My Life as a Tapestry -16 The End of the Beginning

Towards the end of 1993 I took up a post as Research Associate at Aston University in Birmingham, working on a 3-year project on computer-assisted language learning in French and German, neither of which I speak. I had to cash in my pension contributions to be able to live on the salary, but I was given free accommodation at the top of a student residence tower block on the campus for the three weeknights I was on site. Thursday-Sunday nights I was back at home writing up my PhD thesis. National Express coaches ferried me up and down the M1 between Victoria and Digbeth bus stations.

This picture departs from my established format, partly because I wanted something different to mark the end of the first part of this cartoon autobiography, and partly because, for once, I don’t really want to share much about what was going on in my life at that point. It was a period of some unhappiness, although thankfully lasting only two years not the three I signed up for. I’ve confined the main illustration to an image, of a Birmingham tower block at night, which encapsulates for me the whole dark time. The city sleeps. One lonely window is illuminated. The lights of rail freight cranes patrol the otherwise empty horizon (the first time I saw these bright slow-moving lights in the distance I had the weird sensation that whole buildings were on the move past my window).

As the pretend-Latin caption says: ‘Here night falls and dreams end’.

Out in the world, these sad years were complemented by two long-running UK news sagas. One was the story of Charles’ and Diana’s gradually disintegrating marriage. Hours of TV and acres of newsprint kept us closely informed about every miserable twist in this sorry soap opera. Here I’ve shown Diana in an interview she gave with the BBC’s Martin Bashar (who, it turned out, got the gig via a bit of journalistic chicanery worthy of any scurrilous Sunday redtop hack). This charade became known as the ‘Bambi interview’, as Diana pulled out all the stops to make us feel sorry for her, having foolishly married into a family of Martians.

The other, more serious, story was the investigation into serial killers Fred and Rose West and the excavation of the cellar of their house in Gloucester. Over a few weeks Police found 12 bodies of young women in that cellar. All had been variously abused and murdered, over a 20 year period. They included the West’s own daughter. Whilst a trial was pending the tabloids were legally restrained in what they could report, but when Fred West committed suicide in prison all the shackles came off and there was a media feeding frenzy, complete with lascivious, sensational detail. Much of it made-up of course. There was so much coverage that it caused a public backlash and the papers were forced by declining sales to dial it down. By the time Rose West came to trial even Sun readers had had enough of the horror.

In 1994 Steph had a significant birthday, which will remain diplomatically untapestry’d, and my Dad turned 75. The family went away for a weekend together in a budget hotel in Buckingham to celebrate. The picture shows us all poised to toast the birthday boy with his most recent grandson on his knee. It hasn’t escaped me that, as I write this commentary, I’m fast approaching the same age.

In summer ‘95 I passed my viva, became a Doctor of Philosophy, and finally made up for my miserable O-Level results 32 years earlier. At the age of 48 I called time on my formal education. In the autumn I managed to get a 2-year post as a Lecturer at the Open University and my ordeal at Aston came to an end. 

As does Part One of My Life as a Tapestry.

My Life as a Tapestry 15 - The Road of Good Intentions Leads to Birmingham

Immediately after finishing my MSc in Artificial Intelligence course in summer 1989 I got a job at Kingston Poly (soon to be university) as Research Assistant on an European Union project run by PG who had been the director of the MSc course. It was the first step in an odyssey around technology and education (as the O Level Latin title nearly says) that would go on for the rest of my working life.

The global omens were good - Nelson Mandela was released in February 90 after 27 years in prison, heralding the final end of the Apartheid era in South Africa. It doesn’t often happen that true justice is achieved by a true hero in this complex world but this was a clear case. It made my heart sing.

I didn’t have much idea what I was supposed to be doing in my new job and PG was very busy and really just wanted me to be his representative at concertation meetings with EU partners held in boring places like Brussels. He was magically a lot less busy when later meetings were held by Lake Como in Italy and the Rio Tejo in Lisbon. Luckily I got to go with him on those trips too.

The project was supposed to be designing an intelligent ‘workbench’ to support industrial training needs. Very few of the people involved in it had any experience in industrial training, particularly not me. Nevertheless I spent the first few weeks of the project writing a report which I managed to circulate to all 5 partner organisations with the misspelled title ‘Functional Specifictions for the System’ (the malapropism turned out to be more appropriate than I realised at the time).

