Pranky McHoax! fnord 23

I'd had enough of cassettes, fanzines, and all of that shite. It was 1988 and following my exit from Maidstone College with letters after my name, I'd failed to become famous for brooding art of the kind which inspires people who wear black clothes to scowl in nihilistic appreciation. No-one gave a shit about my tapes, including me, and I'd been obliged to take a job with Royal Mail. It paid the rent but left me somewhat knackered and hence lacking the enthusiasm for promoting cassettes which I could no longer be bothered to record. Pranky's letter therefore came out of the blue as a complete surprise. In fact, given the time which had passed since I'd last bothered with cassettes, fanzines, and all of that shite, I couldn't really work out how he'd even got hold of my address.

His name in full was Pranky McHoax! fnord 23.

That was really his name as it appeared on his birth certificate.

Pranky McHoax! fnord 23 was really his name.

It really was his name.

That's what people called him.

It wasn't really his name, but it's what I'm calling him, and for a moment you believed me. I played a prank on you.

Ha ha!

Pranky's letter came out of the blue as a complete surprise, including with it an A5 black and white fanzine folded eight times to the size at which it could have been swallowed by a spy so as to fit the envelope. The fanzine was called Datakill and the print was tiny, each page crammed with information at all angles and in every available space in a typographic style most likely inspired by Skate Muties from the 5th Dimension, an earlier and similarly chaotic fanzine. Each page demanded that I concentrate in order to work out what I was actually looking at, and I eventually discerned fanzine, record and tape reviews - and mostly of the sort of stuff I liked, alongside interviews with the Severed Heads and Datblygu. I hadn't heard anything by the Severed Heads, and I'd never even heard of Datblygu but it all sounded pretty interesting.

I replied to Pranky, thanking him for his fanzine, expressing a regret that I wasn't really sure why he had written to me. I no longer produced anything I could send him in return, and he didn't seem to be looking for contributions even were I to come up with something. He didn't seem to mind, and had written mainly through a love of networking, which reminded me that I had been the same a few years earlier. There were thousands of us, all over the country and even the world, churning out our cranky fanzines and stubbornly esoteric music, all sending each other tapes or photocopied lists of tapes or whatever. Nobody had even considered calling it a scene so far as I was aware, and I was at least glad that it had continued in my absence. Pranky sent me a couple of tapes of Datblygu and some other bands he liked, and I returned the favour, and so we began to write each other long vaguely counter-cultural letters. Pranky wrote in all capitals and often green felt-tip. He used a lot of exclamation marks. He was interested in all sorts of stuff too, obscure music, conspiracy theories, outsider art, and anything generally regarded as weird. He also seemed to be fairly heavily into the writing of Robert Anton Wilson. I hadn't actually heard of the guy, but I recognised certain familiar obsessions in common with William Burroughs, Vague magazine and Psychic TV, not least the supposed ubiquity and possibly mystical significance of the number 23. In fact, thanks to my juvenile overinvestment in the low calorie philosophical musings of Porridge, I had already been bored thoroughly shitless by the supposed ubiquity and possibly mystical significance of the number 23 before I'd even finished school.

Possibly it was the relentless capitalisation, but Pranky's letters always suggested that he was shouting. He seemed loud and enthusiastic, a counter-cultural equivalent of the sports coach in American high school movies taking no crap, pooting no guff, firing off fifteen directives a second, making shit happen whether it wanted to happen or not.

Have you heard this?

Did you read that?

What do you think of this?

Isn't that a pile of shit?

It was exhausting but fun, longer and longer letters zipping back and forth, Jiffy bags bulging with all manner of crap, tapes, fanzines, paperbacks found in second-hand shops spilling out onto the carpet like a mail art version of the scene where they open up the shark and all the money sluices onto the deck, wads of dollar bills still sealed in plastic. I say mail art - which you can look up on Wikipedia if you care that much - although it really wasn't. Pranky seemed to like the term, and I never expressed an objection, but then more or less everything he did was capitalised by his own account, and I mean the subject as well as the letters, and then there were all those exclamation marks seasoning the message whether it needed it or not.

I JUST READ ABOUT SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABS IN RE/SEARCH + NOW I WANNA SEE THEIR VIDEOS!!!!!

You do????? Wow!!!!! That's amazing!!!!!

In November 1991 I caught a coach from London to Newport, having promised Pranky that I would visit him. He lived in Wales. My family went on holiday to Wales more or less yearly when I was a kid, and I hadn't seen the place in years. The coach journey was uneventful but entertaining, shared with four Welsh teenagers on their way back from Amsterdam and patently hungover. The quietest and most severely hungover of their group was named Dai, and he served as comedy scratching post for the other three on the grounds that he was probably still too drunk to fight back. They spent most of the journey spinning horror stories of what would happen to their colleague at the checkpoint on the Welsh border.

'How many dogs' bums have you got in your bag, Dai?'

Even I couldn't help laughing, but it was nervous laughter. There was something a bit weird about my going to meet Pranky McHoax! fnord 23, and I was slightly scared, imagining a sort of Welsh Jim Carrey shoving fanzines in my face and being four-hundred times more interesting than I could ever hope to be.

I alighted from the coach and Pranky was there to meet me, a quiet little googly-eyed bloke with glasses and a head which seemed slightly too big for his body. He'd driven into Newport to pick me up, and now we drove north to the town where he lived in central Wales. We spent the journey in awkward conversation about all sorts of stuff, obscure music, conspiracy theories, outsider art, and anything generally regarded as weird. It was a lot like reading one of his fanzines, just with less obvious enthusiasm. He lived with his dad, and I slept on the sofa for a couple of days, just hanging out, visiting places, talking about all sorts of stuff, obscure music, conspiracy theories, outsider art, and anything generally regarded as weird. Pranky didn't seem exactly lacking in social skills, but what social skills he had were calibrated to a peculiarly narrow focus. He reported or described things, often in great detail, but it was difficult to tell what he really thought of them, or how he felt about anything. My stay was not unpleasant, but I was glad it was to be only a matter of days.

Pranky's dad had recently retired, and I never quite worked out what had happened to his mother and didn't like to ask; and peculiarly I found it significantly easier to get on with the old boy than with the son. It was the same at work. The older generation always seemed to have more going for them than my contemporaries, and certainly more wit.

'I suppose you think we're all red-faced Taffs up here in Wales, don't you?' Pranky senior observed drily as we were introduced, and  he continued to take the piss out of me for the rest of my stay. Next morning, being first to rise, I found myself temporarily flummoxed by their kettle, a design with which I was unfamiliar.

'Here, let me do it,' sighed Pranky senior shuffling into the kitchen in his dressing gown. 'Bloody genius from London,' he muttered.

Pranky and I shopped for records, purchased dubious second-hand flying saucer literature in Hay-on-Wye, and climbed a mountain. I would have been happier climbing more than one, having been obsessed with anything mountainous ever since those Welsh holidays of my youth, but Pranky didn't see the appeal, I suppose finding significantly less novelty in the geology of his surroundings.

It was a pleasant time, but an odd one, and it was a relief to get back to London and the more familiar territory of our respective letter writing personas.

A second issue of Datakill came out, at least as a somewhat disappointing stack of photocopies in an A4 plastic envelope of the kind purchased in packs of twenty from WHSmiths, and I myself re-engaged with the network as I took to self-publishing my own comics, and even releasing a tape of new music. Meanwhile, having had the flames of his existing obsessions stoked by, amongst other things, certain issues of Re/Search, and keen to break away from the admittedly limited field of the music fanzine, Pranky changed direction, channelling his not inconsiderable energies into Hoax!, a fanzine dedicated to pranks, hoaxes, conspiracies, good old fashioned lies, subversive or otherwise counter-cultural activities, networking, and whatever else he felt like writing about. A lot of work went into the thing and it proved quite popular. It shared some territory with Re/Search, some with Vague, but was otherwise more or less it's own thing and even caught the attention of You've Been Framed presenter Jeremy Beadle, then hosting his own radio show on some station or other. You've Been Framed was a laboured early evening entertainment show in which hidden cameras film the horrified faces of unsuspecting members of the general public as they return home to find, for example, that the greenhouse is full of raspberry jam; and Beadle, the supermarket's own brand Noel Edmonds, was a fan of Hoax!

This is a good thing, is it? I asked in so many words, the patronage of Jeremy Beadle not really being much to boast about, I wouldn't have thought; but Pranky believed otherwise. He'd spoken to Jeremy and they were on first name terms. Apparently the presenter wasn't such a square in real life. He had even been in one of the early line ups of Test Department but had ended up having to jack it in, what with the tiny hand and everything.

Not really.

I just made up that last part. It was a hoax!

Ha ha.

Pranky really did seem to be buddying up with Beadle though. I wouldn't joke about that sort of shit. They bonded with particular adhesive strength over cassettes of prank phone calls.

'Hello, could I speak to Mr. Johnson please?'

'Yes. Who is this?'

'William Burroughs.'

'Who?'

'It's me, William Burroughs the writer.'

'Bill Beaumont?'

'No - William Burroughs.'

'I think you've got the wrong number.'

'I'm not really William Burroughs!'

'What?'

'Fooled you! Ha ha!'

