ago -
That seemed to be
The question
On everyone’s lips.
“You got Feste perfectly,
Just how I
envisaged it”
“…Not only when
You’re onstage
but off too!”
At last, at last, at last
I’m good at something…

And so the party…
I danced first with P.,
"...Don't go away..."
Chloe called me...
I listened…
…To her problems…
References
To my “innocent face”…
Livvy said:
“S. seems Elusive
But is in fact,
Accessible;
You’re the opposite -
You give to everyone
But are incapable
Of giving in particular.”
M. was comparing me
To June M….
Descriptions by AN:
“She does not dare
To be herself…”
Everything I’d always
Wanted to be,
I now am…
“…She lives
On the reflections
Of herself…”
Partly of truth,
“…In the eyes
Of others…"
"...So long, Carl..."
“There is no June
To grasp and know…”
…Partly of myth.
I kept getting up to dance…

The Children of the Sun

During my second year at Westfield I lived in an upper floor apartment in Powis Gardens, Golders Green, with my two close friends, Andrew and David, from Darlington in the north east, and the Yorkshire city of Hull respectively. They were both French students, although like me Andrew also studied Drama.
Soon after moving in, I decorated the walls of my room and the lounge (which doubled as David’s bedroom) with various provocative images including reproductions of Symbolist and Decadent paintings, and icons of popular culture and the avant garde. We then went on to organise what we optimistically called a “salon” after the fashion of French. While well attended, it only ran to a single meeting, being a desperate attempt by three pretenders at aping Oxford-style decadence in the upstairs apartment of a tiny little dwelling in suburban north London. One thing is certain, we were not part of any revived Brideshead Generation or anything of that sort.
We drove our ebullient landlady half-crazy at times through heavy-footedness and other crimes of upper floor thoughtlessness, although she rarely complained, even though we were in the habit of holding noisy discussions well into the night. In common with most of my friends I drank heavily most evenings, but almost never during the day. In fact, self-doubt was not a serious problem for me in the early eighties any more than was depression. My first two Westfield years were a neverending round of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set against the background of one of the most beautiful and bucolic suburbs of north London. I'd go so far as to say that I was a genuinely happy person back then, with clouds only starting to appear in my life once I'd left Westfield in the summer of '83 with a view to travelling to Paris the following autumn to work as an English language assistant in a French secondary school. This meant that I'd not be seeing my friends at Westfield again, that is as a fellow student, nor joining them in their final year celebrations. An alternative existed in the shape of a few weeks abroad, one which Andrew perhaps wisely opted for; but accepting this would have deprived me of the chance of spending more than six months in Paris, a city I’d long worshipped from afar as the only true home of an artist. So, in the autumn of that year, I took lodgings on the grounds of the Lycee JP Timbaud in Bretigny-sur-Orge, a commune in the southern suburbs situated some sixteen miles south of the city centre, and remained there until the following May.
I'm almost certain that at some point not too long after my arrival I became afflicted by a sense of self-disillusion, having up until this point considered myself a genuinely good person. Perhaps I felt I’d let people down, people who’d loved and trusted me because of the way I looked, with such an "innocent face", as described by an admirer in "Gallant Festivities". At the same time, paradoxially perhaps, I'd never been vainer, to such a degree that some of the Lycee kids affectionately likened me to Aldo Maccione, a comic actor of Italian extraction whose absurd affected swagger he referred to as "La Classe".
Yet there seems little doubt to me today that that my conscience was starting to scream out in protest and pain. It may also have been the case I was aware if only unconsciously that by severing myself from a vast network of highly gifted friends, many of whom looked to me as a colossal and charismatic talent and who cared for me deeply as I did them, I'd squandered yet another opportunity for social advancement. Whatever the truth, during his residence on the edge of my beloved City of Light, the Golden Boy started to unravel fast.

Paris Will Always be Paris

1) My Paris Begins

...my paris begins with those early days as a conscious flaneur i recall the couple seated opposite me on the metro when i was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexity slim pretty white girl clad head to toe in denim smiling wistfully while her muscular black beau stared through me with fathomless orbs and one of them spoke almost in a whisper "qu'est-ce-que t'en pense" and it dawned on me yes the slender young parisienne with the distant desirous eyes was no less male than me dismal movies in the forum des halles and beyond being screamed at in pigalle and then howled at again by some kind of madman or derelict who told me to go to the bois de boulogne to meet what he saw as my destiny menaced by a sinister skinhead for trying on marie's wide-brimmed hat and then making my way alone to my room in the insanely driving rain getting soused in les halles with jane who'd just seen dillon as rusty james and was walking in a daze jane again with judy at the cave de la huchette jazz cellar the cafe de flore with igor who asked for a menu for me and then disappeared back to bretigny cash squandered on a gold tootbrush two tone shoes from close by to the place d'italie portrait sketched at the place de tertre paperback books by symbolist poets such as villiers de l'isle adam but second hand volumes by trakl and ernest deleve and a leather jacket from the marche de puces of the porte de clignancourt wandering the city alone or with andrea or igor or david or dom or astrid and sandra i still miss her losing rory's address scrawled on a page of musset's confessions d'un enfant du siecle walking the length and breadth of the rue st denis what a city as anna-justine once wrote me so thrillingly lovely and yet so desespere my beloved paris may your hope return one day...

2) A Paris Flaneur

I took the Metro
To Montparnasse-Bienvenue,
Where I slowly sipped
A demi-blonde
In one of those brasseries
Immortalised by Brassai.
Bewhiskered old toper
In a naval officer's cap,
His table bestrewn
With empty wine bottles
And cigarette butts,
Repeatedly screeched the name
"Phillippe" until such a time
As a pallid, impassive bartender
With patent leather hair,
Filled the old man's glass to the brim,
With a mock-obsequious
"Voila, mon Capitaine!"
I cut into the Rue de Bac,
Traversed the Pont Royal,
Briefly beheld
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois,
With its gothic tower,
Constructed only latterly,
In order that
The 6th Century church
Might complement
The style of the remainder
Of the 1er arrondissement
Before steering for the
Place de Chatelet,
And onwards...les Halles!