In Brussels I got to see a) the statue of the  Mannekin Pis and b) groups of hungry south European tourists roaming the streets at 10pm (dinner time in Italy, Spain, Portugal etc.) looking for a restaurant that hadn’t closed by 9pm (dinner time in Brussels).

At Lake Como I experienced magical scenery and delicious food. In Lisbon I wandered down whole streets of houses clad in extravagantly decorative tiles (azulejos). And ate sardines.

I had some highly enjoyable and convivial lunches with PG and our colleagues from Germany, Italy and Portugal, and sat through a number of presentations on intelligent systems architectures which were illustrated by diagrams that looked like stacks of film cans that had been used for archery practice. PG argued socratically with everyone (he was Greek after all) and spent hours passionately defending preposterous theoretical assertions that even I could see were probably bullshit. I did learn that  ‘workbench’ in IT-speak was not a place where you sat to do your work - it was a human-computer interaction concept that could be manifested across multiple architectures. Needless to say, we never actually built anything.

At the end of 1990 my cup ranneth over as Margaret Thatcher was hounded out of office by her own party, having become an electoral liability following the riotous and failed attempt to introduce a flat rate Poll Tax in place of local rates. It was a less edifying moment than Mandela’s release but I and millions of others still exulted as she was driven away blubbing in the back of her limousine with Dennis grinning inanely beside her.

Early in 91 I made the decision to try for a PhD and registered at the Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology. I would be a full time student with a maintenance grant from SERC, although I was allowed to carry on working part-time for Kingston, now doing the occasional lecture in Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems as well as writing reports for PG’s ailing project. As I was technically a full time student I was also entitled to a Young Persons Railcard to enable me to travel to Milton Keynes and back cheaply. (My mother fell about laughing when I told her I was an official Young Person, at the age of 43). For the next two years I divided my time between Milton Keynes where I sat upstairs on ancient green double decker buses trundling interminably through building sites and round deserted roundabouts, Kingston where I struggled to stay one page ahead of the students in the Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems handbook, and home where I wrote programs in Visual Basic designed to teach English to Spanish speakers and vice versa, and watched TV footage of American laser-guided bombs ‘surgically’ targeting Saddam Hussein’s war machine, including 480 unlucky civilians sheltering in a bunker in Amiriyah.

In September 1992 home became a two-up two-down 19th century terraced cottage just across the Harrow road in W10. It was our first freehold property - originally a council house sold for a pittance to its tenants by Westminster council in obedience to Thatcherite housing policy/political strategy and then sold on to us at current market rates (about £75k if I recall). We had to up our mortgage quite a bit but figured we could just about afford it. We completed the purchase on the day Britain crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the loan rate shot up to 15% for a few hours, causing us not a few palpitations. 

The new house came with a small backyard with a border garden which, when we moved in, had nothing living growing in it, not even weeds. But Steph is green-fingered and this was a chance to create her own garden from scratch.  Berta, who lived nearby and was also a keen gardener helped by giving us a jar of healthy and industrious worms as a housewarming present. Over the next few years a riot of planting sprang into life - gardening had entered my world where it has remained and helped to shape my understanding of what home is really about.

We shopped at multi-ethnic food stores along the Harrow Rd and at Sainsbury’s at the top of Ladbroke Grove. Beef burgers were off the menu as BSE had infected Britain’s cattle farms (only 2 years after we had been warned of salmonella in all our eggs). The Government insisted beef was safe of course and to prove it Minister of Agriculture John Gummer tried to get his 4-year-old daughter Cordelia to eat a burger on TV. She wouldn’t eat it, so he did, but Cows continued to go mad and over the next few years four million were slaughtered and burned on huge pyres throughout the land. 177 people died of a human variant of the disease. British beef was banned in several countries.

In 1993 I attended my first international academic conference. It was in Williamsburg, Virginia. When I showed the university tech support people my overhead projector slides they were perplexed. They weren’t sure they still had an OHP - everyone else was using digital data projectors by then. Outside the university Williamsburg was busy pretending to be still in the 17th century - half the town’s population were employed to dress up like characters in a Vermeer painting and show tourists around the wig-makers workshop and the candle factory. My stay there was prolonged by several days due to a freak snowstorm all along the eastern seaboard which caused the cancellation of my flight. 