Pranky asked me to draw a cover for the second issue of Hoax! I said yes, then immediately regretted it when the letter came with a list of forty or fifty elements to be included in the illustration, every possible detail right down to the drawing pins scattered on the pavement. Given that no actual offer of payment had been made, it felt a little as though I'd asked if anyone wanted anything from the cornershop seeing as I was going that way, and been handed a list of parts required for assembly of a basic jet engine. The cover star was to be Bugs Bunny, which was something to do with Pranky's long-winded theory about the cartoon rabbit being a symbol of anarchy descended directly from the mythological Trickster of the American south-west, and the rest was all tittersome references to the number 23, Situationism, phone pranks, and the usual shite which had been getting boring even when clogging up the pages of Vague back in the eighties. I drew the cover, and gave Bugs Bunny realistic human genitals specifically because they hadn't been requested in the long, long list of stuff I'd apparently agreed to draw. I wanted to see if Pranky McHoax! fnord 23 could take the jocular punches as well as he was keen to see them dished out. It turned out that he couldn't, and the cover star's meat and two veg were tippexed out because he couldn't stand to see Bugs humiliated in such a way, as he wrote by way of explanation. I was bemused, but I was even more bemused a couple of weeks later when I saw the second issue of Hoax! on sale at a stall at a free festival in New Cross, and bemused because it was my cover and I hadn't received a contributor copy at that point.

He asked me to draw a cartoon strip for Hoax! I said okay and he sent me a script for something called The Fabulous Phoney Phreak Brothers riffing on Gilbert Shelton's considerably funnier strip subverted to a chucklesome take on pranks, hoaxes, conspiracies, good old fashioned lies, subversive or otherwise counter-cultural activities, and networking. The script was something like fifty pages in length. I drew two panels and came to my senses. I had better things to do with my time.

Pranky began to visit London, usually to attend small press or fanzine events. Hoax! seemed to be everywhere, and the third issue was a big fat thing with a three colour glossy cover of more than a hundred pages. Personally I was finding it less entertaining than it had been, pranks, hoaxes, conspiracies, good old fashioned lies, subversive or otherwise counter-cultural activities, and networking being limited subjects with nowhere interesting to go once you were done tittering; but it was Pranky's thing and he seemed to get a lot out of it, so whatever. Possibly he would eventually reign it in, maybe even move onto something more interesting. He would get the message, perhaps even realising that the rest of us couldn't give a shit about the number 23.

He didn't get the message, and his correspondence became weirder and weirder, larger and larger Jiffy bags mummified in miles of plastic tape the shape and size of something upon which a tramp could reasonably expect to get a good night's sleep. I would hack the thing open, read the letter, and wonder why I should have been chosen as recipient to the rest of it. The tapes would contain interviews or radio features on Manson, Porridge, Robert Anton Wilson, the usual suspects; samples of Pranky's own music, which was actually decent but for laboured titles parenthesised with pseudo-occultural word salad - John Wayne Sleep Gacy Racey Sale-at-Macy's 23 Remix or similar; and the rest would be Cassandra Complex live tracks, Pigface b-sides, Al Jourgensen side projects and others from the industrial rock bargain bin. There was never a real reason to listen to the tapes, or at least not all of the tapes, and the cassettes were too knackered to be worth recording over, and yet some effort had gone into their compilation at some stage, so it wouldn't have felt quite right to just chuck them in the bin. I could have given them to someone else, but no-one would have wanted them, and that was probably how half of them had ended up inside the parcel in the first place. Pranky may as well have been posting me the contents of his dustbin, and sometimes amongst the stacks of paper were reams and reams of surplus photocopied images of the kind which result when a pre-internet fanzine editor is putting together the latest issue of his masterpiece. It was sent with the subtext, here's a pile of random crap - it won't all be of use or interest, but maybe some of it will, which wasn't actually a hostile act, but would have looked more or less the same had it been. Sometimes it took days to recover, to process all this shite.

Please stop, I asked him.

He didn't, and if anything it got worse. Make some joke about Coronation Street containing secret coded messages originated from Terry Wogan and broadcast for the benefit of an alien civilisation inhabiting a planet in the vicinity of Sirius, and the next twenty pages of green felt-tipped correspondence would contain numerous tittering references to the same alongside pages of photocopied magazine articles, books, cassettes, or videotapes rescued from charity shops, whatever the fuck he could find with even the most tenuous connection to Coronation Street, Terry Wogan, or the astronomy of the region around Sirius - VHS tapes alternating episodes of Blankety Blank with alien abduction documentaries. It got even worse when he discovered the internet, then still very much in its infancy.

I had undertaken to start my own religion based upon worship of Ringo Starr, in turn based upon how much I'd laughed when a friend described Ringo Starr as the luckiest man in the world. The religion was to manifest as a series of tracts, of which only one was ever printed, essentially a parody of Current 93 and Temple of Psychic Youth literature spun around the notion of Ringo Starr as an esoteric messiah in the Aleister Crowley tradition. Thee Church ov RINGO was an exercise in postmodern sarcasm and accumulated about twenty or thirty members with fancy certificates and laminated membership cards. Tract, as the aforementioned tract was called, comprised material sent in by whoever felt like sending anything, a disproportionate quota of which came from Pranky, a stream which became such a deluge as to inspire me to disgust for what was roughly speaking my own creation. The straw that broke the camel's back was an eighty page story of generic sword and sorcery presumably nicked from the internet. Pranky had gone through the entire text replacing the name of the main character with Ringo. Seriously, I wondered, what the fuck did he really think I was going to do with this shit?

Amongst the material to be hoovered up by the indiscriminately tittering blender of Hoax! was a whole lot of Neoism which, if it helps, is described thus by Wikipedia:

Neoism is a parodistic -ism. It refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists, and more generally to a practical underground philosophy. It operates with collectively shared pseudonyms and identities, pranks, paradoxes, plagiarism and fakes, and has created multiple contradicting definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization.

This explained much of Pranky's creative output, and also why he asked if he could publish his fanzines under the heading of Runciter Corporation, the name of my own imprint and tape label.

I told him certainly not.

My friend Paul and I had elected to go halves on a mailing address, specifically a postbox with British Monomarks. Paul produced a fanzine called Gneurosis and I had various things on the go, and so we could each pay a tenner or so every couple of months for an address which would appear on all of our works, saving the trouble of angry nutters turning up at our homes, or mail sent to addresses reproduced in the pages of older fanzines going astray when one of us moved. Pranky McHoax! fnord 23 liked this idea and asked if he could make use of our postbox address for some one off undertaking requiring a certain degree of anonymity. Neither Paul nor I had any problem with the idea, so we said okay. Pranky sent the Valentine's Day card, that being his primary intention, and then took to giving out the box address as his own, as though he was sharing it with Paul and myself. He even printed it inside one of his fanzines, apparently missing the distinction that Paul and I were paying for the box address, and paying for stuff to be forwarded from the box address to our homes. Now we were getting shit addressed to him in with our mail, and somehow he had figured that neither of us would mind, or maybe he simply hadn't given it any thought at all.

'Hey there,' I said directly to his face one day, 'you know how you've given out our British Monomark box as your mailing address in the latest issue of your thing?'

'Yes.' He looked nervous, but then he always looked nervous.

'Well, don't fucking do it. I don't want to get your post and then have to forward it to you. I wouldn't have minded so much but you didn't even ask.'

This was unusually direct of me, but the situation seemed to be coming to a head. Everyone I knew was exhausted with Pranky McHoax! fnord 23. He had come down to London to stay for a couple of days, visiting some sort of small press event. This was the third or fourth time. The problem was that, as stated, beyond pranks, hoaxes, conspiracies, good old fashioned lies, subversive or otherwise counter-cultural activities, and networking, he had no interests. He was a poor conversationalist, and if he initiated a conversation the first words out of his mouth would usually be did you know that followed by some wearying trivia involving the number 23, or prank phone calls, or an obscure producer of balls-achingly poor industrial music, or Jeremy fucking Beadle. Occasionally he would hint at a supposed prehistory of reckless abandon, booze, sex, and the sort of hard drugs which made Syd Barrett the lobster he is today - or at least was in 1995 - but Pranky's testimony seemed unconvincing. He may as well have been telling us about his misspent youth as a gunslinger in the old west. He didn't smoke; he didn't drink; he'd sip cautiously at a half of shandy in the pub, and there was no point even trying to cook for him because he had his bottle of coke and his little packet of cheese footballs.

'No, I'm fine, thank you very much.'

For someone so relentlessly fixated on subversive mayhem, he presented an oddly joyless character, a little Celtic tickertape machine dispensing an endless stream of factual novelties, and never really engaging with anything outside his chosen field of tittering subversion; and he got away with it because we felt sorry for him; and here he was once again in my flat, and I couldn't work out why we still knew each other.

I'd had an exhausting day at work as usual, a six o'clock start followed by eight hours of hard physical labour. I had rested in the afternoon, but it was never enough, and all I wanted to do was eat my doner kebab and watch fucking Brookside, my favourite television programme in all the world. Nat Simpson seemed to be knobbing his own sister so far as anyone could tell, Mick Johnson was off his box on steroids, and Jimmy Corkhill had, against all odds, transformed into some sort of role model to the unfortunate Tinhead. It was dynamite, and then came the knock at the door just as the show began.

Pranky had been in town all day, dealing with small press things, noting with not inconsiderable amusement the preponderance of the number 23, and that the 23 bus route goes past Liverpool Street station and Liverpool is the birthplace of Ringo and Mark Pawson said this really funny thing blah blah blah Jeremy Beadle blah blah blah illuminati blah blah blah…

'Listen,' I suggested. 'Do you think you could find somewhere else to stay tomorrow evening?'

That threw him a little. 'Okay,' then he continued to talk bollocks throughout the rest of Brookside.

Next morning he was gone, leaving just a pile of about fifty copies of Message from the Sun God, an A4 fanzine he'd had printed comprising a lengthy rant - a good thirty or so pages - lifted wholesale from some nutcase on the internet. There was no reason on earth why anyone would want to read it, aside possibly from members of the psychiatric profession, and Pranky had paid money to have it printed; and there on the inside cover was the British Monomark box address I had asked him to refrain from using as his own. Maybe he thought I was joking, or maybe he didn't believe the fanzine would generate any mail so it didn't matter, or maybe I had been subject to an hilarious prank. For the next year mail continued to turn up addressed to the Sun God. I threw it away, just as I had stuffed all those copies of Message from the Sun God in the recycling bin rather than, as had probably been intended, leave them on buses to mess with people's minds blah blah blah. He called it culture jamming, because whatever the fuck it was he was doing with his life really needed a special name.

