(You can run some late period Dexy's Midnight Runners music in the background to this entry if you like. I won't mind).

London, October 1996. It rained almost constantly, the water clogging up the gutters of Battersea where I lived in a dingy, greasy, freezing cold two bedroom flat with an actress and her friend. I had arrived just as Britpop was in its initial death throes, spewing out delights such as Sussed and Proper for the nation’s collective attention (which the nation promptly rejected like a cold portion of yesterday’s KFC chicken). Romo, a slightly more developed New Romantic revival, was supposed to be the next major movement if you believed the music press.

I’d just moved there from Portsmouth and had very few friends in the capital at all. I’d tend to spend my weekends and my free time wandering the city aimlessly looking for solo things to do. Sometimes I’d warm myself in the deathly quiet surrounds of the Poetry Library on the South Bank, reading fanzines, publications, and trying to find out about local events, desperately trying to suss where the pulse was. I’d leave the library just as it began to get dark, and watch as couples going on romantic riverside walks would slosh past me, their little union reflected in the puddles below, all glowing with the street lights. Only a year and a half before I had fallen in love with a female friend of mine and the situation had threatened to grow into a relationship, but was ultimately scuppered because she decided that monogamy wasn’t for her, and even if it had been she probably wouldn’t have chosen me to try it with. I still hurt, and I cursed the couples around me. Bastards, all of them.

The main reason I was in London at all was on the basis of some promising enthusiasm from a number of sources. Select magazine had announced interest in taking me on as a freelancer, and a small indie label were also going to interview me about a job as their press officer. Both these opportunities fell through, and no others materialised (in fact, these would be the most promising job offers I was given for the next nine years). Instead, I began reception work for the Department of Social Services in the Chelsea/ Fulham area, and began to meet people in far more dismal circumstances than me. Charming, friendly, chatty paedophiles would enter to talk about the weather and the political issues of the day (“You should never let on that you know exactly what they’re up to”, warned my boss, “however strongly you feel about it”). I’d do my best to nod, smile and engage them in banter about the awful weather. A fat, red faced mother of six with an alcoholic, violent, child-abusing husband would enter, throw objects at me to get my attention, and smirk and shake her head at me as if I were the one in the unfortunate position. An alcoholic ex-West End theatre director with a fruity voice would regularly emerge in order to bark surreal insults to the staff about their intelligence and skills, or snarl declarations about whatever other thoughts he had that day. “St Paul should never have been sanctified, he was a terrible saint!” he screamed on one occasion, before storming out again. At other times, he’d use the reception area as a stage space, and deliver huge, bellowing monologues on items that had caught his attention in the newspaper that day, pacing around and throwing his arms in the air, before leaving with a sharp “And with that, I say good day to you!”.

The Social Workers set the psychiatric assessment team on to him, but they found nothing much wrong apart from the fact he was an obvious alcoholic. One day, I was unable to suppress laughter at one of his comments, and he too began sniggering out loud, hid his face and left fairly quickly. He always left me alone after that.

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As my six month lease on the flat came to a close in March 1997, and the landlord wanted me out, I realised I didn’t really have the cash to live anywhere else in London, or the connections to make life more bearable there. Darren lived in a large house in Vartry Road that was filled with musicians and offered me a room that was available, but I could barely scrape the cash for the deposit together, and in any case I’d decided I’d had enough. London clearly wasn’t for a below-average wage earner. I wasn’t meeting anyone new, I wasn’t getting out enough, and no matter how many times I walked along Oxford Street, I didn’t see any other old acquaintances, though occasionally I’d see people who were doppelgangers of old friends of mine. I was going back to Portsmouth again, to sleep on a friend’s floor and look for admin work there. Darren confessed that perhaps this might not be such a bad idea. After all, he regularly toyed with the idea of leaving, and money was a problem for him too.

I wouldn’t bother to try to return to the capital again until the arse end of 1999. By the time I returned, Darren had gone off to become a successful session musician with The Manic Street Preachers and Primal Scream (working on their seminal “Exterminator” album) and I’d gained a Magazine Journalism diploma from a technical college in Hampshire. Sometimes I think back and wonder how different my life might have been if I’d stayed put, but ultimately what’s the point?

In any case, by sheer coincidence I finally moved into the Vartry Road house in October 2002, albeit with a different set of people. I still don’t know what that means (if anything) though.