Book transports5 october 2016

M y

l i f e

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MY LIFE ON A STICK

This effort is dedicated to all the people who are in it and some who aren’t, although many will never have a chance to read it as they are a bit dead. So unless there is a library in the hereafter, where I can only hope they would have enjoyed it, I can only commend it to the living.

TRANSPORTS OF DELIGHT

by

Sean Byrne

1 3 5 17 31 61 69 77 95 105 111 129 141 155 163 167 173 179 191 197 209 215 239 245 259 271 281 303 333

Introspection 00/00/00 Buggies & Juggies Austin Special Roadster Our Island Home Getting Car Born & Horny Music In the Blood C.U. then P.F.T.R. Legover London No Big Deal Balloonatics Turning over in Mexico Lost & Found Brazil Mexican Honey Superman Calls Fixxing It for the Fixx and Some Penguins Morocco By Tonka Between Times Heller Hey Steven over here!

Heller II Hot Snowflake & a Road Trip All shit shaped & Bristol Fashion Jordan Shutting Up Shop Pictures Visiting Time Four Poems & a Thought

Introspection This is not an autobiography but there are a lot of cars in it. It’s more a go at trying to remember things, a doffing of cap to the people, places, projects, things and events that have adorned my passage through time and helped shape the first 42 years of my life. What started as a series of anecdotes around the raggedy collection of vehicles that were part of or traversed my journey up to now, soon boiled over into much more but retains the perspective of Transports of Delight!

Most of my meagre earnings have come from music; or participating with the aerial units in films; hot air balloon adventures, running large projects or productions usually involving flying, all Transports of Delight for me and for those who subsequently enjoyed the results. From rather solitary, rural beginnings, I have stumbled through a magical melange of music, wondrous wheels, glorious girls, gifted friends and family, fanciful flying machines, movie making and airborne art; I have lived in two of the world’s biggest and most vibrant cities but rarely been sure about what lay round the next or even the last corner, mostly guided by a lust for challenge, travel, adventure and indeed lust, a powerful motor in itself! It has been difficult pinpointing dates and the order of events as I have never kept much of a working agenda let alone a dairy, (I think I mean diary) so as I ricochet willy nilly up and down memory’s bumpy old cul du sac, taking pause for thought, there will be those in the know who may question the whole sequence of some events; but I hope they will be tolerant and enjoy the naïve realism of these recollections and reflections with a lot of digression along the way. Actually there are even a few complete fabulations which should be obvious!

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00/00/00 For those for whom dates signify something, my parents Patrick Garratt Byrne and Joyce Florence Byrne née Reynolds produced me, Sean Garratt, on December the 14th 1950 and my brother Liam Garratt on March the 21st 1954 both in Royston Hospital. Flint Hall Farm, Royston, Hertfordshire was the family home from my birth to their deaths. I attended Market Hill Infant School in Royston, Holloways Junior School in Barley, Hitchin Grammar School and nearby Cambridge University’s Emmanuel College where I read Enginearing (sic) from 1969 to 1972. I married Claire Ann Heyes my University girlfriend in 1977 when she became pregnant with James Robin Alexander Byrne who plopped onto the starting grid in Paddington on April the 19th 1978. In 1980 after separating from Claire, I met Dianna Alejandra Marin Reyes in Mexico City during June 1980, proposing to her in Brentford Middlesex on the 14th of February 1984 and tying the knot, leaping and yearning, on the 29th of that same month. We didn’t have children until Pablo Alejandro Byrne Marin was plucked from the womb in Bristol on the 13th of March 1990 followed by Ana Cristina Byrne Marin who first smudged muslin in Mexico on August the 22nd 1991. My brother Liam lost his life in a car accident in August 1980, my father passed away suddenly and rather carelessly aged 73 on October 27, 1987 and Mum reached her expiry date in March 1993 aged 70, after a short bout with Cancer. Dianna, Pablo Cristy and I moved to Mexico arriving on the Day of the Dead, 1st November 1993 to live in Tlalnepantla, just outside Mexico City where we are to this day.

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BUGGIES & JUGGIES

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Wriggle and squirm your way back down memory lane through the less accessible tissue banks, and strengthened synapses, spongy recesses, clustered and administered by our hardly understood grey matter as far as you can go, way before puberty, way before the shock of teachers or jabs of vaccines. Wheedle your way into the postlactating, post-nappy and post-crawling times but before taste, escape and danger were of comprehensible concern, when first catchphrases and serious food preferences were being formed and around the time of those early face-to-the-wind street cruising or in-restaurant dalliances witnessed from behind some thematically decorated towel or blanket whilst in your little charriot. Big faces peeping in and you completely out, oblivious, giving your hapless parents a few precious and last minutes to kid themselves it would always be that easy!

There you are betrayed, bespoke and bewildered, on the point maybe of spitting out your comforter for the last time! If my own children’s progress is any guide it seems there is a strong wish to rise into the more autonomous species-defining bipedal stage and pretty soon to the scooter and bike pedal phase and out of these restrictive trolleys. Having said that as long as you were in one you were a babylike and fair game. I remember a Brazilian girlfriend, Nalu, helping to ‘put down’ my first son Robin one evening and stroking my little chap’s little chap, telling me that they liked that and it sent them off.

Well hey what’s new!

Searching through photographs I was pleased to find a picture of me sitting bolt upright in a pram. Surely everyone has one. Roll on a few frames where, having dropped the brush for the umpteenth time, I move a little more to the front and all hell breaks loose as I topple dress and all into the wet grass, surely banging my head on the only protruding stone, root or abandoned tent peg in an otherwise perfect lawn causing a centripetal tug of attention towards yours truly. Always it’s willing recipient, falling over in this way, down stairs, off chairs, on stage during concerts in fact buffoonery at

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Out it goes again!

any given opportunity continues to figure in my life spasmodically, still waiting for the screw that keeps my head on to fully tighten.

I think the name ‘baby carriage’ was an apt description for earlier porta-totties, unfortunate though the implication of parental horses doing the tot-porting: pulling, pushing and puffing may be, and however wagon-like the wheels and springy the springs. For my brother, my Mum opted for a rather splendid Silver Cross affair as shown up top, the wheeled equivalent of a four poster I suppose all majestic and bouncy.

I am surprised no one has ever thought to put a little electric motor on these things so that once full of baby, paraphernalia, shopping, laundry and library books it could receive assisted passage.

Hang on they have – meet the 50 mile an hour totwagon and that looks exactly like David Partridge who you will meet later!!

Terry Gilliam’s vision of babies in street-crawling prams devouring admiring grannies on sight is a great favourite of mine. I mean who hasn’t been scratched in the face by those tiny little un-pared finger nails, worse than a cat!!

On trying to sell a rather beautiful coach built classic Silver Cross model at auction once I was told that it along with certain older electrical goods could not be sold there for

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legal liability and health and safety reasons. Didn’t seem to be a problem when it was first bought, thought I. Silver Cross is I think the only surviving manufacturer from that golden era.

Me, Mum, Aunty Peggy and, I guess, my as yet invisible brother

From the stately perambulator we have progressed through the rather less prosaic buggy - more callously calling it a push-chair - making more sense to the puffing pop – we have marvelled at the simplicity of the carrycot and its collapsible, stowaway undercarriage, and through strollers, baby walkers, the little bicycle seat, to arrive at the mammoth foldaway 8 wheeler convertible car seat/swing/ stroller/ bed/ shopping cart with everything bar the kitchen sink a drive shaft and computer guidance system, but yes, with the bar and plenty of space for an extra kid, pet, concealed firearms or drugs for those so requiring.

Unless your mother took you In-Uteri roller skating as part of her preparations for your birth then these surely are our first set of wheels, bought especially for us and for our exclusive use unless you factor in the value of exercise to the human propellant.

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As much as both genders are exposed in the same early way to wheeled mobility we both also come to grips as it were at the earliest of ages with woman breasts. Though man breasts usually lingered nearby they held no attraction as those lucky enough to make the connection hungrily fixed de rote on those other aptly parsed ‘jugs’ for our milky feasts. It seems only the boys keep the fascination not only for those wheeled sub frames but also for these engorged super frames, for most of our lives going in the guise of at least enthusiast, if not fashion photographer or life art painter or for the

Hey Mum let’s play that Ben Hur game again

strange few, gynaecologist or plastic surgeon. There is little let up throughout life of the hope of acquiring the next set of wheels and securing regular access to those treasured chests. Often the two go hand in hand so to speak, for there were few options for furtive fondling prior to passing the ‘Test’ (as in driving) the unintended double entendre of the pink pass slip opening the way to a perfect union. For who can deny the lure and purity of in-car fumblings combining obsession number one with obsession number two (which is which varying from individual to individual and not including normal sporting activities).

Perhaps sex on a blanket over the bonnet or that Holy Grail of car sex, the hard to get I-spy-book-of-sex, box-ticker a blow job on the move, or the great achievement of sex in a Mini (car not skirt), Fiat 500 or better still Bubble car – sit fondly in your memories.

From depressed clutch and neutral knob to brakes off and loosening belts, buckles and buttons, peeling away civilizations unfastened trappings in a dash to the finish. Of course in the Mini it was better to get in the back first, in the Fiat get out altogether and as for the Bubble, well, it could have served as a condom I suppose.

Nevertheless despite being more appropriate for some contortionists night off than a couple of young conservatives post ball antics, it is indeed a fine thing and, prodding away in the dark both emotionally, actually and sexually, a fine way at some stage to shed your virginity at whatever specific moment that should occur.

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But maybe I am wrong here, those so endowed also like driving (the lure of future unfettered shopping trips?) and from what I have seen there is little doubt that breast size, shape and firmness are shared preoccupations and it isn’t just cos we like ‘em large, the girls do too! And bras no longer hold them in, they actually cross the heart and shove up and out which, though I suppose is for our benefit has to have been asked for by women. Should we then admire, reach out for or comment on the teetering mounds more often than not the riposte is at least awkward if not cheekily stinging. But why I wonder does the explosive flagrante of an exposed nipple in our western culture end up as newsworthy, somewhat shameful to the exposer and fit only for over 18’s when we have been sucking and squeezing these things since cutting the cord?? Whilst some primitive tribes still emphasise their sexuality and clearly not so far back in history the Romans, Greeks, Indians and Pacific islanders revelled in it, societies based on one of the world’s newest religions have all this goodness cloaked in black, making women invisible participants in a scary charade, mostly left without rights or opinion. However scandalous, outrageous or even illegal it may be when so revealed, tits and titillation are fundamental to life literally from before day one however you look a tit.

We are a funny lot and I defy any biologist or anthropologist to explain convincingly why modern humans are the only animal to be shy when it comes to many basic functions.

Why the embarrassment? I guess such a driver as sexual arousal so easily provoked is too powerful and distracting to have it ‘out there’. But such denial or concealing tendencies have given birth to the psychology of Freud and writing of Kafka as well as the man made concepts obscenity, decency and morality which all just emerge as frustration, ignorance, or at worse violence and repression. Legalize soft drugs and let ribald lacivity ensue if you ask me, whilst not forgetting, time permitting, to save the planet and a few species if needs must - as indeed they do!

Another thing, when first born we pudgy, sludgy, grey baby monsters are held up for all to see and compare – oh he has his mother’s eyes, your nose, Dumbo’s ears, that dimple there, all that hair, but nobody says look he has his dad’s dick although in father’s advancing years, the similarity sadly does eventually become more apparent!

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Much younger I felt that girls were a bit mean – well they were - and that unlike today’s Wonder and Triumph cantilever structures, bras were contraptions made to hide away, sort of cancel out the swelling so that girls could keep doing unnoticed all the things that we boys did. At 13 years old I remember asking the girl in the neighbouring caravan at Leysdown Caravan Site on the Isle of Sheppey near Sheerness while on summer holidays with my maternal grandparents Edgar and Flo (yes we knew how to

have fun in those days in this kind of favela on wheels) if she had oranges down her shirt, Was I so stupid, did I really believe that, I mean melons maybe but oranges!?! I think she said they weren’t but with ‘It’s All Over Now’ by the Rolling Stones blasting out rather too insistently from the beachfront fairground I should have understood something. Clearly the stirrings were there but full shakings and understanding were not. Coincidently by then I had mastered a technique of after lights out self-pleasuring whereby everyone else in our tiny caravan was not shaken out of their slumbers but I must have been kidding myself.

I was convinced when after scratching away at the first strange itchings in my loins led to a rather surprise outburst of goo, that what came out was fat and this was my secret diet – nuff said I was keen to keep my weight down and if this meant aligning with the pleasurable sensation of keeping my pecker up so much the better. Had I been on to something, lip-o-suction would have acquired a whole different meaning - more treat than treatment.

This girl didn’t become my first sexual adventure, just another to lose weight over, but we had some fine days careering round the go kart track and pacing the mile out to the sea’s edge to float and paddle amongst the jellyfish, turds and everything else that swept out from London or in from the sea. We would look for and net tiddlers in the outgoing streams and explore the variety of flotsam and jetsam that cuddled up to other detritus abandoned by the outgoing tide. From age of 9 to 12, my closest cousins Michael

I always had the idea that ‘oranges’ was right behind me trying to catch up. Guess not!

and Shelagh Reynolds together with their parents Ray and Pat usually accompanied us on these annual holidays. In the evenings, with the adults inside, we kids would hang around outside the caravan site’s social club. Meat pies and chips were brought out to us with the slightly guilty but self-satisfied bearer asking if everything was alright!

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Those inside bingoed the night away with their two little ducks on all fours or doubledin at the dartboard going for their 501’s whilst others mindlessly swigged beer and pulled on roll-ups, maybe shuffling cards or the domino bone yard, waiting for the pool table to free up as they swilled their Watneys Red Barrel to the sound of Harvey Singalong at the Organ and the nights dubious ‘act’. Abandoned to the terrace, downing the regular supply of fizzy favourite Vimto, we collected and swapped modern aeroplane and sporting personalities cards from the automatic A&BC gum vending machines, or did whatever took our fancy amongst the small grass topped dunes, until sooner or later Harvey would have ‘em all singing about Bulls and Bushes, and not dillying or dallying on the way. Once the Hokey Cokey hit in we knew that, so primed, such late night cavorting would soon see everyone, except those after late night Hanky Panky, spewing out knackered to lead us beerily back to our dreary little shacks on wheels.

Here we are a mile out in the Thames Estuary!

It wasn’t so bad, but the enduring memory I am stuck with is of a child walking around one night outside the club with a pencil stabbed in his eye and looking for his uncle, not wanting to be thought a ninny, I also impale my finger on a nail and am rushed off for tetanus jabs. Were those really the days? Of course they were!

Leysdown Caravan Site, Isle of Sheppey, in the Thames Estuary.

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My maternal granddad Edgar was a World War I veteran and although others would tell us how awful it had been for him signing up for glory and to do his bit as a 14 year old lad, he seemed content having survived the mincing and once retired from his job as a local Trades Union convener lived out his days in Sittingbourne, Kent tending an allotment and getting around in a variety of interesting three-wheelers. These included a motorbike and sidecar and then the closet motorbike that was a Bond Minicar, both of which arrived to great ado the few times he and my gran Flo made it the 100 miles or so up to the farm near Royston where I lived with my parents Pat and Joyce and younger brother Liam.

Flo followed Edgar to the grave within a few months when I was about 18 and it was sad to see some of the family squabbling over their lives’ possessions before Steptoe and Son arrived to cart off what was left and the house was returned to council house rental stock.

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Road tax and self-preservation evasion. One of the Bond cars (Edgar’s not James’s)

Would I lie to you!!!?

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AUSTIN SPECIAL ROADSTER

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Like many a boy of our time, despite the 60’s terror at the looming doom of nuclear war with the unknown but anyway ‘horrid’ Russians - who were surely targeting our local Bassingbourn Royal Air force base in a first strike, I was forever putting myself into dangerous situations, whether climbing high into trees to where the branches were thinner than my as yet uncrushed thumb, or scrambling over the fragile yet to collapse corrugated asbestos barn roofs, or up through still stacked bales into the warm eaves of Flint Hall Farm’s old yet to catch fire tithe barn with its plethora of enormous hairy spiders and their webs, bats, rats, mice and birds.

One of my earliest joys was a tricycle, perhaps the start to a lifelong fascination with three-wheelers. One of the realities with the type I am riding here is that instead of just falling off sideways as on a bicycle you always seemed to end up with the tricycle on top of you, face down in the mud in a ‘bad’ accident and some signs of blood spilled. Looked good though and guaranteed a treat!

I cut my teeth (and probably my lip and a few other things too) on that fabulous tricycle which I adored but later on I especially liked propelling myself on bikes or slender wooden platforms with pram wheels and no brakes other than dug in heels, without any thought for the breaking bones, distraught parents or disfiguration that could result.

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At the end of the day a graze or two was nothing compared to the thrill of haring full tilt between trees and bushes down narrow footpaths or hopping over rock and rut or up precarious ramps to fly a few yards again and again and again. My particular favourite was to see how fast I could pile into our wooden garage door without falling off, usually after a measured jump, without damage to me or the bike and no thought at all for the door or the creepy crawlies who called it home or the extra dents that would cause problems when the door became my summer tennis opponent! No name for it then either - BMX, Cross biking, no tricks, fancy T-shirts or famous riders to seek out,

- in fact no T-shirts, only white undergarments in those days, more likely to be string vests and always white at least to start with. Skate boards? What were they? No springs, carbon fibre or light alloys- no magazines talking about revolutionary titanium frames, no titanium for mere mortals either for that matter, just me and the bike’s heavy old frame with its sewn leather saddle, big rubber tyres and round heavy metal, quick to rust tubes lofting a gut that needed shaking up by things that begged jumping, thumping or crumpling, bumping into or skidding over. The motor biking equivalent was called scrambling!

Living on a farm made these challenges easy to pursue, with muddy puddles in the tractor wheel ruts, paths through the woods sliding over exposed and slippery roots (whether from rain or from moss). The bikes Sturmey Archer gears forever failing to mesh as if squabbling in their small cylindrical home of the rear wheel hub, no Shimano derailleur for us, in fact I think no gears at all at times either and often even no chain, broken during some clumsy foray or other! The wheels and frame were willing allies and extensions of self ready to bend and twist and ‘derail’ along the way.

Bigger boys needed bigger toys and of course my dad had the ultimate fascination – a car, a real car breathing oil, coils, leather seats, sparking plugs, a gear knob and a hand crank - oh my!

He also had a particular knack for fixing things, old radios, kitchen appliances, photo enlargers, cameras, cars, plumbing, and for making toys, shelves, music a mess and so on. With my birth he had gone about extending our little three room home, adding three more rooms by building along into the, by then, conveniently abandoned cowsheds.

It seemed he could lend his hand to anything, always countersinking his screws, and 19

But he wasn’t alone how about this for a potential death trap! Built for Nick Horton by his dad Farmer Anthony. Perhaps they wanted to kill us!

There with Nick, Liam and I is late arrival to the farm,Willy Palin

putting plastic wood on his pin tacks before brushing on paint or varnish. His talents seemed endless. At times his manic search for a missing bit, bob, button, bolt, brace or bracket would see him vanishing off to his mates Cyril and Harold Cooper’s garage and machine shop in the quaintly baptised and nearby village of Fowlmere where under their bemused watch he would don overalls and let loose on the power tools, turning out hinge, flange, threaded rod or other stuff as part of some continuing work-in-progress, Either that or he had a bird nearby, who knows!

Cyril the Squirrel and Harold Hare of Fowlmere Engineering

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Dad’s grass roots hair styling, a Head of his time!

Dad’s riveting fascination for milling machines, welders, drills, bits, lathes, ties, taps and dyes and the rest tried to rub off on me as you would expect, and I did study Engineering at University. Here is a photo of me doing some precision drilling in a dirty white overall a few years later during my course’s obligatory Industrial Experience requirement with Mr John Whitehead’s Herts and Cambs Engineering (As in Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire but – in my mind always parodied to Hearts and Minds).

Busy drilling a hole through my foot

In truth my mechanical, constructional and electrical abilities stopped somewhere short of Meccano, Bayko, Airfix and my Hornby train set though, so it’s likely my grommets, dyes, keys and shafts never quite made spec. I could readily blame the cranky old machinery that whirred and danced erratically in my care, but it was fun watching the metal peeling off and forming spirals washed away by the milky cooling fluid.

More of John later.

I suppose many of Dad’s endeavours were in order to complete the new bodywork for his Austin Seven Special and accompanying trailer tent that were coming clearly into focus in an old farm shed.

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The Austin 7 Before it became ‘special’

In the emptying halls of my memory I have him vanishing off in the 7 at least once with his mate Tony Pearce - the more mysterious of his friends and a Bondesque Reuter correspondent who had set foot in mystical Budapest and used a small cigarette holder 22

to smoke his Dunhills. A later jaunt with tent in tow had Dad hauling me my brother and mum into a distant field for family recreational purposes.With manically pumped Primus Stoves hissing magically away and the fiery light from the delicate gas mantles glowing warmly, I just remember this as a great trip, I think we went to Wells on Sea. This once formative and multi-dimensional but now diminished memory seems to have distilled down to the smell of the kerosene and butane and some tinted black and white postcards images now lost with little or no recall of the portrayed Cathedral, Sea or even the road trip and ingenious tent.

In sooner rather than later years the Special was sold on and the trailer tent kind of faded away into the back of the barn and beyond, but lived on as if by magic as a rather splendid small scale replica which was a treasured object for many years. Unfolded, its green felt lined storage box provided the grass base where it could be fully rigged, pegs, canvas, guys, corner supports, outrigger beds and all. It was simple but sublime and represented something perfect about my father. Whether it all came out of Popular Mechanics or Amateur Model Maker or some other person’s head I don’t know, but for me it was him and a marvel. You could picture him as a kind of Geppetto figure, awkward with children but always building wooden toys for his boys and grandchildren.

A fort for me and later on a fully equipped carpenter’s tool box, for the grandchildren a wheelbarrow, post office van, crane and more. He even built a spinning wheel for some obscure reason too!

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I felt if I could unravel his reasons for making such things maybe I could understand him. I wanted so much for him to be successful and happy. The model trailer tent along with a ceremonial silver canon cigar cutter were objects that I would always check on during much later infrequent visits home. There was also a whole bandsworth of musical instruments, to be precise a violin, double bass, a miniature violin, a guitar, clarinet, trumpet, alto baritone and soprano saxophones, ukulele and for a while two small pianos and drums too. All kinds of books filled yards of shelves and nooks including a long run of Argosy magazines and Dylan Thomas first editions; a large collection of jazz 78’s including Leadbelly, Les Paul, Django and other favourites including Susannah’s a Funnical Man and Abdul Abulbul Amir! Paintings and drawings by friends, pewterware, clocks, homemade pots and plates, a spit, Arabian daggers and a couple of bayonets all lined our shelves, walls and the open fire’s mantelpiece in the Hovel, a lowly place we called home for many years at Flint Hall Farm, Royston and was actually proudly so-named on all correspondence.