Mail turned up from Pranky himself, a battered Jiffy bag the size of a small suitcase doubtless bulging with Scientology pamphlets and Neon Judgement live tapes. I marked it not known at this address and had it returned to sender.

I felt guilty, and continue to feel some small degree of guilt to this day, although I've a hunch it may simply be pity. Pranky was not necessarily a malicious person. He was just a bit of a bore with poor social skills, and he probably knew it to some extent and couldn't help it; and even if he wasn't intentionally taking the piss, it often felt that way. It's a shame, but the world is full of sad, sad stories, and sometimes when someone is a pain in the arse, the kindest thing you can do is tell them to fuck off.

More than a decade later he resurfaces on YouTube as a stand-up comedian. His routine involves creaking puns made in reference to a series of unlikely objects produced from within a suitcase. The camera cuts to the audience, unfortunately exposing the fact of the soundtrack of uproarious hysterics having derived from a source other than those who sit politely chuckling and wondering if this is what this bloke intends to do for the duration of his act. The funniest thing about the clip is its single response in the comments box:

I have worked with the biggest names in world comedy like Jimmy Tarbuck, Bruce Forsyth and Joe Pascquale but I have never witnessed such talent, timing, original material and pizazz in the one package. Were you beamed down in a UFO from Planet Comedy? You seem to have an unearthly quality. I was pissing in my Armani slacks watching this, it's incredible… the hat out of the rabbit - sheer genius. I can try book you into the O2 Arena and we will take it from there. You are a magic comedian.

Even as I read the words, I weigh up the possibility of Pranky McHoax! fnord 23 having submitted the comment himself from a different account, and that he was absolutely sincere, and just for a moment I feel incredibly sad.

Kids Farting into a Tape Recorder

I date the arrival of my first tape recorder to 1978, and almost certainly to my thirteenth birthday in September of that year. It was a Crown CTR-300, a mono portable and pretty basic, but nonetheless magical so far as I was concerned. Within a couple of weeks I'd got hold of a five pin DIN lead by which I could connect it to our family radio and tape songs from the Top 40 Countdown on Sunday evening, and amongst the first songs I recall having taped were Public Image Ltd's debut single, Germfree Adolescence by X-Ray Spex, and Tommy Gun by the Clash - all prominent around November 1978 according to Wikipedia. I almost certainly recorded other, patently shittier chart toppers during those early efforts to kill music through home-taping - Olivia Newton-John, Sarah Brightman and the like - but some subconscious process tends to select those memories which better allow me to think of my younger self as a cool little dude. I suppose we all do it to a greater or lesser extent.

It's all delusion of course, and I should probably be thankful that my formative recordings were all committed to a single ninety minute cassette, because I was unwilling to save up my pocket money and invest in a second tape; so any regrettable evidence of my once having enjoyed the rocktastic sounds of both Racey and Showaddywaddy were erased within weeks, and by 1979 I'd turned my single C90 into a canvas upon which was painted a moderately more creative effort which I vaguely remember calling Pirate Radio Burton. I'm no longer even sure I actually knew what a pirate radio station was, but I'd picked up the term somewhere and apparently liked the feel of it. I did all of the voices and played all of the characters, executing ham-fisted pre-pubescent parodies of things I'd seen on television, and it was shite, but even at the age of thirteen I understood my branding it pirate radio to be an ingenious acknowledgement of it being shite, which paradoxically made it even funnier, so I believed. Of the great and subsequently lost tonnage of comedy gold submitted to my crumbling overworked 129 metres of ferric oxide, all I can recall was a wry satirical sideways glance at the Cadbury's Flake advert from the telly comprising my attempt to sing the only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate refrain, concluding with a racist observation likening the chocolate bar to a specific kind of penis; and because it was still the seventies and I was thirteen and nothing like so witty as I believed myself to be, I stood in our kitchen, proudly holding the tape recorder as I played Pirate Radio Burton to my mother, all twenty minutes of it including the racist penis joke. She laughed, although with hindsight I suspect it was probably uncomfortable laughter.

At least I was doing something creative, I suppose.

Eventually I graduated to more considered works, notably a semi-pornographic take on Keith Michell's Captain Beaky alternating the trumpet break lifted directly from the record with my spoken verses, toilet-humoured variations on the original turned to the cause of amusingly slanderous allegations made against my friend Gordon. By 1980, possibly due to an increase in pocket money, I had also graduated to the habit of buying a new cassette tape when I wanted to record something, in preference to adding another notionally archaeological layer to my long-suffering C90; and I took to making covers for these tapes, turning my felt-tipped pens to the design of amusingly titled compilations such as Songs for the Hard of Thinking.

Well, possibly not that amusingly titled, as I realised even at the time. Songs for the Hard of Thinking had a second and final volume before I switched to a new series of compilations of stuff taped off the radio under the banner of The Illegal Tapes as a witty challenge to the home-taping is killing music lobby - who seemed to be kicking up quite a fuss at the time - inlay cards rendered with Jamie Reid style ransom note lettering to show them I meant business. The Illegal Tapes volume one kicked off with a Simple Minds live set recorded from In Concert on Saturday 19th July 1980. This time I would get it right, I told myself: my own private library of free music, and only the cool stuff - no Racey, no Matchbox, and definitely no fucking Barron Knights. Novelty records were behind me now, given that I was a big boy and nearly fifteen, although my good stuff was not so Cromwellian a term as to exclude episodes of The Burkiss Way as broadcast on BBC Radio 4, a weekly comedy show which was actually funny despite the possibility of having provided some of the inspiration for Pirate Radio Burton. I've a vague feeling that the name the Pre-War Busconductors may have derived from The Burkiss Way, specifically from Fred Harris dully intoning an increasingly ludicrous itinerary of invented band names in parody of John Peel.

Regarding the Pre-War Busconductors, I was up to the eighth volume of The Illegal Tapes and for no reason I can remember, it occurred to me that it would be fun to take my tape recorder around to Grez's house and to record ourselves making a noise. Santa had furnished me with an acoustic guitar the previous Christmas, and Grez had been teaching me to play a few things - Babylon's Burning or Kings of the Wild Frontier plucked out on single strings.

Grez was in my class at school, and had weened me off the same four Beatles records by lending me a Devo album, which freaked me out at first but was ultimately for the best. I got to know Grez a little better and began to make regular trips to his house to listen to Stranglers albums, which was how I met Pete, a boy from the year above our own at school, and who lived in the same street as Grez. One evening I called around on Grez and found himself and Pete sat at the living room table inventing bands. They had exercise books and were drawing album covers for groups existing entirely in their own imaginations, chronologically ordered catalogues encompassing line-up changes, singles, b-sides and so on. I probably should have found it strange, but it seemed in some way related to my Songs for the Hard of Thinking compilations. Clearly it was some intensely personal thing, possibly not unlike having imaginary friends, and yet neither Pete nor Grez seemed particularly troubled that I had caught them engaged with such an indulgence.

On Saturday the 13th of September 1980, all of the above factors came together with our forming a band. We were around Grez's house. It was pissing with rain, too wet to do anything outside. We had instruments and it seemed like it might be fun, and the name Pre-War Busconductors had lodged in my head from somewhere or other. To be specific I recall the entire undertaking as having been my idea, as something to which I recruited the other two, but then it was a long time ago and most likely I'm remembering it wrong.

We had an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a semi-acoustic bass owned by Grez's older brother who never seemed to be around enough to object to our borrowing it. Also, Grez had an ITT Combat radio which came with its own microphone and could be used as an amplifier. It wasn't particularly loud, but we could produce a terrific overdriven din by placing the microphone inside the guitar. Somehow we also had a pair of drumsticks acquired from somewhere with which we bashed away at a drum kit assembled from whatever was to hand - cardboard boxes, an upturned biscuit tin, Grez's space hopper, and an Action Man assault craft - basically a big solid lump of injection-moulded plastic in the shape of a rubber dingy for your action figures - which made a great snare drum. The first problem we encountered was that we couldn't really play, although we didn't see this as either a problem or even necessarily relevant. Grez could handle a few hesitant chords - enough to hammer out something at least bearing passing resemblance to a tune; I could manage notes on one string, and if our collective sense of rhythm was a bit on the undeveloped side, we made up for it by enthusiastically failing to give a shit. More significantly, Pete could really sing and was spontaneously funny.

He was an unusual child, always seeming confident and quick witted, but occasionally he would overload and effect transformation into some kind of human jack-in-the-box, refusing to communicate in anything but siren noises and generally running riot. One of the most vivid episodes ended with myself and Grez stood in his driveway, both watching Pete bouncing up and down on a spacehopper on the garage roof whilst serenading us with a song comprising mostly bleeping noises. Grez was going wild because his parents were due home any moment.

Meanwhile back on that wet September afternoon, we'd just pressed play and record. Grez thrashed out an uneasy sequence of bar chords. I plucked out random arrhythmic notes on his brother's bass whilst singing in the voice of a thick person, like the little man from Monty Python with the knotted handkerchief on his head, or some skinhead grunting away on a television documentary. Diligently dropping my aitches, I made up the words as I went along, words which were repeated and even harmonised with embellishments by the astonishingly soulful Pete. This is punk at its worst, he half-sang, half-boasted as we came to the end of a chorus, and it was. That was the whole idea.

