Not One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

I parked the car on yellow lines, and crossed the busy Hampstead Road, heading for a small, single storey building by the entrance to the hospital. It was a grey, wet morning, and I wasn’t feeling well. Pushing my way past a group of people smoking on the pavement, I went through double swing doors, and entered a large well-lit room. In the middle, placed one behind the other were four dark brown, wooden benches, upon which sat an assortment of people, some of who revealed teeth which made them look as if they had been chewing shit for breakfast.

On one side, seemingly cut out of the wall, there was a small, white, Formica hatch. In bold, black letters above it was the word Reception. An air of elation hit me when I walked in the place. It felt like an aviary where nitrous oxide had been released. Shouted conversations swung to and fro, high squeaky voices shrieked uncontrollably. There was a constant movement of chattering people.

Around the edges of the room they sat the silent, jaded men, unshaven, with watery eyes and runny noses. They stared at white walls insensibly as if looking for movement or maybe a message, which if decipherable would have read 'help me!'

Women with fuzzy, scraggly hair, and long splintered nails, looked at the floor, tired, twitchy, nervously lifting their heads occasionally to gaze at the clock high on the wall, watching the present become the past and wondering what the future held, which from their look was very little.
The smell of neglect was everywhere, like an industrial wash - house. The steam of broken dreams wafted around the room.

“Yes?” barked the young, strong, and healthy looking woman behind the counter, snapping me out of my reverie, her face set, uninterested but enquiring to the absolute minimum because that’s what she got paid for. “I’ve come to register,” I muttered. The words hit me. Register...

I was trying to come to terms with my illness and I had to register the illness in order to come to terms with it. To put my name onto a government list so they could measure the affliction in the population of those that came forward seeking help. My sickness that lived with me night and day, had to be divulged to the authorities in order for them to lift a finger. I was feeling clammy. Cold shivers ran up and down my spine. Somebody was sitting on my grave reading the headstone, which had at the bottom the final chiseled words, “Is that it then?”

I stood by the hatch and filled out the white card, giving them my details and on completion handed it back. I sat down on a bench squeezing in beside a thin-faced man with sunken eyes and unwashed, shoulder length dreadlocks, he stared straight ahead, eyes half closed, lost in thoughts of nothingness, who can tell?

On the other side was a fat man, with a spud like face, who when he turned and spoke let off a stench of halitosis that reminded me of sweet and sour pork. I wasn’t hungry.

In the background a nurse was shouting, her voice impatient as if addressing recalcitrant children. “Yes! Go into the toilet and I want you to give me a sample of your urine now...not tomorrow not next week but now! You know the consequences if you don’t!” Two over coated youths with rheumy eyes held glass tubes in dirty hands and shuffled off to the 'karzy' muttering to themselves. I thought about the consequences, and saw my headmaster, Dr. Heavysides the self – fulfilling prophecy, wobbling backwards and forwards across the gym in his struggle to administer six of the best.

Looking further down the corridor I could see another hatch. This one was fortified and had a metal grill covering most of it, apart from a small section at the bottom through which hands periodically appeared to dispense drugs in white paper bags. Two parakeets stood there chattering. There tall, spiky, Mohawk haircuts flashing blue and yellow in the pale light whilst they examined the small brown bottles they had been given. “And what ya got then?” “Painkillers…and uppers,” said the other. “DF 118’s, black bombers and Mogadoms.”

I thought of ME 110's and bomber moons over London lighting the Thames, and fires burning, and death raining down from the roaring heavens… how the children cried. A cold sweat soaked my inner cloths.