The Happy Highways Where I Went

The Wanderer of Golders Green (1985)

Wed, Jul 2nd - 9:42PM

13 A Cambridge Lamentation

Introduction

"A Cambridge Lamentation" centres largely on my brief stay at Homerton, a teaching training college contained within the University of Cambridge, with its campus at Hills Road just outside the city centre. It is a mosaic of works or parts of works all previously published at Blogster and yet subject, to the best of my knowledge, to considerable modification since, these being the original versions of "Of All Sad Words of Tongue or Pen", "Shreds of Nothingness" and "A Cantabrian Lament". "From Mr Denmark to the Audition" is an entirely new piece, written in May 2008, the month a final version of the story was prepared at FaithWriters.

Shreds of Nothingness

The first employment I undertook after leaving Westfield was as a wandering deliverer of novelty telegrams. It may be that I gave no serious thought to the future, because I didn’t intend having one, and that my life’s work was the pursuit of immortality through acting, music or literature, or ideally all three, while tasting as many earthly fruits, strong sensations, and limit-experiences as I was able to in the meantime.
I evidently had no deep desire to leave anything behind by way of progeny, nor for any career other than one liable to project me to fame or infamy. That said, in keeping with my then passionately felt liberal-left convictions, I constantly entertained the thought of an alternative career in one or other of the so-called caring professions throughout the '80s. In the event however, I ended up succesfully passing an interview for a Post Graduate Certificate of Education or PGCE course at Homerton.
The pathological restlessness I suffered from at Cambridge, and feasibly evidenced by "A Cantabrian Lament", based on a letter or series of letters I wrote but never posted shortly before the end of the Michaelmas term, might go some way towards explaining why I left the college only weeks afterwards. However, quite why I was so determined to do a bunk remains a mystery to me more than two decades later. After all, I'd every reason to be happy there, as I'd been made to feel so welcome, and appreciated, and not just by the tutors and my fellow students. For example, a young undergraduate, well-known throughout the university for the high quality of his theatrical productions singled me out to feature in a play he intended putting on during the Lent Term. I think it was a Berkoff; or perhaps a Pinter; I can't remember. He did this after seeing me play the leading role of Tom in Tennessee Williams' “The Glass Menagerie" for another student's directorial project or something. Evidently, if he took an interest in you, you were pretty well made as an actor at Cambridge. What more did I want, for Spielberg himself to have been in the audience? Incredible as it might seem, I was actually rather disappointed that he wasn't a talent scout from outside the unversity. That's how unrealistic I was. Everyone was falling over themselves to give me a break and I still wasn't happy. Didn't I realise that I hadn't been born into a world of social privilege, and this was not my due, any more than anything else was?
As if all this weren't enough to fulfill my egoistic cravings if only for a while, Tim Scott, the then president of the world famous Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club had talent-spotted me. This is not an exaggeration, given that since the the late 1950s, Footlights has played host to such brilliant figures as Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, John Cleese, David Frost, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Stephen Fry, Hugh Lawrie, Emma Thompson, and more recently, Sasha Baron Cohen. I could have been added to that list. Tim just happened to be a Homerton man, and so sticking with his own he asked myself and a close Cambridge friend Jonathan to be part of the production he was preparing for his presidency. And to cap it all, when I made my first appearance at the Manor Community College in the tough London overspill area of Arbury where I was due to begin my Teaching Practice, the pupils reacted to me as if I was some kind of visiting movie or Rock star. My TP would have been a breeze.
As a Christian, my faith helps me to cope with the full furious ferocity of my past follies. God's offered me a second act in life, during which I might go some way towards atoning for the damage I caused during the first; so that one day those terrible words contained in “Maud Muller” by the American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) might not burn themselves too savagely into my mind: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘it might have been'". But it's not going to be easy like it was for me was back in the mid-1980s when I could afford to throw my golden youth and good fortune about like some kind of crazed Renaissance princeling. It's going to be nothing but struggle, but God willing it'll all work out for the best in the end not least for my poor soul: "For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world and lose himself, or be cast away?" (Luke 9: 25).

A Cambridge Lamentation

1.

In such a state
As this
I could fall
In love
With anyone.
The night
Before last
I went
To the ball
Couples
Filing out
I wanted to be
One half
Of ev'ry one
But I didn't want
To lose "her".
I’ve done little today
Except mope
Dolefully around
I’ll get over
How
I feel now,
And very soon.
Gradually
I’ll freeze again,
Even assuming
An extra layer
Of snow.
I have
I have
I have
To get out of here...

2.

Homerton's always a little lonely
at the weekends...
no noise and life,
I like solitude,
but not in places
where's there's recently been
alot of people.
Reclusiveness protects you
from nostalgia,
and you can be as nostalgic
in relation
to what happened half an hour ago
as half a century ago,
in fact more so.
I have I have
I have to get out of here...

3.

My capacity for social warmth,
excessive social dependance
and romantic zeal
can be practically
deranging;
it's no wonder
I feel the need
to escape.
I feel trapped here,
there's no outlet for my talents.
I have I have I have to get out of here...

From Mr Denmark to The Audition

And get out there I certainly did, within days in fact of the start of the Lent term of 1987. I can remember watching the classic Fred Zimmerman movie "From Here to Eternity" on TV with Dean, a talented musician and songwriter who went on to be a close friend for more than ten years, and another couple of guys I think, before simply vanishing into the night. Lying doggo for several months, I didn't get involved with anything to do with acting or performing until the end of the year when my old Westfield friend, Astrid Hilne asked me to take part in a rehearsed reading of a play called "Gayuka -The Dressing Room", or something of that sort.
Then a comedy character was created for me by Astrid called "Mr Denmark 1979". Of the kind of the deluded egomaniacal loser, Mr Denmark was a one-time winner of a Scandinavian male beauty contest, split like Miss World into three sections, formal wear, day wear and swim wear, who'd been lunching out on his paltry success ever since. What's more, he'd come to believe in his key role in the development of pretty well every major cultural event since the dawn of Pop, only to be cravenly ripped off by Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Punks, Rappers and so on.
In September or thereabouts, Mr Denmark served as one of the MCs for a marathon benefit for the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, featuring future superstars of television, film and beyond. They included the stand-up comedian Jo Brand, the satirical impressionist Rory Bremner, and the character actor and playwright, Patrick Marber. Ole Danish went down so well that I wrote a show around him which premiered at a new variety venue called Club Shout in what I think was 1988, again to great success. I kept him going until about the mid 1990s before finally tiring of his narcissistic antics.