They had moved there at the invitation of the farm’s owners Jenny and Anthony Horton, The Hovel representing a move up from the old bus they had inhabited prior to my birth.

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On the sitting room windowsill there was a black phone and large box that looked like a pencil sharpener but which, when cranked, summoned a similar apparatus in a cupboard over at the Horton’s who would then connect us to the local Royston telephone operator’s voice ready to route you to anywhere in the world. Our number had just 4 digits to start with, Royston 2254 – no direct dialling in those days. The phone, most radios, and an electric mantel clock had casings of the world’s first plastic - Bakelite (or polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride in case you wondered or wanted to make some)!

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Great family friend Cicely Hammond, herself a General Post Office telephone operator, standing by our instrument.

Mum and Dad’s first home Next stop The Hovel, Let the parenting begin

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Yes that would be me

This would have been Dad’s idea for sure

Looks familiar!

Learning about hard work, me sitting by watching other people get on with it!

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Lego still to come but there is always something to push up your nose.

Getting to grips with Stocks and Chairs, still don’t understand them!

But trivial details seem to have got in the way: Back to that Austin 7 Special a little gem that I childishly concluded would be a first step on the way to further Triumphs, Morgans, Jaguars, Bugattis maybe an MG, my card collections coming alive one by one. We had the sheds and tools and it seemed the expertise on hand but other than dabble with a later Austin 8 soft top and my brother’s similarly coloured Morris Minor convertible, the horrid truth was that our car pets were to be neither solid nor flashy, nor fast, usually well past their third owner and worst of all ‘a bargain’.

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One that comes to mind was the Hillman Husky as Dad turned his attentions, probably with full justification, to becoming an unemployed, manic depressive with as I began to understand six other kids and something of a back story!

Nice to see the back of this one or actually two if I remember correctly!

Prior to the 7’s departure, I am told part of my formative years included falling off my tree-slung swing and clonking my conk on the Austin 7’s front parts thus doomed to forever lugging rather deformed and very inefficient breathing tackle until at the age of seventeen some polyps and bone were painfully removed with hammer and chisel under eye-yanking local anaesthetic and while the breathing got no better, the great inhaler shrank to a squishy boxer’s snout. I swore that anything to do with hospitals or exams (medical or otherwise) were of no particular benefit and such scrutiny or surgery was to be avoided at all costs. So other than faking it at University, I have staunchly avoided getting a pilot’s licence, prescription eyewear, the prostate finger and so on because tests and torments are not for me!

An odd post-op memory I have is sitting in front of a pretty well-oranged nurse while she delved around in my nostrills with some tweezers pulling out the nasal scabs. The whole thing still gives me the creeps.

The poor old Hillman, bless it’s or its’ soul(s) was clearly well meaning and cosy looking with it’s 0-50 in 24 seconds and top speed of 65 mph. After all it had come from some designers heart and I imagine it will resurface as a cartoon character someday. This road hog (and it was slow and a pig) was to be the chosen jalopy for what would be one of our nicer and oft repeated family jaunts down to the Mumbles and the Gower Peninsula. Dad’s birthplace.

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OUR ISLAND HOME

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My father was a private person when it came to the things that had affected and shaped him personally but it is clear that Wales was where he felt most at home and had a root or two. The way he progressively slipped back into a Welsh accent as we closed the distance between home counties Hertfordshire and his beloved Gower peninsula seemed kind of silly to us as if he was putting it on but I realise now as I write this, that his natural lilt was so and he was just falling back into it as part of the whole nostalgia and joy of these once a year regressions. Having been the sales director and travelling salesman for the Cambridge Battery Service – a company he set up with a friend called Jim Truelove and wife Frances - he was knowledgeable about much of the country and would regale us with stories of places we passed along the way. But in those pre-motorway days he had one great fear and that was Birdlip Hill and whether we would actually make it to Wales in our Husky at all.

Birdlip is a long steep gradient climb in Gloucester which tops out at the Air Balloon Roundabout and I seem to remember some steam and a queue of traffic on our tail but we always made it up there and it was downhill all the way from there. Still before us we had the intimidating Forest of Dean, Offa’s Dyke, and the fortifications of Monmouth Castle before we could feel we had arrived safely in Welsh Wales and left England behind. Sometimes we took the route through Hereford but always passed through Abergavenny, Merthyr Tydfil and Neath. We never passed through Cardiff – probably because Shirley Bassey lived there with her Bay full of Tigers and Dad seemed to prefer avoiding such strident, powerful women!

The journey down through the coalmining Valleys and past still impressive steel works ferociously consuming the coal was way beyond anything I had ever seen back in rural Hertfordshire.

On the very first day on one of these much anticipated trips to Pembrokeshire, my brother and I slewed two pedal boats into each other in Singleton Park which screwed off the top of my right thumb as I put flesh bone and nail between the gunwales in the hopeless hope of warding off what would have been only a minor bump anyway. It also rather screwed up my holidays. No swimming in the sea for two weeks, (exactly the length of our stay) while all the bits knitted back together again.

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Another memory from the journey was being introduced to a thick cut, whiter than white loaf of Mother’s Pride bread, an absolute novelty to a farm boy, so soft, tasty and seemingly fresh (bread not boy!). Nowadays we are all back to far healthier Wholewheat, Stoneground, Buttermilk seed covered stuff.

I occasionally regress and slip a medium cut white loaf in the supermarket trolley recalling that revelation.

A key person and motivation for these trips was my father’s lifelong buddy, local Swansea bandleader and tenor saxophonist: John Lovely who I was sure looked after Gower and its Mumbles (so named after a Celtic word for ‘Breast shaped Hill’) during our absences and was one of the nicest people you could ever meet!! He and Dad together looked like Laurel and Hardy. There is a recording of him and I having a chat when I was about five which I still have somewhere. But on our first trips down to see John and Dad’s beautiful Gower coast and those Mumbles we met John’s clinically mad wife and it was hard to understand how he kept it all together. I remember her as someone who would have perfectly filled out the typical and rather inappropriately named Bedgown and top hat of traditional welsh dress that looks terrifying even now, just lacking the Gwiddonod’s broomstick and cauldron or in Betty’s case maybe not, she had enough cats!!

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Once Betty floated off, polivested, not so gently across her own river Styx, John met and married a blowsy bigsexy woman called Rose. Dad absolutely loathed her in his prejudgemental way!!! John of course absolutely adored her. Oh dear!

John and Rose Lovely

They would visit Royston in their little Bubble Car at least once a year and we were perennial visitors to the Mumbles and Gower coast passing some really great holidays there even after Dad followed Betty down the muddy slipway paddling away into his own dark waters, I imagine him aboard one of those quaint little Welsh fishing coracles muttering away confidently while spinning slowly out of control into the blackness pleased not to be paying the Ferryman, saving on the passage but no inkling where he was going as he drifted into Limbo!

Lovely Bubbly

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In between rock climbing, exploring the pools and trying to surf on flimsy boards in two foot high waves, we would visit places like Laugharne and Dylan Thomas’s House with its nearby dilapidated and un-cared for writing shed. Peeping through cracks in the shed door I am still convinced that there were quires of paper still unsung in there – surely impossible years after Thomas’s death though.

Dad had been his contemporary and one of his favourite stories from their time working together as journalists was beating Thomas in a writing competition. Because my father was an honest man I believe him in the same way I believe his claim that a song he had written and sent to London’s Denmark Street, better known as Tin Pan Alley, to publishers Campbell and Connelly was stolen from him, well at least his tune.

“Harmonizing The Blues”. Every time I hear Try a Little Tenderness (credited to the publishing house) I think how different his and our lives would have been had he gained the recognition and income from just half that one song. Bastards!

With a name like Sean Garratt Byrne you would think that I would have at least gone to a wedding or a funeral to the Emerald Isle at some time, but it wasn’t until many years later that I first tripped the streets of Dublin for a couple of weeks, travelling with a hot air balloon. I can claim to be a true Brit, with each one of my grandparents hailing from a different quarter of the former Kingdom. Strangely perhaps the place I most feel empathy with is Ireland. I just feel Irish. Many have tried to dig into our family tree but it all fizzles out very early on and although we seem to have come from the County Wexford area little is known prior to my great grandfather’s arrival in Wales.

Thomas Garratt Byrne my Welsh born grandfather whom I never met, was something of a Thespian and managed the Grand Theatre in Swansea for many years also appearing there in a number of Gilbert and Sullivan Operettas, and as a minor player with travelling companies. Keeping a strict Victorian house, I think my father must have been greatly shocked when, by then a widower, he ran off with a servant girl and left his modest wealth to her on his death in 1947. The only way he figured in my life was as a kind of ghastly and ghostly emotional shadow over the rather sad man that my father seemed to be. Even so, beforehand this is where the young Patrick, my future father, learned many circus and theatre tricks, he could for example dance on roller skates, juggle and was well versed in Shakespeare. Prior to the war he followed in his 35

father’s footsteps becoming the youngest theatre manager in Britain on taking over the Reperetory Theatre in Bournemouth. All this was to change of course during and after the war when cinema eventually caused the demise of most grand theatres and touring companies in the UK. The realization that my father was shared with an earlier family, still living in Bournemouth, became more apparent when his eldest son Patrick began to visit us while on leave from the air force stationed at RAF Bampton one of the many small aerodromes that dotted post war Britain. He was so like Dad and more an uncle to me until somewhere along the line he took an overdose of barbies and wasn’t there anymore.

You just can’t trust life or people can you? I was too young to fully understand why the Maltesers stopped coming but it seemed too easy to me that someone’s light could be snuffed out so easily, especially by little pills. If you believe in patterns, then when my second half-brother arrived to stay during his Service leaves I hoped he wouldn’t take leave of his senses and chop off his head too! Fortunately Michael and siblings Patricia, Gillian, and Thomas live on though I understand there was another daughter who died young. Coincidentally this makes me a seventh son which should have meant special powers but these have yet to rear within! My pop-sharers are as bemused and disenchanted with Dad as they have every right to be even though to his credit he didn’t run away from his responsibilities and sent regular money to this family which basically meant they stayed poor and so did we!!!. The only time I recall meeting Tommy was when he knocked on our door one afternoon on a surprise visit and Dad sent him packing just because, in keeping with those times, he had a DA, drainpipe trousers and a string tie. I guess that wasn’t the surprise he was expecting. The next time I met him was at Dad’s funeral where he was the official emissary to make sure our father was indeed art in heaven whether dearly departed in a coracle or not, and probably not interested much in how he was hung, drawn or even quartered!!!!

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Michael’s visits were a joy, he could play the guitar and yodel a bit and knew tunes like Peggy Sue, Not Fade Away, That`ll Be The Day by Buddy Holly and Dream, Bye Bye Love, Wake Up Litte Suzy by the Everleys and so on. Much as I had enjoyed sitting round bonfires with school camps that would come to the farm, drinking cocoa and singing Michael Row the Bloody Boat Ashore, Harry Lewis; Foggy Foggy Dew and Swannee River with its old folks at home, I was happier with my brother Michael’s Bo Diddly and Rave On, less righteous stuff strumming and singing away in the cowsheds that adjoined the Hovel where he could get a good echo out of Dad’s old six string.

When Dad was at peace with himself which in fairness to him was much of the time, it seemed we were fortunate to live something of a Darling Buds of May existence on the farm with summer lunches often in the garden under the trees, the sounds, smells and colours of a farm in all its phases.

While much of our daily diet still had echoes of wartime shortages and the ration book, Sunday lunch always seemed something of a celebration and never went by without much activity in the kitchen and the finality of The Roast, either a tender, sumptuous Welsh Leg of Lamb, with brussel sprouts, carrots, parsnips, roast potatoes, lashings of delicious gravy, onion, bread and mint sauces, or if it was beef then perfect Yorkshire puddings and all the trimmings. In fact many people made a pilgrimage to the farm to share these meals.

To follow, rhubarb crumble, blackberry and apple pie, baked apples, Birds Eye custard standing by, or sometimes a gooseberry fool, trifle or spotted dick. Occasionally Dad would prepare fantastic lemon and sugar pancakes and go on about how good the ‘wet Nellies’ wer, which for him had been the soggy ones in the edge of the tilted tray when he was a youngster.

For particularly special occasions rump steak would appear and coffee cake from Day’s Bakery, but every day we enjoyed mum’s lovingly prepared simple hearty food, bangers and mash, stews, shepherd’s pie, cauliflower cheese. Dad’s favourites - steamed yellow haddock with poached eggs, kippers or tripes prepared in milk - were solitary pleasures, whereas newspaper wrapped, Fish and Chips from Kenzie`s chippie in Kneesworth Street, chips and batter clinging to the paper like limpets, was a gluttonous and shared treat. ‘Perfick’ as Pops Larkin might say.

Our immediate neighbours were pigs and bantams and cows as well as farmer Anthony ‘Ant’ Horton, his wife Jenny and children Sarah, Tessa and Nick who owned the 180

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acres that made up this former market garden from the war years; faithful old Snowy on his Fordson Major tractor and the two sheepdogs Lucy and Lassy completed the scene, although from their point of view they must have wondered at the sheeplessness of the fields – baaaa-rren so to speak. No sheep but plenty of piglets which in their early months would escape their runs and often as not seek refuge in my bedroom chased and chided by the farmer as they scampered around, little porky trotters skidding on the tiled floor in their freedom until inevitably they were rounded up, put back to scoff their oats, and use their beautiful noses to forage around the little Nissen hut sties or stir up the slops until eventually fattened up they all would too willingly trot up the ribbed ramp into a trailer and be towed away to some grisly bloodstreamed house of death. Snuffling and A rare image of Snowy chatting away as they went, I am sure they thought they were going on in his tractor holiday, always so optimistic!

Three little pigs, hogging the camera.

The realities of farming often seemed cruel, like when we would hear the squealing as the piglets had their little gonads removed, for reasons I never could understand, but it was an equilibrium of life that we grew up in and, one which apart from the few painful days of noisy castrations and sad departures to slaughter, we enjoyed. I have to say looking at the old boar and father of them all, Charley Fred, in his apartments he seemed to be the most respected being on the whole farm and couldn’t give a fig about anything as long as he was left to himself and provided with a fresh sow every now and 38

then. On the whole pigs seemed happy creatures always looking on the bright side as opposed to the more mundane cows who just chewed the cud all day, came past the front door for milking and then lolled around disinterestedly with their slimy noses and dirty bums releasing methane and them emitting rather pointless and indistinct moos, until they too paid the price of most farm animals.

It was a common sight to see the Royal Air force’s Canberra, Vulcan and Lightning bombers over the fields practicing manoeuvres as well as occasionally the Hawker Hunters of the Black Arrows display team refining their displays. I would arm Airfix and Revell plastic models of them all to hang from the ceiling of my bedroom.

We also had itinerants who would slip in and out of our lives when they came to stay in the BUS, or its close neighbour the STY to the north of the main farm buildings. The former had been converted from an old 40’s jalopy into a weekend retreat and the latter must have been a home for pigs once I suppose but was being lovingly converted into a simple home away from home by retired seaman Jim Lawson and his wife Cicely.

Both temporary residences were works in progress and had hedges, lawns, flowers, vegetables and chimneys that all came into clipped and weeded trim on their occupants’

Me and Mum visiting the Sty

frequent visits from London. Whereas our view was over the southern fields to Reed, they had unbroken views north towards Royston and beyond. Elizabeth Berridge and Graham Moore were the owners of the bus, both writers of some acclaim and with 39

whom my parents maintained a great friendship throughout their lives along with son Lawrence, daughter Karen and eventually their families.

Lawrence would roll up on his Vespa scooter and was studying fine arts in London. He too could play guitar and when his visits coincided with Michael’s a great skiffley time was always on the agenda.

Karen, better known as Tippy, was the perfect crush-on girl for a lad my age. Between Her and the Horton’s youngest Tessa I could share out my fantasies (for that is all they could ever be with our age differences) and the better summer days occurred when they were both around.

Other’s who would appear all through my life on the farm included Godffrey Wicksteed, related to the Wicksteed family down the road who made climbing frames He was a master seaman and had been First Mate on the 1957 Mayflower II’s historic recreation of the trip across to Plymouth, New England. He was also in charge of rigging on the Cutty Sark clipper moored on the Thames until his death at 98 years of age, taking with him much knowledge of rigging these ships. Ironically his brother Ivan who made the climbing frames had a mysterious skin disease that meant he could not go out in the daylight (hmmm Dracula?).

Then there was John Aston, who would turn up for many weeks and weekends, staying with the Horton’s. He spent most of his time cutting their lawn always dressed immaculately in suit and tie.

Writer Peter Young had studied at Cambridge and used to come for a retreat every once in awhile. Dad had picked him up hitch-hiking and he evidently had no interest in anyone else but Dad and would follow him around talking books, poetry, fine arts, crosswords, and the important issues of the day. They would yacker on contentedly for hours.

Later visitors included painter Liam Hanley who had a special fondness for the rolling landscape around the farm and captured it in many of his works. His father James Hanley was a well known author and would visit from time to time. The Hanleys and the Moores were firm friends and when my parents left the Hovel to move into the Big House, they took it on as a shared weekend cottage allowing the BUS to slip into decay.

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Liam Hanley looking the part. What part I have no idea!

Last bus from Moorefield

Ivy and Denis Vestey were other welcome visitors all through our lives bringing as they had a daughter of my age called Diane. From sharing an early bath to later snogging in the back of her parents car and going to summer camps together I suppose it would be fair to say she was my first attempt at a girl friend but it never got, shall we say, meaty, beaty, big or bouncy despite her name Di Vestey! In truly good spirit though, later when at Saffron Walden Teacher Training College, she did introduce me to some of her more carnally inclined girlfriends and has remained a close friend going on to marry Peter Healy and raise a couple of kids Rachel and Nicholas.

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The third family who came to live on the farm when I was about 11 were the Palins, They had a Borgward Isabela car, and as their son Willy and I were the same age we had no choice but to be mates although he had been raised in London and knew all there was to know about girls and everything whereas I was still hard put to imagine how if ever I would get my hands wandering other than down my own trouser front!

A Borgward Isabela as owned by the Palins

Despite living only 40 miles from London I don’t recall ever going there until my early teens, and although I have never read any Dickensian novels the idea fitted that London was indeed populated by all things dark and dangerous with only Dixon of Dock Green and Scotland Yard to protect its populous. The counter to Jack Warner was of course Charles Penrose and his Laughing Policeman although I could never figure out whether he aided or abetted the cause of justice.

Those were the Dandelion Days I suppose, lots of Dixon of Dock Green nature about, fresh picked mushrooms from field and stable, new lain but rather small bantam hen eggs, fresh warm milk, and scratchy old blackberries, raspberries and gooseberries over by the rhubarb patch. For a short season Greengages, plums, apples and wild strawberries, and even grapes. Home grown potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, peas, aplenty as newspaper-wrapped tomatoes ripened in the passage and seemingly endless broad and runner beans lengthened on their creeping vines bringing food and colour to the front garden with their little red flowers. We must have drunk a lot of tea in those days too but I have to say we didn’t grow that!! Instead it was Brooke, Bond or Lyons teas with their fascinating collections of cards inside the boxes of which I managed to collect the lot over the years.

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The occasional coffee might be powder from a NAAFI stores tin or the ghastly Camp variety, an old Scottish recipe of coffee, chicory and sugar with an appearance not unlike Bisto, which I have to say never reached my soft spot but which I gather still inhabits supermarket shelves for those with a hankering.

Evenings usually brought a warming milky drink like Ovaltine, Horlicks, or Hot Chocolate to round off the day.

The evidence is undisputed that what comes out the back end of animals enrichens the soil and is part of nature’s highly successful, way of recycling things. So, at the appropriate time the Muck Spreader was hitched onto ‘Fergie’, the little grey Ferguson tractor, filled with manure and dragged slowly around the unploughed fields magnificently flinging its load everywhere it seemed apart I suppose, from into the farmer’s pipe as he guided the little tractor, although if the smell of the pipe smoke was anything to go

by I could be wrong in that summise! I am still not convinced about this marriage of convenience, especially when on occasions a municipal sewage truck would arrive and similarly spray its decaying human slurry around the fields.

The cycle of farming is wonderfully predictable and however smelly, soggy and cold the winter months, with snow occasionally drifting across our access to the outside world, the country spirit thrived and pulled us through. All of us would dress in front of the small coke fired Rayburn stove in the Hovel’s little kitchen, and keeping clean was a 43

matter of evening immersion in a slow filling hot bath helped by a parade of steaming kettles which meant you curled up at one end of the tub as it mixed in and then eased your toes down to the delicious hotter end. Then running to the sitting room and drying off, shivering for a while in front of the sitting room’s open fire, the silver birch logs’ beautiful bark curling further back and blackening to flame as the timber furnace blazed away, it’s yellows, oranges, blues and reds devouring the labours of all the finding, dragging, sawing, splitting and stacking. Gradually the front half of you tended to toast.

Eventually we would tuck in under cotton sheets and heavy wool blankets maybe tossing in a hot water bottle or a cat or two for good measure and bodily warmth (Brandy and Soda, two vicious buggers), my brother Liam and I curling up in our bunk beds. At some stage I found it more comfortable to sleep in the sitting room by the slowly greying fire which was good as it gave me the chance to peep out of the window and occasionally catch Tessa Horton’s shadow as she undressed in her room. Close to midsummer, I would sneak out of the house some balmy nights and run naked under the moon through the woods like an animal, maybe a mile or two before coming home again incredibly nourished by such a secret and feral experience.

With spring sprung and the drudge of ploughing in the manure and sowing accomplished, summer brought the carpet of green corn tips teasing the fields’ surface and thrusting towards the sun, changing the colours, smells and sounds of the entire landscape, as far as you could see trees, fields, hedgerows, gardens, everything. Nature was growing its new skin, birds, insects, animals, flowers urgently reshuffling interdependent in a world much more fragile than we realised or gave any importance to then. Too soon the golden fields signalled the end of waiting and calm, each slender stem now a few feet high and bearing heavy fronds of wheat or barley waving and bowing in the breeze.

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You could feel the tension as harvest time neared, maintenance on the old Massey Ferguson combine harvester complete as it waited, oozing grease. Then the magic morning when all hell let loose, the harvester roared clumsily into life and lumbered into the crop, lowering it’s clattering blades to rip into the ripe fields of barley and wheat.

