Rescue of a Rock 'n' Roll Child

1 Gambolling Baby Boomers

Birth of a Rock'n'Roll Child I was born Friday 7 October 1955 at the tail end of West London's Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate. My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had b... read more.

2 The Triumph of Decadence

Sad Loves of a Seafaring Man In late summer 1973 the minesweeper HMS Thames set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. It was my first voyage as an Ordinary Deckhand with the RNR and I was just seventeen years old. During the trip ... read more.

3 My Future Positively Glittered

Those Landmark Years Â For two years I'd slavishly followed those artists who'd either predated Modernism or been part of its banquet years and beyond but in '76 a new decade, that of Brando, Monroe, Presley, Dean, and the first stirrings of the Ro... read more.

4 West of the Fields Long Gone

Like Some New Romantic Some months after the final curtain triumphantly fell on Richard Cottrell's production of "The Dream" at the London Old Vic, I applied for and was offered the position of sales assistant in Bentall's china department ... read more.

5 From Paris to Cambridge Town

Darkness in Bretigny I'd say things started to go a little wrong for me once I left Westfield in the summer of '83 with a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant in a French secondary school, the Lycee ... read more.

6 Reborn in the Nick of Time

Collapse in an Indian Restaurant The period straddling late 1992 and early '93 may well have been the most debauched of my entire existence. My memories of it are hazy but they do tell me that during that time, or at least thereabouts, I'd typically ... read more.

7 A Final Distant Clarion Cry

Twilight of an Actor Following on from Jim Cartwright's bitter-sweet two-hander "Two", which I touched on in some detail in "The Trials of a Teetotaller", I performed in oneÂ lastÂ playÂ at the Rose and Crown theatre, the charact... read more.

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 remain... read more.

2 Born on the Goldhawk Road

Introduction: These two pieces set the scene for the entire work to follow, a kind of experiment in memoir writing with a spiritual core. Both deal with my childhood in London in the 1960s. The first was adapted from a Christian testimony dating from... read more.

3 A Child's West London

Introduction "A Child's West London", the second and last of two pieces based on my childhood in the west London of the 1960s, is not so much a story, as fragments taken from spidery writings with which I filled four and a half pages of a s... read more.