1987 was also the year I first got seriously involved in walk-on work for television and the cinema. I'd done some previously. For example, I briefly feature as a side drummer at a typically English village fete in the 1980 movie "The Mirror Crack'd", based on the Agatha Christie novel and directed by Guy Hamilton. The film's co-producer with Lord Brabourne, Richard Goodwin, went on to do a good deal of work with my father. And in the 1986 telemovie "Poor Little Rich Girl" directed by Charles Jarrott and based on the life of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, I can be seen in a white suit gesticulating like a loon as seminal twenties crooner Rudy Vallee. But these were just isolated episodes. From 1987 or 1988, I took this form of work more seriously, initially in multiple episodes of the sitcom "Life Without George" (1987-'89) which I received through the agent Bill Richards. But it was through the Screenlite agency, with its HQ at Twickenham's Lee International Studios that most of my walk-on work arrived for what I think was a three-year period from about 1990, and largely as a crime scene photographer in "The Bill", a long-running television series centred on a south London police station.

Soon after I'd finished my work for "Life Without George", I started rehearsals for John London's translation of "The Audition" ("El Veri del Teatre") by the Catalonian playwright Rodolf Sirera, which was due to have its London premiere towards the beginning of '88 at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill. Directed by Astrid Hilne, it featured Steven Dykes as a shadowy amoral character known simply as The Marquis who lures an actor called Gabriel de Beaumont played by myself to his house on the false promise of an audition. He goes on to sadistically manipulate de Beaumont into acting a scene from Xenophon's "The Death of Socrates" as if he were actually dying by use of a supposed poisoned drink. It received some fairly positive reviews, as well as more lukewarm ones in The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Stage and other British periodicals, and Steve and I both received praise for our acting. I should have taken advantage of this minor triumph, but I'd already committed myself to work as an English teacher at the Callan School on Oxford Street. I stayed there for two years between about March 1988 and January 1990. It was a blissfully social period of my life, as the piece that follows, "Strange Coldness Perplexing" makes perfectly clear, but my theatrical career suffered because of it. Not that I was entirely inactive in this respect, in that I continued to perform as Mr Denmark while working as a Callan teacher, and entered a singing competition at Pips Wine Bar on South Kensington's Cromwell Road, and even hoped to gain a residency there, but it didn't work out.
I could write a whole book on my time at Callan's alone, indeed on pretty much any of the major episodes of my existence, "Spawn of the Swinging Sixties" being merely one version of it, to which layer upon layer might be added to create a complete portrait, although it is doubtful whether this will ever come to be realised in the time I have left, however much or little this might be. Minor edit: 7/3/13

Wed, Jul 2nd - 9:37PM

14 Lone Birthday Boy Dancing

Wed, Jul 2nd - 8:04PM

15 Reborn in the Nick of Time

Introduction

As of 3rd July 2008, this is still a work in progress and far from complete.

Collapse in an Indian Restaurant

January 1993 may well have been the single most debauched month of my entire existence. It was also my very last month as an unsaved person, whoich is to say someone who has not been born again by the Spirit of God. During that time as I recall, I'd
typically rise at about six in the morning soon after which I'd prepare myself for the day by way of a bottle of fortified wine or something similar. Then I'd periodically keep my units topped up by sipping from a small bottle of vodka or gin. Some evenings I'd spend in central London, others with my fellow students from Greenwich, who were irresistibly drawn to an anarchic subversive self-destructive personality who sang "Real Wild Child" as if he really meant it. Although once I'd quit drinking and become a Christian, the socialising stopped outright, and I was dubbed "Mr Invisible" by one of the students.
There were times in town when I couldn't keep the booze down, so I'd order a king-sized coke from MacDonalds which I'd then lace with gin or vodka whose smell was thereby disguised. I'd meet with Mark or another close friend, Rob perhaps, or Adrian, or Dean. One thing they had in common is that they were all becoming alarmed by my increasingly dishevelled appearance and bizarre behaviour. There seemed to be no end to the limits I was willing to take the latter, although I was never aggressive or threatening. I was an ecstatic drunk, a true Dionysian. One day'd find me crying out on a British Rail train, another performing a wild disjointed Karate kick into thin air causing passers-by to flinch in terror, or being actually helped onto a train by a vagrant in better shape than me, or tearing my shirt and trousers to shreds after having arrived too late for an audition. But things really came to a head in the first fortnight of 1992, when I collapsed in an Indian restaurant in suburban Surrey. I'd been quietly dining with two female companions when, suddenly feeling like pure death, I asked one of my friends whether I looked as bad as I felt. As soon as she'd confirmed that indeed I did I got up from the table, walked a few paces and then collapsed into a heap in the middle of the restaurant, only to be carried out into the fresh night air by two or three Indian waiters. One of them then set about attempting to shock some life back into me by flicking ice cold water in my face, while desperately urging me not to give up. For him to have spoken this way I must have looked pretty close to packing it all in. But I made a lightning-quick recovery, and within two days was drinking as heavily as ever, continuing to drink virtually around the clock until the weekend. I spent Saturday evening with a close friend, and early in the morning of the 16th after having drunk solidly all night, I asked her to fill a long glass with neat gin and each sip took me further and further into the desired ectstatic state.
I awoke in a state of exhileration, which was typical for me following a night of heavy boozing. It was my one drying out day of the week, and I probably spent it writing and doing some general clearing up. One thing I specifically remember doing was listening to a radio documentary on the Doors which I'd taped some weeks or perhaps months earlier. I especially savoured "When the Music's Over" from one of my favourite albums, "Strange Days", which seemed to me about living in the shadow of death, beckoning death, mocking death, defying death. I saw myself in Jim Morrison, a great idol of mine in those days, straddling transcendent bliss and total annihilation. But for Morrison the Blakean road of excess led not to the palace of wisdom but to Paris, the city of his dream of being a great poet like his idol Rimbaud, and where he died an unnatural and probably terrifying early death at only 27 years old.