Some years just one heavier than usual storm might flatten much of the heavy headed crop and, unable to recover, sodden, it would begin to rot without yielding anything for all the hard work and care that had brought it so far, so close.

During holidays I was allowed to help and later even got paid for it. I would position the tractor and trailer up alongside the enormous pulsating harvester as it cut and threshed its dusty way across field after field, in a scene repeated all over our little part of the world and beyond as farmers rushed to complete the task as quickly as possible.

Rabbits, hares, partridges, hedgehogs pheasants and all kind of birds, animals and insects especially ladybirds followed, fled or were flattened by this enormous shaver that laid bare acre after acre leaving a trail of straw and stubble behind it and delivering its pearls into my trailer. Once full, back to the farm buildings where the haul was tipped into a huge inverted pyramid shaped hole in the Little Barn and from there it was lifted and sifted again in a large pulsating wooden dressing machine, passing through various trays, until with all the chaff blown away the golden seeds were lifted into large wooden storage silos by a combination of conveyor belts and elevators. With all its machinery coming to life this otherwise quiet little barn became the noisiest and most dangerous place on earth where you could ‘drown’ if you fell into a grain bin or easily lose an arm in the enormous belt driven mechanisms.

The next stage (and one of my favourites) was baling. Another rather elegant machine was required for this task, feeding in the dried straw at one end and chucking out large bricks held together with binder twine, a coarse string actually produced from Mexico’s Yucatan sisal crops although I didn’t know that then. These were collected and stored in the barns and fields for animal bedding but also provided a tremendous natural climbing frame. One day while travelling back from the fields sat atop a trailer full of bales I was

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horrified to see the other side of the trailer load toppling away from me. On tumbling to the ground with my side of the load I realised that my perception of movement had tricked my body. Rather like at a stop light when you feel you are going forwards if the vehicle besides you moves slowly and unexpectedly backwards.

It seems that to be a farmer you have to be prepared to be covered in dust, grease, shit, piss, blood, rain, mud, cement, creosote, more shit and more dust all year round. No wonder they like a cool pint!

Farmer Anthony Horton particularly enjoyed his snuff. When he himself snuffed it his wish was to be buried over-looking the fields on the farm.

He lies in an unmarked grave at the edge of Seven Rides Woods.

Pubs played a vital part in our lives. The most popular was a mile’s walk away down the Belt called the Eagle Tavern until it closed its doors in the 60’s. Then the Cabinet four miles away in Reed became the place if it wasn’t the Green Man, The Old Bull Inn or Boar’s Head in closer Royston. Left at home I would usually be rewarded with a Britvic Pineapple Juice on the raiding party’s return.

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Royston is a chartered market town where people would bring their animals for auction and their produce for sale along with other odds and sods which would go for pennies as the hammer came down making one man’s junk another’s treasure. It was magical to stroll around on a Wednesday even after the livestock side closed. One of the benefits was that on market day the pubs could stay open all day.

The long closed Eagle Tavern. Just how a pub should look!

Although not a big drinker, there was a time when Dad decided that home-brewing wine would be a good idea and taking advantage of the readily available dandelions, elder flowers and a variety of berries not to mention the productive vines that covered the back wall of our half of Flint Hall, we soon had carboys and demijohns full of mawkish liquids bubbling away through fermentation traps which in the end belied themselves, becoming intoxicating brews far more interesting than the Bulmer’s Woodpecker Cider that had been my alcoholic awakening at kid’s parties. It seemed you could make wine out of almost anything so, bottled, dated and custom-labelled, these questionable concoctions stood in ranks on the passage shelf. The one that finally got me under the table was the wild strawberry variety.

Almost ready to be drunk

Apart from the home brew, I was lucky to have the first 17 years of my life breathing farm air, walking or biking almost everywhere, eating food reared or grown locally, sawing logs and collecting firewood and all with the absence of TV until I was about 14.

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It was BBC radio’s Navy Lark, Beyond Our Ken, Round the Horne, The Goons, The Archers, Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites, Jimmy ‘the Kid’ Clitheroe, Hancock’s Half Hour, Down Your Way, Letter From America with Alistair Cooke, Desert Island Discs and even Gardeners’ Question Time that honed us, colouring and informing our lives.

Life outside your own was what came through the old valve radio with it’s few English channels and lots of hiss, interference, canned music and foreign chatter as you twirled the dial, hoping to find some mystery voice on some overlooked frequency. Meanwhile we contented ourselves with The Light Programme; The Home Service and Third Programme or perhaps the more exotic harder to track down BBC World Service broadcasting away in a number of languages to the ever-shrinking British Empire and increasingly growing, more complex world. Another miracle was the simple crystal set which could scratch out Radio Luxemburg 208’s ground breaking evening music shows.

These eminated from the most powerful transmitter in Europe, once the origin of German wartime propaganda broadcasts by Irishman William Joyce, comically known by the British as Lord Haw Haw - that was our narrow window on the world along with the BBC’s 6 clock news.

Marvellous little Crystal radio receiving signals from as far away as Luxembourg!

The nostalgic image of a family crowded round a Bakelite or marquetry-cabinet encased radio warmed by its assortment of humming bulbs somehow filtering through those tremendous declarations of war or peace could be no more real, and endured long after the wars finished, the BBC announcers making English their own, never mind the Queen’s claim, purring in a way that made even the barely decipherable but hypnotic Shipping Forecast something to look forward to. I would wonder at the reality of all those veering and backing winds sweeping over vast areas with names like Dogger, Crommerty, German Bight, Fisher, Finisterre, Bay of Biscay and Trafalgar, picturing brave seamen battening down the hatches in their sowesters and smocks retiring for a shot and a snout thankful for the heads up. Then the six pips brought the BBC`s transmissions to an end 48

for the day and you were left wondering for those hardy seafarers, the trawlermen and even pirates and smugglers who might have tuned in to that calm voice to help better steer a path between monster waves, whirlpools, giant squid, a rampaging Moby Dick or icebergs. Certainly no thoughts then of Cap’n Pugwash rogering the Cabin Boy or Master Bates and Seaman Staines up to no good in the bulwarks.

You could only imagine what life was like too for the courageous yet mindlessly bored souls manning crucial lighthouses and lightships or weather vessels surely enjoying some calm periods to hang out the washing and dance a quick Hornpipe to pass the time, but mostly lashed by the unforgiving forces of the sea in all its fury. It’s a mystery to me how they built those lighthouses in the first place under such conditions!

The radio represented contact with the outside world far ahead of Newspapers and letter post. Telly was in its infancy at least in our house where it seemed to be a very unwelcome birth all together. Even after Dad started managing Sydney Rumbelow’s local music shop which also supplied televisions locally on a rental basis, he wouldn’t permit such a thing in the house until one day he brought one home to ‘test’. This test seemed to take rather a long time until one day he put a huge H shaped aerial up on the chimney and it seemed that testing, at least of the set and the BBC’s black and white programming would continue. No ITV though with its horrid adverts, which anyway needed an aerial in the shape of an X. We only caught commercial television on infrequent trips to Mum’s brother Ray’s family in Maidstone, Kent where I seem to remember Sgt Bilko and Top Cat were amongst the viewing diet as well as some adopted or adapted game shows, mostly bought in from the distant land of those strange Americans.

Programmes like Champion the Wonder Horse, Roy Rogers, Bonanza, The Lone Ranger and his Red Indian sidekick Tonto as well as Wagon Train and many others gave the impression of the US as a truly wild and unsettled country with justice dealt by the best gunslinger and ‘the law’ a rather flawed affair altogether if you were a Red Indian or Negro. Fairly accurate I think!

There was plenty of subliminal racism and use of archetypes in many of these programmes, for example, if you are Hispanic it is clear that Kimosabe as Tonto calls The Lone Ranger means ‘Quien mas sabe’ or ‘who knows more’ Whereas Tonto is the Spanish for fool. If ever a Mexican appears on the scene he has his crossed bullet belts, is a bandit and inevitably drunk.

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Dad had also been proud to bring home one of the very first very expensive battery powered BUSH transistor radios which enjoyed a charmed, portable life until it slipped into the bath in the middle of the Navy Lark without of course electrocuting anyone or even exhibiting any fizzing death throes.

There wasn’t the urgency or immediacy of today. Things could be taken rather more calmly, with time to chew over the manicured and considered opinions as expressed in the National daily nwspapers as well as Sunday’s Times and Observer rather than today’s quickshot scoop-driven reporting with the issue deadline usually more important than the issues themselves. Serious considerations of the news and general state of world affairs could usually wait until the weekends when in balance a ‘trashy’ like the News of The World or Sunday People would also be lying around exposing naked truths and pandering to common beliefs. Best of all the 60’s brought the introduction of the welcome and fought over Observer and Sunday Times colour supplements. I later collected old Picture Post and Life magazines and these colour supplements seemed to take over the role of such respected pillars of information which had documented the world for earlier generations but were losing out to electronic media and becoming relatively unsustainable on a standalone basis.

As a youngster there was also The Children’s Newspaper, Look and Learn and Boy’s Own all of which fascinated while The Eagle, Valiant, Tiger, Dandy, and Beano were comics that were pure and glorious fantasy worthy of every minute spent immersed in them. Dan Dare and Desperate Dan, Biffo the Bear, Korky the Cat, Dennis the Menace, Roy of The Rovers, wonderful stuff, and perhaps the greatest pay off was at Christmas when you were assured of the wonderful yearbooks plus of course Rupert the Bear`s new annual in your carefully hung pillow case. Also welcome in the parental stocking was Carl Giles cartoon annual..

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Rupert was brilliant because you could enjoy it on many levels. It had the story unfold in pictures, headings, short captions, rhyming couplets, and full prose. I confess I was a caption’s reader myself which seemed to run more at the pace of the illustrations.

Thank you Mr Bestall! Thank you too Enid Blyton, Beatrix Potter, A.A. Milne and Ernest Sheppard, Rev Wilbert Awdry; Michael Bond; Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling and of course Edward Lear who all fed from and then helped define English culture!

How perfectly special you all still are.

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I always rather liked Geography and early on in my teens insisted on a subscription to the Royal Geographical Society’s Geographical Magazine which, like America’s similarly focused, but then more expensive National Geographic, still provides an eye-opener to our world with amazing adventures, discoveries and insights. In both, most months, there is a supplement of a map or wall chart which held enormous fascination for me and instilled a strong wish to travel, live a big life and wear the mantle of adventurer or pioneer somehow.

Even so, unlike today, the world seemed so huge and inaccessible from the reality of a small chair in front of a log fire on a farm near Royston in the middle of nowhere even though sitting on the 0 degrees Longitudinal Meridian Line it was in some way the beginning of everywhere!

A lasting memory of the farm was the annual Vintage Motorcycle Hill Climb that was staged in the Pony Field.

On a reliably muddy weekend for many years enthusiasts would roll up with their lovingly maintained historic relics and undoubted skills to not only disgrace themselves with the hill climb trials but also scramble enthusiastically if also ungracefully in and out of the wooded slopes that graced the side of this ever ponyless field. I could only have been 8 or 9 but the rich Castrol oil smell and the camaraderie around this beautiful obsession were immaculate and entirely magical. The star of the show for me was always the Morgan three wheeler which shone like no other car I had ever seen and blupped its way to inevitable victory in its category in which it was the only participant.

This and the skills of the scramblers as they coaxed their vintage machines through an impossible course amongst the trees and almost vertical climbs was pure poetry in muddy motion.

London’s King Alfred’s School had evacuated to the farm from Golders’ Green during the war and built a bomb shelter still complete with bunks as well as heaps of rotting rubbish which yielded toys and curiosities during my early explorations of the farm.

Most years, carrying on this tradition, the Pony Field - which was in the National Camping Guide - would host a group of deprived children from London whose bonfires and sing-a-longs were so much part of my sense of being in those days, they would set about re-creosoting the barns, in exchange for a short time away from their bombed out London in those still uncertain and deprived days. I mentioned earlier a recording where I recount an evening spent in their company.

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My mum had served in the WAAF Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and my Dad had risen to Sergeant in the Army being put in charge of an Italian POW camp near Royston.

Apart from gathering that they met in London where they lived for a while during the War my parents hardly talked of those heady immoral times that witnessed their meeting, courtship and war service. I do know that their union was frowned on by both grand-dads and that they were ostracised for many years prior to my birth which it seems was a catalyst for forgiveness. Glad to have helped! The most important part of their lives in just a bit of one paragraph then. Maybe I should look through that suitcase full of letters that passed between them and know more!

I remember sneaking my first 45 RPM EP record, The Beatles Twist and Shout, into the house. This purchase was made difficult by the fact that my father managed Rumbelow’s, the only record and music retail shop in Royston at that time and I had to persuade June of the upstairs record department not to leak the purchase to him as he didn’t like the Beatles, my Beatle Cuban Heel Boots, mop top or any of the new voices and styles that were springing up during the swinging sixties (which somehow completely swung past Royston).

What treasures there were in that shop, had we but known! Dad would sometimes let me bring home the guitars and amps. I remember a beautiful white hollow body electric that must have been a Framus, a Hoffner Violin Beatle bass, a little red Rosetti guitar similar to George Harrisons first guitar – his now worth 800,000 dollars but then costing just a couple of quid! There too a plastic Grafton saxophone that was interesting.

In those days there were no American Fenders, Gibson or Gretsch instruments to be found, only major recording artists had those, purchased in The Great United States of America or in the Beatles case in Hamburg. Although I didn’t buy my first guitar from Rumbelows I did eventually get my first amplifier which was an amazing split VOX AC30 as used by the Fab Four.

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My 14th birthday present of a 50 quid Swedish made Levin Goliath acoustic bought from Ivor Mairantz’s music shop in Soho sounded nice through its clip on De Armond pick-up and turns out was also Pete Townsend’s first stage guitar, but when I finally got a Guild Starfire IV as used by Dave Davis of the Kinks I lost myself in the feel of the neck, the sheen of its cherry red body, the smell of the guitar in its plush lined custom case and the wonderful sound of the combination. It lived by my bed and is still one of the most beautiful things I have ever owned. I stupidly sold both much later in life. The AC30 truly had the best sound I ever got from any amp and the guitar was an absolute gem. I still have my Levin, which was drastically improved when rebuilt after taking an unexpected shower in a motor home toilet while we travelled ballooning in Europe.

Thereby hangs a tale, one day in the sixties my father got in a crimson rage over something or other and grabbed my Levin by the neck and raised it above his head but before bringing it down to smash it to pieces, something got the better of him and he picked up his own lovely little guitar, on which I had learned, and smashed that to bits instead. I suppose I should have thanked him but I loved both instruments and was sad that his temperamental instability in the end only brought misery to him and anxiety to his family. Such violent outbursts were not uncommon for a while and though it was never vented on us directly it made me angry that he couldn’t control his inner angst and consequent wrath, something that also caused him to grind his teeth a lot.

He eventually rebuilt the guitar, painting it black, but it never sounded or felt the same.

My Mum was a patient soul and definitely a calming influence but for a long time his dependence on Barbiturates and even a short time away in a mental home distanced me from him and any hope of understanding his inner torments. John Mitchel, a local artist friend, introduced him to Subud, a kind of free-Buddhism which may have helped calm him down, but there were moments I wanted to kill him for the times he darkened the atmosphere of our usually happy little home and had even singled out the poker I would use without perhaps being too sure about how and where I would poke it.

Most days he would hammer out some old jazz favourites on the upright piano, Margie, Georgia, Honeysuckle Rose, blue Moon or something of that ilk, which usually indicated he was at peace with himself for a while. A piano which Harry Saunders, another regular visitor and artist with his wife Pat, had decorated with New Orleans images and which I still possess and treasure, a resonant reminder of the strange inaccessible man who was my father, with so many under-developed and un-exploited talents.

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I am sorry to say I loathed school from the age of 11. Caps and ties, shorts and satchels played no part in my early education or idea of the world. Discipline and conforming had little place in my aspirations or upbringing until Hitchin Grammar School imposed it’s hard-headed ideals.

Royston’s Market Hill Infant School where teachers Mrs Feast and Miss Giffen did their best to control us all from the tender age of 5 until 7 was OK and I learnt the art of pissing contests if nothing else before having the opportunity to enter Holloway’s junior school in Barley a few miles from Royston. This was a small but amazing establishment run by Benjie Rae and her assistant Judy together with a couple of old English Sheepdogs. Benjie especially encouraged us to read, cook, play, explore, perform, question and create, 4 years of foundation and fascination for life, nature and how to inter-react between the 30 of us who were fortunate enough to attend this garden of enlightenment. I am sure the value of this schooling in my life is immeasurable but once again the memories are too misty and disparate.

At a Holloways’ school reunion recently, the first in 40 years, we found ourselves well grounded in that teaching/learning experience having taken on what followed feeling prepared and able, I think such isolated brilliance also left us all a bit confused, by the subsequent impact of harsher, less sensitive education methods, and ironically perhaps we were a little less well equipped for the unforgiving tussle that is survival in the real, uncompromising, hardnosed world as it gradually envelopes and dissolves you like a carnivorous plant if you let it.

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There is a particular road that passes the back entrance to Flint Hall Farm and makes its way past the now decommissioned Eagle Tavern and Wicksteeds climbing frame manufacturers to Barley. It is a narrow B road which was the route the school bus took us to Holloways School but it is also where I first did 100 mph in a Riley as passenger of John Mustill, a Michael Bolton look-alike crooner who fronted the Evergreens band with whom I strummed my stuff from the age of 14 tender years.

The little humpback bridge halfway along its ‘straight’ made it all the more fun. One of the cars we were sometimes driven to Holloways school in by Mrs Richmond of Richmond’s Coaches was a Jaguar MkVII and I am sure we almost reached that mystical ton in the Jag.

Good time to mention these two, too fast cars Moving on to ‘grown-up’ school in Hitchin my name changed and ‘Sean’ became ‘Byrne’ and you had to put your hand up to speak. A 20 mile train journey from Royston, it was the only suitable day school for me. The line still operated steam trains to start with which was a great adventure until towards the end of my school years they changed to diesel locomotives and for some of the schedule little two car railbuses.

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These changes took away a lot of the magic that journey provided. The route took us through dark smoky tunnels, much whistling and churning of wheels as the engine and six or more carriages, some with isolated compartments and some with a corridor all the way down to the guards van, clatterd through Ashwell, Baldock and Morden and Letchworth Garden City screeching to halt in most of them until slowly sidling into Hitchin and then usually pressing on to London’s King’s Cross. A good opportunity then, to get to know the girls who were on the same journey to Hitchin Girls Grammar, Letchworth’s mixed grammar or St. Christopher’s school whose students were notable for not having to wear a uniform. Nick and Tessa Horton had gone there and I was lined up for it being in the mould of Holloways, but, as a private school, my parents just couldn’t afford it so on with the cap, down with the self esteem, off to Hitchin Grammar

it was to be! There was a rowdy upper school mob on the train too but I was lucky that their leader Brian Taylor was the son of my Mum’s best friend Marjory in Royston and he conveniently kept his gang from hounding me.

The rail transport it was always good to miss

My parents decided I should learn to Ballroom dance around this time so I could begin to have more local friends. Living on a farm and going to school 20 miles away meant I had few mates in Royston; Michael Swann, Mick Varney and Gary Williamson were contemporaries traveling to Hitchin but mostly in different forms and we rarely saw each other out of school.

The lack of available girls whether at home or at school was beginning to matter, I needed to start somewhere and I couldn’t see too much wrong with the idea of an hour or two spent clasping a girl to my chest and sashaying her round a dance floor, whatever the context. So I learnt the Waltz, Foxtrot, Chachacha, Quick Step and I think we had a bash at the Rhumba and Tango too. Off we went to competitions, usually coming last but who cared. I had a girl in my arms!

Needless to say, I mostly loathed senior schooling other than for a few highlights and a few special people. Emlyn Williams was an inspirational Maths teacher and charmed some incredible results from my calculating little brain to enable me to attend Cambridge University later on. He and the Physics master (Mr Hunt who bristled to the nickname of Carey of course) were the only aspirational teachers. The Music, Geography and History classes were usually fun too but the rest fell into the hands of the

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usual inadequates - pompous, knuckle rapping, sadistic, uninspiring, gown-sweeping practitioners of their art, relishing in the farce of detention but always supporting the team – ‘Come UnHitched’ or whatever it was they shouted during our Rugby games which were more unruly scuffles than matches. My sporting highlights at this school were limited to unofficially beating the school tennis champion once and setting a record for the Hammer Throw by rather symbolically hurling a ball and chain as far from myself as possible. A good burst of speed at the hurdles and 100 yards put me in third places or so whereas my performances in the cross country and swimming can only be described as ‘incomplete’. My gallant efforts had me puffing in close to last the times I couldn’t avoid competing. The sticky, batty worlds of Hockey and Cricket passed me by, not requiring any gifts that might pertain to me.

The climax to my scholastic disenchantment was when my buddy Woody Woodshill and I were caned by Headmaster M.G. Dolden, for bunking off our last year`s time-filler Biology classes to jam in the local music shop, something much more important and closer to our hearts. What annoys me still and most of all is that I let him do it.What was I thinking? I have the feeling that he didn’t enjoy it any more than me but in those days the system put us both in those positions, me bent over a chair without the foresight of an exercise book in place and him arm raised with birch rod in hand directing his institutional wrath unflinchingly towards my poor bum. Boy did it sting, six of the worst, humiliating, alienating and therefore stupid!

By the time I left Hitchin I had been playing guitar with a band called the Evergreens for a number of years and one time while still there, we were booked for the end of year school dance, when the girls and Boys grammar schools linked arms and danced to the same drum so to speak. I watched the headmaster dancing away to some waltz or other and wished we could have changed the rhythm to a calypso or something to catch him wrong footed! It would have been difficult anyway as we had no such numbers in our repertoire which consisted mainly of songs about getting smoke in your eyes, a lady being good, A train and rain in September!

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I did however enjoy Rugby Union which I took to like a toad to a swamp playing as Prop Forward for the school`s XV for my last 2 1/2 years there. When I tried later to get involved in the sport at the beginning of being ‘up’ at Emmanuel College Cambridge things weren’t so promising. Charging around during trials on a completely soggy, foggy day when you could see no further than half the pitch, and where a high punt would disappear for a while, I was sent off by my own captain, a rather pathetic history major from the bottom of my own college staircase, for laughing and joking with the

opposite team who were all from our college anyway. Doubtless he has been swallowed up by his own annals with the passing of time while my only contact with Rugby since was to share the same staircase later with Gerald Davies, the already established Welsh International star. From then on my sporting interests turned more towards hurdling closed college gates with my girlfriend! I did manage a spot of tennis, croquet and pinged a pong or too along the way when the fancy took me.