Towards the end of 93, just as my studentship was coming to an end, I got a job as a Research Associate at Aston University working on another European project this time to do with using new technology for language learning. This was something I considered I did know something about by now, the only problem was - Aston is in Birmingham. It was agreed that I could work at the university for 3 days a week, at home in London for 1 day a week, and on writing up my PhD for 1 day a week. That meant I could be at home from Friday to Monday, get a coach from Victoria to Birmingham on Monday night, stay in a university hall of residence for 3 nights, and get the coach back to London on Thursday night. 

The first time I sat on the coach and saw the Birmingham skyline appear across the fields of Warwickshire it seemed to me like a fabled city. But my stay there was not to be a happy one.

My Life as a Tapestry 14 - Turning (in)to My Dad

In 1987 I turned 40.

When I was growing up, 40 was considered the prime of life for men and over the hill for women. I remember Mum in a parish review singing ‘Nobody loves a fairy when she’s 40’ in a tutu. 

When I hit the big 4 I still thought I was quite a way off my prime. But I was feeling prematurely middle-aged and a bit unsettled, mainly because of Dad’s operation (for colon cancer) a couple of years earlier. He, and all the family, had been worried that he might either not survive the op or else be condemned to wearing a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. In the event he came out of it with nothing worse than a loss of confidence. A loss I shared. I was suddenly aware that I had been taking his existence down there in Purley for granted, for years – available for Christmas and the occasional family party but otherwise irrelevant to me – but he was not going to be there forever. As soon as he was able to get out and about again we started meeting up from time to time for lunchtime beers and chat, usually at some pub in London that one of us knew. I briefly considered doing the right thing by his values and settling down to a respectable career at London School.

 But TEFL was getting tedious and Margaret Thatcher won her 3^rd election and I was feeling bolshie. The Right thought they were riding high but us lefties could see the writing was on the wall for their yuppie nonsense. What was the name of the Townsend Thoressen car ferry that rolled over in the sea just outside Zeebrugge killing 193 passengers and crew after leaving port in a hurry with its bow doors still open? The Herald of Free Enterprise. That election also produced the British parliament’s first ever black MPs: Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant and Dianne Abbot, so change was in the air.

I urged the change along by becoming MATSA (white collar trade union) Staff Rep and Branch secretary – they gave me a badge and shelf-full of ledgers to record subscriptions in, not exactly the barricades as far as I was concerned.

I formed a band with some friends at the London School of English and we wrote and sang political songs. We were called Mad Hazel (Spencer’s nickname for Harriet). Spencer could play anything provided he had the music in front of him, Harriet played flute and a gutsy tenor sax. We sang ‘Took the country for a grand/Took me for a business man/Blew it on a one night stand/That’s free enterprise!’ which was about the Government’s futile efforts to get the unemployment figures down by giving people £1000 to start their own businesses.

In late ’87 a great wind blew up, flattening 15 million trees across the country and killing 18 people. Steph and I weren’t directly affected, except that she had to make her way to her OU exams through streets full of fallen trees. During the several days of heavy rain that followed, however, our bedroom ceiling developed a large blister which sagged downwards around the light fitting. Curious, I took a screwdriver and poked it. Next moment we had a torrent of dirty water pouring down the flex onto the carpet. We turned the light off and in the dark improvised a water chute out of bin liners. For twenty minutes I stood on a chair and held one end under the waterfall and Steph held the other out of the window. Eventually the flow stopped and I went up onto the roof to find it missing a large number of slates – presumably distributed across North Kensington by the storm. The roof was mended by the Freeholder, who owned a cafe next door, but redecorating the bedroom set us back a few hundred pounds.

Hot on the heels of the ‘hurricane’ came Black Monday – a financial crisis that wiped £150 billion off the FTSE. It was the end of Thatcher’s popular capitalist boom, the end of yuppies, the end of champagne sharedealing, and eventually the end of her. How we laughed. 

The following year it was the end of London School for me too, as I took up a place on a Government-funded (the irony was not lost on me) 1-year course in Artifical Intelligence at Kingston Polytechnic (later University). We borrowed £3000 against the mortgage to support me and I bought a bicycle to get me down to Kingston every day. The route took me across Richmond Park - during the winter of ’88 I was rewarded with some magical encounters with deer in the frosty early morning landscape. I got fit too and felt years younger. Also on the route was the little hamlet of Strand-on-the Green in Chiswick, where there were a couple of real ale pubs on the riverside. In the summer of ’89 Dad and I met there a couple of times to drink pints of Youngs and talk about his childhood, his army life, his work life, and his retirement.

Then the Berlin wall fell, and there was a new sense of hope. 