The Death of an Addict

Alcohol and other narcotics lull the addict into a false state of security, and indestructibility. This makes them ill-prepared for their first serious health crisis which could also be their last. This was certainly the case for me, although I survived where others have not been so fortunate. Suddenly, faced with my own possible early death, self-destruction didn't seem so glamorous any longer, and I didn't want the music to be over after all. When it comes down to it, how many addicts seriously want their habit to lead to a lonely, squalid, awful early death? Once death has become a certainty, there is nothing an addict can do other than wait to die. From what I can recall, there is nothing welcoming on the other side for an unrepentant addict who takes things too far, quite the contrary in fact. Unless I imagined it I sensed something awaiting me that frightened me to the very core of my being.
At some point as Sunday evening wore on, I felt my legs go numb, as if I was about to collapse as I'd done a week earlier. Scared half to death, I opened a spare bottle of sparkling wine I had about the house even though I'd earmarked Sunday as a booze-free day. Once I'd drained it, I felt a good deal better for a while. I even felt sufficiently recovered to take a few photographs which I still have in my possession. Soon after doing so I set off in search of more alcohol. Arriving at a local convenience store, the Asian shop-keeper, highly alarmed by my wild-eyed appearance gently informed me that it being Sunday he wasn't able to sell me any liquor for some time yet.
There was nothing for me to do but take refuge on a nearby green, where I lay for a while, still dressed I imagine in the shabby white cut-off shorts I'd been wearing earlier. I was also unshaven, with freshly cropped hair which I hadn't got round to highlighting yet. It's safe to say I didn't look my best. Finally, I was able to buy more booze. I can't remember exactly what I bought, but I think it may have been a litre of gin, because that's what I was swigging from the following day.
I made my way to a nearby Methodist church, and singing hymns, I broke down and wept, their beauty and purity being in such stark contrast to my awful condition. That night I was unable to sleep. Every time I shut my eyes, I could have sworn there were shadowy entities beckoning me, waiting for me to die and join them. I must have felt convicted by God, because I set about destroying my collection of books...books on astrology and numerology, New Age and the occult, seditious artists in love with death, war, crime, rebellion. I was playing devotional music as I did so as I recall. I also destroyed hours and hours of diary-like recordings that I had committed to cassette tape since the early 1980s or earlier and which teemed with gross narcissism and decadent sensuality, as well as occasional bitter outbursts of a startling vehemence, so that I no longer recognised them as proceeding from the person of Carl Halling, as well as innumerous musings committed to paper which I deemed ungodly and more often than not with good reason. Were I to have died, I didn’t wish to leave anything behind that was of a flagrantly evil nature. These dozens of tapes testified to a secret vengeful self. That self is barely existent today, or rather, I refuse to tolerate him, even for an instant. I've spent fifteen years at war with him, and I'm still not through. Today, what you see is what you get and while it's far from pretty, at least it's real. I can be blunt and outspoken, and beyond a surface pleasantness, I have little of the social ease that was once mine, but by the Grace of God there's a genuine decency in me today, which can only grow.

The Eyes of Passers-By

The legs started going,
Howlings
In my head.
Thought I'd go
Kept awake with water,
Breathing,
Arrogantly telling myself
I'd stay straight.
Drank gin and wine,
Went out,
Tried to buy more,
Unshaven,
Filthy white shorts,
Lost, rolling on lawn,
Somehow got home.
Monday, waiting for offie,
Looked like death,
Fear in eyes
Of passers-by,
Waiting for drink,
Drink relieved me.
Drank all day,
Collapsed wept
"Don't Die on Me".
Next day,
Double brandy
Just about settled me,
Drank some more,
Thought constantly
I'd collapse
Then what?
Fit? Coronary?
Insanity? Worse?
Took a Heminevrin
Paced the house
All night,
Pain in chest,
Weak legs,
Lack of feeling
In extremities,
Visions of darkness.
Drank water
To keep the
Life functions going
Played devotional music,
Dedicated my life
To God,
Prayed constantly,
Renounced evil.
Next day,
Two valiums
Helped me sleep.
By eve,
I started to feel better.
Suddenly,
All is clearer,
Taste, sounds,
I feel human again.
I made my choice,
And oblivion has receded,
And shall disappear...