We all read Sounds music paper every week. Grez and Pete read Grez's brother's copy, and I'd been buyin' one for meself since about February; and if there was one fing we agreed upon it was 'ow much we enjoyed Garry Bushell's articles, albeit for the wrong reasons. For the most part we listened to the sort of music which Bushell 'ated, but nevertheless found ourselves drawn to his enthusiastic Alf Garnett-style traditional workin' class knees-up themed reviews of the Cockney Rejects, Angelic Upstarts, and others associated with Oi! music, as it 'ad become known. We were fifteen years of age, rustic, and clueless, but even we could see there was somethin' weird and 'ence immensely entertainin' in Bushell's testimony and the world 'e described as though terrified that anyone might ever mistake 'is little 'ooligan scene for anything posh, poofy or otherwise stuck up. Each time 'e set pen to paper, 'alf the word count was taken up wiv some wheedling testament to 'ow these boys weren't afraid to kick in a few 'eads if they didn't like the look of you, just so that we'd know his lads were the real fing and would put you in fackin' 'otspital, you caaaant; usually followed by disclaimers of 'ow they loved their mums and wouldn't 'urt a fly, and it was just workin' class culture wunnit, and it definitely ain't racist or nuffink to love yor country. He told us the Cockney Rejects were the best band he'd heard in two years and then quoted the lyrics, the immortal words:

I like punk and I like Sham,
I got nicked over West Ham.

Something about those two lines from Police Car entertained the living shit out of us, and I don't think it was just us either. I've since met people who've never heard a note of the Cockney Rejects, yet who are nevertheless familiar with that couplet. One evening we saw Oliver - one of the older kids who now worked at Discovery Records in Stratford-on-Avon - staggering home from the pub with a friend, singing those same lines from Police Car over and over, then muttering bloody brilliant and collapsing with laughter.

Of course, we all liked punk, and I for one liked Sham 69 and still play their records today; and it wasn't that we were better than the Cockney Rejects, or that there was anything wrong with good, honest, stupid fun, or that rock lyrics had to suggest something dripped from the quill of Shakespeare himself; but Police Car was just a bit too fucking stupid for its own good, and then there was Bushell trying far too hard with his desperate impersonation of a Cockney barrow boy, and this whole idea of taking pride in being a thick fucker, a position with which we were painfully well acquainted at school on a daily basis. We just couldn't not take the piss.

Accordingly I can't even bring myself to name our first ever song because the whole thing was horribly racist, and that was the point of it. We were trying to make something so stupid that even Bushell would have sighed, shaken his head in despair, and dismissed us with an amusingly witless quip about our being about as much use as a copy of Men Only in Larry Grayson's dressing room. I listen to the song now and it sounds like badly executed Alf Garnett, and I doubt anyone could ever take the words on face value; but it will nevertheless stay under wraps because even taking all of this into account, our first ever song remains uncomfortable listening. We were fifteen and had grown up in rural Warwickshire in the seventies, and there were two black kids at our school of about six-hundred. Black faces were not particularly common on British television, and although Pete, Grez and myself shared an inherent understanding of racism as essentially absurd and we listened to music by black artists, a certain lack of cultural sensitivity came with our environment. Racism seemed ridiculous and was therefore funny to us because we had no experience of it. I had learned nothing since that Flake advert on Pirate Radio Burton.

Five years later, my friend Garreth came to see me at the house in which I lived in the village of Otham, Kent. He was looking through my cassette tapes, all the Pre-War Busconductors albums with the hand-drawn artwork.

'What's this?' he asked, bewildered. He'd picked out the tape carrying the title which shall remain nameless, its general concept illustrated on the cover by four cartoon Pre-War Busconductors in smiling Al Jolson tribute, jazz hands and bones through noses above the somewhat unconvincing promise, a pisstake of racism.

'It's a piss-take of racism,' I explained unconvincingly, trying as hard as I could to sound casual, as though I hadn't just been rumbled. 'Like those skinhead bands, that sort of thing.'

I longed for the ground to swallow me whole, and in case it isn't obvious, Garreth was black.

'I understand,' he said, and I felt terrible - a king-sized arsehole.

I spoke about this to friends some years later, and it turns out that almost anyone of my generation and background who was ever in a band went through a phase of shocking Bushell-inspired ironic skinhead anthems.

The second song the Pre-War Busconductors ever recorded - just a few minutes later - was executed in much the same spirit of militant stupidity as the first, but thankfully without invoking Oi the Elephant in the Room. This elephant was Little Blue, the star of his own animated children's cartoon series who had taken his mummy's fountain pen and broken it in two. The ink had squirted in the water, as the theme song reported, staining him blue in colour, hence the title, with predictably hilarious consequences. I'd never seen the show and had no idea of the tune - which admittedly didn't make much difference - but Grez had, and he improvised an impressively nihilistic adaptation of the lyrics.

Little Blue, Little Blue,
Farting in the bath as some of us do,
He pulled out the plug and he got sucked down,
He couldn't swim so he had to drown.
The blood it spurted in the coffin - wow!
His mummy's got a dead boy noooooooow.....

We came up with two further tracks - a pitiful cover of the Stranglers' In the Shadows and something called Sodding Off - and that was our first session, immediately followed on volume eight of The Illegal Tapes by a couple of Jam singles I'd borrowed from Grez, When You're Young and The Eton Rifles. Playing back the tape and hearing our own clanking efforts alongside proper music like you would get on the radio seemed to legitimise what we were doing, and so we carried on, reconvening the very next day at my house to thrash out another four songs, notably a terrifying cover of the theme song for the children's show You and Me. Somehow it felt as though what we were doing was important, and it clearly wasn't just some one-off experiment.

We got together most weekends at whichever house contained the fewer parents and began to build up a body of work; and the more I listened back to our efforts, the better they sounded; and I realised it would make sense to have everything on one cassette. I borrowed Grez's tape recorder, plumbed it into mine with my five pin DIN lead, and copied all we had thus far recorded onto a single C90. This was to be our first album, and we came to this decision without being aware of the wider independent cassette scene which was just getting into gear at around the same time. I decided my tape label would be called Busconductor Records, and got out my felt-tipped pens and set to work on a cover.

In December we acquired a fourth member, Eggy who was in the same class as Grez and myself and had begun to wonder why we never seemed to be around at the weekend. He wasn't particularly musical, but it wasn't like he could make it any worse. We remained more or less a complete fucking racket for the first six months - enthusiastically cacophonous covers of whatever we felt like taking the piss out of, everything from the usual kid's show theme songs to the BeeGees' Tragedy; or potentially libellous songs about people at school; or further Bushell-inspired stupidity. Usually there was a tune tucked away in there somewhere behind the sound of something being banged hard to a rhythm more closely associated with home improvement than music; and usually there was some less melodic accompaniment, one of us honking away on the harmonica or similar. We would take it in turns to sing, depending on who had the most inspiration, and usually either Pete or Grez were the best at this, both having a better developed sense of surrealism than either Eggy or myself, even genuine wit you might call it; and so it didn't matter too much when Pete decided to sing an entirely different song to the one we'd apparently been playing, often a freshly improvised eulogy to the impressive girth of that which could be found within his trousers. Even pausing the performance to fart directly into the tape recorder made little difference to the thematic integrity of our songs.

The sum of the parts may have sounded a little less like a complete fucking racket were it not for our approach to mixing which amounted to each one of us trying to be either louder than the other three, or else nearest to the tape recorder; and the occasional disruption of proceedings by the intrusion of something so fucking funny it just couldn't wait: me yelling nipple blue into the condensing microphone as we recorded Little Blue for one example, which was funny because of tits, and because it sounded a bit like the title of the song. Nipples are rude, you see. This was why Pete and Grez were more suited to vocal duties than myself.

The elevated musicality of Grez and Pete was rudely illustrated when they went solo, breaking away as a duo under the name of the Desolate Accountants. Specifically it was Saturday the 15th of November, and we'd planned to convene as the Pre-War Busconductors, except I'd gone to the local cinema to see Breaking Glass at the last minute leaving the other two to their own devices - Eggy not yet having joined at that point. Desolate Accountants recordings were less raucous than those of the Pre-War Busconductors, and surprisingly musical in places because Grez could actually play and Pete could genuinely sing. Of all the cacophonous crap ever committed to tape by any combination of the four of us, the Desolate Accountants were the lot you might get away with pressing onto vinyl and selling to people, and in our small private universe their formation seemed to mean that we were not merely a band, but an actual scene. No longer feeling obliged to spontaneously piss about only when all members were present and incorrect, Grez and I recorded together as AA Book of the Road, and with Eggy as Half a Pound of Pork Sausages; and once Eggy had joined the Pre-War Busconductors, we rebranded the original three man line-up as Eddy & the Ogdens and recorded a series of Coronation Street themed cassettes.

Having acquired a second mono portable tape recorder - specifically a Panasonic RQ2106 - I was now able to bounce terrible quality backing tracks from tape to tape to produce my own multilayered solo material as the Post-War Busconductors, just like that Brian Eno. Grez similarly took to solo work as the Anthropod Lithontriptic Band, producing songs which, if poor in terms of recording quality, nevertheless still sound good today, at least to me. He was developing a definite style with the guitar and he really knew how to string a tune together, often using chords of his own invention; and it helped that he was witty, and that he really understood the romance of stupid:

Don't wanna take no exams.
Don't wanna take no CSE.
I just wanna break things,
And have bricks chucked at me.

Don't wanna know no long words.
Don't wanna learn to spell.
Every other word I say,
Is usually fucking hell.

Don't wanna live in a loony bin,
Or any snobs' place like that.
I just wanna smash in windows,
And go round being a prat.

This could have been half the kids at our school, and singing about it kept us sane.