Steph won a scholarship to spend her last degree year studying fulltime at Cambridge and I started taking the train up from Liverpool St. to stay with her at weekends. We walked round the ancient city and through the Backs discussing our academic work and feeling like proper scholars on the verge of recognition.

By the end of 89 I’d sat my first formal exams since 1972 and got an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and a job on an European research project being run by the Head of the course. I was quite proud of myself, particularly of the Sc bit. As the not-Latin caption says, I was emerging as a technocrat. From the windows of our Golborne Rd flat I watched the Kings Troop on their Sunday morning trot down the road to Wormwood Scrubs for gunnery practice. Parked round the corner was Dad’s old company car, now mine, a Reliant 11 automatic with electric windows. I was upwardly (and laterally) mobile. Thatcher’s evil reign would soon end. Things could only get better.

My Life as a Tapestry 13 - (The Art of Husbandry)

 At the beginning of 1984 Steph moved in with me in Colin’s Housing Trust flat off Ladbroke Grove (he was living with Moira in Camden by this time). She brought with her a Sunbeam Electric Frypan - the first time I’d ever seen one. It was big enough to roast a whole chicken in and we used it for just about everything. This was the first of many innovations she introduced into my domestic life, and indeed into my life generally.

A few weeks later we were in Mozambique, teaching English to electrical engineers, as part of a contract that London School had with the Swedish government. We were there for two months. It was a profound experience because of the vitality and friendliness of our impoverished students, but also because of the growing destabilisation of Mozambique by South African-backed rebels; a violent tropical cyclone named Demoina that levelled all the palm trees along the Maputo beach front and left the city without clean water for several days; and our colleague and trip organiser Terry catching cerebral malaria and having to be flown home early. 

Despite all that, Steph and I got engaged while we were there. On the day we made the decision we went for a walk along the shore and saw a huge flock of flamingos in a coastal lagoon. I sat on the beach and watched S. paddling out to try and get closer to them. I thought how lucky I was and how happy I was going to be with her, but then I was ambushed by irrational fears: what if something happened to her? Do they have salt-water crocodiles in Mozambique? Can sharks swim in a foot of water? What if she steps on one of those spiny things that are fatal? When the flamingoes noticed she was getting nearer they started to move away so she came back, to safety. I felt a huge sense of relief but had the sense not to say anything.

When we got back to England the miners’ strike was under way. The famous photograph (by the Guardian’s Don McPhee) of a confrontation at Orgreave Coking works, between a hairy miner in a toy police helmet and a fresh-face constable just up from London, symbolised the conflict for me. Unfortunately for the trade union movement it was ruling, rather than working, class coercion that got the upper hand under Margaret Thatcher.

1984 turned out to be a pretty catastrophic year for many working people all over the the world, without even needing Orwell’s Big Brother to organise it. Unemployment in Britain hit 3.25m; Union Carbide killed 40,000 Indians in a gas explosion at their pesticide plant in Bhopal; Pemex killed 500 Mexicans in a petrol explosion at San Juanico; civil war in Sri Lanka killed hundreds; 1.2m people died in a famine in Ethiopia. And the ruling classes had some nasty moments too: Indira Gandhi was assassinated by Sikhs, and the IRA blew up the Grand Brighton Hotel during the Tory party conference and almost but not quite got rid of the entire British cabinet.

On December 8th we got married - cliche it may be, but it was the happiest day of my life so far. We did the formalities with just Peter (my best man) and Carron (Steph’s best woman) at Chelsea Registry Office, then had a celebration ceremony with as many friends as we could pack into the Orangery in Holland Park. Steph and I read poems to each other (mine was Robert Graves’ ‘Counting the Beats’ - I think) and several people sang and played. We gave out red and white carnations and everyone had their photos taken, enabling me to recreate the scene 36 years later. I’ve shown Peter singing ‘The First Time Ever I saw your Face’ (Ewan McColl), Gilli singing ‘In my Life’ (The Beatles), Colin singing ‘Let it Be Me’ (Everly Brothers), and Susan’s family, Steph’s band of Kiwi girlfriends, and some of my friends posing for photos. And I’ve drawn Moira looking like a visiting film star in her fake fur coat (at least I hope it was fake), with her daughter Emma. Later we all had dinner and then a ceilidh at the London School - I’ve pictured my Mum and Dad and me and Steph, waltzing in a haze of marital bliss.