Reborn in the Nick of Time

It's difficult for me to say precisely when it was that I became born again. It may have been that first night as I destroyed remnants from a wicked past. Wicked past? Was I really so bad? Well, I was a nice guy and all that, but nobody knew my thoughts, which is just as well. My thoughts may not be perfect today, but I genuinely believe that my mind has been renewed by the Holy Spirit. Yes, it may have been at some point in the night of the 16th-17th January 1993 that I came to believe in my heart that Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God; and the Saviour of Man, who died physically on the Cross at Calvary for the sins of Man, and then who rose again on the Third Day to join His Father in Heaven. Believing in this way involved repentance of my sins, and submission to Christ as my Lord and Saviour. While it's true that no one comes to the Father unless drawn by the Holy Spirit, what is also true that prior to become a Christian, I was probably on the point of wholly immersing myself in the new Bohemianism of the 1990s, marked by the onset of the so-called Zippie. Zippie culture being an amalgam of the longstanding travelling Hippie Underground, and the relatively new Rave or Dance scene which birthed sometime in the late 1980s. The Counterculture which had risen to prominence in the UK in the late 1960s had run out of steam by the mid-1970s, to the extent that Hippie was a term of abuse for many Punks. However, it'd merely gone underground and by the late '80s had appeared to have made some kind of truce with Punk to produce several kindred bohemian tribes. I lapped it all up as I've stated earlier with all the fanaticism of one who was sick to the back teeth of the eighties, but thank God I was delivered from it in the nick of time. At some point during the night of January 16th-17th my memory informs me that I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my Saviour. I was not saved in any church, or in consequence of being evangelised, but through what might be termed a violent "Road to Damascus" conversion. This means I was in the extraordinarily fortunate position of already being a Christian before I joined any church on a full-time basis, or even met with other Christians for fellowship. But being a Christian didn't protect me from terrible onslaughts over the next few days. The following day the 17th I somehow made it into New Eltham to attend classes. On the way home, however, the sickness returned, and I started swigging from my litre bottle of gin. Eventually in desperation I phoned Alcoholics Anonymous. Next day I attended classes at Richmond College in Twickenham, after which the sickness returned again worse than ever. With trembling hands, I ordered a double brandy which stabilised me. I drank so much that afternoon that I started raving. I was thrown out of a pub for preaching. Walking through Twickenham town centre I started making the sign of the cross to passers-by. Later that day I took an old heminevrin capsule I had lying about the house and felt better for a while. But during the AA meeting I attended at night I was in such a terrible condition that I felt my chest would burst. It wasn't until the day afterwards that I genuinely started to recover after having taken a long sleep with the help of Valium. I wasn't certain whether I'd awake, but once I did I knew that I was better and that furthermore, I had God on my side. It was a good feeling.

Wed, Jul 2nd - 7:42PM

16 Beyond the Borderlands

Introduction

A first version of "Beyond the Borderlands" was published at the Blogster.com website on the 5th of September 2006. It is still a work in progress.

Another Close Call

While delivered from the worst effects of alcohol abuse, I still briefly continued to pay for it beyond my coming to faith in the shape of panic attacks which could strike at any time after leaving the sanctuary of my home. Thankfully, these only lasted a short period of time at their most debilitating, although I suffered on and off from them from several months, and they have recurred at rare occasions since. I controlled my panic syndrome with the help of the anxiolytic drug Diazepam whose most famous brand name is Valium, and which induced relaxation of body and mind, but to nowhere near the same degree as alcohol had done.
In the early days of my sobriety, I continued with my Post Graduate Certificate in Education partly at the University of Greenwich, and partly at Richmond College in the leafy west London suburb of Richmond, Surrey. I did so while rehearsing for the play “Simples of the Moon” by Rosalind Scanlon, based on the life of James Joyce’s troubled daughter Lucia. It premiered at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith on the 4th of February 1993.
At the same time, I regularly attended drugs and alcohol counselling sessions in Greenwich, my counsellor Elaine being a warm, down to earth woman with a London accent and gentle pale blue eyes. She was also detached and unflappable, as befitted her calling. In fact, the only time she lost her cool was when I announced to her over the phone that a matter of hours after deciding of my own volition to stop taking diazepam, I'd defected to the powerful sedative Chlormethiazole. I'd used Chlormethiazole, or Heminevrin to use its trade name, on prescription for a week or so in the early 1990s as a means of controlling my drinking. What I was not aware of at the time was that when used in conjunction with Valium, or indeed alcohol, it can be fatal. However, a sufficient number of hours had lapsed between my ingesting a single capsule of the drug and calling Elaine for my imminent death not to be an issue. I can recall her literally laughing with relief at this realisation.

Prayers of Repentance

As well as Elaine I owe a great debt to the friends I briefly made through Alcoholics Anonymous, and particularly my sponsor Don. During my worst days, he faithfully monitored my painful progress towards health and sobriety on the phone, which was a great comfort to me. Still, I chose to attend only a handful of meetings before stopping altogether. The reason I did this was a matter of days after coming to faith, I received a phone call from a man called Spencer working for Contact for Christ, based in Croydon, Surrey.
I think Spencer had got in touch as a result of my having half-heartedly filled in a form that I'd picked up on a train...perhaps the previous summer, while approaching Waterloo station with the sun setting over the foreboding south London cityscape, filled with alcoholic anticipation. I'm sure I tried to put him off, but he turned up at my parents' house nonetheless...a trim, dark, handsome man in late middle age with gently penetrating coffee coloured eyes and a luxuriant moustache. At his insistence, we prayed together, and he effectively became my spiritual mentor for the next two years.

Some time after our initial meeting I visited him and his wife Grace at his large and elegant house in that part of Surrey where suburb meets country, some distance beyond the Greater London border. Surrey is the wealthiest county in the UK, which is not to say that there is no depravation, because there certainly is, in Surrey-in-London of course, but also in parts of Surrey proper. This is especially true of urban areas such as Staines, Woking, Redhill, Addlestone and Camberley. The latter for example has a large London overspill estate on its outskirts known as the Old Dean. Spencer's large and elegant house, however, was in a safe and affluent part of the county, and we prayed together there over areas of my pre-Christian existence that he felt required deep repentance, after having made an extensive list of these. My continuing use of diazepam and my longstanding addiction to cigarettes were two of the areas addressed, and while it may have been coincidental, soon after gradually cutting my diazepam intake down to zero, I altogether lost a taste for tobacco. Admittedly, I continued smoking on and off for some four years after quitting valium, but I never really enjoyed a cigarette again. In fact, even as early as 1994, a single draw of a cigarette was enough to inhibit my breathing for the rest of the day, and rob me of a good night’s sleep.
By September 1994, I'd been happily established within Cornerstone Bible Church, a Charismatic Evangelical church affiliated to the Word Faith movement for over a year. My panic attacks had ceased, and I was celibate, non-smoking, teetotal, and wholly committed to being worthy of the name Christian, to the walk to which I had been called by God. If in late 1992 I was growing impatient with what remained of my conscience, and how the latter inhibited my demented hedonistic lifestyle, within less than two years I had been transformed not just beyond all recognition but all belief, that is, without taking into account the miraculous changes that God can bring to bear on the life of one such as I, because God alone can bring about such miracles. Minor edit: 7/3/13.