The first Pre-War Busconductors album was completed in February 1981 and was named Little Blue after the cartoon elephant. I drew a cover, and Pete made a copy for himself, duplicating my cover in his own somewhat neater hand - it being another few months before any of us discovered the magic of the photocopiers which had only just begun to turn up in public libraries and the offices of estate agents. Neither Grez nor Eggy seemed too bothered about having  copies of our work, presumably preferring the performance. I on the other hand began to ruthlessly archive everything we did, even paying a few quid for the original tapes of the first two Desolate Accountants albums when Pete and Grez decided that they weren't very good and that they might as well record over them.

After the Sex Pistols, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, and all that self-aware Jamie Reid artwork, I'd become obsessed with the idea of music as mythology - for want of a better way of putting it - as an art form divorced from its own creation. The Pre-War Busconductors weren't so important as the understanding of ourselves as important, regardless of how scatalogically ludicrous the songs may have been - when you could even call them songs; and so I kept a copy of everything.

We recorded a traditional disappointing second album which was called PWBII, and then a third, by which point we had somehow began to develop rudimentary musical qualities. Grez was playing well, and I was at about the level of musicianship at which Grez had been when we started - good enough to pluck out a rough bass line on the Teisco electric guitar I'd bought for a tenner from Andy Scrivener down the sportsfield. Inevitably we began to play live concerts, although to be fair these concerts differed only from the studio recordings in so much as that we all cheered, clapped and whistled at the end of the songs, impersonating an audience, shouting out requests to ourselves and then introducing the next one as being a little something off our new album. Sometimes there would be a double bill of the Desolate Accountants and the Pre-War Busconductors, keeping the count of audience, support band, and headline act to just the same four people. The venues were our respective houses, usually when parents had gone out somewhere for the afternoon, although Grez's mum had become something of a regular at both our live performances and studio sessions.

'It's been going on all day and it's far too loud,' she would desperately opine, meaning we knew to limit ourselves to no more than another seven or eight numbers, and probably none of the angrier protest songs like Police Harassment. We always assumed disgruntled, temporarily deafened parents were exaggerating about the volume, and simply wanted to censor us because they were squares and their lives were over whilst we were the kids on the street with something to say, until one day, as the Desolate Accountants played live in the spare room of my house, I wandered out into our garden to see how much I could hear from out there. The spare room was on the top floor of a three story house, with only a small air vent in the wall overlooking the garden. Pete and Grez were playing acoustic instruments, without amplification, and yet somehow - even from about fifty yards distance through a thick wall - it sounded like angry giants fighting in a scrap yard, albeit marginally more tuneful.

Aside from the gigs at our respective houses, there were a couple of outdoor events too, one at the Nodder Nest - a secluded corner of the local sportsfield devoted to romantic pursuits, judging by all the spent johnnies - and the public bogs in the Telegraph Street car park. It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon as the town geared up for the royal wedding celebrations in the evening, and I kept watch while Pete and Grez vanished into said public lavatory with a guitar and a tape recorder. A moment later, a terrific noise emerged, amplified by the acoustics of ceramic tiles. It was a new song, one specifically tailored to the occasion.

Public bog - the place to be,
Public bog - the public lavatory.
Public bog - the place to be seen.
Public bog - the local latrine.
It really stinks around this place,
And you get peed in the face.

The song lasted about a minute, and then we ran away, laughing like hyaenas. As gigs went, it wasn't quite Elvis at Caesar's Palace, but as performance art it made even the best of them look like wankers.

We kept at it throughout 1981, relentlessly filling one cassette after another, slowly evolving towards a point at which the chaos began to sound almost composed. It wasn't so much that we'd improved as simply discovered our weaknesses and learned how to play to our strengths, such as they were. The songs remained essentially shambolic and puerile, but were easier on the ear in certain respects, and so our ambition increased accordingly - although more in terms of what we were already doing rather than becoming a real band or taking it needlessly seriously. In this adventurous spirit we wrote and recorded The Truth About Croydon, an epic undertaking by our standards spread across three C60s, a trilogy in fact. The Truth About Croydon was our Hard Day's Night, our Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, except it was on cassette tape rather than film for obvious reasons. The Truth About Croydon was partially autobiographical and mythologised the story of the Pre-War Busconductors, our formation and rise to imaginary fame, before going off on a traditional quest narrative in which we attempted to track down Simon Jordan, a kid we'd known at school who had supposedly gone to live in Croydon a few years earlier. We played ourselves as well as most of the other characters, but for the occasional bemused parent drafted in for lacklustre readings of it's been going on all day and it's far too loud, or my mum helping to recreate the historic phone call of that fateful day when Grez called and she had to tell him that I'd gone to see Breaking Glass. Of course there were songs - seminal numbers from the early days of the group for the historical section, then songs about what was happening within the story, new material for the fans - that being ourselves - effectively classifying the undertaking as musical theatre.

The Pre-War Busconductors became our identity, the closest thing we had to being in a gang. It gave us purpose, and of course an endless supply of jokes which only the four of us understood. Writing exercises in both French and English at school became marginally more engaging when we found ways to sneak in some mention of our band. If word didn't exactly get around, a few selected kids borrowed one of the two existing copies of Little Blue, although I don't really remember what they thought of it; excepting Steve Harris who apparently thought enough of it to join the band, becoming the potential fifth member but for only appearing at a couple of recording sessions; and three decades later my friend Crispin told me he'd always been impressed by my having recorded a song called Nine Inch Turd in the S-Bend.

Inevitably it couldn't last. Pete was the first to go due to his parents moving away. The rest of us carried on for a little bit, limping along with just the three of us but it wasn't the same, and sixteen seemed a bit old to still be thrashing out ironic covers of the Get Up and Go theme music. It was probably for the best in so much as circumstances pulled the plug on the Pre-War Busconductors before we started taking ourselves too seriously and bought real instruments. We sort of kept in touch, but something always seemed to get in the way, possibly ourselves.

By coincidence, Pete and I ended up at the same art college at the other end of the country, by which point he had his friends and I had mine. Grez went to university in London, then ended up dropping out under circumstances I never really liked to ask about given that he'd clearly had a rough time. Eggy lived about three streets away from me in London for a decade or more, and I only discovered this three weeks after he had moved to Dublin. I'm pretty sure I delivered his mail at one point without even realising. Similarly absurd - given that we'd all started out in rural Warwickshire - Pete ended up living at about two miles distance from where I had settled in London, and although we spoke to each other on the phone from time to time, we met on maybe two or three occasions at most.

He turned up with Grez on one such occasion and we got out the guitars and began recording. Pete's voice was as great as ever, and Grez had become an accomplished guitarist during the intervening decades, but somehow it was difficult to work out what we were trying to do or what we expected to get from the session. Forty-year old men chugging out a jazz-funk Eggs, Beans & Mayonnaise in 2006 would have been too depressing.

In 2015, having lived in Texas for four years, I flew back to England, to my mother's place in Coventry, with the intent of bringing back as much as I could of the crap for which I hadn't found room in all the boxes shipped over in 2012. This comprised mostly cassette tapes, and these had been left behind mainly because I wasn't sure what to do with them, and partially because I was scared of discovering that they were all blank, the ferric oxide having crumbled from the tape years before. Amazingly this not only turned out to not be the case, but the quality of them is astonishing - material taped over thirty-five years ago sounding as though it had been recorded just yesterday. I guess the lesson in this is not to take too much notice of the aggressive turnover of new and purportedly improved formats pushed by the music and consumer audio industries every five years or so.

I have all these cassettes, and I'm slowly digitising the collection so as to save it for posterity if and when the tapes finally degrade, as promised by those who want me to throw my lot in with downloads and soundbars, whatever the fuck those things are. I still find the songs funny and even kind of musical, or at least sonically interesting in places. I've spoken to Pete and Grez about this essentially archaeological exercise, but I can't tell what they make of it. I even have the impression - possibly wrongly - that Pete is in some way embarrassed by our body of work, possibly regarding Little Blue and others as damning evidence that he was once less cool than he is now; and whilst it's true that some of it is awful in certain respects, I can't see the point in regretting any of it. Nevertheless he insists it be not only kept to ourselves, but off the internet, and shared between us only in physical formats. Indeed, his concern has been expressed with such vigour that I considered giving him a false identity for the purpose of this essay, but the idea has struck me as ludicrous so he'll have to make do with my having withheld his surname. In any case, I can't see that he's even particularly likely to read this, so it probably won't make a lot of difference.

When each conversation with a friend concludes with either we really must meet up, or else we must do this more often, chances are it isn't going to happen, and there are usually good reasons why you've lost touch with each other, reasons which might seem awkward should they become subject to examination. The Pre-War Busconductors happened for a short time and it did its admittedly stupid job, and then slipped gracefully backwards into the realms of an origin story. Even if we all remember it differently and with different degrees of affection, it's how we came to be here, and this much will remain so long after the tapes have crumbled. The sad thing is that I sometimes wonder if those tapes of the four us farting into a tape recorder weren't as good as it will ever get, the last honest art made by any of us.

Adolf Bunter

'Lawrence is okay,' McArbuckle muttered as he sat. 'He's one of us.'

'Huh?' I was trying to work out if he'd really just said that.

'I was just saying that you're okay. You're a decent guy.'

Adolf Bunter sat smiling, giving no response, a great human dome of flesh in a black polo-neck occupying the corner of the pub as though recently dolloped out from a catering spigot in the ceiling, Satanic goatee arranged neatly around a mouth in a configuration suggesting sea creatures, and the eyes wobbling left to right in that massive head. I had the impression he was on his guard, and my apparently necessary introduction as someone who could be trusted did nothing to dispel this. He had an oddly craven look to him, like one of the more pathologically uncomfortable characters played by Roy Kinnear.