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GETTING CAR BORN & HORNY

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Learning to drive was an easy business living on a farm. Put the car in the middle of a field give a lad the keys and run for dear life. A good plan and apart from some guidance from Dad on double de-clutching and toe/heel coordination as well as how to get out of a skid and drifting I was on my own, an old Austin A40 proving a great ally careering down lanes and across fields.

In those old cars you could lift the bonnet and all the tubes, wires, levers and lumps kind of made sense like my little book on ‘How Cars Work’ all laid out in reality. The spark plugs pointed at what they were doing inside the straight four engine, which was helpfully upright and lined up with the cars direction, cables trooped off obediently to and from the distributor cap and, big hoses sloshed the coolant around, small ones carried the petrol, a few fuses and that was that. Anything at all complicated and there was always a Haynes guide to see you through. No computers, turbos, hardly any fuses, at best some twitchy guages for engine information on the dash, amperes, volts, temperature and fuel level at most with perhaps an oil pressure guage, always too low. When it got hot - steam, when it was running out of oil - noise and smoke, the intermittent windscreen washer was ahead of its time, but entirely due to faulty wiring, the juddering headlamps mustering all their candlepower, dimly suggesting what mixomatosis stricken rabbit might be looming in front of the bumper rather than beaming halogenically into the next county.

This robust little car was the forerunner to my first on- road experiences. By then we had a Ford Consul – a fine car with huge bench seats, registration TLC 3 and a steering wheel gear shift that could shoulder its way effectively through the protesting cogs. The police drama Z Cars was a favourite, TV cops Jock and Fancy in their Ford Zephyr solving Merseyside’s crimes, a realm on from good old Jack Warner’s Dixon and his lamp post. The Consul was a step down from a Zephyr but had some of the airs if not graces of its more expensive sibling and was a good vehicle to learn on, once you dominated the dustbin full of gears and lackadaisical, rudderlike directional response.

I took driving lessons in a Ford Anglia which was a Wayne’s World apart from the Consul, teeny by comparison with a stick shift and perky. Automatic gearboxes were not an option, hardly found on cars in England (except perhaps the DAF 600 which was fully automatic, cleverly managing to do without gears at all), and anyway where would be the fun in that?

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When I took my test in the Anglia I failed first time round which was rather a surprise, but I put it down to the difference between familiarity with the motorised houseboat

Wot, no gears!

Daf if you ask me!

that was the Consul and lack of practise on the little motorised dinghy that was the Anglia. Second time, after a few lessons on the Consul, I took it along and passed with flying colours - well the slip was still pink - curiously not actually a flying colour on any national or ships flags!!

It is a strange affair, the driving test; hamming up on the Highway Code and understanding the way it worked were important. The instruction from the examiner was to carry on straight unless he gave directions to the contrary. On my second attempt we set off from the Hitchin test centre and he said nothing at all for ages. I would arrive at a junction, look left, right, left again, sail across, then the next then the next and so we went on, I wondered if he had fallen asleep. Emergency stop, backing into a space (those little matchsticks stuck in view in the seat leather helping a bit), three point turn, (quite a crunchy affair in the bulky swamp rider Consul), hill start and then the question and answer bit. Finally back in the test centre and the wonderful words: – “congratulations you have passed” – with the imagined but unsaid, ‘look you little wanker just cause you’ve passed your test doesn’t mean you’re Stirling Bloody Moss so keep your speed down lay off the scrumpy and watch your step.’

Poor guy and his clip board on to the next wet behind the ears Mike Hawthorn or foureyed head-to-the wheel spotty simpering wannabee or someone’s granny on her fiftieth attempt. Most instructors’ cars featured a double set of pedals and steering wheel but he just had a clip board and thoughts of lunch! As the job descriptions say ‘Driving Instructors and Examiners spend most of their time sitting in cars’.

Free then, roadworthy and authorised, I embarked on my driving life! There are those, like my Mum, who never get round to it or don’t see the need, but for me it is one of the most liberating and enjoyable activities on offer and has played a big part in enabling me to live out some of my dreams.

I bought the old Consul from Dad for 20 pounds I think and one of my first ever A to Bs was to the Plumpton Blues and Jazz Festival with school friends Gary Williamson and Mick Varney where we camped out and I shared my sleeping bag with a rather spotty girl. I was sure that spending the night together a la Rolling Stones was meant to

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be bit more than it was but our exchanges hardly passed sharing body warmth as, fully dressed, we shivered and clumsily cuddled our way through to the next day. But in the I-Spy book of life it was a great box to tick and the Festival was great too. Peter Green with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers being the standout for me.

I learnt the value of petrol and the fact that of all the fluids involved to keep a car running this fossil fuel derivative was the most important, and that many people can become mean when sat at the helm of these machines. One afternoon the Consul began to sputter and fail as I was terminating a rather long overtaking manoeuvre on the way to nearby Baldock. Seeing that completing the task was impossible I began to brake and look hopefully for a gap to pull back into.

The rather unfriendly people in the line of traffic didn’t seem to want me back with them, preferring to see me die, but I like to think the heavily breaking oncoming truck was rooting for me, we were in this together! I only just managed to squeeze in as the oncoming traffic accelerated past. Then of course without gas, I proceeded to slow to a halt which pissed The British Consul off the people behind me even more.

It must have been in the Consul that first Royston girlfriend Sue Humphris and I, both late starters, unburdened ourselves of our virginities in a consensual and bungling affair, asking each other if that was it, somehow expecting nature to put all the pieces together, answer all the questions and propel us into extatic convulsions. Even so it was nice to share that unique moment with someone I really liked and once achieved we used every opportunity to clamber into the back seat to enjoy and better understand our delvings. You feel that parents must know this is all going on but fortunately everyone continues in denial.

If the Consul was an honourable car, my next was nothing less than a capricious rogue. The

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The happy hippy shaking couple

Ford Consul Capri GT was a short lived affair rather in line with the Edsel costing more to produce than its sale price. What I bought was a souped-up version with twin Webbers and wide wheels- It had been repainted in and over its original colours and sported wide wheels and non-original rectangular headlights.

Ford Consul Capri GT

It made a great noise and went like the clappers. I decided to get rid of it when it unexpectedly went into a 360 spin before coming to a halt at a traffic light in Cambridge one day. My girlfriend Sue was standing waiting for me. I can’t remember if she was impressed by my impromptu pirouette but I felt stupid. No one hurt and amazingly nothing hit but it was all too unpredictable for me and I decided to move on to wiser wheels. Around this time Dad had aquired a Wolseley 16/60

Now this was a rather fine car with beautiful rich plum leather upholstery, a fine paint job and lots of chrome. It was a roller. Well it rolled about a lot let’s say. The road up to our house on the farm would have served well as a test bed for car suspension as well as driving skills. I still seem to speed up when off-road and enjoy the rally like sensation, negotiating the bigger ruts and stones and driving a car to its full capacity. The Wolseley didn’t understand this in the way the Austin, Capri and even the Consul had done. It

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demanded time and respect for its paintwork and puny shockers, a cat after so many dogs. I began to discover another of the pleasures of driving which is window down, gentle cruising and none of that braking into and accelerating out of corners. Treated that way there was time to enjoy the walnut facia and scenery as well as the neutered purr of a rather under-powered engine never mind how many tigers were put in its tank!

My days at school were fast drawing to a close and even though I felt committed to music as an interest and future, I could offer no real plan or guarantee of success so I followed my parents wishes, stayed on a term more at Hitchin Grammar and tried successfully for Cambridge University after obtaining extraordinarily good grades at A and S level in Maths and Physics and an offer of place at Sussex University. But it was a curse in a way and I felt someone must have pulled a fast one and tricked me by sending someone else’s results.

Once ‘up’ Sue and I clung on a bit longer as long distance lovers once she went to Teacher training in Brighton & Hove and I ‘hoved’ off to brighten in Cambridge. For a month or two I hopped on the train down to Sussex for the odd weekend and enjoyed greatly British Rail’s tea and apricot jam while watching the English countryside rush by. We had fun at this campus near the sea, able at last to sleep together with all that that implies. We were both dealing with the incredible liberation but intense challenge of living away from our homes in Royston. When one day her parents brought her on a surprise visit to see me and I was arm in arm with Claire, it rather spelled the end.

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MUSIC IN THE BLOOD

Joanna and P. Forte bashing out Lady Be Good for sure, or the Honeypot Stomp or perhaps Tea for Two.

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Just let me get this thing under my chin!

I’m feelin’ you bro’ let’s honk

Blowin, jammin’, groovin’ call it what you like. The Byrne Bros. on Dad’s little guitar and soprano sax

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From 9 years old, I learnt a few cords on the Ukulele with it’s ‘my dog has fleas’ tuning, before graduating to the guitar and playing along to Dad’s stride piano as he pumped out old jazz chestnuts like ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’, ‘My Very Good Friend The Milkman Said’ and other Fats Waller classics. I found beauty and a connection with those strings and frets. All these old tunes included rich chords whether diminished, suspended, augmented; major, minor or perfect sevenths, sixths, ninths elevenths, thirteenth; all beautiful colours on the audio palette. I developed a large musical vocabulary and soon became adept at passing between them strumming along to a rather rigid foot tapping beat to songs that were very much from another time.

When Lawrence’s visits coincided with half brother Michael’s and they got going on the guitars, there seemed to be more sharps and less flats, more open strings too, occasionally a capo would raise the pitch and, as I played along, my first finger seemed exempt from bar duty - inevitably required in the fancier jazzy chorded stuff. So different.

But soon to come was the sheer joy of the Beatles. I loved them and I loved their music.

One of the things they did so well was to combine this happy, jangly strumming with all those lovely rich chords and a lot of cheeky mischievousness! They incorporatedthe rhythms and progressions of jazz along with adventurous melodies and bass lines coupled with complex harmonies and backing vocals into a new kind of music which never really got or needed a name. American R&B, a little theatrical comedy, George Formby’s Ukelele, and The Navy Lark, blues harp, Hammond organs; it could go from folky yearnfulness to progressive angst, jazzy crooning to pure pop. The later inclusion of strings and oriental instruments added rather than detracted as they became universally loved across age and language barriers, unwittingly breaking and redefining musical boundaries and possibilities as they went. I felt part of their journey, accompanying and enjoying every twist and shout. They paid homage to all that was good but were still just four guys caught up in a whirlwind with no real grasp of what they signified until much later. As Ringo says: “I’ve never really done anything to create what has happened. It creates itself. I’m here because it happened. But I didn’t do anything to make it happen apart from saying ‘Yes.” The post war age of hope and reborn innocence indeed.

Of course their background was first and foremost skiffle before discovering the blues, jazz and US R&B. The old 78’s we had on our shelves had also been knocking around in Liverpool I imagine as well as, so they say, what the sailors brought ashore which clearly wasn’t limited to the clap and the Hornpipe!

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Apart from sporting a Mop top and Cuban heeled boots, there was a time when I think I could play every Beatles’ lick and song, knew most of the words and harmonies and was as much of a fan as it is possible to be. I bought the Beatles Monthly, went to a couple of totally satisfying screamy concerts and followed their every move on TV, radio, news print and documentary. I lapped up the films Hard Day’s Night and Help, Loved Magical Mystery Tour, tolerated Yellow Submarine and marvelled at the incredible artwork and photography that accompanied their growth, expected something better from Derek Taylor’s rather patronising sleeve notes about the ‘Boys’, where it seemed he was on another page or in another age, but he wasn’t! Of course when the Beatles hit he was thirty years old, which in those days was considered ancient! The beauty for me although significantly younger than them was following the way it all unfolded until in the end it could unfold no more and unravelled.

From pure innocence to un-fettered experimentation and finally to the heady heights of international stardom and the danger of becoming a parody of themselves their split was in many ways inevitable. In a few years going from a backing band in a Hamburg strip joint to the most famous group in the world and still not fully aware of their impact or achievement, nor reaping all the rewards of their incredible and continuing journey.

Those who live in Mexico - as I do now – can enjoy two hours of Beatle related music every weekday on Universal Radio’s Club de Los Beatles. Running for 40 years it is the only programme in the world to dedicate such time to the Fab Four and beyond and has over a million accredited members.

Surely it was only a matter of time and finding the format!

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In 1965 local businessman and family friend, John Whitehead asked me to join the dance band he managed called the Evergreens. They played working men’s clubs, weddings, firms’ does, dances, mainly jazz dance standards but they also featured a ‘beat’ section where we would include Midnight Hour, Elvis songs and eventually a few more contemporary songs which I would sing like ‘The More I see You’ from Chris Montez, Bobby Hebb’s ‘Sunny’ , ‘If I had a Hammer’ a hit for Trini Lopez. A bit of pocket money, a chance to play music to people, that was good enough for me. Not yet 15, by far the youngest in the band, I went off to gigs with Barry Mansfield, George Howe, Rodney Griggs, Jeff Bray Eddy Collard on drums and greasy but loveable old Elvis sound-alike Bill Jacklin on Vocals – later replaced by Schmoozy Michael Bolton lookalike John Mustill.

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So there we were with two Vox columns a mixer and a manager. All our kit and ourselves would travel in a Ford Thames van passing by the bands houses in Letchworth, Baldock, Royston and Hitchin and heading off to venues such as Stotfold Working Mens Club with its massive theatre organ dominating the stage, The Wilbury Hotel, Baldock Working Men’s Club and Alconbury Air Base, my first real contact with Americans and an introduction to hamburgers far better than our Wimpy produced late night favourite in Letchworth.

So here’s the idea motherfuckers: we play, you dance

It would be fair to say that the Evergreens had no impact whatsoever on the British Music Scene or even the local one, but it provided a few Spinal Tap moments nevertheless such as at a firm’s dance in Letchworth one time when the drummer fell out with the pianist who walked off, whereupon the sax player followed suit with the bassist until finally Geoff the trombonist the drummer and I were the only three left on stage with the people still dancing to our raggedy waltz.

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Eddie Collard on drums was a jazzer and often smoked his pipe as he played but found it difficult to adapt his style to R&B which limited the ‘beat’ section rather. I would write out all the parts for songs like Eddie Floyd’s ‘Knock on Wood’ and Wilson Picket’s ‘In The Midnight Hour’ and just hope that Eddie would latch on to the drum pattern

from the record, but it just wasn’t in him! I thought to myself if declared jazzer Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts could do it surely he could! But no! The tidy staccato drum intro to Jo Tex’s great “Show Me” for example completely eluded him, he would stumble into it sounding more like a drunk colliding with a bank of dustbins!

This band morphed into a kind of lounge band called The Barry Mann Five which was Barry, me, a bass player, singer and drummer but this fizzled out eventually as we went our separate ways, me off to University for one.

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C.U. THEN P.F.T.R.

Interview togs. Corduroy and cravat - Up for anything!

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After the extra term`s study to take the Oxbridge Entrance exam, my interview was with David Williams, Senior tutor of Emmanuel College and an extremely nice Fellow who later became Vice Chancellor of the University. I declared that my main interest would be to form a band. I was granted a place. Whereas most people I got to know at Cambridge came from abroad or from many miles away I could have got there on a skateboard as it was only 12 miles from home and one of the few English Cities I had ever been to with Dad working there for a number of years with CBS. Of course there were no skateboards then so four wheel roller skates would have had to do. Hardly breaking the bonds then!

The means of getting about at Cambridge is the bicycle. Around those times Engineering graduate Dr Richard Moulton’s famous collapsible bike with its teeny wheels had hit the street (he also designed the suspension for the Mini) and I was determined to have something interesting to peddle around on. So I got a Moulton inspired Raleigh RSW 16 with its fat wheels and rear basket.

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I ditched the basket sprayed the bike orange and remember going to lectures in a purple woollen turban and yellow boots with a variety of red plastic bags instead of a satchel.

It soon became obvious that us engineers were on the lower rungs of student ranking despite all the important work that had already come out of the department such as part of Concorde’s development for example. Now Natural Sciences, Philosophy, Mathematics, History, Anglo Saxon, these were the schools full of brainy people – future Newtons and Wittgensteins, who surrounded us latter day sappers. I had wanted to read Maths but coming from a Grammar School was advised that I wouldn’t have a dog’s chance so to enter under the Engineering banner and change once ‘up’.Easily said and ultimately not done. Two weeks in, I felt that the doddle of ‘Arq and Anth’ might be suitable but also realised that I might as well stick with Engineering even though it had more of the

trappings of secondary school than further education. Besides I was already well into realising my far more exciting plan of forming that group.

It wasn’t long before the four founding members of Public Foot The Roman were jamming. Jamie Lane the drummer in Magdalene (reading History) and the rest of us Engineers: Greg Knowles (Queens) on guitar, Howard Tweddle (Pembroke) on bass and me on guitar, singing and writing some original songs.

Like most bands we started off playing stuff we all knew – numbers from Free, Wishbone Ash, Deep Purple, Sabbath, the inevitable 12 bar Blues and even a bit of jazz. Were we any good?? Of course we were! The added benefits of having a group were that we could have a van and my college lent us a music room to practice in and a large cupboard to store our gear. as well as a treasured parking space. Even though the work load was horrendous, you were never expected to do it all as the course work, lectures, tutorials and private studies amounted to more than 24 hoursworth a day. Somehow we managed to fit in a fair amount of practice and started looking for gigs.

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To begin with we had limited equipment to move around, and one of the guys on my staircase, Neil Young head and medical student Steve Wright, had a Citroen 2CV which he put at our disposal. This served as our bandwagon for the first few outings, with the canvas roof rolled back, bass cabinets, columns, amps, guitars, Selmer PA, mikes and stands, a full premier drum kit all stacked on the canvas seats, the 2CV’s rather limited 30 horsepower and 2 cylinders managed to deliver us to the Taboo Club, St. John’s Cellars and other such venues. When we later got our Ford Thames Van things were easier. I was the elected keeper of its keys having negotiated a place to keep it..

Designed for the job!

Steve also gave us our band name when he brought back a broken footpath sign.

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During the fresher year, I was asked for help with the Thames to accompany some college bed racers down to London. Colleges would compete in pushing beds the sixty miles or so to raise money for a good cause. Now the Thames was not a particularly new van and it had some emission problems as we found out half way down when the tired runners who jumped on board to take a rest while others took their turn began to suffer carbon monoxide poisoning during their break, stumbling out later sapped of energy and even more tired. I of course proceeded to doze off at the wheel on a few occasions

(the race was at night) and was lucky to have my current girlfriend Kay along, one of Dianne Vestey’s more eager beavered friends from nearby Saffron Walden’s Teacher Training College. She kept an eye on me and delivered enthusiastic prods on far too many occasions in my view but probably for the best.

Our services weren’t required in subsequent years.

It looks kinda guilty dozen tit!!!

Towards the end of Cambridge, my grades dropped in line with my disinterest but my desire to pursue music rose. I thought of quitting but my tutors, especially Senior Tutor John Reddaway, wouldn’t hear of it, advising me, rightly I guess, to stay on and that I would get through. As Head of Engineering I recall he invited the new intake to his house for early freshman’s drinks where I found myself apologising for having ‘flobbed’ on his dog. How that could have endeared me to him I have no idea but thus I left my distinguishing mark!

Having the guy who set the Industrial Sociology exam as a tutor helped. ‘I think it’s quite likely that the things we have been studying will be in the exam’. Such indications together with the encouraging words of my Senior Tutor and some Structures lecture and crib notes lent from the best engineering student in college, Mark Lewis had me feeling I just might force a pass. Mark’s notes especially once slurped up on coffee and Proplus in an all night cramming session, were then extruded from my brain with help from a a little amphetamine tab getting me my best exam result ever, even though I hadn’t attended any classes or done any practicals. This experience further convinced me that such exams were a stupid test of anyone’s true abilities.

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Showing appreciation for my parents’ sacrifice in putting me through C.U.

So, Now what!?

Amazingly I achieved a Special degree, the lowest accolade the University could muster!

This was later converted into an M.A (Master of Arts) on payment of 50 pounds and the simple fact of surviving 10 years! Now that’s what I call an education!

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More importantly for me, we had one of the best bands around, we even had money over at term’s end, to enjoy a Bernie Inns band nosh. Avocado prawns, steak and chips and a cylindrical ice cream being Hobson’s choice and thus the same for the rest of us!

Summer Vac. rehearsals on the Farm, in the Hovel (my family had moved across the road by then) great friendship and compatible abilities had us preparing the ground for when we left Cambridge. Both Jamie and Word (as we called Howard) were getting good exam results and in the last year of University we recruited Cambridge graduate Dag Small on organ and piano which enabled us to have a much fuller sound and be more versatile in our approach and writing.

We were filling a few gigs outside Cambridge and beginning to make a name for ourselves with mostly original material by now. Regularly appearing at the Tech, Cambridge Union, School of Architecture and Lady Margaret’s Hall we were developing a rocky progressive style. I would unashamedly appear in Purple Satin with yellow boots and my long hair, rolling about on the stage during solos and thoroughly losing myself in it all. On one occasion during a rollaround solo I cut my head on a broken beer bottle and was surprised to see blood pouring down my shirt and onto my guitar, I nevertheless felt that this was all good and part of the thrill and spill of it all. Sid Vicious, Iggy Pop eat your hearts out!

Or maybe not.

Cambridge’s dusk to dawn May Balls were a challenge as we usually managed to fit in three gigs a night. Sharing Roxy Music’s dressing room on one occasion had us ‘borrow’ some of Brian Eno and Brian Ferry’s makeup, we also took part in a great sing-along with the Average White Band though I couldn’t understand how Hamish Stuart’s amazing stage voice could be so completely shot in the dressing room environment, probably the prolific consumption of McEwans’ Export had something to do with it. Impressive local band Henry Cow took time out to watch us, probably unimpressed but mates anyway lending us their van and roadie when we needed them. Our sound guy, Joe Tash, a postgraduate student from the States has since become big in sperm I believe, stopping it doing what comes naturally as he researches male contraception!

Jeremy Jones a friend of Jamie’s introduced us to Ben Nisbet and his label Sovereign records who were having success with a band called Renaissance. He liked us and committed to making an album with producer Derek Lawrence (Wishbone Ash, Deep Purple) sleeved in a gatefold sleeve from Hipgnosis (Pink Floyd’s record cover designers). Apart from receiving no advance, one other factor was that this album would be recorded two weeks before we all took our final exams at Cambridge. No wonder it sounds a bit sped up at times!