The swing doors to the street creaked every time somebody came in or went out. For the first hour I was there the chatter was incessant, but after a time there was little or no laughter. Most of them seemed to know what was going on. They collected scripts from the office window when their name was called, and queued in the corridor, shaking bottles of pills, and tore open paper bags, and talked about who had what, and how much they were charging, and whether it was good quality. A lost tribe of pasty-faced barterers in a sealed off unit of the hospital unconcerned or incapable of being able to see the barriers corralling them in, and even if they could see, it served little or no purpose to know, and it was probably a better idea to try to ignore or forget.
“Did ya ‘ear about Charlie down Kings Cross? He got ripped off…it turned out ta be red brick dust…dirty bastards!” “…I ‘ear what’s ‘is name’s got some stuff ta sell…” “Watch ‘im he’s a slippery fucker...”

Through a row of windows high on the wall, I could see the day, but there was no sun. 'And in my cup of corn there is no golden field.'

The room was silent now. I was thinking of injustice and how examples are made…of those that don’t fit in. How the state is there by our free and enlightened choice, but if your free and enlightened choice doesn’t fit in with theirs…well forget it. “Sorry, old boy, but you have to have your heart peppered up by marksmen at fifteen paces. Why, we’re preparing the way for the great freedom and sorry, old feller, you ain’t going to be around to see it, but just take our word it’s coming, sure as the Flying Scotsman.”

My name was called. I stood up and followed the young nurse down a corridor, and into a room off to one side. I was struck by the immediate silence. A doctor sat at a desk in a white coat, she asked me to sit down opposite her. This I did. The lighting was subdued. The room was warm. My mouth was dry.

She confirmed my name, age, address and my current GP. I nodded. I knew deep down that this was my only chance. I had a young wife and child at home and I desperately needed help. The doctor wanted to know when it had started and how much of it I was taking on a daily basis. In my head I turned back the clock a couple of years. I could hear the words coming from my mouth. It was an acknowledgment that I was stuffed. The realisation that I couldn’t break the habit without assistance, that no matter what I tried, no matter which way I went, I always fell into the hole at the roadside, and that ever day that I passed the hole was getting deeper and more difficult to get out of.

I lowered my eyes and recognized for the very first time my true addiction, and a fear ran through me. I kept thinking 'I’m fucked man!'

I caught my breath and thought of the baby and what a lousy dad I was to be in such a state. No football in the park, no sunny days climbing the frames, no rolling on the grass…so little laughter. I was missing his development. I had abandoned both him and my wife. I had gone adrift and now I didn’t know how to get back to shore. I was calling the life - guard, sending rockets into the sky. Tears rolled down my cheeks like a child.

I cried for the first time in years and at that moment I felt the isolation of my life, and how removed I had become by this style of living, although dying was more appropriate. It was as if my entire life that had gone before was meaningless, and the years of laughter and hope had come down to this one moment of desperation.

I talked to the doctor…and the sickness of withdrawal went through my body like an express train. An involuntary spasm of nerve endings shook my legs as I fought for control. I talked of the love I had for my child, as I hit my leg with my fist, and how much I wanted to be part of his life again. I was lost and I wanted to be found. I wanted to be lifted up again into the world. I wasn’t waving I was drowning. I talked of the past few years and of how difficult my mere existence had become, of striving day in and day out to make ends meet. Of pressure and strain, and now anxiety.

I thought of Percy and Dickie Geneva who were now dead and buried side by side in Kensal Green Cemetery. How we gathered round the grave and listened to them being laid to rest. The heavy soil clattering on the coffins 'smacked' out of our nuts, and never thinking it could be us. And Trehearne Hawksford, and Ray Gange, galloping round the West End searching for 'it' in a never -ending spiral of contentment and cold sweats, clucking like the desperate turkeys they had now become, and like all turkeys at Christmas time, there was no hiding place for them. No refuge.

We were all lost. We had little self - respect, and none of us could help each other, and that was the great sadness of it all.

Trehearne’s wife had run off with his child back to Newcastle to escape his terrible addiction. Unable to deal with or wanting to deal with the wizened husk of a man her husband had become. He was trapped and stricken with grief at his loss and his life was coming apart. He’d had operations to remove blood clots from his lungs. His once beautiful body covered with scars. His skin was yellow. 'Ya know they treated me for years for jaundice and then discovered I was a China man.'