Tue, Jul 1st - 9:53PM

17 The Trials of a Teetotaller

Tue, Jul 1st - 9:41PM

18 The Twilight of an Actor

Tue, Jul 1st - 9:28PM

19 A Final Distant Clarion Cry

Introduction

“A Final Distant Clarion Cry” consists of diverse unrelated writings which I painstakingly knitted together to make a suitably grand finale to my as yet untitled experiment in spiritual memoir composition. The kernel of the work was “Apologia for a Cyber Church”, a piece written specifically for my friend Lane Nickerson. Substantial portions of the apologia are still to be found within “The Perils of Church Hopping”. To the apologia I added a prose section from the former “Some Perverse Will”, originally published at the Blogster.com website on Christmas Day 2006, while the poetic soul of the piece was incorporated into another story. Also grafted onto “Final Cry”, and specifically “Waves of Bohemia” and “The March of the Modern”, were extracts from “The Redemption of a Rebel Artist”, initially published at Blogster on the 14th of September 2006. “Fireworks Frantically Exploding”, “The Dispersal of Clouds”, “The Wilderness Decade”, “The Summing Up”, and “Not by a Long Chalk” were all written specifically for “Final Cry”, which was first published as a whole at FaithWriters.com on the 13th of November 2007, and then again in December. But there is still alot of work to be done on it yet.

Part One

Fireworks Frantically Exploding

The troubled, turbulent 20th Century having ceded to the 21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout my neighbourhood, I discovered through a phone call to my father that my mother was desperately ill with flu. It was a harrowing start to the new century, but once again God poured blessings on my family, and she made a complete recovery. It’s crossed my mind since that she may have become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused by the fact that I'd latterly quit yet another course; this time an MA in French and Theory of Literature from University College, London, which was one of the most prestigious of its kind in the world.
I found the course fascinating, despite aspects of it that disturbed me, and which were likely to become increasingly so had I persisted with it. However, leaving the course on spiritual grounds as was indeed the case was a painful experience for me as I felt certain I was headed for a first class degree.
As if in consolation, I was appointed chief musician of the worship band of the Liberty Christian Centre, suburban satellite church of London’s Kensington Temple which I'd sporadically attended for a few months during the previous summer. I'd been recommended for the post by my friend Marina, Russian wife of the pastor, Louis M. originally from New York City. She went on to become worship leader, alternating as such with another close friend and mentor, Martha J. from Peru. It was Louis who'd got in touch with me the previous summer through KT about joining a cell group at his home in the Surrey suburbs. This eventually mutated into Liberty, with which I forged very close ties from the outset, going on to serve in the Worship Group until well into 2001.

Once Liberty had come to a close in early ‘01, I returned to my first spiritual port of Cornerstone Bible Church, a fellowship affiliated to the Word of Faith Movement and specifically to Rhema Ministries of Johannesburg, South Africa. Before defecting to the Riverside Vineyard Christian Fellowship, I’d gone to Cornerstone for about two years from early 1993, in fact, had attended my very first service there even before becoming a Christian in ‘92. Drunk at the time as I recall, I'd sat next to a beautiful blonde woman of about 55 whom I later discovered to be a successful actress who at the height of her career in the sixties had appeared in television cult classics "The Avengers" and "The Prisoner". Apart from an elder from the Jesus Fellowship, who'd laid hands on me at a meeting of theirs in central London, she was my very first spiritual mentor. However, I was never to see or speak to her again as I didn't return to the church for several months, and by the time I did as a newly born again believer, she'd moved to another church. She subsequently came back to Cornerstone, but we kept on missing each other. Tragically, she went to be with the Lord in 2001.

The Dispersal of Clouds

Within a few months of having made the decision to abandon the MA at UCL I’d also quit my position as telecanvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thereby bringing a fairly lengthy period as an on/off office worker to an end. Since then I’ve worked only casually, rarely remaining in one menial employment or another for any length of time. However, if my job life has been in slow decline since the onset of the 2000s, my musical life has flourished.
By the end of ‘00, I was the lead singer for a band formed in that year by composer-musician Barrie Guard, who most recently worked with Indie Rock artist Lupen Crook. The band became known as "Nuages" after the famous instrumental by French Jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, this despite the fact that a band with that name and operating within a similar musical field as us already existed. With respect to the creative aspect of my career, after much prompting from Marina and other members of Liberty and KT, I finally wrote a series of Christian songs in 2001 which I hoped would be played by Liberty's worship group, but sadly, the church folded in that year, much to the sorrow of all concerned, as we’d become very close as a fellowship.
I subsequently made a brief return to Cornerstone, before quitting once again in late ’02. I did so in consequence of a renewed desire to seek out churches lying beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic family, this time born of internet research. By this time, disillusioned by nearly two years of sporadic gigging, Nuages too had called it a day. We disbanded in the wake of the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival held in St Mary's Church near the village of Shelton, Norfolk, which was a real shame in my view, because those who attended the festival were the audience we’d been searching for all along, evidenced by the passion with which they greeted our final performance.

To return to my Walk with God, among the churches I visited after leaving Cornerstone for a second time in the autumn of 2002 were Wimbledon's Bethel Baptist Church, pastored by Bible teacher and writer Jack Moorman. Bethel is what is known as an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church, based on the US model, and therefore KJV only, which is to say using the King James Version of the Bible alone. I was quite happy there, that is, until one Sunday evening when my train home was severely delayed, and I found myself stranded at Wimbledon station for over an hour in consequence. Despite this, I fully intended to return the following Sunday to see a friend of Bethel's gracious pastor David Cloud of Way of Life Ministries, preach at the church, but for some reason never did.
I also attended Christ Church, Teddington, a Free Church of England fellowship whose rector Dominic Stopford, with whom I’ve had several long and interesting conversations is a tall striking man with the magnetizing voice and presence of a classical stage actor. The Free Church of England separated from the established C of E in 1844 in response to the High Church Anglicanism of the then Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts. It is resolutely Evangelical, as well as liturgical and Episcopal.
By the end of the year, my quest having reached a satisfactory conclusion, I'd begun to make a tentative return to the Pentecostal-Charismatic nation.
Given the restlessness I've just described, many might be forgiven for suggesting that my walk with God has not been an easy one, particularly since about 2000, and I'd be forced to agree with them. This may be at least partly attributable to the fact that I came to faith relatively late. The Bible warns that each person who rejects the sovereignty of the fleshly realm for Jesus's sake will undergo much tribulation and persecution. Perhaps this is especially true of repentant Christians who accept Christ following a relatively long period of time within the decadent heart of the world as avid flunkies of the Flesh. However, as comfort these late converts possess a true and infinitely worthwhile purpose in life. This was something that ever eluded me in my youth, for all the fierce, flaming fanaticism I lent my ideals, whether artistic, intellectual, political or whatever and yet which amounted in the end to precisely nothing.