By then we had a rather heavy old Commer ex Post Office diesel van to cart our gear around in. As well as holding the keys for this and doing most of the driving I also

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attempted to maintain it. With The Thames I had changed suspension, bearings and so on but this rattly old diesel monster was beyond me. Such that after one gig somewhere in Kensington it broke down on the High Street and I felt obliged to spend what turned out to be one of the coldest nights I can remember guarding the equipment until we could sort it out next day.

We stayed in Chelsea where Jeremy was renting a house and rehearsed in Jubilee Studios, housed in a basement warehouse under Covent Garden’s Old Market, for a couple of weeks before establishing ourselves in De Lane Lea Studios to pour our hearts out for just one week. Our music was fairly complex but the rehearsals had done us well and we managed to get everything down on tape mostly in one take with just a few overdubs and embellishments. The album lacks polish but something was going on!

Ever since selling my AC30 and Guild Starfire, I had struggled for a good tone and although my Levin served me well acoustically my fairly new three pick-up Gibson SG Custom through a Fender Twin, or Hi Watt or even a rented AC30 never cut the mustard. Too thin.

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My tone troubles started when I met H&H founders Mike Harrison and Malcom Green whose company was based in Cambridge. These two enthusiastic guys pursuaded us to buy the prototype of their new line of PA amps and then their revolutionary guitar

gear. The pedigree was flawless, you would see the omnipresent blue H&H power amps in almost all large public address systems or professional recording studios. Entranced with this entirely digital technology we all bought the beautifully designed guitar equipment and mixers. During the change over I sold my VOX AC30 even after Mike had worked some magic and carried out mods to it which made it virtually hum proof whilst retaining its amazing sound.

For a while I travelled with Malcolm as their guitar demonstrator which took me once to 10cc’s ultra modern Strawberry Studios in Manchester. The engineer played me the background voice wall of sound fade up that would eventually be part of ‘I’m Not in Love’. We also went to see Ken Dodd whose tickling stick certainly got me in stitches. A truly funny man and so much better in person than he ever was on the telly.

I don’t think I was much of an amp demo man but I quickly realized that as long as you could bash out a recognizable lick or two, ‘Sean will now demonstrate our new sustain’ and put up with a hundred badly played versions of Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love and Argent’s ‘Hold Your Head Up’ opening riff, then it wasn’t so bad.

In London’s Soho we popped into a Topless bar which was a truly weird experience, chatting across the bar with a finely formed women naked from the waist up as she shook her Hi-balls and stirred my lower ones!

Raising the tone, as it were, Greg had great feel and seemed to get a good fat sound out of just about anything with his lovely black Gibson Les Paul or earlier Gibson SG Special, even through the tubeless H&H gear. His influences were many perhaps Free`s Paul Kossoff being the stand out.

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My young ears and fingers had picked up on jazzers like Charlie Christian, Kenny Burrel, Joe Pass and Jim Hall to mention a few but by now I was a muddled mix of Wes Montgomery’s octave playing, Danny Kirwan’s vibrato, Django Reinhardt’s rhythm and staccato soloing, Pete Townsend’s fullness, Barney Kessel`s rich chords and Charlie Bird`s simple ones, Bert Jansch’s finger-picking, John Lee Hooker’s beat, Hank Marvin’s simple melodic style, Peter Green’s feel but always a Ritchie Blackmore wannabee and tempered with the heart and soul of George Harrison’s contributions to the Beatle’s though he actually got away with quite a lot of fairly duff playing in my view., which made him even more of a hero His later slide playing put him into another realm altogether.

As far as my musical influences went, well anything from Jazz through folk and Memphis blues to Heavy rock, I suppose. As well as obviously the Beatles and more directly Yes and Gentle Giant, Genesis that sort of stuff. The Who early Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell - so much songwriting and production talent to feed off. Then Stevie Wonder’s ‘Music of My Mind’ came out which totally raised the bar. A wonderful fusion which revolutionized the making of music, a soulful and humanizing use of synthersizers, bringing alive fantastic songs. Relaxed yet complex structures had Stevie playing most of the real instruments with a lazy discipline in both performance and edit. The groundbreaking new component was through cooperation with the group ‘TONTO’s Expanding Headband’ whose revolutionary development of Dr Robert Moog’s original analogue machines (first heard on Wendy Carlos’s hugely successful but rather ghastly ‘Switched on Bach’ and more subtley on Beatles and Beach Boys recordings), allowed for tones, textures and transitions never heard before. Wonder’s music along with Steely Dan’s carefully crafted songs and highly disciplined renditions tangled with Yes and Gentle Giant’s jumpy compositions, tinged with Deep Purple’s drive steered most of my musical thinking then. As far as stage work was concerned my tendency was towards multimedia and theatrics but few ideas came to fruition.

We blended together well and Dag’s masterful piano and organ playing along with Word’s hurried bass made for an interesting sound. Jamie on drums didn’t record well on that album but he went on to become a phenomenal player and sought after session drummer. Complex arrangements, good melodies, great energy and harmony singing took us unwittingly into the niche of Progressive Rock but we knew we had to be danceable too. It was a happy time we spent in De Lane Lea with Chopper the engineer and Derek.laying down our tracks.

The record came out in the UK and US and we were all set to travel to the States and start promotion, touring with ex Yes guitarist Peter Banks’ new band Flash, also on 86

Sovereign,. A few months preparatory touring in the UK saw our sound develop incredibly in depth, tone, tightness and confidence... My singing tone and style became much more rounded as did my guitar tone and I could finally remember all the words!

We had something. People listened and danced to our music and we played large venues and prestigious clubs like The Marquee Club on Wardour Street along with the whole London pub and club circuit. With flight cases built and ready we were really at a peak when we were informed a few days before our departure to the States that an American band called Flash had taken out an injunction and everything was cancelled. Whatever else an Injun Tune was it was also cold steel into the heart of our band that was on quite a roll when it foundered on this rock.

So instead of more roll there followed a three month hole. In part this was because of an energy crisis in Britain. Three day weeks, uncertain electricity supplies and unavailability of vinyl all meant no records could be pressed, no venues were booking bands and people had no money to spend anyway. In that time of immense disappointment Jamie and Greg along with DAG got involved in other projects and a day before being offered a second album they quit, going on to form a moderately successful band called The Movies before the curtain also fell on that a few years later.

The band was no more.

In the end just another flash in the pan

Word and I were committed to carrying on but the label wanted at least the twin guitar work and Greg felt unwilling to come back so it was all over for PFTR and back to square one.

Time to look for a new sign!

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LEGOVER LONDON

A rare item indeed!

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By this time I was living in a broom cupboard with Claire my long time girlfriend from Cambridge. Our bed filled the under stair space we rented and as access was through someone else’s bedroom it could get a bit funky.

But these were the best digs in Cambridge. A large family house with garden at the end of Conduit Head Road it had a mix of students, friends and musicians and was run by true virtuoso musician: mandolin, guitar and bass playing Chris Cox, whose bands The Junction Band and Duke, Duke and the Dukes with their charismatic singer John Dyer were legend in Cambridge. This was an outlet for a while and I started playing double bass and acoustic with them while I looked for the next thing.

I had a beaten up old Transit Van and my first Austin Mini which were useful vehicles but generate few memories of love.

Filler jobs included installing a complete intercom system in Sinclair Radionics, St Ives moving around like a rat in the false ceiling for a couple of weeks. It was bit complicated and way beyond me really but at the end of my tenure there was music in the lavvies, private and group calling and I got paid which is always a good sign. I liked the fact that the only speaker with an off switch was in boss Clive Sinclair’s office. Most of the system was made from ‘off cuts’ as it were from the innovative computers, calculators, radios, TV’s and stereos that were being developed way before their time.

Visionary inventor Clive Sinclair later turned his hand to developing one of the first commercially available electric cars, the three wheeler Sinclair C5 but it run out of juice with only 17000 sold.

Clive in his C5

Clive’s tiny telly

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A curious anecdote about this man, and strange for one of the pioneers of the computer age, is that he doesn’t have a computer or use email himself. Does he know something we do not?

Everyone at Conduit Head Road was on a trip (especially Sinclair employee, Hendrix loving acid head Leo who had got me that job) and one of Chris Cox’s involvements was with the Save The Children Fund for whom he was planning one. I was sitting around at a loss one day while he was packing up his old Bedford van and about to leave for Germany. Looked interesting and when he said wannacummalong. Yeah sure!

I threw some available unwashed clothing in a duffle bag and signing off from Claire for a while, leapt into the van and set off for the Black Forest to help look after a camp full of deprived, problem children from Manheim. What the fuck as they say, I recalled the days when similar groups had visited the farm so had some idea what to expect!!!

Chris was the camp leader and that was fine with me, no real responsibilities, I just had to help with a bit of cooking, logging, singing and so on to give these hapless unfortunates a good time. Ich bin ein Liebe Dich, sprechenzi spraut as it were.

It all got off to great start until one of the large kitchen knives went missing which was frightening given the background of these kids, Along too was a chap from the house called Henry who decided to dress up in Lederhosen for most of the trip, he was an odd fellow who would regale us with tales like how his Great Dane was prone to killing smaller mutts in the park and that once when pissed off with his employer in a hotel restaurant he had emptied his bladder into the daily special. Not the first time I have heard of such occurrences and it certainly makes you think twice about complaining when there is a fly in your fondue, hair in your hamburger or feather on your capon!

I figured he could be our cutting edge thief and kept my eye on him. On returning to England he and his Great Dane moved on to pastures new where I heard he was run over by a truck. Shame I was beginning to like him! A particular entertainment for these kids was treating my long hair as a carrousel, swinging round and round on it which amazed me as much as it amused them.

One rarely fought after camp task was to cart the contents of the camp latrines and dump them bucket by overflowing bucket into a proscribed spot upstream from the boisterous noises of kids bathing in the same river downstream. This had me wondering at the sanitary consequences of it all especially in a country that has a little shelf in its loos for pre-flush examination of the daily dump. Funny lot these Germans. However it was great to share a shower later with fellow camp animator Agi Nagi in the mixed

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facilities (Vive le Hun) for whose 16 year old body and mind I developed a huge craving but despite employing all my rock world cunning and wit could never convert it into anything more than hankering and abject failure. Enjoying the seven course meal at the end of the trip without ever tasting the regions famous Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte.

(Black Forest Gâteau) I did develop a taste for the local wine though. I felt that there was so much to see in the world and I needed to get my arse into gear!!!

Once back in Cambridge it wasn’t long before I was moving on from Conduit Head Road. At a bit of a loss really, I formed a threepiece with Billy Grey on Drums and John Mayall’s brother on bass. Billy was brother of a legend in Cambridge, Andy Grey, founder of Cambridge market’s Andy’s Records where you could buy all the new breaking music at discount prices. He was our Richard Branson and had a Bentley to prove it! It was fun and we rehearsed in the beautiful thatched farm cottage near Saffron Walden where Billy lived. We never did play on stage - Billy’s drum kit was a beautiful yellow Ludwig affair which he played well and maybe we sounded good in those heavy trio days, but I never felt my writing and guitar playing truly suited that format.

Claire went off to study teacher training in London and I moved back to the farm where I bumped into the remnants of a group called Baby Whale in a splendid house on the walk home to Flint Hall Farm from Royston where my earlier one eyed Polish dentist’s receptionist had lived. Whale had beaten PFTR at the annual Melody Maker Rock Contest heats a few years before (finally losing to a group called “Listen”) but by then the singers had gone and what remained was part of a newer line up: sax payer – Raf Ravenscroft, violinist Lindsay Scott, Latin percussionist David Ulm and a few other dazed, abandoned hangers-on from the original band. We started experimenting with this unusual line up, became good friends and realised that there was something special there. Raf could also play Flute (and later Cello) Dave was a great percussionist and played the bass flute as well, Lindsay had been a champion Scottish fiddler. My writing had changed a bit and easily adapted to this line up, more country, funky, jazzy, Latin than before and with so many more fascinating sounds to play with. I wasn’t enjoying living at home much and decided to follow Raf, Lindsay and Dave down to London in the hope of taking things a stage further.

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The simple line up of guitar, percussion, sax and violin wasn’t enough for what we had in mind so the first step was to find a versatile rhythm section to complete the line up. After a few tries and advertisements in Melody Maker we met up with keyboards player Dave Rose, Billy and drummer Theodore Thunder from Allan Price and Leo Sayers’ Bands and shortly after stand out bass player Mickey Feat. These and other great musician

Raf and I during auditions in the Troubador basement

like drummer Stretch, David Cochrane, the amazing keyboardist Derek Austin and drummer Geoff Zeopardie from Linda Lewis’s band and many others helped us pull the sound together and we started making demos, some with the help of Chris Parry from Polydor who on seeing a few gigs declared us the next Beatles (only to sign the Jam once Punk kicked in, next Beatles no longer relevant or required).

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We had good gear and rehearsed a lot at the Troubadour in the Kings Road and also at a Club off Leicester Square run by two ladies who made awesome egg sarnies. We eventually received an offer to record with Pierre Tubbs, producer and writer for a couple of hit artists called Maxine Nightingale and Al Matthews. Raf, who was sessioning on these records, felt he could capture our sound and anyway we were impatient to start recording, perhaps too impatient.

Financially things were pretty difficult too and some young dude from the States who collected rock bands T shirts entrusted me with 40 pounds to buy and send on whatever came my way having bought a few shirts off me. I am as honest a bloke as you can find, but those Rich Boy T shirts became Rich T biscuits and despite swearing to myself with every dunk that I would reimburse him, I never did. That, a stolen Mars Bar from the school tuck shop and an Instamatic camera I once filched sum up my life of crime for which I should surely be punished, but I wish I could go back and undo those things so as to have an unblemished record!

Finally Legover got into the studios and began laying down tracks. We had a manager and publisher but no record deal.

We called on all our friends to help out and gradually the album took shape over a few Kebabs and Retsina soaked sessions. I still think there are some great tracks on that record but somehow once we finished it, with no outlet, we had thirteen months and a partial remix by Rupert Hine to wait before it came out eventually to little effect on Smack Records, part of the Charly group.

With a name like Legover, the title Wait Til Nighttime and on a label called Smack people could be forgiven for expecting something raunchy, so when a tinkly piano ballad came out as our debut single the few reviews I saw were unsurprising but nevertheless disappointing. We were great live, with landmark songs like Black and White, Blackmail, Money Matters incorporating Latin grooves, blending most musical genres. But the Punk movement was girding its loins, the fuse was set and our style of music was about to take a long hibernation in the UK. I thought the Sex Pistols were brilliant but such music and culture was not carved into my being.

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Meanwhile Pierre Tubbs offered us the opportunity to be Al Matthews backing band (he had a British hit with the Tubbs’ penned song “Fool’”) to be followed by a tour with Maxine Nightingale as her band - basically us, her and her brother so we took it while waiting for our debut album to come out.

Al Matthews was a great guy an ex marine and actor but more of a cabaret performer when it came to music so we set out on a tour of short residencies at places like Baileys Club in Liverpool, staying at the famous Adelphi Hotel. We were forced into mischief and post gig cavorting at the pyjamarama gymnasia of our shared rooms, and like most budding musicians away from home we lapped up the totty and dreamed of fame.

It was with Al that we supported the Four Tops on a tour of the UK and it was impressive to see these masters at work twirling, reaching out and still being there after so many years yet still seeming fresh as sugar pie and funky as a honey bunch Unlike them poor old Al would come on stage leaving his cane behind the arras as he had just had some ghastly operation where half the hole of his anus had been removed and so travelled with a Rubber Ring (see later).

When someone wants to bare their soul to you it seems ruder not to pay attention than to listen up. What I remember most about our short time together had nothing to do with music. Maybe in an effort to bond with us pre gig, Al insisted we bear testament to his stolen starfish by dropping his sweats, bending over and, spreading his cheeks, bare his ‘sole’ to us. It seemed only correct that we muster a gaze upon his currently unpuckerable, surgically lacerated and extremely pink sphincter. Whilst the Four Tops sang out “Baby, I need your Loving”, I think Al only needed his baby’s O ring to get him through. Nobody does it like the marines I guess.

1976 and time to cross the Atlantic, my first time on an airliner and it was a Boeing 747 Jumbo bound for LA where we were to start rehearsals with Maxine.

Not wanting violin, it meant leaving Lindsay behind for a few months in the process but he would still get the 15 quid a week retainer from backer/managers Hugh Mainprice and Jim Atkinson as we all did. I would miss Lindsay, he was our cynical old timer and the most successful of the group with his previous group the J.S.D. Band, and his maturity and contacts. Amongst other things he had taken me to jam with legendary Steve Marriott and Ian Wallace in Marriott’s thatched cottage in the Essex countryside, a house that would later catch fire and end prematurely the life of one of England’s greatest rock singers.

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Rock and Roll’s loss!!!

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Timing is everything and on arriving in the States we encountered a rather paranoid Maxine, seeing her Pierre Tubbs’ penned hit “Right Back Where We Started From” disappearing down the charts in self-fulfilment and with gigs being pulled. We, the jobbing band, made the most of it anyway of course. Perhaps the climactic evening was at a large hotel in Dallas where we had been hastily booked to cover for the nonappearance of Ike and Tina Turner. Their famously tempestuous relationship had finally imploded just before what was to be the start of their nationwide tour and as we set off on the opening number and our lady Maxine decided she was going to implode too and stayed in her hotel room. Raf disappeared from stage and rushed to her room, eventually persuading her to come down but once she did start, the poor thing had a

cold sore the size of a raisin on her lip that must have been extremely uncomfortable emotionally and physically. No wonder she turned out to be a one zit wonder like Al Matthews. The small audience that had used their tickets must have wondered what they had bought into - first Ike and Tina and then this!

We were booked to stay at the famed Tropicana in LA for a while, but it was way beyond its best and despite wanting to soak up all things rock and rub shoulders with guests like Tom Waits we balked at the idea of soaking up other peoples residues displayed as they were on the unwashed and stained bed linen doubtless concealing every bug a bed could bear and at worse a mattress full of lusty crabs. We were eventually housed in a more sedate Ramada Inn. Mind you a footnote to that hotel is that a few days in the police came by and asked after a regular hippy guy who had been staying in the Hotel.

Turned out a dead body had been discovered in his blood spattered room!

We literally went to town when not rehearsing or playing the few and far between gigs, the nearby Rainbow, Roxy, Whisky, all those lovely guitar shops, groupies, receptions providing temptation, fulfilment and enough Hollywood for an innocent country boy like me! Despite supporting great artists at concerts with Three Dog Night (Mama Told me not to Come), Santana (Oye Como Va) Boz Scaggs (LowDown), it somehow felt just a bit meaningless to me even though we were sharing the stage with the greats of that time, I just didn’t see myself trundling around in a backing band for much longer.

Some telly including the Don Kirschner Rock Show and a trip to stifling Vegas and finally our last gig in Miami staying at the Castaways Motel for an outdoor concert where I got the best sound ever from my 1957 Gibson Les Paul TV Special through a Sunn Head. Towards the end of the tour my publisher Nigel Haines took me aside and said he only wanted to carry on with me and couldn’t afford to keep on with the group.

I probably took the wrong decision and gave up on Legover, losing my friendship with most of the members especially Lindsay and Raf who had been more than prepared to carry on despite some friction that was developing between Raf and me. If any one of us achieved a smattering of greatness though it was Raf who went on to play the famous sax lick on Gerry Rafferty`s great song ‘Baker Street’ and gig with everyone from Marvyn Gaye to Pink Floyd as well as record a couple of albums and other music of his own and write Saxophone tuition books. David Ulm now lives in Brazil with his wife ZeZe and Lindsay is a radio presenter. Maybe luck wasn’t with us but I respect and miss all those guys a lot.

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Marriage to Claire with Michael Latimer,Tony Barton, and Alan Bown along as witnesses

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NO BIG DEAL

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Coming back to London, a retainer but no group I began to write differently but still within the perspective of a group. Quite a while prior to the tour, Raf had introduced me to actor Michael Latimer, from the popular TV series Van Der Valk, and his business partner Tony Barton who had a fantastic if ambitious project called “Wully and The Zany”, a stage musical set during the Londonderry Siege. The story was sensitive then with the IRA a powerful and unmerciful force that made anything to do with Ireland an extremely risky area to turn into burlesque.

But the theme excited me and over a few years I wrote some interesting original pieces of music to Tim Rose Price’s libretto and Michael’s lyrics. Michael and Tony were thrilled with my work but we never would get the musical to the stage, despite Michael’s fame and many contacts. The last demos were produced by Muff Winwood at Island Studios with the promise of an album, but circumstances rallied against us once again and it never happened.

Nigel Haines was now managing me together with trumpet legend Alan Bown and they kept plugging away on my behalf until eventually I was signed to Deke Arlon and Christopher Neil’s publishing company CD Music through Chappel where Mark Rowles took an interest in my development offering me demo time in their little six track facility, and my writing developed well as long as I was busy and kept my eye on the ball.

Our first release was to be on Chris Ewell’s Acrobat Label and whilst I took my two advances and bought a house I felt I was in good company with labelmates Roger Chapman and Ian Gillan. Maybe I hadn’t been wrong to split from the group after all!

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Christopher Neil was becoming hugely successful as a producer with Sheena Easton, Dollar, Leo Sayer and Gerry Rafferty amongst others as well as sustaining an acting career in rather suspect films such as “The Adventures of a Plumbers Mate”. Although it was clear he was an accomplished producer I wasn’t sure he was for me but he had taken to a track which I had written for a project that Alan Bown and I had developed called ‘The Holiday Album’ featuring a whole bunch of new songs. I had demoed Dancing at the Rubber Ring (Hi Al) with Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann singing as I didn’t feel it was a song for my voice. Christopher Neil didn’t agree and off we went. The characteristic sound he put into it was a kind of electronic rototom bounce which I had heard on a recent Donna Summer track. I felt if anything was going to go out of date faster than fresh fish it was that sound but a man with hits under his belt probably knew best.

I heard Byrne and Bown’s record on Radio 1 once, much to the amusement of the person with me in the car at the time (balloonist Graham Elson), but never got that sensation of joy because honestly I hated the record and the rubber ring sound was already passé, making me think of the kangaroo boing on Charly Drake’s ‘My Boomerang won’t Come Back’ rather than the grand entree onto the world’s musical stage I needed.The B side was the haunting ‘Because of You’ one of my better songs which I still enjoy.