Now he drank. Every morning he knocked on the door of the off - licence at 10 o clock, to buy large bottles of dry martini to glug back in his empty flat in Waterloo. No sunrises for him only sunsets.

Ray lived in squalor down in Clapham covered in abscesses on his arms, unable to find a vein other than in his groin. He spent most days squeezing puss from his swollen hands or wiping blood from his crutch. Throwing the stained tissue and needles onto the floor, leaving it for weeks on end a means by which you could tally his obsession. He was 23 years old and wasting away. Misusing his life, almost wiping his backside with it. 'Up yours! You bastards!'

And the campaign of 'Say No to Drugs!' with the smiling, yearning, face of Lady Di beseeching addicts to give up drugs, splashed into our living rooms from some celestial world in a display of shared anguish, and her little realising she was the reason we took them in the first place. The smell of bullshit was everywhere.

There was silence in the room when I’d finished. I raised my head. I noticed the doctor was looking out of the window. A dull, disinterested expression spread across her face. Almost distractedly, mechanically, she handed me a tissue from one of several half empty boxes on her desk. I blew my nose and felt a fool.

She nodded her head slowly and said in rather a removed fashion, 'I see…' her elbows resting on the arms of her chair. Maybe that was part of the therapy, to appear contemplative but also having a tiresome, worldly, aloofness. Nothing I said had touched her.

My conversation was riddled with me. Always me. The self -obsessed life of me, and no doubt she had heard a thousand stories of a similar nature.

It was always somebody else’s fault.

I nursed the notion that my wife had stopped loving me since our son had been born. That she was too preoccupied with his needs and neglected mine. I felt lonely. The broken nights of sleep added to my discontent. Tiredness stalked every day and always the baby crying, always demanding nourishment unable to be left alone for a moment, sucking the wet nipple I longed to suck. Tasting the warmth of life I wanted so badly to taste, but there was never enough time for me, and I lay opened mouthed whilst my wife snored gently by my side oblivious to my needs, and I wondered if I was being unreasonable.

Then the journeys to Soho started. Then they become more frequent as my addiction grew, and all the time I was meeting Trehearne in the back room of his sex shop in Walkers Court, and like naughty schoolboys we smoked heroin together, lamenting how our respective wife’s had turned away from our needs to concentrate their affections on our offspring.

So we’ll 'Chase the Dragon man!' And we’ll never become addicted…and if we do we’ll just stop like that and we’d click our fingers together at the same time and give high fives…and laugh like the idiots we were.

The doctor told me to come back in two weeks. I left with my skin crawling. Cold shudders wracked my entire body. I had been expecting help that morning and now there was nothing for me but the long, dreary day ahead, and the obvious realisation that I had to feed my habit.

Across the road I could see a traffic warder sticking a ticket to the windscreen of my car. I rushed over. Then in front of him in a gesture of total defiance, I screamed, 'Look!' and tore it into shreds. The car wasn’t even registered in my name nor was it my address. I shouted after him 'Why don’t ya get a decent job ya wanker?'

He looked up briefly and then carried on walking up the wind swept street, totally ignoring me, not at all interested in my outburst.

I was beginning to find it difficult to think of something original to say or to even think. I was snared in the thespian world of Shakespeare, where life is a stage on which we play our part; only I was stuck with an archetypal role I didn’t want to play. The embittered, sniveling addict who was unloved. A drop of mucous dripped off my hook-nose, onto the pavement.

The phone rang for what seemed ages.
'Mini, you got anything?' I tried not to sound desperate.
'Ah Alphonse…ya maybe…how much ya want then?'
'Just the usual mate that’s all.'
'Okay come round.'

I turned left up Hampstead Road, and drove towards Mornington Crescent, and then up through Camden to Kentish Town. The sun was trying to shine. I felt like shit.

