Drinking
My First Foreign Holiday
I left school in July 1966 and started work as an apprentice in that September. I didn’t earn a lot of money but I did manage to save a little in the Bradford and Bingley [more…]
Memoir
Arts
The Swaling, Part Forty Six
Davies brought me breakfast in bed. Was it genuine concern or his army humour? I was in a bit of a state. His cooking wasn’t great. The culinary school that he relied upon seemed to [more…]
Arts
The Swaling, Part Forty Five
A Queen’s Messenger had called through the night with a letter. Unhelpfully, I was asleep under a bed at the time. My colleague, Natasha, took the call but, also unhelpfully, had gone work before I’d [more…]
Arts
The Swaling, Part Forty Four
We are together alone on the floor of Natasha’s Dolphin Square apartment. She has closed the curtains and sat on the opera glasses to attract my full attention. In doing so, she ended our nighttime [more…]
Arts
The Swaling, Part Forty Three
Myself and my colleague Natasha are squatted on her studio floor beside open curtains looking at the nighttime lives of others. Safely in darkness, to ensure our scantily dressed shapes aren’t silhouetted to the outside [more…]
Arts
The Swaling, Part Forty Two
“Beau Peeper? Classy. From some kind of top-shelf magazine one hears about? The things you do for Queen and country, Worth.” I’m showing Natasha my exhibit ‘A’, a newspaper cutting I hope will persuade her [more…]
Arts
The Swaling, Part Forty One
Miss Williams’s accommodations resembled a hotel room rather than an apartment, and a middle-market one at that. Its attraction was location, location, location rather than size, furnishings and decor. That location was the seventh floor [more…]
Arts
The Swaling, Part Forty
April 1984 suffered its share of chill winds, further proof that the final quarter of the 20th century drew towards an ice age. But the clocks never struck thirteen and the masses making their way [more…]
Arts
The Swaling, Part Thirty Nine
We’re in the underground comms room of a deserted nighttime British High Commission in Singapore. Outside, a swaling wind, a tropical storm mixed with the burnings of Indonesian crops, is battering the city state’s good [more…]