He had seen my cartoon in a fanzine, possibly Gneurosis, and now he wanted more. It was kind of a relief that he hadn't taken offence given how the point of the cartoon had been to extract great quantities of Michael out of him, his previous band, and their pal, the one resembling Jasper Carrott. In some ways it was also quite flattering, even encouraging to know that purveyors of such stentorian gloom had a sense of humour - if that's what it was.

Adolf Bunter was busily reinventing himself as a man of culture, some sort of patron of the arts, the sort of guy who eats paté whilst listening to that Pavarotti. To this end he was putting together a magazine of some description. It would be square-bound and would look reet classy, and there would probably be a compact disc with it too. It sounded pretty much like Re/Search or Rapid Eye from what he told me, the usual routinely outré subjects and suspects. He was after a cartoon strip and would be happy to pay.

Of course, I had to ask about the group of which he was once a member, the group I'd had such fun taking the piss out of in the pages of Gneurosis. 'So what happened? How come you split up?'

'It was three people in a room, each trying to be loudest.'

He talked a little about the past, about poor decisions made whilst young and stupid. This I took to be a reference to his having once been a member of the National Front, concerning which I hadn't asked because I wasn't sure I really wanted to know, and it hadn't helped that we had been discussing Coventry, the city from which I had moved just a few years before, the city in which my parents still live. He'd said it was terrible what the Luftwaffe had done to Coventry during the war, although of course what Dresden had suffered was many times worse. I observed that Coventry City Council had pretty much finished the job Hitler started during the fifties and sixties, tearing down a great number of old buildings which really could have been left standing. He seemed to warm to this idea, I suppose enjoying the notion of Hitler as the lesser of two evils.

This was not the first time I had encountered representatives of the extreme right, or at least a person with such vile politics lurking in his past like the turd that just won't be flushed. One such individual I had already forgiven on the grounds that he'd seen the error of his ways, learned from the experience, grown up, and was somewhere to the left of Tony Benn by the time I met him. The other had been Nick, whom it was incredibly difficult to dislike. I suppose he became our pet Nazi skinhead because everyone had already been endlessly entertained by his wit and charm by the time anyone realised. He was funny, seemingly very intelligent, and strangely disinclined towards the sort of racist remarks you would expect from someone who regularly attended No Remorse gigs dressed as Alex from A Clockwork Orange. The only truly awkward moment I recall was my mentioning having recently watched the film Romper Stomper, which Nick said he had also seen, happily reporting that he and his friends had chanted filthy yellow monkey at the screen whenever one of the Vietnamese characters appeared.

'Charming,' observed Andy without any obvious sincerity. Andy was also present in the kitchen, and was then a volunteer at Hackney Chinese Youth Centre and therefore regarded Nick as an idiot. With hindsight, the anecdote had almost certainly been forged for the sake of aggravating Andy.

I say Nick was our pet Nazi skinhead, although it's not like I was particularly in a rush to hang out with him for reasons which are hopefully obvious. He lived in a squat with some of my friends, none of whom had bothered to enquire as to his views on who should have won the second world war, and it can be quite difficult to get rid of somebody when you've already been their mate for three months.

Eventually he moved out of his own accord, which solved the problem. We all had an anthropological root through the cardboard box containing his record collection just before he vanished - all of those horrible bands: Skrewdriver, No Remorse, Skullhead and weirdest of all, what appeared to be a Chas & Dave rarities and out-takes album.

Nick's story became weirder still when in later years it emerged that he had been the son of some Lord or other, or at least someone with a country estate, and had moved to Italy to marry a woman of Indian descent. Either he had renounced his brief flirtation with racism - as claimed - or it had all been some peculiar put-on for the benefit of a father whom he apparently hated.

Adolf Bunter was somehow different. There was about him, for want of a better word, an unpleasant vibe I hadn't noticed in association with either of those mentioned above. It didn't help that his band just happened to fixate on north European imagery, Odin, runes, laments about the death of culture which never quite seemed to name any names of those apparently held responsible, and very little in the way of covers of ska, bluebeat, or reggae standards. Having grown accustomed to extending the benefit of the doubt to the sort of musicians who might slap a picture of Hitler on the cover of a record and then explain how they are simply exploring controversial images and ideas, I likewise extended the benefit of the doubt to Adolf Bunter.

Besides, I'd explored my own fair share of controversial images and ideas going right back to the Good Old Hitler cassette album recorded with friends at school as Eddie & the Ogdens. The cover showed Stan and Hilda Ogden along with their lodger Eddie Yeats from Coronation Street stood upon the podium at Nuremberg, each with Hitler's face. The music was as close an approximation to Oi! as we could manage on acoustic guitar and cardboard box drum kit, which was actually surprisingly close. Week after week we had howled with laughter at Garry Bushell's reviews of skinhead bands in Sounds music paper, particularly the occasional weedling attempts to pass off a few genuine bad lads as being not so much racist as simply proud of something or other. Good Old Hitler was our addressing this unpleasant phenomenon by trying to make ourselves laugh, specifically by seeing how offensive we could be if we tried really hard; and we succeeded in producing something that was pretty fucking offensive. Then of course later came Do Easy, my own flirtation with badly recorded industrial music and the increasingly predictable exploration of controversial images and ideas, and mostly for the sake of upsetting the sort of people who would be upset by controversial images and ideas; see also most major art movements since 1909; none of which is to say that recording a song called Exterminate All Weaklings and slapping a picture of Dennis Nilsen on the cover of the tape isn't necessarily an extraordinarily retarded thing to do, only that it isn't always indicative of where the author's true sympathies may reside. Personally I draw the line just this side of the point at which fans turn up to your gigs dressed in full SS regalia, and this doesn't cause you to take a long, hard look at what you're doing with your music and how it's presented. Anything short of that can probably be justified as art, if not necessarily great art. Anything beyond will most likely be either straightforward horrible bullshit, or horrible bullshit reliant upon being given the benefit of the doubt because it's simply exploring controversial images and ideas blah blah blah...

Adolf Bunter seemed to like my cartoon. He came to my home to pick it up, occupying the entire width of my couch much as Hitler's forces had occupied the Rhineland in March 1936. I showed him my paintings assuming a mutual interest in mythology, but he flicked through with the speed of someone searching for a specific image, something familiar. So much for patron of the arts boy. Maybe he was looking for Odin, or something a bit more Caucasian in spirit.

I met Adolf Bunter on just two further occasions in a pub near the Imperial War Museum in London. McArbuckle, whom I knew a little better, had invited him along as we went for one of our laboured Saturday evening drinks.

The less said about McArbuckle the better, but he was Scottish and he fucking loved his pies. Whilst he didn't really appear actively racist, it sometimes seemed dependent on who he was with and what mood he was in. He would go on at length about how much he loved his Public Enemy albums, oblivious to Public Enemy often being the choice group of those who otherwise hate rap but wish to appear open-minded - those for whom Public Enemy represent socially responsible black people, not like those gangstas with their sexism and glorification of sex and violence. He loved Public Enemy, but hated that awful Snoop Doggy Dogg, seedy little man that he was and not much better than some dope dealer; and then next week he'd always had time for good old Snoop - a genuine entertainer in the traditional sense of the term if ever there was, and could I burn a couple of CDs? I don't think it was that McArbuckle was so much a racist as just a complete prick.

The two of us were sat drinking with Adolf Bunter in some pub near the Imperial War Museum when a black man entered as though the universe was about to illustrate some point for my benefit. He came over to us and asked how to get to Borough tube station, which was at about ten minutes distance from the pub. Adolf Bunter politely delivered a series of directions, pointing and smiling. The man left and Bunter and McArbuckle sat chortling away like Beavis and Butthead. I looked out of the window and saw our man heading off in entirely the wrong direction.

'Borough tube is that way,' I said, pointing, initially confused.

'I know!' Adolf Bunter's many, many chins bounced happily as though someone had emptied a dustbin of ping-pong balls onto a squash court. Whatever the conversation had been, I found it difficult to return to our subject, and so the evening descended into idle observation of red London buses passing by the pub or waiting at the traffic lights just outside, mostly with some commentary on how you never see a white man driving one of those things any more.

The final encounter, another one of those meetings which just seemed to occur for no good reason, was in the same pub and served to introduce us to the surprisingly unpleasant Mrs. Bunter, whose contribution mostly seemed to comprise smirking, occasional comments which you couldn't quite work out whether or not they were meant to be insulting, failing to buy a round, and then requesting cocktails which cost as much as everything that everybody else was having added together. Happily I fell out with McArbuckle soon after, and was no longer subjected to either his peculiarly toxic friendship or his peculiarly toxic friends.

Years later, I noticed one of the cartoon strips I had drawn for Adolf Bunter had turned up on his website testily credited to some closet queen from South London. Elsewhere the site carried a notice protesting that Adolf Bunter deeply regretted certain political affiliations held in the past when he was young and stupid, adding that if people weren't going to believe him then they weren't going to believe him and there probably wasn't much he could say to change anyone's mind. My take on this, being older and hopefully less gullible, is that what you say is more or less irrelevant if you can't pass the fans turning up to your gigs dressed in full SS regalia test; and that like McArbuckle, he probably wasn't so much a racist as just a complete prick.

Once in the town of Guildford fair, a rotund minstrel he did strum,
Songs of liking not the foreigners written mostly with his bum,
On the stage in old Valhalla, that silly fat fucker I did hear,
and listen to those songs I would, but that in this world is too little beer.

The Quiet and Pleasant Man

Robert James Shepherd - my grandfather on my mother's side - was born on the 8th of March, 1910 somewhere in Liverpool, England for the sake of argument. He was one of a fairly large working-class family tracing its ancestry back to Northern Ireland, and possibly to Scotland before that. I almost certainly have some of the details wrong, but this is as much as I can recall from my mother's genealogical research which takes our family tree back to the late 1600s. Somewhere in there lurks a member of the Orange Lodge, but we don't like to talk about him too much, not least because we don't really know enough about him for anything more than a short sentence.