It was surprising to think of my life as one – dimensional and how my dependency on smack made it that way. Everybody and everything paled into insignificance. Nothing mattered other than the desire and plotting to escape the kindly words of others and find what I needed most.

I’d been to Mini’s gaff many times before. He was a lifesaver in some ways, but of course the main problem for him, and me to a certain extent, was that he was also addicted. He looked like a gaunt version of Steve McQueen, but with a tooth missing at the front.

He got the scales off the kitchen shelf and weighed me a £20 bag. Spooning it out of a much larger bag, which he produced from his underpants. Maybe he thought the coppers wouldn’t search there. He pulled tin foil out of a kitchen drawer, burned off a small square shape piece before wrapping it around a Biro and making a tube out of it. This was about four to six inches long the average penis length when erect.

He then tore a sheet of foil into another square, and placed some of the brown heroin in the middle. Holding a lighter underneath the foil he began to melt the smack and at the same time inhaled the dark fumes through the tube. The smell of burned heroin permeated the flat. Always that sweet, stale, smell that clung to curtains and furniture. The chasing, fiery, dragon, scorching all rooms.

I followed him. Within seconds the warmth returned to my body. The aches left my joints. I stopped sweating. My body calmed down. The fear subsided. My blanket was wrapped around me once more and I felt secure.

I told him what I had done, that I had been at the Temperance Hospital most of the morning to try and get my self sorted out with a script and that if I could get on a methadone course well it might save my marriage. He looked at me and shook his head.

'Ya talking bollocks mate…ya like the stuff too much to give it up…and why give something up that you like so much anyway?'
'But Mini I’m serious.'

'Ya that’s what they all say. Look at Buddha…he got a script sorted and within a week he was back on the gear.'

'Ya but that’s Buddha not me.'

'That’s not Buddha that’s the gear…that’s what it does to people. He now sells his methadone for gear. I’ve got 400mils of his stuff in the fridge.'

He held up his hands as if to say ‘well try it if you want mate but it’s a waste of time.’ I didn’t argue.

I left Mini’s about two o clock and switched on the cab radio in my car. I spoke into the mike. '72 mobile.'

'Where abouts are you 72?'

'Kentish Town Road.'

'Yeah go to 247 Camden Road, your mate Trevor’s been on the blower for the past hour…he wants ta see ya.'

'Roger.' I replied.

I’d met Trevor through the mini-cab firm. A big, fat, black guy, who weighed in about 18 stones but was only about 5ft 6inches tall. He had no neck to speak of, and his stomach flopped over the belt of his trousers but despite his physical appearance, he always tried to look smooth, like a knock down version of Barry White. His shirt pressed, trousers pressed, hair combed, shoes polished, and white jacket brushed, almost ready for some cabaret engagement.

I never really thought as to why he had chosen me out of all the other cab drivers there. Did I look more gullible? Was there an air of desperation and vulnerability about me that even I couldn’t detect? Did I possess a naiveté that always appeals to those on the make, a kind of 'You seem like a bright well educated sort a geezer…wanna earn a few quid on the side?'

We nearly always went on an 'as directed' journey. I was never quite sure where we would end up. He would sit in the back barking his orders between mouthfuls of fatty impregnated meat kebabs, the chilly sauce dribbling down one of his many chins, his mouth full of greasy lamb and damp lettuce, a paper serviette tucked down the front of his shirt collar to prevent dribbles from staining his precious jacket and static riddled polyester shirt, which generated sufficient electricity to give him a shock every time he touched the metal door trim of the car.

I knocked on the door, the curtains twitched in the bay window. After several moments it eventually opened.

It was Trevor’s wife a spliff hanging from her mouth. She was a fat, insulting slag that he had met whilst out on parole about five years previous, and within a very short space of time they had got married and knocked out a couple of brats called Leroy and Barry. She was always hitting them, always screaming at them for no real reason that I could determine. She made their life wretched, and it seemed like a form of revenge to me to get back at Trevor. She didn’t say much, just grunted in recognition, her face a picture of total misery.