For our honeymoon we went to New Zealand and I finally got to see where Steph was brought up and meet her family and their then-current mad Dalmatian, Dominic. We got to ride across Auckland harbour in a 4-seater plane, and we got to climb down to the bottom of one of the extinct (at least that’s what they told me) volcanoes. Eagle-eyed Aucklanders will spot the anomaly in the picture: the hyperdermic-like Sky Tower wasn’t built till 10 years later - but, like mad Dalmations, its so much part of my mental image of Auckland now that I had to put it in.

Back in England, momentous 1984 was followed by an unmemorable 1985 (apart from the Rainbow Warrior outrage, the Heysel and Bradford Stadium disasters, the Brixton and Handsworth riots and the Battle of the Beanfield, the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer, and the death of Ricky Nelson).

The following year we joined the property-owning classes. As the radiation blew over Europe from the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, the UK government was in the process of selling off the more profitable nationalised industries, supposedly to the public but ultimately to their cronies in the financial ‘services’ industry. My favourite cartoonist Steve Bell caught the zeitgeist perfectly with his depiction of Sid (from the government’s ‘tell Sid’ publicity campaign that aimed to get people to buy shares in newly privatised British Gas) sharing his lorry cab with Alexis from the TV show Dynasty (played by Joan Collins as a stereotypical rich witch) and worrying that he was HGV positive. 

As the media clamoured for everyone to get rich and live like yuppies Steph and I allowed Abbey National to sell us one of their new foolproof endowment mortgages and we bought our first flat, in Golborne Rd, on the 4th floor above a Moroccan cafe. ‘Hypotheca’ in the fake Latin title means mortgage. I now had a wife and a mortgage. I had officially arrived at maturity (just in time for my 40th birthday). 

My Life as a Tapestry – 12 (Grownup Life Begins)

The period from autumn 1982 to Spring 1984 was a watershed in my development – the beginning of my growing up in fact. As the bad Latin title has it, ‘Here at last one becomes adult’. During this time I got my first proper job in 7 years (monthly salary, national insurance, pension, holiday pay, works canteen, union membership etc. etc), found a direction for my future career, and met the person who would become my life partner.

The job was at a prestigious EFL (English as a Foreign Language) school in West London. I walked up the imposing front steps in my newly-bought-for-the-purpose cream suit (builders made ‘ducky’ noises at me as I passed) and entered a world of Cambridge First Certificate, Swiss Bankers, high tech listening library, rich Iranian refugees from the revolution, free photocopying, high fashion Italian divas, boardroom role plays, Japanese rock guitarists, the digital revolution, and free lunches and morning pastries.

The photocopier was kept running 12 hours a day. My colleagues and I queued up to make teaching material out of anything that caught our eye, with complete disregard for the laws of copyright. The only thing that constrained our reproductive enthusiasm was an ex-actor called B., whose effectiveness as a teacher had been fatally undermined by his eccentricity and who was instead kept busy with a variety of support tasks, which he hated. One of these was to clean the photocopier every day. The time of greatest demand was just before start of the afternoon teaching session, so, naturally, that was when B. chose to start cleaning the photocopier.

I’ve depicted a few of the colleagues who I best remember from those early days: big T., responsible for technical innovation and general weirdness – he introduced me to micro computers (as they were then called); little M., initially staffroom pet, later Director (or Fuhrer, as she was known) of Studies – she acted dumb but managed to elevate herself to a high status role on the national TEFL stage; out-of-the-closet R., funny and acerbic – his later death from AIDS made the sensationalist media coverage shockingly real and tragic. 

T. brought little computers called Newbrains into the school and encouraged me to learn BASIC so I could make digital teaching material. I took to it like a born anorak and began to spend much of my non-working time crouched over a little keyboard writing routines that ran to hundreds of lines and executed in half a millisecond.

Steph came to teach at the school in spring 1983. By summer we were walking together in nearby Holland Park, which was a magic garden of woods, lawns, Jacobean mansions, Japanese gardens and other pastoral delights, patrolled by peacocks, Rheas, Cockerels and other exotic birds (one night a couple of years later, two dogs got into the park and killed the lot of them). The park bordered on the Commonwealth Institute, where Steph took me to show me the landscape model of Auckland, her home town (there was also a transparent working model of a cow, but it wasn’t switched on while we were there).

