Seven Chapters from a Sad Sack Loser's Life - Chapter Three(1)

The summer of '74 was one of the most blissful lifelong loser David Cristiansen ever spent at the beautiful little former fishing village of Santiago de la Ribera; and there were a good few of those.
Each afternoon, he’d meet up with friends both male and female on the jetty facing his apartment on the Mar Menor, which was more or less deserted after lunch, where they’d listen to Bowie on cassette, or Donny keening “Puppy Love” on a portable phonograph, and generally enjoy being young and carefree in a decade of endless possibilities.
To some youthful Spanish eyes back in '74-'76, David was an almost impossibly exotic figure from what was then the most radical and daring city in Europe, and he played his image up to the hilt. In truth, though, he was barely less sheltered and innocent than they, and how wonderful it felt for him to bask in their soft Mediterranean loveliness for a few brief seasons.
However, there was a change that came over Spain with Franco's passing, and the birth of the so-called “Movida”, which could be said to be the Spanish equivalent of London's Swinging Sixties revolution.
Perhaps it didn’t happen right away, but by David’s last vacation in La Ribera in the summer of '84, it was he who was in awe of the local youth rather than the other way around. For they seemed so cool to him, dancing their strange jerky chicken wing dance to the latest New Pop hits from Britain.
By then, of course, most of his old friends had vanished into their young adult lives, and his time as the undisputed English prince of La Ribera had long passed.
He returned to London in late summer '74 with a deep tan and his long hair bleached bright yellow by the sun.
Only days afterwards, he found himself on HMS Ministry, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station. This involved his 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, he was approached by an old sailor who kept going on about how good looking he was; but he was no predator, just a sweet lonely old Scotsman who wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, and David was happy to oblige.
He even went so far as to agree to a meeting with him the same time the following week, but he had no intention of keeping it. Besides, it wasn't long before HMS Thamesis was on its way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port.
Once they'd arrived, one of the CPOs warned David not to wander around Hamburg alone, for fear he might end up being ravaged and then dumped in some back alley; or worse.
He duly joined up with a group of about three or four other ratings on his first night ashore, and they headed straight for the Reeperbahn in the bewitchingly vicious St Pauli red light district, which was in such stark contrast to the leafy outer suburbs, where David found himself, possibly a day or so later, through a specially organised coach trip.
A gang of them ended up in a park where David had his picture taken on a bridge by a reporter for the Surrey Comet, before a group of breathless tittering schoolgirls asked him to join them in some photos, and he of course obliged.
On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors announced he’d been quite a hit with the Hamburg teenyboppers, while another wryly opined:
“It’s cos ‘e’s blond, innit…”
Whatever the truth, their simple unaffected joy of life must have seemed so touching to David, especially in the light of what girls barely older than they were subjecting themselves to a mere few miles away.
A few months later, David became a student at Prestlands Technical College which lay, then as now, on the fringes of Weybridge, an affluent outer suburb of south west London.
In semi-pastoral Prestlands, as in his beloved La Ribera, he learned to be a social being after years of near-seclusion, first at Welbourne and then as a home student. So, attention came to be a potent narcotic for him in the mid 1970s.
However, despite constant displays of flamboyant self-confidence, those who tried to get to know to know him on an intimate level found themselves confronted with a paradoxically inhibited individual.
The regular Prestlands Disco was a special event for David. And on one occasion early on in a Disco night, he got up in front of what seemed like the whole college and delivered a solo dance performance, possibly with white silk scarf flailing in the air, to a fiery Glam tune by Bebop Deluxe to frenzied cheers and applause.
On another, a trio of roughs who may have gate crashed the Disco only to see in David the worst possible example of the feckless wastrel student strutting and posturing in unmanly white, took him aside at the end of the night, doubtless intent on a touch of the old ultra-violence:
“Oy you, we bin watchin’ you, you’re a poof, ain’tcha…”
But David stood his ground, insisting that despite what they may have thought about him, he was just as straight as they. Apparently convinced, they then vanished into the departing crowds after muttering a few dark threats.
‘75 again, and David’s music, swimming and Martial Arts sessions were no more;
But the private lessons continued with a young academic called Mark, a slim young man with long darkish curly hair who lived alone but for several black cats in long time Rock star haven Richmond-on-Thames. For as well as being a private tutor, he was a successful session musician.