Trevor and his younger brother, who I couldn’t stand, were in the kitchen. His brother had just come out of ‘nick’ the week before, and had already blagged a fare off me without paying. I wasn’t amused to see his wide boy, arrogant, ‘I am the man’ tactics, taking advantage of what I thought was my good nature.

They were stood around the gas cooker carefully melting down cocaine on spoons, watching it bubble then mixing a small amount of bi-carbonate of soda with it. This seemed to cause a chemical reaction of sorts, which separated the bubbling brown coke from the shit that was in it, and eventually made a small purer rock. To me it was a mystery and I wasn’t even sure that was what I saw.

He looked up. 'All right bro?' Trevor punched my knuckles with his. 'Won’t be long man, just gotta get this sorted.'

He then went to the fridge and took out a can of lemonade and poured the contents down the sink. He made a small indentation on the side of the can at the end furthest from where you drank. He got a sharp pin from the drawer and punched a series of holes where the indentation was, and then with his lit cigarette he flicked some ash over the holes.

He placed a lump of crack the size of my little fingernail on the ash and lit it, at the same time as he inhaled deeply. The can filled with smoke and after a short breath he took his finger off the hole and swallowed the smoke.

When I tried the rush was instantaneous, the flap on the top of my head opened and steam came out of my ears. 'Wow!'

He always looked up and down the street before jumping in, carefully scanning to see if there were any geezers sitting about in cars trying to look casual. 'Turn right let’s go up the Seven Sisters Road.'

He never said much about anything he was doing but I knew it wasn’t legal. He just went about his business efficiently, stopping always in industrial estates. Places where people did not know each other very well. He would walk into buildings with his briefcase in his hand, and would simply ask if 'John' was about. This was based on the assumption that there was always a John. They would either say, 'Try up there or he’s not in,' the usual responses, and if they mentioned that nobody worked there of that name he would shrug his shoulders and say 'This is number eight isn’t it?'

He certainly had bottle if nothing else.

I mean riffling through jackets and overcoats or picking up holdalls, briefcases etc took a nerve that most never had and calmly walking out and saying 'Good day' on occasion was to my mind a touch of class.

He knew I was hooked on gear. When we parked up on some industrial estate in Haringey he would go off whilst I got my regalia out and had a 'bootlace.'

I never asked questions. I was not concerned where my money came from. On some occasions he would come back in a hurry. I mean I wasn’t interested in the whys and wherefores and seldom did I ask what had happened. That was his business and if he felt like spilling the beans, which he never did once, then I just left things.

Usually after a morning session he had about three or four stolen credit cards, usually with values up to a hundred quid. In most cases it stood to reason that they would not have been reported stolen until at least the evening.

It was essential to remove the current signature.

This was done with a solution of nail polish remover and washing up liquid and was administered with a cotton bud to the ink, where miraculously when it had dried, it was possible to wipe it off with a tissue and resign the card.

Provided you didn’t go over the limit then there was no real reason for the shop to ring the credit company for clearance, unless your bottle went.

To him being black meant that they were more likely to check out the details. The notion that all black geezers were at it was a dominant theme in a lot of peoples thinking, particularly in the retail trade. It was just the way things happened to be.

We were not there to fight for the cause of the Black Panthers. In our minds there was no Martin Luther King’s having dreams about all men being equal? 'This nation would not be rising up to live out the true meaning of its creed.'

If I was to do it, then it was more probable that nothing would be said providing I could keep up the front and my arse hole didn’t go.

So we would stand looking in the window of Dixon’s pricing the goods after which he would give me a line of 'Charles Aznovour' before I went in, in order to ease the flow and loosen up the epiglottis.