My next attempt was to be solo and a single titled “The Hunter” produced by Chris’s engineer Greg Welsh with the benefit of one of the first computer mixing desks in London. What seemed like a good idea and designed to save time actually meant that tweaking and remixing took longer than ever. The result was OK although we got someone else in to play guitar, I just wasn’t inspired but overlaid and improved a copy of Ray Russell’s solo anyway even if just to show I could. Once again the song chosen for the B side, the rather melancholy “Come What May,” is also still a favourite amongst my compositions. After a lot of false promises and wishful thinking, maybe mostly on my part, I was eventually dropped from the label which was a great blow. Shortly before parting, Chris had wanted me to record “Love Games” a song he eventually took into the charts with Leo Sayer.

Earlier on I had missed out on a chance to be signed by Robert Stigwood’s RSG label.

While in the States I had met with Chris Bond who was interested in producing me, especially liking Blackmail off the Legover album. He had handled the early Darryl Hall and John Oates albums and it felt right to me. Only much, much later did I learn that the reason this never came to anything was partly because my manager, dear old Nigel Haines, didn’t have enough money for two air tickets to the States. I am sure I would have had a better time of it there, where it seems there is a market for anything unlike say the UK where the pop circus and business in those days were extremely volatile and had certain requirements as far as looks, style and age were concerned.

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Chris Neil certainly came good big time, writing and producing in collaboration with Mike Rutherford of Genesis on his highly successful side project Mike and The Mechanics (for whom I actually auditioned, albeit unsuccessfully). Songs he co-wrote for their albums rank high in my all time favourites. So much depends on timing I guess.

I was given another stab at it with Phil Wainman’s company Utopia and we laid down a pseudo reggae track I had written called Tomboy which actually turned out pretty well but never saw the light of day. Once again the chosen B-side Hush (Baby Don’t You Cry) is probably one of my better compositions. I shared Studio time with Billy Idol’s Generation X. Billy already had the swagger that took him to the top but he was a tiny little bloke and probably still is!

Other small musical achievements I need to air here. I wrote the theme song for the BBC series ‘The Rock and Roll Years’ which the production claimed kept them going when they got stuck and featured quotes from hit songs throughout the 20 years they were covering. I appeared in front of 300 million people on the Eurovision Song Contest, singing back-up for Bardot’s “One Step Further”, as well as with Bonnie Tyler on Top of The Pops and somehow or other also recorded with Demis Roussos. An album by Jack Lancaster included my vocal but also featured the great Phil Collins and Gary Moore, I auditioned for Manfred Mann and Mike and the Mechanics and Upp. I was offered a gig as singer with pop group 5,000 Volts whose producer said I was sure to write hits (still waiting!)and got to meet so many great talents working in studios like Surrey Sound, Eden, Matrix, Trident, De Laine Lea, Abbey Road, Gooseberry, Air. I crossed paths more than once with Tina Turner looking for her comeback. I wrote songs with Cathy Shostak, Mike Latimer, John Tarrant and my namesake Simon Byrne all of which took me somewhere interesting if not to the top of the charts! Collaborations with other musicians I respected included a time in Belgium with Two Man Sound and Wallace Collection founder Sylvain VanHolme trying to create a new sound for them with my songs and voice. I made the Belgian charts with a song carrying my lyric: ‘I see the Lies in your Eyes, featuring Belgian band The Machines who I voice coached and contributed some lyrics when they recorded their album “A World of Machines” at Studio 2, Abbey Road under Sylvain’s guidance. As my singing improved and I did a bit more session work a few respected singers and composers started refering to me as ‘The Voice’. But for me it all ended in 1983 when my publishing deal with CD Music fizzled out. I have hardly played or sung since.

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BALLOONATICS NOTT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY A BATCHELOR’S JOY AND LAUGHTER COLIN’S BALLOONS START TO SHRINK I GET INTO SHAPE

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In 1978, during a long period waiting for a single to come out I decided I needed a second weapon in my armoury rather than just another string to my bow. Music was my first love but without a group to practice with I was becoming less dedicated, a bit bored, lazy, losing direction and feeling somewhat uninspired, spending less time writing, playing or even listening to music.Whereas once I would never be far from a guitar noodling away, I felt impatient, lost and now, married to Claire and with a young child on the way, unsure how to deal with such a responsibility, for which I didn’t feel ready at all. I began manically adding to my collection of cigarette and trade cards, an obsession which became a main motive cited by Claire in her petition for divorce a couple of years later.

We were living then in W2 post district in Paddington’s Connaught Street just a stone’s throw from Marble Arch. We heard the IRA’s bombs go off in Connaught Square and witnessed two exciting smash and grabs of a furrier’s across from our third floor window.

The London Evening Standard was my local paper but our little community of pub, shop, newsagents, clock maker and local characters made it feel like a village even though all the world’s nations populated these streets especially the nearby Edgware Road which runs from Marble Arch and its Speakers Corner out into the northern suburbs of London and as the A5 as far as Holyhead in Wales. My immediate requirements however seemed to be held within walking distance of our front door at number 23.

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One of the places you can be sure to see interesting opportunities is The Times newspaper’s vacancies section and, on almost always failing to complete its extremely demanding Crossword Puzzle, suited to people far more erudite than I being steeped

in English culture especially its’ literature and history, I would glance through those classifieds, hoping to find an opportunity in a motor racing team or an opening to some adventure or other which would take me out of England and around the world or at least entertain me for a while. One day I came across a classified that read: ‘High excitement, Low pay, come and work with the world’s leading Hot Air Balloon Company’ I was interested enough to drop the Hot Air Balloon Company (HABCO) a line and they called me for interview.

As part of The Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 there had been an impressive display of tethered balloons in neighbouring Hyde Park so I had seen something of what was involved though it never crossed my mind then that my future would be at the forefront of ballooning’s development into the 21st century in the way it turned out.

I was clearly overqualified and a bit older than they were looking for but in the end I and a much more gifted chap called Jo Whiffen were called back and offered work. Neither of us wanted a full time position. He manufactured kites in the East End and I had strong commitments and hopes with my music.

Negotiating the low pay with HABCO’s Tessa Tennant

My first task was to help well known balloonist Julian Nott break a couple of ballooning records – duration and distance. He had achieved recognition for building a balloon using primitive materials and flying it over the Nazca Lines in Peru, and as a ballooning boffin was the first to really put ballooning and himself into the UK record books with height and distance records as well as many other firsts. Ex adman and HABCO’s CEO, Colin Prescot had seen great mileage in involving Julian’s media flare and attention gathering antics so had invited him to join the company. In order to move the projects forward they needed an assistant to help develop the technology and equipment, so

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my apparent engineering background was to be put to good use in building the burner which would in effect be just a larger version of the old Primus Stove or blow torch with its pressurised kerosene - the same as those that had accompanied me back in my family trailer tenting days, On more illustrious occasions the Primus stove had also been to the summit of Mount Everest back in 1953 and on Andreé’s failed balloon expedition to the North Pole in 1896 as well as holding the honour of being the first stove at the South Pole with Amundsen in 1911 so the technology seemed well proven at least The big advantage would be the weight saving in the fuel cells which unlike the normal balloon fuel of propane could be carried in unpressurised plastic containers strung round the basket. I say basket but the material that Julian had picked for the gondola was a light and strong Kevlar honeycomb sandwich structure that was used for Concorde’s floor panels. Off we went to the workshop. With all the normal balloon flight tanks being kept there, it had been nicknamed the Bomb Factory. Let the alchemy of ballooning begin!!!

It was fun and became even more so when one day a particularly jovial, boisterous fellow rolled up with a loud voice to start clearing the bomb factory of the frippery and chattels of its previous owner. HABCO’s chief pilot Robin Batchelor had with him just one tool - a sledge hammer to demolish the larger machinery of what had been an engineering workshop - hmm. After a few high swings, crashes, bangs, rebounds and a lot of tempered swearing it became clear that this approach would not work; the cast iron was not as brittle as it should have been, and we went off for a greasy spoon breakfast and a natter.

Bolstered by Colin’s enthusiasm and marketing awareness, Julian’s project achieved its goal and between sponsors Typhoo Tea and later British Gas a lot of other people’s money was spent and good times were had, eccentricity, free money and survival, a good mix. Colin learnt how to manage these events spinning on his feet, sometimes having to turn failure into media success as they ‘found another way that didn’t work’ but always returning great value to their backers. For example this was applied successfully when on the first duration attempt Julian and Colin ended up almost immediately in a tree.

Unfazed the next attempt proved successful. Eventually Julian went his own way, living now in California and pushing his particular envelope further into outer space.

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Soon afterwards Robin Batchelor and I took to the road in the to fly conventional balloons for Fisons, Prize Yoghurt, Home Tune and other brands that the Hot Air Balloon Company managed from an office in Berners Street in the West end near

Wardour Street. As pilot, Robin did all the flying, elected to do most of the driving and PR and also shouted a lot. My principal requirements for the job seemed to be brawn and tolerance but it was great fun. I hadn’t seen much of the British Isles but in a couple of years I now visited most of it’s mainland, county towns, major cities, tearing up the tarmac, and sliding down recently gritted country lanes, using the wonderfully detailed Ordnance Survey maps to their fullest in chasing the balloons to catch them at the landing. This often took me down roads that would never have figured on my or any life map had it not been for this rather crazy activity, we even encountered people in backcountry Wales who didn’t understand English at all.

Early days

Robin was, and still is, tireless and a man of many interests with friends spread across the land. Rarely would we simply fly, eat, have a beer or two and then conk out as most balloonists do. If there were antiquarian book shops or junk shops to be found, in we went and then maybe an 80 mile dash across B roads to visit a chum or chumette always ready with open arms and tea. Well almost always, as sometimes they were out.

I would compare this attention to friends and interests to plate spinning and admire him for the efforts he goes to keeping all the twirling china aloft on their sticks. Very much in the style of Phileas Fogg and Passepartout I enjoyed every hour of it - if not every minute! (As one of those friends, I dedicate the title of this book to him partly inspired by the thought of spinning away on one of those sticks!)

The second year of hot air ballooning got interesting as HABCO gave us a couple of early special shaped balloons to play with. One was for British Telecom’s Buzby (a yellow Bird) and the other for British Gas (a blue flame).

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The design technology was not as advanced as it is now and these balloons had few outlets for the hot air on landing plus the Big Bird seemed to have had some negative pressure issues which caused it to inflate only partially if lightly loaded. Nevertheless off we would go from the County Show grounds, me down below helplessly watching and usually Robin in the basket doing his best to keep everything the right way up and get down safely. On particularly windy or rainy days we would usually make our excuses and retire but if Robin had the bit between his teeth or if someone he really wanted to impress was around, then it seemed nothing would stop him. Tethering in the rain at Blenheim Palace, home of the Churchill’s I could recall Winston once said – “If you are going to go through hell, keep going!” On another occasion at Shuttleworth Aircraft Heritage Museum’s open day we made what must be the fastest ever running take off dragging half way along the grass runway before the hot air going up beat the high wind going along and the balloon swung into the sky, only to drag itself a little later across three fields of lettuce on landing. All in a day’s work m’lud.

I have never kept diaries but had I done so, I would have noted in those two seasons how ballooning was advancing incredibly fast. I joined around the time that the need for crash helmets was replaced by solid and then flexi-rigid upright supports for the burners, and powerful fans made obsolete the tedious business of flapping in the cold air pre-inflation and also the crew category of Cremation Charlie whose job it was to hold the balloon’s mouth open while the pilot hot inflated his sagging envelope without inadvertently grilling a Chuck Steak. So no more Cremation Charlies, who like the Lancaster bombers similarly ill fated Tailend Charlies are consigned to history now leaving a lot of Proper Charlies these days looking around for other forms of selfemolation.

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George, Hoffmeister’s Hot Bear Balloon team working flat out as usual.

Pilots usually had steadier occupations for the down times which if confined to the UK meant almost 8 months. Those I knew included an antiquarian bookseller, Journalists, designers, lawyers, accountants, doctors, a National Hunt jockey, farmers, a pub landlord and a few musicians. All kinds of folk did this.

Even so I couldn’t see myself doing another year of show circuit crewing, but then, once again, and just in time, it started to get really interesting.

Colin Prescot, advertising copywriter turned balloonist and chief executive of the Hot Air Balloon Company, is one of the greatest people I have ever had the pleasure to meet and an inspiration. He stepped out of advertising on meeting Robin one day after seeing him on a TV programme (What’s my Line) and realising the commercial potential of modern hot air ballooning. (His book “To the Edge of Space: Adventures of a Balloonist” is a great read if you come across it).

Since these strange but simple craft first appeared in the late 18th century, balloons have always had sponsors and attracted huge crowds, but in more recent years the idea became lost with TV entering everyone’s homes and a greater concentration on massmarketing and statistically verifiable campaigns.

Colin on the phone with his business advisor

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Fison’s Fertilizers followed Prize Yoghurt, Terry’s Chocolates, Osram Lightbulbs, 555’s tobacco, Lambert and Butler, British Telecom, British Gas, Budweiser, Carmakers such as Audi, Ford, Jaguar, and Aston Marin. The risk resistant banks took a leap of faith as did, Alka Seltzer, Guinness, and Esso. BP. Shell, Ricard Hoffmeister, Virgin Atlantic Airlines, Xerox, IBM, Samsung, Rupert Bear, Coca Cola. Even the company’s own accountants succumbed to the idea that ballooning ‘worked’ commissioning a balloon in the shape of a bowler hat. Well they should know!

This was happening mainly because through hard work generating interesting programmes and valuable PR hits with the media, Colin and his principal business partner Tessa Tennant had evolved a formula that created millions of pounds worth of advertising benefit for their clients, mainly through TV and other media which could then be measured. Cleverly designed campaigns and stunts would create lots of coverage relatively cheaply. As a consequence tons of fun for us out in the field coupled of course with the responsibility of delivering the promises and living up to the expectations generated by enthusiastic salesmanship.

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Up up and probably away on my frst flight

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This was truly the heyday of commercial ballooning as we trundled hither and thither and further to whither the Birdman Robin`s fancy took him. His fancy often coincided with mine such as when we met up with some great girls who Robin had previously picked up hitchhiking and nicknamed Joy and Laughter. Finding ourselves in Carlisle at the City’s annual Show we ended up sharing two rooms in a B&B. The two girls fitted perfectly their Joy and Laughter epithets. A few joints were rolled but for me they had the effect of disjointed collapse rather than the required giggling stupidity and although before too long we were all four of us standing up naked in the bath/shower where Robin seemed to have mastered his girl. I insisted in making sure the other’s tummy region was the cleanest in Cumberland while my little sausage kept sending messages ‘don’t fuck up, you can do this, I am counting on you, we need this’, and so on. Later when I retired to my room with the most beautiful girl I had seen since Julie Christie appeared in A for Andromeda it became clear that the night was yet old and despite offering a back rub and my version of bangers and mush, our room would be a silent uneasy haven while Robin played conkers in his.

The next day Joy or Laughter (I can’t remember which was which) confessed she wished she had known me better. Damn, Damn, Damn, I couldn’t have agreed more!

Late December that same year found Robin and me rushing up to Edinburgh to spend New Year’s with them with high hopes of continuing our dabblings but despite entertainment from the heads of the Legalize Marijuana Campaign in the UK, of which the girls were part, our only achievement after various cocktails of mushrooms, porridge, whiskey and great dope was to find us nitwits in the kitchen juggling eggs between us, in a way we never could have done when straight, and marvelling at the revelations of well managed drug culture.

On the 31st, we both armed ourselves with a bottle of whisky and lump of coal and set about First Footing as is the custom in Scotland, I lost all my footing first and crashed into a gutter smashing my bottle of Teachers but hanging onto the coal once again getting my priorities wrong. With Robin’s remaining bottle we made it round and it seemed to me the best and only way to spend Hogmanay. As we knocked doors and entered houses, toasting and stumbling along, we met strangers and stranger strangers, and at some point came upon someone I could identify with who was singing away at the piano. This is a song I wrote he said and launched into ‘Santa Claus’s Beard is Made of Snow’ There’s one thing you kids you ought to know, Santa Claus’s Beard is made of snow. I could just hear Max Bygraves singing that one, the melody of which still sticks in my mind.

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What a way to get the hell out of the 70’s!!! It also coincided not surprisingly with the end of my marriage!

Back to more or less serious business. Colin Prescot, HABCO’s CEO invented the Cloudhopper a one man harness balloon which took us off to the Eiger in Switzerland with him and the balloons’ constructor Per Lindstrand together with a bunch of other hang-gliding and parachuting misfits for the filming of the 3 mile High Race, a fictional relay race under the direction of Julian Grant. The film didn’t quite live up to expectation but it was another of many that would give us great opportunities to live well and do mad stuff at someone else’s expense. We took along a large conventional balloon to drop hang gliders and launch parachutists from and shared the mountain with Husky powered dog sleds, and hot dog skiers all of whom had legs in the simulated relay race.

At the end of each day we would career down the slopes back to Kleine Scheidegg, Per and Colin on skis and me on a skibob a fairly lethal affair which made me glad I too had

Slip slidin away!

legs the next day and, though requiring less skill, was certainly more coccyx numbing and generally dangerous than any ski could ever be! My prior cycle training on the farm held me in good stead as I juddered over moguls and was launched free flying into soft and hard snow alike!

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One stunt that went not-so-badly-wrong as-it-could-have-done was attempting to drop parachutists from the top of the balloon. At the point of taking off with Per almost boiling the air in his balloon the two parachutists appeared dangling inside the envelope in the process of being broiled. Needless to say we and the parachutists abandoned the idea to more research.

Netting Nessie

These hoppers were the forerunners to a whole campaign for Smirnoff Vodka which used one along with a small hot air airship to promote the brand. Colin’s advertising savvy and willingness, perhaps over willingness to look silly had him flying into the City of London in full attire of bowler, suit and umbrella pushing the slogan ‘Well They Said Anything Could Happen’. Full media coverage as usual.

I accompanied him on another stunt which had him walking on water trailing a bottle of Vodka hoping to catch the Loch Ness’s wee monster which, I can now reveal, he did to the great surprise of all concerned! This was never reported in the press of course.

But this was nothing next to the stunt for Debenham’s sale a few years later when completely enclosed in a Pooh Bear Suit he set off to fly over Pooh Sticks bridge in Sussex held aloft by a tiny helium balloon. I was along as his assistant, but felt my main duty would be to report the accident when it happened! Once again Colin sailed into glory rather than power wires hitting only the front pages. Has the man no fear, or limits. In his search for ever hairier stunts in ever diminishing balloons; would he one day inflate his own scrotum and float away on that, balls to the wind as it were?!

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Actually it seems comedian Chris O’Dowd may have beaten him to it conceptually with his announcement in 2013 of the world’s largest flying bollocks, a hot air balloon to raise awareness of testiclular cancer in men – fsomething fairly rare in women I would suspect).

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TURNING OVER IN MEXICO MARC WOLFF ARRIVES COLIN’S BALLOONS GET EVEN SMALLER AND A LOVE THAT LASTS

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I rather liked all this travelling and the filmmaking lark, as well as the feeling that we really were pushing the boundaries. By 1980 I had also been to Brittany in France assisting Colin with a balloon for a Fanta commercial, my main memories being the amazing food that the three person catering team produce from the back of their small Citroen van. There was Lobster for lunch and the local Muscadet wine at the breakfast table (it paid to have in David Fanthorpe a gourmand as producer) and it was on this job that Marc Wolff appeared in our sights, an ex-Vietnam helicopter pilot who had moved to the UK from the US and was establishing himself as the number one helicopter film pilot in Europe. His arrival, passing under some power wires to land in a football field, and later low flying and thus demolishing a tent all seemed very much in keeping with this wonderfully crazy occupation.

In 1980 a project to fly the smallest balloons ever in one of the highest cities in the world began to take shape. Colin had proposed to the producers of a new Ryan O’Neal film, Green Ice, that his Cloudhoppers would work much better than the original parachutes in Gerald Browne’s book and they had bought it. They wanted smaller and smaller balloons for a robbery sequence and using new high performance fabric it was thought possible so Per Lindstrand leapt to the challenge and produced 6 pocket size balloon envelopes and back pack fuel systems. Even though all the calculations said they couldn’t fly at the altitude required – Per must have had a different slide rule to everyone else - we all got on board and it was ‘länge leve tolerans’ a bit of surpringly understandable Swedish for ya!

There were only six of us in the team that went to Mexico: pilots Ian Ashpole, Colin Prescot, Robin Batchelor and Graham Elson, me for crew and logistics and Joe Whiffen for crew and repairs. Per Lindstrand and Tessa Tennant came out during the early stages too. Three Cloudhoppers were to be flown tethered together as, winched in, they simulated the robbers landing on a central Bogota bank to relieve its vaults of some emeralds.

On arrival to Mexico, our first task was to retrieve our equipment from customs. Once allowed onto a huge patio area to do so, it was hard to believe the absolutely chaotic heap of all kinds of freight piled up metres high, boxes and bags built into what looked like a huge pyramid shaped bonfire ready for torching. ‘Found one’ shouted Ian, ‘There`s another here’, ‘I think this is ours too’ .... Little by little we extracted our kit incredulous at the horrendous lack of organization. But miraculously it was all there so ‘no problem’.

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Showing great leadership – or maybe he didn’t have any choice - it was quite a thrill when after two weeks of rehearsal Colin lit up the burner, inflated one of the little grey balloons and was floated off Mexico City’s Citibank building over its main street Paseo de la Reforma putting Per’s calculations to the test.

I think all musicians are groupies at heart and maybe all groupies have a musician in them if you see what I mean. Liberated from a marriage in England and elevated to the heights of movie making in exotic lands brushing shoulders in the Holiday Inn lift with the likes of Ringo Star and Barbara Bach who were finishing a stint acting in an American slapstick called ‘Caveman’ as well as commencing their long lasting relationship. Something so off the wall and bonkers as filming a robbery sequence with barely tried technology, on top of a skyscraper at night in the largest and one of the highest cities in the world had S.B. embark on much merrymaking. We really were on top of the World!

29 years old, not at all wise, fairly fuzzy round the edges and definitely feeling an emerging free spirit having just separated from Claire my companion of 10 years from Cambridge days, sadly losing close contact with our two year old son Robin, I enjoyed Mexico to the hilt.

My silly desire to visit countries with Z, X or Y in their name (thinking more Mexico, Brazil and Egypt than Zaire, Luxembourg and Libya) was off to good start as we headed off to the town of eternal spring - Horny Cow (well that’s what I thought Cuernavaca meant). I had great hopes.

Mexican Motorways were definitely a concept but not much of a reality in those days and though now the country is criss-crossed with perhaps one of the best, if not the most expensive, systems in the world, then let’s just say - it wasn’t.

The ubiquitous crew transport was the Combi, these small VW vans were everywhere and their unfortunate tendency to play chicken with oncoming, overtaking DINA buses that roared along on the continuous gradient from ‘Three Marys’ down to The Ex Hacienda near Lake Tequisquitengo was alarming and perhaps the most dangerous part of the whole trip.