Specialising in the French Symbolist poets, he exerted a strong influence on David in terms of his growing passion for European literature and Modernist culture. However, it was the less known literature of Spain that they studied together, from the anonymous picaresque novel "Lazarillo de Tormes" from about 1554, and embracing Quevedo, Galdos, Machado, Dario and Lorca.
He was also an early encourager of David’s writing, a lifelong passion that would ultimately degenerate into a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi; or the irresistible compulsion to write. As a result of this, he became incapable of finishing a single cohesive piece of writing until well into the eighties when he managed to complete a short story and a novel, both of which he went on to destroy but for a few fragments.
It was largely through Mark that David came under the spell of the Berlin of the Weimar Republic of 1919 to 1933:
After he'd expressed interest in a copy of one of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels, "Mr Norris Changes Trains", conspicuously placed in front of him on his desk, Mark told him in animated tones that it had inspired the 1972 movie version of the Kander and Ebb musical, “Cabaret”. In fact, while a work of art in its own right written for the screen by Jay Allen, and directed by former dancer Bob Fosse, "Cabaret" had been largely informed by Isherwood's only other Berlin story, "Goodbye to Berlin".
Seeing "Cabaret" later on that year was a life-transforming experience for David, one of only a handful in his life brought about by a film, and the beginning of a near-obsessive preoccupation with the Berlin of the Weimar era of 192
So much that has become familiar to the West and beyond in the last half-century, from the deconstructive philosophies that dominate our academia, to the theatre of outrage that is the essence of Rock music, pre-existed in some form in the Berlin of the Golden Twenties, during which she existed as the undisputed world epicentre of the Modern impulse.
Under her auspices, great artistic freedom thrived in the shape of the painters of the New Objectivity movement, such as Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang's dystopian "Metropolis", and the provocative dancing of Cabaret Queen Anita Berber, and her epicene companion, Sebastian Droste. And then there’s the notorious sexual liberalism, which, as depicted in pictorial depictions of her cabarets and night clubs, has carried a power to shock even as far as the jaded 21st Century.
But beneath the glittering carapace, she bore within her the seeds of her own ruin, for despite the genius that flourished alongside the licentiousness, she was operating largely in defiance of the Judaeo-Christian moral values that have long formed the basis of Western society. Given that several other European and American cities were hardly less hysterically dissolute than Berlin, it's little wonder that the key Modernist decade of the twenties has been described by some critics as the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. In its wake came the Great Depression, the unspeakable horrors of the Second World War, and the collapse of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, all of which were succeeded in turn by the dawning of the Rock and Roll era, and its quasi-religious exaltation of youth, which some critics see as the very triumph of Western decadence.
Decadence…that loaded word had a very special meaning and power for David Cristiansen in the mid 1970s…ever since his mother had used it, in fact, in reference to a series of photos of Germany’s Weimar era featured in an edition of the Sunday Times magazine:
“Why do people want to be decadent?” She’d asked, as if genuinely concerned for those featured, which of course she was, having been raised in a Salvationist home in the idyllic Vancouver of the 1920s, and therefore imbued for life despite herself with a Christian worldview.
But to David Cristiansen, the answer was obvious, because in his Rock and Roll eyes, decadence was so heavy with the mysteries of the most forbidden sins that he could scarcely wait to become its incarnation; and while he would fall far, far short of his goal, he’d almost die trying to attain it.

David made no less than three sea voyages in ‘75, two as a civilian and one with the RNR, as well as spending a week with them docked at the Pool of London.
The first of these was to Amsterdam, via Edinburgh and St. Malo, on a three-masted topsail schooner TS Sir Francis Drake of the Society for the Training of Young Seafarers.
Among his shipmates were his 17 year old brother, Dane, several young men from Scotland and the north of England, some recent recruits to the RN, and a handful of older “mates” who'd been given authority over the rank and file of deck hands.
In overall charge, though, was the suave Ship's Captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of David’s own alma mater of Welbourne.
It was an all-male crew, and David was quite well-liked at first, even if his popularity faded in time, with a few good pals remaining him…such as the small cherubic southerner with long dark hair worn shoulder length like the young Jack Wilde, who stayed loyal to him after they'd tried to impress a couple of girls together during a brief stay in St Malo, France.
He got on fine with a few of the others, but 'Jack' was a true prince who’d helped him out in his time of need:
What happened is that David had fallen hard for one of the girls, Françoise, and was wandering around in a mournful daze after having failed to pluck up the courage to ask her for her address:
“Oh, I really like Françoise,” he whined, over and over again, but his misery was genuine. That is, until Jack handed him a piece of paper containing Françoise’s address. It transpired she’d scrawled it down just before leaving them, and for a time, David was drunk with relief at the news, just walking on air, because there was the danger of his coming down with a serious case of lovesickness had she become lost to him forever, but thanks to Jack, he’d found her again.