My grandfather's parents were Joseph and Emmeline Shepherd, and his military documentation gives his home address as 17, Hotspur Road in Bootle, which is technically Merseyside rather than Liverpool depending on who you ask and when; and providing you ask someone other than my grandmother who would customarily adopt a face of stony and silent disgust in the event of anyone mistaking her for a Scouser, which occurred with some frequency due to her fairly distinct Liverpudlian accent.

What I have left of my grandfather's story is cobbled together from fading childhood memories; a couple of hundred black and white photographs which, if numerous, remain nevertheless mysterious; and a lever arch file containing military documentation, certificates of training, pay book, and all sorts. From these I know that he was a joiner by trade - following in his father's footsteps so I believe - who enlisted with the Royal Artillery on the 1st of April 1933. The next few sequential documents I have are third and then second class certificates of military education passed in English, mathematics, map reading, and a subject termed army and empire. He is identified as a Driver on these certificates, ascending to the rank of Gunner on his first class certificate of military education dated to the 16th of October 1935. He transferred to the Army Reserves at the rank of Bombardier on the 29th of January, 1939. Notes made in his Certificate of Service booklet dated to the 28th of September, 1938 describe his conduct as exemplary, with some officer whose signature I am unable to decipher describing my grandfather as follows:

A first class surveyor and a reliable and trustworthy NCO. He is very intelligent and is methodical and painstaking. He has a quiet and pleasant manner.

England went to war with Germany on 3rd of September, 1939, from which point my grandfather's story is told mainly in photographs as he sits atop a camel before the Great Pyramid in Egypt, along with other scenes of his life in India or the North African desert. Two formal uniformed portrait photographs delineate his promotion from Corporal to Staff Sergeant, and then there are the medals - notably the Africa Star - and what little I am able to remember him telling me of his time with Montgomery's Eighth Army when I was a kid.

My mother was born just after war ended, and a receipt for the payment of an examination fee dated to the 3rd of November, 1948 testifies to my grandfather's return to civilian life as a structural engineer - or an architect if the more specific term seems a little obtuse. He may not quite have designed the buildings, but he made sure they didn't fall down. This trade was much in demand in the city of Coventry in the West Midlands, much of which had been flattened by the Luftwaffe during the war, although it could probably be argued that Coventry City Council spent the next two decades bulldozing the bits which Hitler's finest had missed. Anyway, the point is that my grandparents moved to Kenilworth, Warwickshire, just down the road from Coventry, which is how my mother ended up in that part of the country, and ultimately how I came to be born. Kenilworth had become aspirational in the years following the second world war. You were someone if you lived in Kenilworth, which pleased my grandmother as much as anything pleased her. My grandfather, who had never suffered any particular shame in acknowledging his Merseyside roots, may have felt differently, but work was work and I suppose he tended to keep his thoughts to himself.

My mother has described her home life as pleasant up until the age of twelve or so, at which point my grandfather apparently found himself bewildered as to how to cope with teenage girls. Where he would once play with my mother and her younger sister, read to them and tell them stories, he became a distant and apparently humourless authority figure inspiring my mother to rebel further when charged with inconsequential accusations made purely for the sake of authority.

He seemed to do well as an architect working for Coventry City Council, and he had his friends and his fishing at the weekend, but the war had stayed with him in certain respects, unfortunately leading to a spell in the nuthouse during which he was subject to electroconvulsive therapy. It probably didn't help that my grandmother had never quite been the sharpest tool in the box, and had always been a somewhat self-absorbed individual. Whilst she doted upon me as a child, and I in turn thought she was wonderful, even at that age I could see she had something of a martyr complex. Nothing my grandfather did for her was ever quite good enough, and he did plenty.

'Never mind,' she would say with a laboured sigh. 'I suppose at least you tried.' She herself had been the least favoured of three children, the one with neither the beauty nor any particular talent to speak of, and so she grew up with a vague sense of being owed something which she could not quite articulate. She apparently fell some way short of being the world's greatest mother, and I always wondered if she saw my arrival in terms of atonement, as a way of making up for lost time. I was indulged as her own children had never been.

The happiest days of her life had been as a land girl on the farm of Sammy Shellew in Cornwall, and memories of the same were frequently invoked for the sake of contrast with an endlessly disappointing present. If only she had married Sammy, or if only she had not moved so far from the wonderful Thelma, her greatest friend in the whole world. She met with Thelma a few times in the seventies, but eventually fell out with her; and then the venerable Sammy Shellew came to stay, which didn't work out so well due to his having interpreted my grandmother's gushing praise as a sexual overture, which probably wasn't entirely his fault.

For most of the 1970s I would be taken to stay with my grandparents every other weekend, arriving Friday evening and coming back Sunday afternoon. It was a regular thing, a routine, and like many children, I loved routine and found it comforting, something upon which one might rely in a world which appeared chaotic through not yet being fully understood. One of my earliest coherent memories is of watching Neil Armstrong landing on the moon as viewed on my grandparents' black and white television on Sunday the 20th of July, 1969. I would have been three years old, two months short of four. My grandfather was ten years older than I am right now.

Weekends generally began with breakfast, usually my grandfather making buttered toast - your bog standard Mother's Pride white sliced bread and probably Stork margarine, but somehow I've never been able to make toast quite so good as he did. Tea was stewed until bright orange - or at least the complexion of Judith Chalmers from that holiday show. The cocktail cabinet built into the sideboard was well stocked with kid drinks, Cresta or else bottles of Nesquik syrup for milkshakes and a selection of drinking straws, but they got me onto tea quite early on, always served from a pot into a cup with a saucer, one of those matching sets invoking some level of sophistication.

'He's been a proper little tea urn this weekend,' my grandmother reported one Sunday as my parents arrived to take me home, and it was true that I had been guzzling one cup after another. I can still recall my overpowering thirst of that particular weekend.

Some Saturdays I'd awake before my grandparents and would go downstairs and find something amazing in being the first to rise, in being the one to draw back the curtains upon a new day. On one such occasion I switched the radio on just as Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty was playing, and right in the middle of that Bob Holness saxophone break which I have ever since associated with an early Saturday morning at my grandparents' house; and the thing is, I'm not even sure of this being a real memory as opposed to some sort of association made after the fact.

My grandparents didn't seem to like anything racier than Jim Reeves so far as I could tell, so modern pop music was absolutely out of the question. My grandfather had apparently taken some delight in mocking his youngest daughter's love of Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders by referring to them as the Bananabenders, and I don't recall the radio ever having been tuned to anything that would have featured Baker Street. My parents took me to see Grease at the cinema in Stratford-upon-Avon when it came out, and the next Friday as they ferried me over to Kenilworth, I begged them not to tell Grandma we'd been to see the film. I somehow felt that such an admission would bring disgrace upon us, but I still have no idea how I thought this would work or what would happen if our terrible secret should be revealed.

Breakfast was usually prefaced by my grandfather walking up Caesar Road to the newsagent for a newspaper. I would tag along and he would buy me one of the small, brightly-coloured plastic dinosaurs from the display on the counter, or in later years the new issue of 2000AD comic; and I have a very specific memory of reading issue sixty-eight with the gruesome cyborg Artie Gruber on the cover at the breakfast table with my hot margarined toast and orange tea. My grandfather quite possibly passed some faintly disparaging comment on my reading material, thus cementing the memory in place. 2000AD comic was one of the first things I understood as belonging to my generation and thus beyond the scope of adults. Six weeks later as our family headed off for a week's holiday in Delabole, Cornwall, my mother frowned at the cover of issue seventy-four upon which Judge Dredd is seen on the verge of being devoured by a tyrannosaurus.

'It's very violent,' she observed in disapproving fashion.

'It's violence in the cause of good,' I explained somewhat ineptly.

After Baker Street, the orange tea, toast, and my weekly dose of violence in the cause of good, my grandparents and I would bundle into the navy blue Morris Minor and drive to Leamington Spa. My grandfather drove cautiously, perched forward in his seat, gripping the wheel and generally refusing to talk. Often he would whistle Bizet's March of the Toreadors from Carmen, and he would whistle it with such enthusiasm and frequency that I came to regard it as his signature tune; although specifically I have a better memory of him whistling it when it was just the two of us. He seemed less given to flourishes of carefree cheer in my grandmother's company, and my mother tells me that he was once in the habit of singing to himself, Pennies from Heaven and other songs of the time. I suppose by the seventies he generally felt less moved to song.

By the eighties, having invented experimental music, I produced a track attempting to invoke his memory by recording the running of a friend's Morris Minor whilst whistling March of the Toreadors. It seemed like an important thing to do, but the recording was disappointing.

Once in Leamington Spa I would be unleashed in a labyrinthine Regent Street toy shop called Toy Town, there to blow what feeble sum of pocket money I'd managed to save on model railway accessories, Ellisdon's jokes and novelties, Micronauts, Dinky's die-cast Gerry Anderson vehicles, model kits of dinosaurs, Shogun Warriors, or Faller alpine houses earmarked for the aforementioned model railway. I was good at spending money but not at saving it, so my model railway comprised mainly accessories and scenery with very little actual railway. With hindsight it strikes me as a little weird how I would buy and build bungalows, houses and shops past which no miniature electric locomotive would ever trundle on OO gauge tracks, and I can't help wonder if my granddad ever noticed this and imagined I might have some subconscious drive to one day follow him into the architectural trade. Having been a joiner, he still had all of his carpentry tools and so jollied me along by making a couple of wooden tunnel entrances which might eventually parenthesise the locomotive passage through a hillside of papier maché and chicken wire.

