Birth of a Rock'n'Roll ChildI was born Friday 7 October 1955 close to the undistinguished source of west London's Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate. My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton, and suburban west London was marked by a homespun simplicity back then that we can only dream of today. By '63, with my brother a... Read Full Story

Sad Loves of a Seafaring ManIn late summer 1973 the minesweeper HMS Thames set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. It was my first voyage as an Ordinary Deckhand with the RNR and I was just seventeen years old. During the trip I made my best-ever RNR friend in the shape of a fellow OD  Colin who called me only a few years ago from his east London home to talk about old memories, including the time we became trapped by a gang of mangy-looking stray dogs late at night ... Read Full Story

Those Landmark Years Throughout 1976 I gradually sidelined my nostalgic super-elegant image in favour of a far rougher one inspired by the decade of Brando, Presley and Dean. Occasionally I'd relapse, but for the most part I affected the classic uniform of red windcheater, white tee-shirt and straight-leg jeans so memorably worn by James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause". He'd died a week to the day before I was born in early autumn 1955, seen by many as the Year Zero of the ... Read Full Story

Like Some New RomanticSome months after the final curtain triumphantly fell on Richard Cottrell's production of "The Dream" at the London Old Vic, I applied for and was offered the position of sales assistant in Bentall's china department in Kingston-on-Thames, staying there until just after Christmas. A short while later, thanks to the kindness of an old friend and colleague of my father's, Haydn, I found work as part of the cast and crew of a version of Petronius' ... Read Full Story

Darkness in BretignyI'd say things started to go a little wrong for me once I left Westfield in the summer of '83 with a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant in a French secondary school, the Lycee Jean-Paul Timbaud. This spelled my exile from the old drama clique, and I'd not be joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must have affected me. I was after all severing myself from a vast network of gi... Read Full Story

Collapse in an Indian RestaurantThe period straddling late 1992 and early '93 may well have been the most debauched of my entire existence. My memories of it are hazy but they do tell me that during that time, or at least thereabouts, I'd typically rise at about six in the morning soon after which I'd prepare myself for the day by way of a bottle of fortified wine or something along those lines. Then I'd periodically keep my units topped up throghout the day by sipping from a ... Read Full Story

Twilight of an Actor Following on from Jim Cartwright's bitter-sweet two-hander "Two", which I touched on in some detail in "The Trials of a Teetotaller", I performed in one last play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy "Lovelives". Written entirely by the cast, this ensemble piece consisted of a series of sketches centring on the desperate antics of a group of singletons attending a suburban lonely hearts club. Perh... Read Full Story

The Watts of VancouverThrough my mother Ann Halling, nee Angela Jean Elisabeth Watt, I am mainly lowland Scottish and Ulster-Scots. My mother was born in the city of Brandon, Manitoba, but while still an infant she moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of east Vancouver, Canada. Grandview's earliest settlers were usually tradesmen or shopkeepers, in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. My own grandfather James Watt was a a carpenter by tra... Read Full Story

From Tasmania's Tamar ValleyMy ancestry is mixed English, Scottish and Scots-Irish. I'm English through my father, the well-known violinist Patrick Halling, born in Rowella in Tasmania's Tamar Valley to an English mother. While his paternity remains uncertain, he was raised the son of a Dane, my namesake Carl Halling, more of whom later. His mother my grandmother was always known to my brother and I as Mary, but she'd been born Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area... Read Full Story

Introduction:These two pieces set the scene for the entire work to follow, a kind of experiment in memoir writing with a spiritual core. Both deal with my childhood in London in the 1960s. The first was adapted from a Christian testimony dating from 2002, and published at the Blogster.com website on the 1st of February 2006, the second from an unfinished short story penned in the mid to late 1970s about a close friend from Bedford Park where I lived for some thirteen years between ca. 1957 an... Read Full Story