In the world at large, the UK was being turned into Airstrip One. The Greenham women’s peace camp led the resistance, 30000 of them joined hands to encircle the American base in protest against the siting of Cruise missiles there. My friends Peter and Colin and I made our own protest, as part of a CND demonstration in London. We dressed up as characters from the Great War – Peter was Kaiser Bill with a brass coal scuttle on his head, I was Percy Topliss ‘the monacled mutineer’, Colin was Tommy Atkins (singing ‘Bye Bye Love’ by the Everly Brothers!). We carried a copy of a German communist propaganda poster that I painted on a bedsheet hung on the wall of my (Colin’s) flat. (The black paint went through to the wall and I had to spend several days cleaning it off).

Ronald Reagan announced that the US military had orbiting space satellites that could shoot down Russian missiles in the stratosphere. The media inevitably dubbed it Star Wars. No Russian rockets did get shot down but the technology was to come into its own 30 years later, helping car drivers to find their way through unfamiliar city streets (and in some cases blowing them up). 

Not much to laugh at in Thatcher’s Britain, but the Comic Strip alternative comedians gave us some relief with their satiric TV takes on Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and other icons of our lost innocence.

On Christmas Day 1983 Steph and I met for a midday walk along the South Bank. As I remember, it was almost deserted, unbelievably. Since then it has continued to be one of our favourite London places, although it is rarely less than thronged these days. Early in 1984 she came to live with me in my (Colin’s) housing association flat in W10. Our bedroom window on the 4th floor looked out across communal gardens. We suspended a plank in front of the window and grew spider plants on it.

My Life as a Tapestry - 11 (Comings out and their outcomes)

At the beginning of this 3-year period (mid 1979 to early 1982) I had left the theatre group (Sidewalk), split up with Berta (my partner of 5 years), and was looking for a way out of the communal house.

Berta and I parted relatively amicably -  she wanted to come out and live her politics and went to join a radical feminist collective and be a writer. (Much later I was thrilled to discover that she became well-known internationally, as a Jewish Lesbian poet).

1979 was a time of coming out generally, following the new sexual politics of the women’s movement. The pretend-Latin caption here is the slogan of the time: ‘the personal is political’. Tom Robinson’s anthem ‘Glad to be Gay’ had come out the previous year and got to number 18 in the singles charts. Well-off people listened to it on their new Sony Walkmans.

More globally, Iran came out as an Islamic republic with a fundamentalist cleric as supreme leader; nuclear power came out as Armageddon in waiting at 3-Mile Island in the US. Sid Vicious and Lord Mountbatten came out dead.

Peter and I joined a local men’s consciousness-raising group. This was started by Colin and Mac, who were living round the corner in a 4th floor flat. They were both tall, good-looking, charismatic, and politically right-on (if somewhat anarchistic). With some other local guys we sat in a circle and earnestly confessed what was wrong with our attitude to women. Then we confessed what was wrong with our attitude to men. Once we all held hands. On another occasion we were going to do some group yoga, but one of the other guys wanted to do it unclothed in order to get in touch with our real selves, and the session never quite got off the ground. The high point was when we all went to the first ‘Men Against Sexism’ national conference in Manchester. Mac took his 3-year-old daughter and my abiding memory is of him and Colin cavorting in the crowd at the conference disco with the little girl whirling around above us on her Daddy’s shoulders, shrieking delightedly.

After leaving the theatre group I didn’t have any paid work for a while, and I think I got by on supplementary benefit. If you had an Equity (actors’ union) card, which I did, you didn’t have to make yourself available for work other than acting, and there wasn’t much of that. I passed some of the time playing bass for a post-punk band called ‘The Wimps’, whose singer was also in the men’s group.

Then Tony got me a job teaching with him on a summer school in Poland. There I met L. and my life changed. This image of her is dredged right out of my subconscious – it is based on a ‘snake’ Tarot card I once saw. The snake in Tarot is a complex symbol that stands for rebirth and forbidden knowledge as well as desire, seduction, craving, etc. All of which came to pass, and of course, the snake can also do for you! Behind her rears the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, needing no further explanation I hope. Poland at the time was in the grip of an unprecedented challenge to the authority of the Communist party from the Gdansk shipworkers and the Solidarity trade union movement. Tanks were involved. It felt exciting and dangerous. As did L., for me. Catalyzed by Wiborova vodka, we began an intense, doomed (because she was married with a family) affair. I cut my hair so that it stuck up like Sid Vicious. I dyed my old Spanish leather boots bright blue and wore them with white dungarees. She introduced me to TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) which I took to like a duck to water, mastering the modal conditional at a glance! I did a short training course, became a freelancer like her, and started to make a bit of money doing teacher training jobs with her. I moved out of the communal house and into Colin’s housing association flat with him and we put together an alternative cabaret act, where we wore school uniforms and sang Everly Brothers songs. To be fair, it wasn’t just me that was drunk on glamour – the whole country seemed to be in the thrall of the Royal Wedding (how prescient that ‘Don’t do it Di!’ badge now seems to have been).