I repaid him by never getting around to constructing my hypothetical layout, and by nominating him test subject for all the Ellisdon's jokes and novelties I bought once I gave up on the model railway idea. Whilst he never struck me as particularly lacking a sense of humour, he tired of the job fairly rapidly then resigned during breakfast one Sunday. He'd responded to the loud farting rasp of the whoopee cushion on his chair with an indulgent smile. He'd found the plastic fried egg on his plate considerably less amusing, and the novelty double-sided suction cup by which I had attached his cup of tea securely to its saucer was the last straw.

'Your mother shall hear of this,' he muttered darkly, carrying the still full cup and firmly attached saucer to the kitchen. It had been a long weekend for him. The day before, my grandmother had only just talked me out of trying my joke sweets on him by suggesting there was a possibility that I might kill him. I'd made the sweets myself from everything I could find in the kitchen cupboard. To my grandfather's credit, he made no attempt to throttle me, despite probably knowing that no court in the land would have found him guilty. He never raised his voice to me, because I suppose he understood that, being a child, I was essentially psychotic and that it was therefore nothing personal. He was nevertheless able to induce me to behave with just a few words. It was probably the military training.

My grandmother's approach to child care was based on flattery, giving me stuff, and assuming it would be appreciated. It generally was appreciated, although I nevertheless got out of hand from time to time. Standard child psychology would have termed it a testing of limits, which I could have told you even back then. I had become irritable at being addressed as sweetheart or similar endearments with such frequency, and so I began to experiment with basic rudeness, making strident demands, complaints about the quality of service, and on one occasion directly calling her an old bat. I was probably about six or seven and I thought it was funny because I knew she would let me get away with it.

'Don't speak to your grandma like that,' my grandfather suggested, momentarily fixing me with the mildest of glances; and in that moment I saw myself as the repulsive brat I had become. It felt awful and I learned my lesson immediately. It was as though I'd been punched in the stomach.

On Saturday afternoons I would play with whatever I'd bought back from Leamington Spa, or sometimes we drove to Coventry to visit the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, and my grandfather would point out which buildings he'd helped design as we drove through the city. The swimming pool was one of his, as were parts of the university, so I believe, and it had been his job to make an assessment of the extent of the coal mining beneath the city and whether or not the ground would be able to support the weight of St. Michael's Cathedral.

Some Saturday afternoons, he would take me down to Abbey Fields in Kenilworth to catch fish from the stream, or around Kenilworth Castle; and I have no idea what we talked about during those walks, but I recall that we talked at length. As my mother has observed more recently, whilst some of his views were staunchly conservative and typical of his background and times, he was essentially a decent and intelligent man who was interested in things. He had seen some of the world and had come back the better for it in most respects but for those more directly related to the war. He would take me to Leamington Spa and have me splash around in a kayak for an hour or so at a small boating lake near Jephson Gardens, and I would notice the Indian women in their saris and remark on how strange they looked.

'I think they look very pretty,' he observed somewhat forcefully, possibly even wistfully given the time he'd spent in India, belying the generalisation of his generation's supposedly inherent xenophobia.

His creative energies went into plays and letters hammered out on a typewriter which he would sometimes encourage me to use. He wrote a play called One Bad Apple or something similar, a heavy-handed cautionary tale of a hearty and generally conservative workplace ruined by one of those shifty labour union type fellows, and there was another play about a wayward and rebellious daughter coming to no good. He didn't really seem to get much interest in this material, but it was significant that he at least tried.

He encouraged me in my formative attempts at storytelling, listening patiently as I read him by Bod fan fiction. The opening scenario in which Bod had a beautiful dream about a bowl of strawberries and cream was a direct lift from the barely animated children's television cartoon, but the conclusion - the world ends and in the next world Bod is a gorilla - was all my own work. There were also many, many episodes of Doctor Stew, a sequence of single page cartoon strips drawn on a long, long roll of rough hand tissue which had never made it to the dispenser of the cattle shed in which my dad worked.

'There's an awful lot of burping in these,' my grandfather observed reading through my scrawled efforts. It didn't seem like he disapproved exactly, but I got the impression he was concerned. Each episode - and there were at least a hundred of them - usually ended with Doctor Stew eaten alive in time for his devourer to emit a satisfied burp in the last panel, which was also the punchline.

Concerned or otherwise, it impressed me that my grandfather had taken the trouble to at least read my incoherent and extraordinarily repetitive attempts at humour. My grandmother would customarily have sung my praises more or less irrespective of what I had done, which was nice but ultimately didn't count for much.

Saturday evenings were television - The Pink Panther, Doctor Who, Basil Brush, The Generation Game, Starsky & Hutch - all of those shows which have since become tarnished by the overwhelming and disproportionate sentiment of their own nostalgia; or my grandfather would turn off the television and tell me about his time in the war, which was always something of a treat. Perhaps it was because I could tell how much he enjoyed reliving it with me, drawing maps of Tobruk and North Africa with arrows to illustrate movements of troops and tanks, and himself in there somewhere.

Sundays were different, at least following breakfast. Sometimes he would take me fishing, the one activity in which he still took real pleasure, so it seemed. He had made me a kid-sized fishing box in his workshop in the garage, and off we would go with flasks and sandwiches to some point along the River Leam or the Avon or the Sowe. He was keen on outdoor activities, and the boot of the Morris Minor was always well stocked with camping equipment, a kettle, tin mugs, a tiny Primus stove and so on. Alternately we would just go for another walk to Abbey Fields or one of the usual places.

'I've been feeling a bit depressed,' I told him in response to some question or other as we headed out of the door one morning, our breath misting the crisp air. I don't recall how old I was, younger than thirteen, and young enough for it to seem strange that I would articulate such a thing.

I got the impression that he was quietly horrified. 'You shouldn't be depressed at your age,' he said, a trace of pain in his voice.

At the time I had no idea of his own history of depression, the hours sat silently rocking back and forth before the fire described by my mother, nor any really developed idea of what the term even meant. I was trying to articulate a vague feeling of insecurity based on the knowledge that I was getting older and one day the fortnightly visits would cease. I recall this as a fairly specific fear I had voiced in relation to my grandmother's stated ambition to run a tea shop. She had predicted a peculiar future in which I would be riding around with my followers as part of some biker gang. Everyone would draw to a halt behind me as we approached the crossroads.

'Come on, lads,' I would say, 'my grandma's always good for a cup of tea and a bun,' and off we would all ride. The image amused me, but was followed by the altogether more apocalyptic, 'of course one day you'll stop coming to see us altogether.'

I was briefly inconsolable.

Sure enough, my visits became less frequent as I got older, and as my grandfather contracted bowel cancer some time in 1979. We visited him in the hospital in Warwick, and it terrified me to see him frail as a bird in his huge bed, happy to see us but barely enough of him there to fill the pyjamas. I'd always suspected that some elements of the world were subject to change and would ultimately become different, and now it was happening. I didn't cry when I heard he had died because it didn't make sense, but I was distraught at the funeral.

Denied the supposed source of all her woes, my grandmother became a quite different figure, certainly more tragic, but not so tragic as to excuse her increasingly eccentric passive-aggressive behaviour. The jokes she told about her terrible husband lost their jovial tone to become a spiteful, insecure whine about how she could have wasted her best years on such a useless man; but the complaints served only to underscore her own failings, her sense of having been owed something she could never quite articulate. What photos remain of my grandfather are those she somehow missed when she was throwing it all away, and from amongst what little is left of him I have a letter that was never posted, typed on a sheet of lined foolscap and addressed to John Newbury of the BBC. It is dated to the 15th of June, 1979:

I listened with interest to your programme on depression on Wednesday last, and as one who suffered from this complaint over a long period in the past, and having been cured I feel I should inform you of some of my experiences in the hope that you will pass on any relevant information to others who are suffering.

I suffered this sickness from 1944, on my return from five years continuous service in the Middle East and India until about five years ago when I learned about and obtained acupuncture treatment; and apart from one brief spell I have not experienced any depression since. The one instance occurred about four years ago during the transition from a busy working life to one of retirement.

Concerning the discussion on your programme I believe that any lowering of morale for which the causes are known - external conditions such as bereavement, domestic conflict etc. - is really only a sadness which, generally, time will heal. In my opinion, depression is a complaint which has no known cause and exists only within the patient, and can occur at any time regardless of circumstances. In my experience, lonely people are not more prone to this sickness than others. During my last period in hospital I found the other patients to be a typical cross-section of people including a works manager, school teacher, miner, and a policeman. One particular character was a hearty, boisterous person, apparently happily married with children, liked his job and was financially secure, circumstances which should promote contentment; but he suffered and frequently cried for no apparent reason. This was real depression.

I have found that these attacks can occur in different ways, one being like a huge mass of black fluid flowing into one's mind and another like a thousand different thoughts racing through the mind without pause until I feared for my sanity.

I felt a deep sympathy for the people who took part in your programme and I hope that you will tell them that they have no need to continue to suffer, that there is a cure and that I sincerely hope they can avail themselves of it and obtain relief.

Thirty-five years later, there may be days which pass without my thinking about him, but I am not directly aware of them. I often wish I could go back and talk to him as I am now, or at least take back some of the utter crap I almost certainly came out with, although there's probably no need. I'm fairly sure he understood that I was just a kid, and talking rubbish was my job.

As the years pass, I come to see myself in what I am able to recall of him all the more, and this impression has been cemented by a couple of photographs taken in the early 1950s which may as well be photographs of myself; and it occurs to me that there's probably no need to invent time travel just for the sake of apologising for my having been ten and slightly gormless, because he never entirely went away and, as I have said, I'm sure he would understand.