There were heavy storms, and on at least one occasion, the crew were ordered out of their hammocks in the middle of the night to help trim the sails, and while David took no part in this, he did climb the rigging once, just before the Churchill docked at Amsterdam harbour.
Dozens of boys manned the yard arms, to which they were attached by their safety belts alone. David had been determined to make the climb, even though the experience made his legs shake throughout.
The Dutch capital was marked by the same kind of open sexual licence he'd witnessed only the year before in Hamburg, although it seemed to him to lack the German city’s sinister vibrancy. Then - just as today - the sad De Wallen red-light district was filled to the brim with hundreds of little illuminated one-room apartments, each with a single woman sitting in clear view of onlookers plying her lonely trade.
As for Edinburgh, just before setting foot in the city for the first time, one of the lads, dressed to the nines himself in the trendiest seventies gear, warned David not to go strutting about Edinburgh town centre in a flashy boating blazer with his long white socks tucked into the same blue jeans he’d worn for sailing. But having only packed a handful of clothes, David was forced to ignore his advice, and, waltzing some time later into an inner city pub in broad daylight, a grinning hard man with long reddish curly hair asked him:
“Are you frae Oxford, son?”
Perhaps he was aware of the great university’s reputation for producing flaming aesthetes like Brideshead’s Anthony Blanche, and if so, it may have been touch and go for a while as to whether he was going to inflict some serious damage on David’s angelic English face, but in the end he left him be. He may even have admired his chutzpah. But there was just something about David…something that repelled physical violence, some mysterious protective force.
Within a few weeks of returning to London by train from Edinburgh, David and Dane were off to sea again, this time as part of the Mariners Club of Great Britain, bound for the Baltic coast of Denmark by way of Germany's Kiel Canal. And while they were once more supervised by “mates” under the command of a Ship's Captain, the Mariners’ utilised modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships.
The Cristiansens were quick to recruit a handsome young blond guy called Cy from the Stroud district of Gloucester as their best pal and confidante for the trip. It turned out they’d actually met him some ten years previously while passing through Calpe, Spain, either on their way to or from their grandmother Mary’s home on the Costa Brava.
Soon after setting foot on Danish soil they got talking to a couple of girls who, as might be expected, had natural golden blonde hair, but their efforts at romance were wholly innocuous, despite the reputation Scandinavians had in those days for progressive sexual attitudes.
A less pleasant romantic episode took place towards the end of the trip, which saw David in pursuit of a pretty German girl called Ulrike. He was crazy for her, and she made it pretty clear she liked him too, and yet he'd senselessly sidelined her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with his brother and Cy, perhaps expecting her to run after him or something.
Suddenly, overtaken by sickly pangs of remorse, he set out to find her, and at some point during his quest, while walking along some kind of wooden pontoon, he lost his footing and fell fully clothed into the waters of what must have been the Kiel Canal.
He was a pathetic figure the next day, with his fancy dandy clothes all laid out on deck.
“What happened last night?” the captain breezily asked him.
“Well”, he hazarded in response, “I was looking for this girl and…”
“You live in a dream world, David.”
Indeed he did, and self-sabotage was fast becoming one of his specialities.

Also during that summer, David attempted to pass what is known as the AIB –or Admiralty Interview Board - with a view to qualifying as a Supply and Secretariat officer in the Royal Navy.
Up to this point, he’d not had any ambitions beyond becoming a celebrity, or rather major Rock and Roll star. And to this end, he’d made countless recordings of himself singing and playing his own simple songs on a series of portable cassette tape recorders. And all too often, these sessions culminated in a full-on tantrum, such as the time he hurled a newly purchased machine against his bedroom wall, totalling it instantly.
So he took the train to London, and from there to the port of Gosport on the south coast of England. For this was where he’d spend three days within the gates of HMS Stirling, a shore-based specialist training centre, attending various examinations and interviews intended to assess his potential as a future naval officer.
His father was delighted at this unexpected turn of events, little suspecting that in his desire to join the Senior Service, he was driven not by any selfless instinct to serve, so much as a vision of a privileged existence of refinement and elegance. And if this sounds distinctly Wildean for a mid ‘70s youth, then it was perfectly in keeping with what we’ve learned of David so far. Edited 22/1/18.