The wheels came off the affair during a teaching job with L. in Kuwait in Autumn 1981. The snake escaped its cup (another Tarot card, standing for the perils of illusion and allure) and I was no longer smitten, but bitten. Enough said.

My bubble had collapsed, and my self-respect with it. But Myrtle came to the rescue, bless her. An occasional boyfriend of hers had gone to Mexico to study Spanish and she was proposing to go and visit him. Did I want to come? Yes I did. We flew to Houston, got a Greyhound bus to Neuvo Laredo and another bus from there to Mexico City. We had a few adventures there (Myrtle particularly, but my lips are sealed) and eventually took another bus to Xalapa where her friend was living. We found accommodation there and stayed nearly 2 months. I made some friends and some money teaching English and started to learn Spanish from children’s books. By the end of the time I had filled a notebook with poems and little stories (pastiches of Juan Rulfo who I also read) in my erratic Spanish. Myrtle went off travelling in the south but I decided to go home, as Colin had written to say he was moving out of the flat to live with a new girlfriend and we needed to go on paying the rent to make sure the Housing Association didn’t take it away. Some of my Mexican friends were convinced I was going back to England to join the army and go and fight the Argentines in the Malvinas (Falklands) but funnily enough it never crossed my mind. (I have just noticed that the final image of myself in front of the cactus is the same perplexed pose that I finished with in episode 7. Although staring at the future rather than at a toilet).

I had an eventful journey back – one coach caught fire, another left me in the service station at Saltillas and went off with my luggage, guitar, and a little bag with my book of poems and stories. When I finally caught up with it at Laredo I got the luggage and guitar back, but the little bag with the stories was lost for ever. I often wonder what the thief who took it made of my semi-literate ramblings.

The era ended with me getting the complete strip search treatment from a dim but enthusiastic customs officer at Gatwick airport who was convinced that the presence of dental floss and anti-diarrhoea pills in my toilet bag pointed with 66.666% certainty to me being a drug mule with a stomach full of cocaine wrapped up in condoms. He kept me for 3 hours until I finally agreed to have an X-ray to prove my innocence, at which point he let me go without giving me the X-ray. For some of that time my sister Gilli, who had come to meet me, was sitting outside in Mum’s mini. Before she gave up and went home.

Back in the UK, the country was enduring Thatchers’ war and her subsequent triumphalism. But there was a bright spot on the horizon – the Sinclair ZX81 came out and my destiny took a new path. 

My Life as a Tapestry - 10 (Living the Revolution)

This episode (1977-78) incorporates turning 30, alarming to contemplate even at this distance – 30 years old and still playing at adulthood. The picture is dominated by the house in Westbourne Park where I lived with a shifting population of co-communards and co-workers from a variety of socially-funded (ahem) creative and self-help enterprises, whose livelihood was made possible by cheap food, rent, utilities, transport, and what now seems like an unbelievably laid-back system of State unemployment benefits.

My general self-absorption during this time is reflected in this panel by the absence of any depictions of wider social and political issues (ie: no reference to the Red Army Faction, Grunwick, the Yorkshire Ripper, 3 Mile Island, the death of Elvis, the Sex Pistols, Jimmy Carter, the Silver Jubilee, the Iranian Revolution, Margaret Thatcher etc). Let’s say I was living my politics at this time – surrounded by the invisible but highly ideological graffiti artists of North Kensington.

I was also surrounded by the weird and wonderful denizens of No.8. I’ve shown Peter, sharing a joint with me on the roof by moonlight, and playing The Irish Washerwoman whilst rhythmically thumping a foot on the wooden floor of his top storey room (you could hear him in the basement). 

Berta, about to be buried under an avalanche of books that she had just brought from her flat in Ilford, to come and live with me (we had separate rooms). She put the shelves up herself, refusing my offers of help on grounds of gender autonomy (no comment).

David P. endlessly re-building or repairing something around the house (thank god someone was). 

Anita and Sue doing something possibly dope-related on the carpet in the living room.