I was dressed like a dated tailors dummy. 'Lionel Blair’s,' platform shoes with blue canvass covered uppers with white stars. Lime wing - collared shirt, bright orange sleeveless pullover. My hair was cut in such a fashion as to look like a German military helmet. No wonder that I got the occasional 'Zeig Heil!'

If anything I would have thought that the fashion police would have arrested me on sight.

In most cases the people that worked in these shops didn’t give a monkey’s just as long as you had dosh. I was just some geezer coming in to buy some goods and as long as the name on the card suited my face and I wasn’t trying to represent Mahatma Mycoat, or Rumple Stiltskin, there was no reason for anyone to get upset.

By the time we got up to Tottenham I was well into it. In some cases I was even examining the goods for any possible flaws and actually rejected one lot because I detected a small inconsistency on one of the dials. I saw Trevor through the shop window looking at the heavens and pointing to his watch all at the same time.

We had done about seven shops and the boot and back seat were full of boxes of cheap Sony music centres, value of each £99.99. By now a pattern had started to develop whereby I would go into the shop exchange a few words with the assistant, talk about music centres and woe and behold settle for the one at a penny under a ton.

I’m not sure what happened at Wood Green. It was to be the last of the day. When we pulled up outside a shop in the High Street things appeared to be normal. My “bottle” was starting to get a bit thin because I was becoming slightly paranoia with the lines of Charles I had snorted after every successful music centre. My nose had become inflamed with the strength of the coke and my eyes were pinned. Also I was rabbiting too much and sounded like a Cockney Barrow boy 'Watch the apples and pears, put this in ya sky rocket, do I have any claret on me boat'

I could see this war film in my head. Close ups of Aldo Ray driving a truck through a minefield flashed into my mind, sweat pouring from his brow. He throws the cigarette out of the window because it’s too soggy to smoke.

He gets to the other side, he yells, 'Hey you guys…just come on across!'

He jumps down off the truck and walks towards them laughing. The music is getting louder. 'Ya see it wasn’t all that difficult...just follow my tracks! It’s all clear.' BOOM!

High in the trees a flock of birds take off into the black and white sky.

I came back to the car running. Trevor was sat in the front passenger seat. I jumped in, started the engine, and sped out of Wood Green as quickly as possible. He kept shouting, 'Okay what happened? What happened! ya got the card? Tell me ya got the card!'

'No Trevor I haven’t got the card…because I walked out when I saw the Old Bill crossing the road towards the shop! Because when I looked through the shop window after the geezer had said he would have to check the details, I started to get jumpy and there was a copper who I thought was going to nab me…it was just not right so I legged it…if that’s all right with you!'

He tutted. Not an average Tut…but one of those West Indian one’s with the tongue at the back of the teeth, which can mean so many things…disgust, pussy, razzclat!

We drove down to the Holloway Road railway arches in silence. It was not his last card and what the fuck we’d got £700 of gear to sell off anyway, but I got the feeling he wanted to make more money out of that particular card, but then again he felt the same about all of his cards. It’s like they had their own life to live with him for a brief spell and Christ! Did he flog the arse out of them…when he was on the 'Chaz' there was no stopping…only my predicament, which of course was the fact that I was married with kids and had to get home. Home! Shit!

It was nearly seven by the time Trevor weighed me off and I drove like crazy to pick up Toni and Max. She looked a little tired.

'Where ya been till now and why didn’t ya ring me?'

'Well I got a job down ta Victoria and what with all the rush hour traffic, it’s taken me this long ta get back.'

She looked at me kind of strange.

'Well somebody’s lying because I spoke to the office about an hour ago and Vernon said he hadn’t seen you.'

'Ya but I took the job before he got in and took myself off the plot because I knew in the back of my mind I had to get back here soonest…and he wouldn’t have known that anyway because he don’t normally come in till about four.'

'So how much money ya got for today…for the groceries?'