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Somehow our elderly driver in his powder blue Combi managed to take things in his strut and during the two hour long trip the balloon team began to get to know each other more closely.

Normally British ballooning means one pilot in charge, one willing crew pulling on ropes and getting shouted at and landings in potentially angry farmer’s fields. But this job required a curbing of egos, more reliance on crew and even one pilot who was ‘spare’ and functioned as third crew most of the time a hedge against Montezuma’s revenge or worse. And all this operating in an unknown environment. On the journey down to Tequisquitengo, I felt it would be good to get our personalities out so to speak and began to provoke the pilots especially into revealing a little of what made them tick.

Eventually, after much soul searching and consumption of Modelo Extra Special, when the Combi door was finally prised open on arrival at the Hacienda, out tumbled a bevy of already rosy faced Brits onto the cobbled drive closely followed by the clattering of many dozens of empty cans that had contained the testimonial bevvy as we established an esprit de corps that would be important in helping us through what would be a challenging adventure for all concerned.

Our boot camp was to be the rather tumbledown ex-Hacienda Vista Hermosa , built for Hernán Cortes after his successful raids into Mexico and celebrated conquest. Run down but enchanting all the rooms were different. Equipped with its own dungeon and bull ring, only one telephone served the whole dimly lit complex which had no air conditioning or TV but enough birds to fill any tropical aviary, in full toot, tweet and chatty cadence the whole time it seemed.

We had about two weeks to practice, and I suggested that we recreate conditions on the Citibank roof with obstacles and all so we marked out the dimensions and found that laying the three balloons on top of each other and using the same crown rope on first one then the next two we could inflate the balloons in no time. Autonomy of flight was important obviously and these sleek little flying machines had about 30 minutes maximum before needing refuelling. We actually perfected a version of in flight refuelling which required some discipline but we were a tight team Robin, Ian, Colin, Graham, Joe and I and showed surprising maturity given our natural boyish dispositions! We all knew this was cutting edge stuff.

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These practice sessions were brief and only for a few hours each morning before the thermals put paid to further flying. For the rest of the day we were relegated to pool side limonadas, siestas and the occasional beer or margarita. My room was at the top

of a small staircase where the friendly permanent resident, a lizard, cackled away most nights on the ceiling, failing miserably to catch any of the flying beetles that entered my open window. It seemed to be laughing at me as I wilted and the candle by my bed keeled over in sympathy under the oppressive heat, hardly stirred by a fan that served solely as a visual adornment rather than do anything towards cooling the room.

Unheated showers and light clothing soon helped us all adapt to the temperatures. We would reconvene in the evenings in the Hacienda’s Al Fresco dining room and marvel at the Doodlebug proportions of the insects that would propel themselves to slaughter in the large, ultraviolet contraptions which sizzled in celebration at every catch, absolute carnage going on above our heads as we tucked into our soups, salads and spicy steaks.

My upstairs corner sweat box in Ex Hacienda Vista Hermosa, Morelos

Gradually we established how this was all going to work, and also that Marc Wolff in the chopper was much more use to us as a water skiing tow craft on Lake Tequisuitengo than as a fan for blowing the balloons along.

We would return to the Ex-Hacienda to complete some balloon take off shots for the movie, but before all that it was back to Mexico City and the Holiday Inn to start principal photography of our main scenes. The first morning in the hotel at breakfast I was struck by the most enchanting smile I had ever seen as my coffee splashed into its cup and on to the saucer. Dianna had been around serving as a cocktail waitress in the hotel lobby bar during the first few days we arrived but it was only on our return that I felt her true warmth in that beautiful innocent smile. With hardly any English then, when she asked for ‘my number room’ I scribbled it down and spent the next 10 hours upstairs waiting for her to call or come up. She didn’t.

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First call to the Citibank building with our balloons was at 7 that evening and off we went, a gentleman with the nickname Chespirito (he resembled a famous Mexican TV personality with that name) brought our truck of gear and half his family along and we lugged all the gas bottles, Cloudhoppers, fans, ropes, winches groundsheets and other paraphernalia up the 18 floors of the building only partly served by a lift. Then it was a still unfinished new landmark and one of the tallest buildings on Mexico’s beautiful Avenida Paseo de La Reforma. Now it is way, way down that list and actually looks a bit stumpy.

Settling in for the night we lolled and lulled, Colin reassured the producers that our time would come (they agreed) and we accustomed ourselves to ‘hurry up and wait’ entertained by the seemingly endless stream of jokes from the Effects Associates crew – they would have been laughing anyway as for them and many others a night shoot over a weekend with insufficient rest periods meant multiple-bubble, quadruple time or something. By contrast the high excitement low pay philosophy of HABCO was fulfilled in buckets but no one was complaining, this is what Jo and I at least had signed up for. Some light drizzle filled other buckets and rather stiffer breeze than we could work in meant that it wasn’t until 4 in the morning that conditions calmed and we could put into effect our meticulously devised plan popping up the balloons in no time and ready for action as we roped Colin, Ian and Robin together at the hip and started to winch them out over the 100 metre drop so that they could then simulate pulling themselves in on the attached cord, as we had practiced many times, in order to relieve the bank of its Emeralds.

Mexico City’s altitude is almost double that of the Ex-Hacienda, poorer quality gas and lower pressure meant that we had to change some burner jets and on one outing a badly adjusted set on the farthest out balloon started to burn through the Kevlar strings that connected Mr Graham Elson to the little grey bag above his head. I imagine the little grey bag that was his bladder also started to react when Robin Batchelor put out a mayday call to be winched back. He had felt the twangs as one by one the thin suspension lines were slowly burning through and threatening to bring Graham’s hopping and other more routine days as a graphic designer to an end, this plus the fact that the gas was beginning to run out had us all paddling madly (vis a vis ducks) as we calmly winched him and the rest back onto the roof. All this accompanied by the noise of Marc hovering by in the helicopter as the scene was caught on film. Despite the rising pucker factor we managed to pull Graham to safety as he used his last gasps of hot air.

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Thinking about it now the guys were connected together and he was never in real danger but it would have been horribly unprofessional not to say embarrassing had the little grey balloon disappeared down below the level of the roof with Graham swinging into the building releasing his own little grey bag and all us lot saying how maybe we had pushed the envelope too far with this one.

When he finally crossed the edge of the roof you could feel the communal sigh of relief.

Of course this didn’t happen again and apart from some drama when a hose full of propane leaked onto the roof and bathed part of it in gentle flames for a moment like a crepe suzette, over-exciting the more tremulous into a silent Munchen scream, as well as prompting the firemen to look for their extinguishers (which would have been useless anyway), we got the job done rather magnificently even if I say so myself.

Every morning at around seven with the sun up and our night of crime concluded we were escorted the few blocks back to the hotel in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa by the ever present fire-engine parked symbolically but uselessly 18 floors down accompanied by a couple of police patrol bikes all clanging and whining away respectively to good effect.

On these days we usually headed round to Denny’s all night diner for breakfast, munching aqay on three eggs, hamburger patties bacon and hash browns, slice of orange and a bit of lettuce, hotcakes, maple syrup and coffee. A delicious kind of cholesterol Scream!!!

But nobody cared or knew much about such things in the early 80s.

The rest of the day was once again ours to do with as we pleased and mostly we grabbed some shut eye or basked by the roof top pool to the sounds of mad Mexico`s police whistles, sirens, horns, bus engines, occasional gunshot (or was it a backfire) and general bustle, the unorchestrated cacaphony of sounds, smells, sights and other sensations that makes this city so special.

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Then there were the evenings but as our call had been put back now to 2.am we needed to keep our wits about us. Not easy. One strange occasion had me and Jo Whiffen return from an early dinner and wishing each other goodnight until our 2 clock rendezvous, I told him I had to make a call and would see him later. Back in the lobby I saw a group of girls sipping their cocktails and asked one of them if she would help me make a long distance call as I wasn’t familiar with the system, crossing the lobby she made straight for the elevator and suggested we do it from my room. Virilis Puerum ad Caelum!

Imagine Jo’s surprise when he knocked on my door to borrow some toothpaste a little later and I answered the door bollock naked with soft music, dimmed lights and a dark long-haired beauty inspiring the shadows. Rock and Roll!

In spite of all this rampant opportunism, I began to realise that Dianna Alejandra Marin Reyes was someone special for me and so when she suggested we spend my day off at a Balneario in Oaxtepec ,Morelos not far from Mexico City, I thought it would be fun and we set off by bus. It was a magic trip and although we never swam we rented a small villa and became intimate for the first time. It could have been the last time too if the local police had had their way. I was being a bit of a twat pretending to be a dope head and on boarding the bus home a couple of them came on board to arrest me. Not good. Dianna told me to just stay put and shut up which I did with great finesse. Amazingly the bus driver sent them packing and the passengers all shouted abuse.

Such, fortunately for me is the respect Mexicans had and still have for their absolutely appalling law enforcement services!

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My memories of Mexico at that time go from the contrast of tremendous willingness, humour and warmth of most people I met to a general frenetic hustle and bustle that would perhaps better be described as impenetrable chaos. Almost all the vehicles were rusty old heaps, mostly gas guzzling American cast-offs and many roads lacked asphalt and even to this day road signing clearly isn’t anyone’s obvious speciality. I never felt in danger although Dianna would always be warning me of it. Some things you didn’t do. These were the times of President Lopez Portillo with corruption, nepotism and general ineptitude in government and almost all walks of public life at a peak. In two years the country would plunge into a crisis that still haunts it. Lopez Portillo as well as failing to ‘defend the peso like a dog’ as he promised went on to marry soft porn actress Sasha Montenegro and defended his own rather large quantity of pesos rather better, barking out his days on the huge full presidential pension while the roller coaster ride of the Mexican economy took it plummeting into instability for many years. Only now, after what they call political alternation, does stability and progress seem a real possibility even if still a few generations away. One of the enduring problems is Mexican

bureaucracy which seems to have more to do with donkeys than desks and certainly requires many carrots to be dangled for any action to take place.

After a few more nights on the perpetually wet Citibank roof, hosed down to simulate the first night, we managed to get sufficient material in the can and with a short jaunt down to the Ex-Hacienda for the take off sequence, - ‘OK muchachos let’s fly’, says Ryan O’Neil, we just had one more sequence to film of the balloons free night-flying over a city landscape. Clearly this was to be early morning and a place on the outskirts was chosen that seemed feasible. Armed with buns and milk for an impromptu breakfast we set off in the Combi once more towards the location. The pilots were comfortable with the limitations of the balloons and as they rose into the pre dawn sky for the brief flight we trundled after them in a sort of business as usual style. Soon the balloons were down and as we scuttled around putting them into their little duffle bags a rather menacing crowd began to surround us. In the usual balloonist’s way we tried to win them over but it was hard to explain what the hell we were doing and some of the mob seemed convinced we were extraterrestrials or some such and certainly up to nothing that would benefit them. Once we were able to hop back into the relative safety of our transports the crowd got closer and the idea of appeasing them with a few donuts turned into a near riot and we ended up tossing the lot out, part offering and part missile as our drivers accelerated away from the zombies versus combis scene in their own VW air-cooled fashion.

So it seemed we were done, a few technical shots in Churubusco studios and thanks to the boss’s keen negotiating we were off to join the main crew at Las Hadas on Mexico’s Pacific coast to ‘await rushes’ and be cleared to leave for home. This modern resort had been the location for Dudley Moore and Bo Derek’s recent landmark film, “10”.

A lot of meeting and greeting was done in our week there especially between us resting, cocky balloonists and the local girls before we were finally shipped off home and away from trouble.

The Movie? Well during filming we hardly saw anything of Ryan O’Neil, Omar Sharif or Ann Archer as most of our work involved their stunt doubles or stand-ins as is usually the case with second or aerial unit filming where everyone even the director is usually different. When it did come out, I was surprised to hear Maria Muldaur singing the Bill Wyman composed Cloudhopper theme as our amazing adventure all cut together into an unusually long and magical sequence in an enjoyable, but underrated film. Green Ice. 137

Dianna and I made our farewells with the hope of seeing each other again soon. Our last night found us smooching to KC and the Sunshine Band’s, Please Don’t Go, Chicago’s If you Leave Me Now and bopping away to Lipps Inc.’s enduring Funky Town. I knew I would be back. They do say that if you visit Mexico you will return.

Worry, I’ll be back!

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LOST & FOUND

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Back on home turf I was keen for more of this movie making shenanigans and I felt that, given the chance, I had something to offer at a higher level, with some talent for organizing tours, productions and events putting the right people together to do the right job and seeing it through harmoniously.

But for now it was not to be and I was given the keys to a posh new Citroen Van and asked to drive it down to Portugal to work on a series of flights and exhibitions for Ricard, a new HABCO client, employing an enormous bottle replica and small go anywhere 31. Complete with my Yellow Red and Blue Ricard togs, I was soon meeting up with pilot Ian Jacobs and his wife Amanda in Faro where we got to work. Something new on this trip was the accompanying support promotion team consisting of Jean Francois the French coordinator and his selection of PR girls who would join us for the two week tour.

Despite my fresh love interest in Mexico I found myself seated at dinner by the side of one of the most gorgeous girls I had ever met: Ana Maria Peixoto. I was convinced she was Miss Portugal or something – well why not, they have to work too! She had big eyes and was always laughing and crazy and we had a great time as I tried to get her into my bed or me into hers. Not to be till years later, but it was fun trying and a bond developed between us that still lasts to this day. Being introduced to Fado and the many varieties of Port wine as well as travelling in this country stuck on the end of Europe made me feel more like a gypsy or pirate every day.

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It all ended too soon as we trundled off for a visit to the strange non-country that is Andorra and, without offence, best described as a huge off-duty supermarket between Spain and France surrounded by ski resorts when it snows. This was late summer so no skiing or even flying but we got started and put the huge Ricard bottle up on Supermarket roofs, in car parks and on one memorable occasion next to an open sewer where we were accompanied by a jovial French family who laid out their smelly picnic just along from us. Strange people the French. I was getting along great with a lovely Mexican girl, Leo, who worked for Ricard so that end was covered so to speak but a few days in we had to change pilots and I was totally unprepared for what happened next.

Ian and his wife Amanda were going back to England and legendary balloonist, HABCO director and quintessential English gentleman Jo Philp and his young girlfriend Heather, or “Little Purple Flower” as he called her, were coming out to take over for the remaining few days. Before leaving for the airport Ian checked into the London office and I sensed something was up when he came back with a solemn look on his face.

Of course I can’t recall his exact words but in essence he said he had bad news and that Liam, my younger and only full brother, had been killed in a car accident. I knew he had been in the Canaries where he was on assignment as a catalogue photographer for London’s Carlton studios. His wife Joy had survived what appeared to be a fairly light crash but Liam had received a knock to the head and passed away unexpectedly in hospital during the night.

So there I was left alone in Andorra not wanting to believe what I had heard could be true and only the Citroen van, Leo Gonzalez and a newly installed AIWA stereo radio cassette player to cling onto. I had just bought Gino Vanelli’s Brother to Brother album

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and also more poignantly had Art Garfunkel’s beautiful theme to Watership Down ‘Bright Eyes’ on another tape. We drove quietly up into the Andorran hillside, me in shock and Leo a great comfort by my side taking in the deeper meaning these songs had suddenly been given.

Jo was a comforting spirit to have around as was Rum and even Ricard!

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L

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Liam Byrne, no more birthdays for him then!

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Bright eyes, Burning like fire.

Bright eyes, How can you close and fail How can the light that burned so brightly Suddenly burn so pale?

Bright eyes.

Is it a kind of shadow, Reaching into the night, Wandering over the hills unseen, Or is it a dream?

There’s a high wind in the trees, A cold sound in the air, And nobody ever knows when you go, And where do you start, Oh, into the dark.

Bright eyes, burning like fire.

Bright eyes, how can you close and fail How can the light that burned so brightly Suddenly burn so pale?

Bright eyes.

Mike Batt

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Naturally the company offered to fly me home immediately but I preferred to see out my stint and drive back, maybe still in denial. It would be a while before the body was repatriated and the funeral took place anyway.

It was a longer than usual journey home about which I can only recall stopping off to light a candle for Liam in Chartres. The town’s magnificent Cathedral stands clear, as if floating on the landscape many miles before reaching the town. The peace and majesty of this overwhelming 8th century building and its powerful sense of impartial spirituality and real survival over so many years having come through both the French Revolution and two World Wars unscathed when it was certainly targeted at one point or another, helped me come to terms with my own loss. In the next few years I was able to pass through a number of times and light more candles to Liam rekindling his memory and connecting again with his kindly spirit. R.I.P. Liam Garratt Byrne. If only it could have been different.

Although convinced in my atheism it is quite clear why the human race has come to create and follow religious ideals and practices and in more ancient times sacrifice their own to much feared idols and gods. Such inventions as Chartres own Sancta Camisa, The Turin Shroud, The image and myth of Mexico’s Virgin de Guadalupe and the uncanny timing and similarities in the stories of other many convenient manifestations only strengthen my certainly that organised religion is entirely man made and all its grandiose artefacts so obviously as false as the despised ancient idols so held in disdain.

How you explain the Creation, procreation, the miracles of evolution and our silly little planet? God only knows!!!

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Giving thanks to God for the good times and asking Him for strength during the bad or forgiveness when you err, makes sense too. It is comforting to have faith in a greater will and force and somehow keeps society on the rails, but in every practical way I have seen the most profound believers suffer cruelly, however much they pray and thank the Lord, while those who prefer to ignore it all or, so to speak, sell their souls to the devil, rise and shine with it seems a clear conscience and as often as not achieve great success in life. The idea that they will pay in the afterlife or be reincarnated as snakes or worse is in itself a conveniently encompassed belief that only further convinces me of the whole falsehood. Modern day leaders and successful people do pay lip service to a God and religion it is true but I suppose it is simply acknowledging their luck which, whilestgrit and determination are the mainstays of success, is always a player and whether good or bad, pertains to no one. Whenever I hear ‘Praise the Lord’ I have to ask myself ‘Why? For what? But seeing the joy such expression brings it is hard not to recognise the panacea

that faith provides, like a reset button! I just wish people would realise that an awful lot of what appears to be bad or good luck is only part of the miserable manifestations and orchestrations of weak government without humanitarian values who lean on these belief systems perhaps better named ‘relief ’ systems. And by the way if there is anyone home and you are up there, protect us from Islam’s new furor which is a strange and extreme phenomenon, certainly no friend of Jesus or humanity, much barbarity practised in its name a reminder of the medieval times of inquisitions and burnings at the stake!!!! Surely it is time for this religion in particular to enlighten and catch on to the more sophisticated, socially accepted game most other religions play!

Losing my brother is still the worst blow I have experienced in my entire life, but it did give everything new meaning and perspective for me from then on. I felt I was blessed to be alive, breathing and experiencing everything good or bad in a way that Liam never would. My parents of course were devastated and lines permanently etched into their faces that were never there before, their smiles ever dimmed and their lives damaged beyond repair. This kind of loss is the hardest to bear. My brother was a special and calm soul, very sociable and loving with only friends, no enemies. He had talent and a great future ahead of him and we had only just reached the ages where the 4 year difference between us meant nothing. I shall always miss him.

His widow and I became quite close for a while, sharing the loss from different points of view but finding solace in each other’s company. On one desperate occasion with a few too many bottles of wine uncorked we even made love. It didn’t feel in any way wrong for us to do this. In reality there is no more satisfying act than spending time naked and close with people you care for, love or simply desire. The search for this kind of intimacy has never really got me into too much trouble but it probably should have and maybe still will!!!

Going through all my and my dad’s old cassette tapes a few years back I came across a recording of Liam’s voice. He uttered just these few words ‘he was killed in a car crash’.

Who he was referring to I have no idea but it was chilling to hear it.

I was back home by the time the body was returned for burial and decided to go shoeless to the funeral service out of respect for him. I am thankful I have no religion to guide me and his memory is tucked into a simple resting place in my soul though like the simple wooden cross over his grave it fades too fast.

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He got on much better with my Dad than I ever did, unchallenging and sharing the interest of photography. They had been in the process of re-roofing his Morris Minor convertible back at the farm but, in the wake of his passing, it stood many years abandoned in a shed before my parents could bring themselves to sell it with the newly delivered roof still un-installed. The light brown leather jacket he had been wearing when he crashed stayed hanging in a wardrobe for ages too as the bloody stains also gradually turned to brown and faded to a light blemish almost lost in the colour and character of the garment.

I still had my old Volvo B22 inherited from Dad when he bought the Wolseley and which thrummed nicely and would see me through a good few years. I had a great sounding AIWA stereo bought in Andorra and just like one I put into the Ricard van which I finally decided to install before it became obsolete, I had hesitated not wanting it to get stolen. Once installed it got stolen the next day!!!

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This lovely giant amongst cars didn’t perhaps receive the nurturing respect from me it should have and gradually the clutch began to show signs of submission beyond simple

adjustment, finally leaving Dianna and I at the bottom of a small valley with apparently no way out.I would reverse up one side and then give it all the welly I could to propel it up the other, rolling backwards again in a second and third attempt. Eventually we found a way out on a small bi-road but I think in the end, with no money to fix it, I sold it to Robin Batchelor’s sister for spares for her similar car.

Soon after returning to England and the house at 27 Eastbourne Road, Brentford which I had been able to buy with my Acrobat Records advance, I felt it would be good to have some sharers rather than live alone. I was put in touch with a young design graduate from Newcastle and his pretty wife who were coming down to London to try their luck and soon Vaughan and Angela Oliver were settled into the big front bedroom.

They decided to live apart fairly soon in and Ken Corsey another designer moved into the tiny back bedroom, with me keeping the ‘middle’ bedroom. The three bears!

They were crazy times with us three virile and forward looking guys living out a kind of graduate student experience. They introduced me to new music, a steady stream of new girls and new ideas. We were coming through.

With little persuading to give up his job at Michael Peters Design, Vaughan took a job with Ivo Watts-Russell at budding independent record label ‘4AD’, part of Beggars Banquet.

Records Over the years he created his own design ethic as 23 Envelope, now V12, for

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bands like The Pixies, Cocteau Twins, Colourbox and Dead Can Dance giving the label a visual identity perfectly complementing the musical one. His style and technique have become legendary and he is an inspiration for many of today’s young designers. It was fun to be in at an early stage of his journey and share doubts and certainties. Meanwhile Orkneyman Ken has gone on to run a very successful Interior design firm.