Part Two

The Wilderness Decade

As I might have already made clear, the new decade turned out to be something of a turning point for me, not just on the spiritual, artistic and vocational levels, but in terms of my entire personality, which has become more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven years, more of which later.
My entire presentation of self has changed since 2000. Sartorially it has become less soft, and reassuring, and closer to self-protective armour than the peacock feathers of a dandy. Significantly, the previous year had been the first since about '73 that I faced the world with my hair its natural medium brown, after having used bleach for close on to three decades. What prompted this was not a sudden loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the increasingly violent effects the peroxide-based highlighting kits I favoured were having on my breathing. While I hated being a brunet at first, in time I came to relish the dignity darker hair lent my appearance, rendering it far more masculin.
The truth is that throughout my twenties and for most of my thirties, I saw the soul of the true artist as one wholly unbound by conventional notions of sexuality. In consequence, for most of my pre-Christian life, I took no real responsibility as a man in the purest sense of the word, which is to say as leader, provider, protector, and so on. Instead, I opted for a variety of marginalised male personas, punk agitator, insurrectionary artist, doomed poet, hellraising libertine, man of learning and so on and so on and so on ad nauseum. I’ve jettisoned them all.
Images such as these have great appeal in the eyes of the young and disempowered, as do those veterans of outlaw lifestyles who’ve been burned out by taking them to their limit with only their cool to console them, but cool is a poor substitute for peace of mind. More often than not they prove ruinous to a person's healthy social and professional development, which is so vital to their well-being in the long run, to say nothing of their physical and psychological health. Still, they continue to be promoted as desirable through the media and that is especially true of Rock music, although needless to say perhaps not to the same degree as when I was a boy growing up to a frenetic Rock soundtrack in the earthshaking sixties. Out of the music and attitude of the first proselytizers of sixties Hard and Heavy Rock the entire Rock religion was constructed.

The March of the Modern

The tenets of the Rock'n'Roll belief system, with its exaltation of rebellion and excess of every kind, were hardly new in the '60s. Indeed, they can be traced back to Man's initial attempts at attaining spiritual ecstasy beyond the will of God. However, in terms of the Modern World, it could be said that the true ancestor of Rock culture was the great 19th Century artistic and cultural movement known as Romanticism. From the latter, the very notion of the Artist as tormented genius on the cutting edge of social revolution and eternally pitted against middle class respectability is widely believed to have emerged. If Rock culture is not the ultimate outcome of this persisting myth then what is?
It was the great English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who might have first given expression to the notion of an avant garde by asserting that “Poets are the unaknowledged legislators of the world”. Then, in the post-Napoleonic Paris of the early 1830s, a seminal artistic avant garde if ever there was one was born. They were the Jeunes-France, a band of turbulent young late Romantic writers allegedly dubbed the Bousingos by the press following a night of riotous boozing on the part of some of their number. Their leading lights, among them a fiery Theophile Gautier decades before he became an establishment darling, cultivated dandified and eccentric personas intended to shock the bourgeoisie, while inclining to political radicalism. Needless to say perhaps, they owed a colossal debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, as well as previous generations of dandies such as the Muscadins and Incroyables of the late revolutionary years.

The first wave of Bohemian avant gardism ultimately produced the Decadents, and the great Symbolist movement in the arts, both of which came into being ca. 1880. However, the spirit of the avant garde could be said to have trumphed as never before through the Modernist movement which was at its level of maximum intensity from about 1890 to 1930. This extraordinary period birthed such hyper-innovative masterpieces as Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" (1913), T.S Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922) and James Joyce's "Ulysses" (1922), as well as dozens of revolutionary art movements including Expressionism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.
One possible definition of Modernism in an artistic sense is the avant garde removed from its true spiritual home of Paris, (via German and England) and then transformed into an international artistic and cultural movement of immense power and influence. Some thinkers trace the roots of the Modern to the so-called Enlightenment of the 18th Century, which produced great defiance of God on the part of lofty Reason, and so for them, Modernism is a precursor of the avant garde, rather than a spirit that arose out of it, while others go even further back into the depths of Western history, to the Renaissance and its revival of Classical Antiquity.
What is certain is that the Western world of today is one that stands at the very climax of the Modern Revolution; and one of its keynotes as I see it is the mass acceptance of iconoclastic beliefs once seen as the preserve of the avant garde, especially with regard to traditional Christian morality. This process could be said to have accelerated around 1955-‘56, when both the Beat Movement and the new Pop music of Rock ’n’ Roll were starting to make strong inroads into the mainstream. Some ten years after this, there was a further increase in momentum as Pop began to lose its initial sheen of innocence, and so perhaps evolve into the more diverse music of Rock. This eclectic art went on to run the gamut from the most infantile pop ditties to complex compositions owing a considerable debt to Classical, Jazz and other non-popular music forms, and so become an international language disseminating values traditionally seen as morally unconventional as no other artistic movement before it. As a result, certain Rock artists attained through popular consumer culture a degree of influence that previous generations of innovative artists operating within high culture could only dream of.