The communal kitchen table, although I don’t think that particular group of people ever sat round it all at the same time: Dave H., still trying to make a living as an actor; his scary pal Des, and Jill the artist who shared a room with Des and drove him into homicidal rages; Mick, shortly before he cut off his afro and went off down the district line to live with his new girlfriend; Pamela, whose cat was periodically witch-hunted by Jill for bringing fleas into the house; Maggie, one of the original communards from when the house was first bought by a rich Marxist; and the sinister David R. who was forever lurking round corners and chuckling to himself and had a reputation as a local poet and eccentric. The windows are full of the silhouettes of the many others who passed through, the good, the bad, and the drug-addled.

And on the steps outside I’ve drawn Myrtle, holding hands with one of her small charges from the local nursery where she actually had a proper job. Myrtle was one of the few points of connection we had with the West Indian population of North Ken. Our local was the Apollo at the corner of All Saints Road and we spent a lot of time in there, although we rarely had much interaction with the black people who also frequented it. Everyone rubbed along fairly amicably in those days without exactly socialising together (it didn’t stay like that – see the account at the link above).

As well as signing on for Supplementary Benefit as an out-of-work actor, I was making pocket money from my fulltime occupation with Sidewalk Community Theatre. We worked hard and travelled a lot, first around North London and eventually the rest of the country and abroad to Holland. I still have clear memories and not a little fondness for the motley collection of vehicles that I borrowed, drove, mechanicked, and sometimes wrote off during this period.

Bob lent me his mini which I managed to get squashed under a lorry somewhere down the Caledonian road when I was late for a gig. (Despite my meagre income I did manage to pay him for it in instalments over the next 18 months).

Berta lent me her Honda Chaly bike on which I dodged other lorries along the Euston road on my way to rehearsals in Newington Green. Although it was tiny it had a 90cc engine which meant Peter was able to drive it on the M1, all the way to Hemel Hempstead in a thunderstorm with a 5-foot stainless steel microphone stand sticking up out of his rucksack.

Sidewalk had a series of old vans culminating in a 5-ton 1950s bread van which one of the group bought and had the windows customised to look like a clown face. It may have looked jolly but it was hellishly drafty inside and the heating kept breaking down. The whole thing eventually broke down in Aberdeen in January 1979. When we finally got it going again I and another group member drove it back  to London without stopping, for fear of not being able to start it again. You had to drive with one hand on the wheel whilst keeping the other hand inside the engine block in the cab - one finger over an outlet on the carburettor so that you could release air bubbles as they formed, which happened at 10 minute intervals.

Peter and I drove to North Wales in his ancient Reliant Robin. It too broke down, in fog, outside Reading police station. Luckily we managed to get it started again quite quickly, which was a bit of a relief, as we had a large bag of homegrown weed in the glove compartment.

Sidewalk started off doing plays for children and graduated to adult plays in 78-79. I’ve depicted some of the characters I played, and also shown myself when I wasn’t wearing a costume. It is not easy to tell the difference. I remember how much I hated ‘materialism’ in those days – typified for me by the fashion industry, shopping malls, advertising of all kinds. I got my clothes from jumble sales and I remember this particular outfit very well: green corduroy jeans (with a bit of a flare), a woman’s waisted grey silk jacket, a woolly hat, grey suede boots that were a size too big, and…. BLOODY LEG WARMERS! (Oh the shame).

My children’s characters included: Cecil the Mayor, whose first appearance in his big red cloak had 5-years screaming with fear and scrabbling over each other to get to their mothers. Berkeley the snotty school kid who won gold cups and whose scatological war with his underclass neighbours got us banned from some of the Islington Schools where we performed. Podgie the Cat, tormented by Berta with a cut-down Emu puppet.

The adult characters included a sinister Punch and Judy man, a patriarchal paterfamilias in a play about the Women’s Suffrage movement, and Dave the well-meaning male chauvinist  in ‘Son of a Gun’ (see the link to Sidewalk above), which was actually one of the first theatrical expressions of the burgeoning women’s movement in the UK in the 1970s. I’ve included a little visual tribute to Norma and Ken who starred in the first version of that play and who inspired me with performances of consummate comedy and bathos.

I look back on all this now as a kind of late late adolescence. A strange combination of community commitment and personal irresponsibility. My growing up would still be some time coming, but, flying in over Trellick tower in a NZ Airlines jet as 1977 came to an end, although unknown to me at the time, was its eventual cause.