I fumbled in my jacket pocket and took out £60 and gave it to her, she didn’t say much.

'Is that it then?'

I looked beyond her, 'Well there’s always tomorrow.'

'That’s the problem with you Alphonse there’s always tomorrow…where are you when I need ya Alphonse…tell me! Off gallivanting never around…don’t you know I need adult conversation sometimes?'

I sat mute.

'I’m lonely…I can’t get out much in this condition and Max is so demanding…It never seems to stop.'

I kept driving wanting the moment to pass. I could sense she was sobbing. I turned the radio on. Van Morrison was singing, “What a beautiful night for a moon dance…” I remembered our laughter once.

It was dark and she couldn’t see my eyes, which must have been standing out on stalks…totalled.

Max gurgled in the back, strapped to his little seat. I put my hand back and touched his tiny face, stroking his soft beautiful skin.

'Daddies missed you darling.' I said raising my voice. 'He certainly as…my little angel.'

He kicked his legs laughing, excited. 'Dada!'

Toni blew her nose and looked at me.

'And where’s my kisses and cuddles?'

I put my arm around her shoulder whilst I drove. She nuzzled into my neck.

'How did today go?' she asked.

I looked away unable to deliver any lines…in the excitement of the day I’d forgotten what my original intentions were. She knew at that moment.

'Alphonse ya must stop it! I can’t go on much longer…it’s killing ya and yer asking me ta stand by and watch. Look at ya, ya lost so much weight…yer eyes are losing their sparkle…ya tell me lies all the time. I mean what am I supposed ta do?'

It was true.

There was so little physical love for her. I was seldom at home. Always looking for gear, always coming home late when she was in bed exhausted with the kid. Most nights I would stay out, full of smack…driving around the city unable to sleep and never once thought of eating or going home.

Just working, picking up strangers and trying to nick fares outside the mainline stations after I had dropped people at clubs down the West End, and having to contend with black cab drivers shouting and fucking me off.

I was always thinking of Toni and her money and my drug money, and sometimes it was never enough so I would hang about the Electric Ballroom in Camden trying to ponce fares. Sat there in my navy blue CDI Cavalier with automatic gears and all electric sunroof and windows like I was the biz, stoned out of my nut on heroin and Chaz, unable to see the despair and sadness of it all, unable to comprehend my desperate situation of going nowhere very fast. Not realising that all the people I once knew were no longer around and I was totally by myself looking down at Toni and the baby while I rode a carousel that played terrible organ music, and wouldn’t stop spinning around.

I looked at the still moon above Regent’s Park some nights from the car…particularly during the summer mornings just before dawn, when a fresh wind would blow, and all was silent, apart from the birds calling each other.

Sometimes I would go up Primrose Hill, and sit and look down on the city before me, spread like a huge blinking machine with its flashing lights and it’s towers, settled on the land as if it had come from some alien part of the universe and was simply resting there before raising itself.

I imagined the city lifting off and disappearing into the mist of morning, and revealing a huge hole through which you could see the stars and planets of some other life form twinkling in the distant abyss.

And maybe it was true. Maybe we were all being filmed. Our little lives like some soap opera revealed for some beings from outer space to help them pass their time on Sunday afternoons when they were bored and listless and looking for diversity.

There’s plenty to keep the watchers glued to their seats. The lonely old man reading yesterdays paper whilst drinking strong brown tea that went cold thirty minutes before, stares at nothing endlessly. And at number twenty-four Mrs Abraham’s puts her head into the oven and leaves her body on the kitchen floor while Uncle Sol gallops up the street after some runaway cancer…

Gnawed by the sun tossed among the dummy houses, the hopeless melancholy day would begin, and I would feel the loneliness on the hillside and start sneezing. My nose would run, and my body would shiver and tell me it needed more drugs. Just the morning, the demands, and me, also playing my part in the film in which the plots were everlasting and always good enough to soak numerous handkerchiefs…