Part Three

A Taste of Summer Wine

Given the facts outlined above, it's hardly surprising that Rock Music is a time-honoured bete noir of old-school evangelicals, and the internet duly teems with fulminations against it of varying degrees of insight. In 2003, a totemic year for me marked by a passion for doctrinal purity, I briefly declared myself its fiercest enemy, and set about destroying my massive collection of cassette albums. However, by the summer my attitude had softened to the degree that I was able to complete about an hour's worth of adult oriented Rock songs. Inspired by various melodic genres including Soul and Soft Rock, they ultimately defied classification. They were generally well-received, with a small minority declaring themselves to be devoted fans, even though they had been only very roughly recorded on an old-fashioned Sony CFS-B21L cassette-corder. Two of the songs went on to be more professionally recorded at the home of a close friend of my father's from South Africa.
In the wake of this project, my father the violin virtuoso Pat Halling began to plan the recording of an album of popular standards featuring myself and the harmonica virtuoso Jim Hughes. In the summer of 2007, the master was finally created, and the title of "A Taste of Summer Wine" awarded it in honour of the situation comedy "Last of the Summer Wine". This was due to the fact that Jim's playing had long been featured on "Summer Wine", as scored by Ronnie Hazelhurst, who sadly died in late '07. In Spring 2008, the CD finally came to fruition after three and a quarter years of gestation.
This final section of this experiment in memoir composition sees me anticipating the eventual commercial release of "A Taste of Summer Wine", as well as the final editing of the first large-scale literary project with which I can say that I'm perfectly content. The fact is that within a short time of giving my life to Christ, I began to experience extreme difficulties when it came to writing creatively, as if the Lord was preventing me from expressing myself on a literary level. The outcome was that I eventually gave up writing altogether, although I kept on periodically attempting to do so, only to end up destroying the results. Precisely why it was that I became so burdened by a kind of forbidding leaden heaviness each time I tried to write for about ten years from the mid 1990s I can’t say for certain, but I have my theories. To begin with, my work back then reflected a continuing preoccupation with subjects that had held me spellbound prior to become a born again Christian. I glorified these despite a false admonitory tone which served as a cover for my true motives. Furthermore, some of my writings mixed truth and fiction to produce an unsatisfactory hybrid. God requires that all those who take the name of Christian adhere to absolute truth to the very best of their ability. Others contained passages manifesting a dangerous degree of disrespect for the holy things of God; and I thank the Lord he allowed me the opportunity of decimating these. Finally, in January 2006, God made it clear to me that I was sufficiently mature on a spiritual level to be able to write again.

The Summing-Up

There are those who might look at me and see an individual who treated some of the most precious gifts a person can be blessed with during the prime of their young life with a nonchalance so utterly cavalier as amount to blatant contempt. In terms of natural endowment, these would include the kind of intelligence that produced an articulate speaker at just two years old, as well as health so robust that all serious childhood sicknesses were kept at bay until I was 13, when I caught meningitis following a spell as a foreign exchange student in St Malo off the Brittany coast. As if these weren't sufficient, my father procured for me one the most sumptuous educations hard-earned money can buy. By my early twenties anyone who knew me then would be forgiven for believing that if anyone was destined for ultimate celebrity it was me, "le futur celebre", as I was described in a reproachful letter in late ‘77 by a former friend from France…or something similar.
These theoretical critics of mine might make mention of the fact that for all my lavish good fortune, I’ve finished up in a small lower floor flat in a housing estate on the edge of Greater London, a lost soul haunted by the past, and tormented in the present by unfathomable regret. That is far, far from the way I view my situation. Some people in this city don't even have a roof over their head. As for my being a lost soul, nothing could be further from the truth. While I won’t deny that I'm inclined to the occasional remorseful mood, the fact remains that my soul has been salvaged not lost which means that one day all my tears will be wiped away for all eternity. At least, that is my hope.
I’m not the most social of beings I’ll admit, and yet paradoxically perhaps, I love to wander among crowds of people, gaining great comfort from doing so. The truth is that for one reason or another, I’m relatively incapable of pretending to be anyone other than myself in a social setting. This in marked contrast to the myself of thirty years ago who was a dangerously gifted social enchanter. That said, I consider myself to be a person of far greater integrity today by the Grace of God. At the same time, I've never been more aware of the necessity of my reliance on God, nor of the truth that He'll never leave me nor forsake me. When all’s said and done, therefore, I’m a deeply blessed man for all my superficial so-called woes. I have my faith, I have my family, and together they mean more, infinitely more to me than fame, wealth, and social status ever could. I'm not saying these latter wouldn't enhance my life because of course they would, but they'd serve as a bonus, nothing more, because my heart's desire has already been fulfilled. As for my supposed melancholia, this particular thorn in the flesh has been afflicting Christians for centuries. To cite some examples for the sceptical…Martin Luther suffered for much of his life from a tendency towards dejection of spirits which he attributed to a variety of causes including spiritual oppression in the realm of the mind, founder of the Quaker movement George Fox was a "man of sorrows" by his own admission in the early days of his walk with God, poet and hymnodist William Cowper was a lifelong depressive who endlessly doubted his own eternal salvation, Prince of Preachers Charles Spurgeon was prone to inexplicable anguish accompanied by lengthy bouts of solitary weeping and so on and so on. What though are the tears and trials of this brief life when compared to the fathomless joy that awaits the true Believer in Heaven?

Dear Friend I Salute You

Now that I’ve put the finishing touches to the very first large scale writing project of mine of which I'm pretty well 100% certain I'll not end up destroying, is it time for me to abandon creative writing altogether, in favour of music, an art I'm far more suited to than writing, or even acting, which is the one art I've never really had to work at, with the possible exception of singing? In reply, may I say that I've already started working out a second, more detailed autobiographical volume in my head. However, whether it ever gets written or not remains to be seen. So, for all intents and purposes, my literary career is at a close...for the time being anyway. If these writings have touched a single living soul, and there is some evidence they may have done, then my work has been worthwhile. For anyone still reading...thank you for your patience, dear friend, I salute you.

 

Photo: 2001?/'02?