27 Eastbourne Road, Brentford - House of fun Vaughan and Ken someone’s cut off our feet!!!!

These 80’s were an emotional override but the music side of things was beginning to pick up again which I liked.

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I bid for and won the opportunity to write the theme music for a new BBC series The Rock and Roll Years, I also set up a commissioned music company called Soundbox – for which Vaughan designed the logo – and provided music for the FA Cup Videos and a number of other programmes. People would call me for voice sessions which paid well and I was asked to sing on the Eurovision song Contest and a number of other TV shows. including frequent appearances on the Rock Gospel Show. It was satisfying rolling up with nothing but the air you breath and earn a living with that. A high point

out of many was doing a session for Top of the Pops with Bonny Tyler as she promoted her new single ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ I only appeared once as I was standing in for regular guitarist Peter Glennister an old mate from Cambridge who then could hardly nudge licks out of his old Hofner Verithin but was now a sought after session guitarist for people like Bonny and Terence Trent D’Arby to name the only two I can think of right now! My friends and family have lived off that one appearance ever since and it got me mobbed in the Tate Gallery a few days later when on a lovers’ tryst. As the voice accompanying Bonnie on the record is so like mine, people were convinced it was me on the record anyway - but sadly it’s not, it belongs to long time Jim Steinman collaborator Canadian, Rory Dodd.

To complete the Seanymania BBC producer Denise Richards from the Rock and Roll Years proposed following me around in a fly on the wall documentary. Unfortunately for her, me and the fly, after an intense week of amazingness with Dennis Waterman live on Pebble Mill at One in Birmingham, Eurovision and recording the Rock & Roll Years’ theme, my music workload suddenly dwindled to nothing so once again I turned to ballooning and accepted a trip to Brazil to film another Fanta commercial.

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BRAZIL

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Research is a very important part of any success and I went about contacting some Brazilians in London. Tony Barton (who was part of the Wully and The Zany project) hooked me up with Vera Martucelli and her band of friends and it wasn’t long before my research took a more romantic turn. I wrote a song for her called ‘November’ inspired by our first meeting up on Hampstead Heath where she was on crutches recovering from a fall but with her beautiful autumnal hair flowing over her shoulders.

I had been given the task of organizing the logistics for the trip to Brazil, we had a new balloon being built once again by Per Lindstrand’s company and Robin and I were earmarked to set off to Sao Paulo for a six week stint of rehearsals and filming of a global campaign for FANTA.

Me and research assistant Vera, clearly pleased with the results

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A week or so before we were to ship the balloon we had a test inflation and it was obvious that the all orange balloon was more like an Orang-utan and all kinds of oranges, satsumas mandarins and tangerines had been used from different batches of orange fabric. It looked like a patchwork quilt through Eagle Eyes Sunglasses, but Per sorted it out just in time for shipping to Brazil only to see it arrive in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo days before filming was scheduled to start in Brazil. It seems the balloon’s basket was a bit bigger than the available plane’s doors would permit but eventually Cargolux came good and Robin and I plus the balloon were settling into Sao Paolo’s prestigious Maksud Plaza Hotel keen to get started on this new escapade.

While Robin set off scouting my task was to accompany our equipment down to the first port of call, a fishing village and small resort called Parati sitting on the coast between Sao Paolo and Rio. Despite my short visit to Portugal and my applied research, my Portuguese was scummy and actually the way they speak it in Brazil was so different than the original. The driver had his own version and dialect and not long after we set off in a huge removal van with its smallish cargo of the Fanta balloon he turned off the main highway and up into the dirt roads of the mountains. My not so limited knowledge of South American geography and my research plainly indicated that going up a mountain was not the obvious choice to get me to the coastal town proscribed in my call sheet. The dirt road got steadily twistier and narrower with precipices to one side while we still seemed to communicate very ineffectively. We had tried to teach each other a few words but when the driver started calling me a fucker and describing a knife with his gestures I felt that feigning sleep and less talk might be a more comfortable tactic. Four agonizing hours later we rolled down the mountainside (right way up, alive and on the road at least) and up to a junction which indicated right – Sao Paolo, left Rio de Janeiro. Now it was my turn to call this guy a fucker and mimic his knife gestures, to save a few pennies on tolls he had taken the scenic route instead of the motorway. I found out later that the Portuguese for a knife is faca, pronounced ‘fucker’.

It was a massive undertaking. The whole thing was to be shot around beaches, waterfalls and islands - your perfect holiday wouldn’t have had a better storyboard! Some of the most beautiful scenery Brazil could offer and once again its casting directors multiracial dream, meant we had the whitest, reddest, blackest and occasionally greenest people on earth to get this important message out to Fantasize the world. There were film crews from the States, Brazil and Australia shooting parallel commercials with the same balloon but different product - the drink and logos the same, the bottles not.

The American director, Spotty Windbag, called us to a meeting where we were informed that Robin looked perfect but I was all fucked up so couldn’t be on camera and the next few days we spent on the most fantastic locations doing Spotty’s thing.

Robin played Mr Fanta family and was called upon to ‘act’ which he interpreted to mean being himself but just a bit more manic, I was charged with flying the balloon over a waterfall on tethers in the background. After so many years in the game although not a licensed pilot, fucked up or not, I was flattered to be entrusted with this, in place of the local balloonist another Englishman and Cameron Dealer John Thornton who had tumbled into town.

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On one day I was sent off to inflate for a stills shoot, while ‘Robin robbed camera elsewhere. We were a little late getting started and the client wanted to go up on the tether with me. Inflating the balloon was no problem and keeping it up in the air was a doddle, but I was aware that the sun was getting up, a few birds were beginning to soar and the first bubblings of afternoon clouds were appearing over the mountains as usual, so we wouldn’t be doing this for long. The client asked me about my experiences flying and I had to confess to him that this was the first time I had ever done it, which was actually true. Fifty metres up in our small basket he went quiet just as a less than friendly thermal popped on us, pushed out some hot air sending us to the ground and into a goalpost. No one hurt, all briefings done correctly and in my view a fine job but it brought the old joke to life for real which was a hoot.

In the tropics and free of commitments I was still researching and a curious situation arose when the main model - beautiful Angela, me, Robin her screen husband and her real boy friend the art director were travelling in a taxi, the other two guys unaware that they had a third contester for her charms on board as we had had a rumble in the jungle only a few hours earlier during a shared day off. Hee hee!

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The producer ended up having a heart attack. Every day en route to our location we would pass a military checkpoint and they would ask him for his film permission, transit authorization or some paper or other, always finding a way to get another 1000 bucks into their mitts to get his expensive convoy moving. It could be for not wearing

a shirt or shoes while driving, having an open bottle in his car, lacking an interstate vehicle pass but always something unexpected. He quietly disappeared off the scene to suffer silently back in New York.

As the days went by the heat, hours and general workload got to us too and nearing the last day when we were to film the balloon taking off from an island and then if possible flying across to the mainland shore. Robin and I, in the face of fatigue, both decided to try and keep it simple and avoid this particular finale which was in any case a bonus shot after everything had gone so amazingly. Cometh the day, cometh the man and good old Birdman took to the skies and on reaching the mainland brushed through a tree to slow down prior to landing, dislodging a hornets’ nest in the process along with a story that has become part of his ‘leyenda´. A large number of easily pissed off hornets rushed towards the confines of the basket to join the last part of their ride and despite being told to stay on board his passenger, one of the producers, along for the ride, jumped out on landing and was then hit by the descending basket which sent her for three months into hospital with a broken back.

I in the meantime, my job done, had finally succumbed to sharing a celebratory joint with Flavio the location manager as we watched the balloon floating sedately across to the mainland seemingly secure in reaching its destination without issues. We were unaware of any crisis until on our way back from the island to the mainland pier in a small boat we heard calls on the radio for ambulances. Nothing I could do puttering across the sea and another hour or so at least before we would hit landfall and get to the balloon so we had another spliff. When I finally caught up with Robin at the hotel he had the most enormous blisters I have ever seen on his arms and legs and was not a happy chappy. Not the moment to remind him of our non-flight decision (but I did anyway). Shame to see him fucked up too especially after everything had been perfect up until then, but it taught me to be very wary of slipping guard on the last day of any shoot or project from then on.

Like Mexico, Brazil is a wondrous, blundrous mix of magic and misery. One perfect evening strolling along the quay in another location, Ubutuba, marvelling at the mirror blackness of the stillest sea and starlit night accompanied by Edna one of my recently appointed researchers and a production assistant, a young mother approached with her baby and begged with us to buy her child. We kept walking, clearly not candidates for such an investment and she slipped back into the cloak of darkness. On the walk back we saw her abandoned push chair tipped over in the sand and I have always wondered how that story ended.

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Another sorry part of my Brazillian saga is that because of Carnaval in Rio I had to stay on for four days paid holiday until the shippers opened again for business and could receive the balloon for shipment. Such was my plight that I had no choice but to witness the throbbing crescendo of the batacada Samba drum parades approach through the streets, the driving third beat pulse of the Surdo, clatter of the little stick beaten Tambori and rhythmic shrilling of the Apito whistle plus my favorite the Cuica rasping its unearthly orgasmic cries over the shifting sands of the Ganza and other shakers, 100 or more musicians rattling along in one of the most joyous expresions of humanity I have ever witnessed. Add a few incredible transvestite dancers and the dazzling feet of great Samba dancing and what traffic there was stopped in its tracks.

Spontaneous dancing was everywhere and seeing young kids feet blur in movement as they danced explained to me at least where Brazil’s prowess in football comes from!

In quieter moments, time to sip a cafezinho over breakfast in the Ipanema Cafe where Jobim and Moraes supposedly wrote their famous song The Girl From Ipanema, or later overlooking the beach, enjoy a Caipirinha or two in the Copacabana Hotel where I stayed. Such suffering indeed, life couldn’t get much better than this!

I was happy in this crazy Carioca heaven especially once I had been guided round pharmacists by Edna, the young redheaded production assistant I had befriended, looking for jabs and ridding myself of the clap which had chuckled its way into my goolies and plagued my nutcase! The great thing about Gonorrhoea is that while one prick gets it another one quickly takes it away. Wouldn’t it be great if other sexual diseases were more user friendly and all life’s problems could be so easily solved by a little needle?

The balloon tanks had to be purged of propane and I figured as good a way as any was to fill them with water rather than expensive Nitrogen, once emptied I would apply the Irish gas test and throw in a match, I mean hey you either know what you are doing or you don’t!

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MEXICAN HONEY

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After shipping off the balloon equipment from Brazil, I bade farewell to that particular fantasy island and made a hop to Manaus, skip to Bogota and finally a jump into Mexico City to visit Dianna and have a well earned holiday.All that exercise and heat left me knackered as I settled into the Reforma’s Hotel Montejo and confidently anticipated Dianna’s arrival having once again, but more assuredly this time, passed her my ‘number room’.

This Hotel was one of the many buildings that would lose it’s battle with gravity during the big 1985 earthquake but a few hours later our tossing and tumblings gave no hint of any structural weaknesses!

I forget how long I stayed in Mexico but it gave us time to take an old Pullman train down to Oaxaca and explore this lovely state of Mexico. We left from the Buena Vista station. The 17 hour trip was magical if slow and we were treated to the pull down couchettes and personal service traditionally associated with Pullman class. The engine puffed its way along rails that had played a huge part in Mexican history during the Revolution. Sitting President Venustiano Carranza’s government took the treasury and ran his government from a train. How they managed to escape from pursuit by even mules is hard to imagine given the pace we were making but finally arriving in Oaxaca we went about exploring a place Dianna hadn’t been to before either.

We were determined to get to Puerto Angel and the Zipolite love beach so were soon off to The Huatulco Bays, then in the throes of being converted into one of Mexico new Megaresorts but still more a group of tropical villages than anything and I bought right into to the Vazquez Tropical Show’s music which set the tone as it played on the airport taxi’s barely tuned in radio on the trip to our hotel. Gradually working our way down to the Love beach we spent a couple of nights sleeping in hammocks and enjoying fresh cooked fish and beautiful weather.

There was a military camp set up right in the middle of Zipolite with armed soldiers who patrolled in combat uniform, guns at the ready and apparently little time for love or beach. They seemed to have lost the plot and busied themselves hassling the tourists who showed too much skin, though they had come across the world to do so in keeping with the places guide book references and reputation. A plague of stupid non-stinging black bees also bugged us but their kind were soon to be sacrificed to the altar of International Tourism along with the uncool soldiers.

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Even so, these stark contrasts are part of the fascination that Mexico has, not to mention the incredible bio-diversity, climates and terrain that led Hernรกn Cortes, when asked to describe Mexico`s topography, to crumple up a piece of paper and as it unravelled on the table point to it. Certainly his journey up from Veracruz to Mexico City would have been incredibly hard on horseback even with the roads that paved the way in the eighties.

The return flight to England was also a bit of a hop, piss and a dump, stopping off in the Bahamas for a pee and Bermuda for a pooh. I felt like I was marking out my territory and contributing to globification I remember famous England cricket opener Freddy Truman was on the trip too - hobbling around on a stick, as old sportsmen are prone to do, and scratching his googlies.

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SUPERMAN CALLS COLIN’S BALLOONS NOW FAR TOO SMALL FOR COMFORT AND HE DRESSES AS A WOMAN DODGING A DART ROUND MEXICO

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Eventually back to England where Colin had sold another stunt to the movies. This time we would have Superman III at our mercy and the balloons wouldn’t even be flyable. Two metres in diameter, three of them were to be slung under a helicopter and then be lowered into Glen Canyon. Closer than ever in size to Colin’s bollocks I felt my earlier premonition coming nearer to fruition and was concerned at where the line would ultimately be drawn. Clearly this had about as much to do with ballooning as bee-keeping but we were all up for it and once again Colin, Robin, Ian and I were thrown into the deep end, and shipped off to Page, Arizona to get started.

I stayed behind a few days in the UK to pick up Per Lindstrand’s spreader system that would carry the balloons under the chopper. On seeing it disassembled, it all looked a bit Heath Robinson and puny to my intuitive eye but no time for changes so it and I were shipped out anyway. First trials with oil drummies proved that this pudding was inedible as it all collapsed under the combined weight within moments.

My engineering background still getting me into trouble I was dispatched to help construct something better and we were put in touch with a Mormon aluminium river rafting boat-builder based rather unexpectedly in the middle of the Utah desert. It was decided that instead of a flimsy triangular affair we would make a kind of three spoke rimless wheel with reinforcing gussets at the joints for added strength and to prevent distortion. This and 6 inch aluminium tubing was the basis of a really solid looking piece of engineering. It looked right and things that look right have a habit or at least a chance of working. Next job was to measure out the thin suspension cables and swage in the connecting eyes. I had flown down to specialists in Phoenix, bought the gear, tested the swages and line strengths and felt comfortable that none of my balloonist turned stuntmen friends would be free-falling to the deck. Amazingly they trusted my judgement!

Each line was a different length so the balloons would look as if they were flying and after successful tests with the drummies we were set for our first live trial.

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The rig was suspended below the helicopter and lthe ines went down to the top of the balloons where Per’s construction took over with a cable inside the 2 metre diameter balloon. Seeing how the rest of the Lindstrand rig hadn’t lived up to expectations we were especially careful that the internal rigging was also free of twists. All said and done, the three air-filled balloons were tugged into the air under the A Star piloted by Marc, their little back-pack fans whirring fancifully away – all suspended by a ¼ inch aircraft spec. bolt of which I bought a couple without thinking too much about what circumstances might require use of the spare! These I also bought in Phoenix and one now lives on Robin’s mantelpiece.

Knowing how in our close-to-the-edge business, all the calm and control can suddenly turn into tragedy with one little slip, it was nail-biting watching from below as four of my best friends swung away into the air with equipment signed off by me the only thing between them and certain death. The release mechanism had been removed or completely disabled so any problems with the helicopter, working close to its limits, would have been hard to resolve too. A lot of faith was vested in me and Steve North, Marc’s personal helicopter engineer and companion on most of his trips.

No major issues though and then it was for real and off to Glen Canyon to shoot the sequence where the balloons take off from the side of the Canyon and drop down into the river bed some 800 feet below. We did this in two stages, first basing ourselves at the lip of the Canyon for the take off and then locating into the Canyon for the landing sequence so we were always at the take-offs and landings. Something that became

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Quite happy to leave the high excitement to Robin, Colin and Ian and accept the low pay on this occasion. Did they really realize what they were about to do????

They’re all so wonderfully bonkers!!

apparent immediately is that when we caught the first balloon to touchdown, the static shock to the handler was really strong. So we used a piece of wire attached to a prong to discharge the energy straight to ground before grabbing hold of the balloons. That’s great in theory but on a few occasions the trailing wire decided to discharge through my foot instead.

The sequence called for doubling the actors and apart from performing the stunt our great HABCO thespians were dressed up as blond bombshell Pamela Stevenson (Colin), Correctrix Annie Ross (Ian) and villain Robert Vaughan (Robin).

On landing the medical crew offered to take the ‘balloonists’ and Marc’s blood pressure.

It was somehow not surprising that Marc’s numbers were absolutely normal and stable although he had the task of leading all this to a safe conclusion in perhaps one of the most stressful stunts of his flying career. Even so this job depended a lot on a trust that had built up between us all and I think we made an impressive team

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We had a few more cameo roles on the Movie and a job that came my way was to connect a container under a huge Sikorski helicopter. On the second run the lightly loaded container fell off about a mile from where I had hooked it on. All eyes were on me as it tumbled down the River Colorado but I was later exonerated from blame as the hook had been badly adjusted by the helicopter’s mechanic to start with so that, after flying over my head, the wildly swinging underweight container had un-hooked itself going outside the tolerances of the release mechanism. You can catch Robin too in the same sequence as he helps arm the container for lift-off giving it his own particular twist.

I took advantage of this trip to pop down to Mexico and further my relationship with Dianna. In those days of high telephone charges and slow letter post there was no Skype, Viber or email so there was a lot to talk about and catch up on.

Dodge Dart. Great car first time round. We bought it back from the next owner when we moved to Mexico in 1993 and it blew up after 200 kilometres.

Back in the Montejo Hotel, still standing but a bit more run down as if someone knew its days were numbered, Dianna and I met up and started planning our trip to Acapulco and beyond. She had been on the lookout for an old banger which we could buy and then sell on return. The Dodge Dart Volare she found seemed ideal and within a few days we headed off to the seaside finally stopping for a few days in Ixtapa-Zihuatenejo which was so much nicer than smelly old Acapulco where we stayed only one night. We returned through Morelia which was and still is a very special town in Mexico as is the whole of the State of Michoacรกn. Road quality was predictably unpredictable but towns like Patzcuaro, Janitzio and Tzin Tzun Tzan were captivating as was the whole area with each town devoted to a particular strand of handicrafts from guitar building to the making of copper pots.

Anyway, Time to go home and see what was up next. As far as I was concerned I was now in the movie business.

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FIXXING IT FOR THE FIXX AND SOME PENGUINS

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As well as HABCO I had also dabbled in a bit of music video production with friends Rupert Hine and Jeanette Obstoj. I managed the production for three music videos they made for the FIXX a talented UK band that Rupert produced and which eventually found its fortune in the US with virtually no recognition in Britain.

Getting a white horse that would fall on command, a Sherman tank, and simulating the D-day Landing on a beach near Worthing all for a few pennies as well as coordinating country houses, catering and street locations for their video ‘Stand Or Fall’ had given me a taste for that kind of problem solving.

A second video “Are We Ourselves” was filmed at the enormous Radio Telescope of the Jodrell Bank Observatory with helicopter filming at night as we coordinated the gigantic telescope to move to our command, and some special effects make-up required a different approach and good negotiation most of all after the shoot when I was required to make the local Indian vegetarian restaurant a closed set so Jeanette could roll up some spliffs and get those so disposed completely stoned! It all worked and the song became the Fixx’s first US number 1.

For those night aerials I employed Graham Berry, a friend who won a BAFTA chasing Anneka Rice’s bum in the making of the early TV reality show ‘Treasure Hunt’ where in-studio competitors would guide her in a helicopter to solve clues and find treasure at the locations proposed, all this against an ever ticking clock. Reality TV at its best.

The third outing was ‘Less Cities More Moving People’ and even more difficult with 13 London and home counties locations to cover in three days including a maternity hospital intensive care unit, old people exercising in a geriatric home, Leicester Square, Speakers’ Corner, Edgware Road, the City and China Town. But picture this. In 1982, the Horseguards had suffered a horrendous attack by the IRA and tensions were still high. Jeannette’s request for the key shot was to have the band performing on a trailer ‘leading’ the Horseguards round their exercise route in Kensington. The problem being that the route is secret and varies from day to day. First step then follow them round a route to see basically where they might go..

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So Sean Garratt Byrne proud owner of his Saab 99 does just that and the next day his house is surrounded, helicopter searchlights beaming down onto the roof and special branch ordering me to ‘come out with your hands up and no harm will be done to you’ I wish, but actually they just came and rang the doorbell. Convincing them I was just an innocent production manager eased the way for full cooperation and we managed to get

the day’s route and jump in front of it to get our shots. Although I was sure the driver would somehow take a left instead of a right at some stage and have band exit mid song camera right while the mounted troop slipped grinning militarily out of stage right.

Didn’t happen – all good and all for a small donation and a few tubes of Polo mints which the horses liked (or was it Rolos)! All these videos are available on You Tube.

In the early eighties Dianna was by now living with me in Brentford and I got more involved with Rupert and Jeanette’s life going to work for Geoff Jukes management company ‘Jukes Productions’ who managed Rupert, his band Quantum Jump, Jeannette, The Fixx and Simon Jeffe’s Penguin Cafe Orchestra. First task, get some new offices and once in 330 Harrow Road above a Video store with Brian and Roger Eno’s management installed upstairs,it looked like it could be interesting and indeed it was for a while.

Me and the gals Vera, Joy and Diana.

I was instrumental in pulling together the Fixx’s “Phantoms” and The Penguins “Broadcasting from Home” albums. I met painter George Underwood who was responsible for the Phantoms cover and an early collaborator of David Bowie, he also designed Gentle Giant’s first album, their music a great influence on PFTR’s music.

Somewhere I have a photo of some blue penguins he had manipulated which perhaps was more relevant to Simon’s project but Jeffe’s wife Emily did those covers. Simon’s

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eclectic sound, a mix of folk, classical and new age, still holds great appeal and tracks like Music for a Found Harmonium have been used many times for commercials.

Geoff Jukes himself is an interesting guy, a staunch supporter and follower of Tibetan Buddhism and creator of a foundation active in recording and filming talks given in the UK from visiting Tibetan Bhuddist Monks and teachers. That faith, like all others, doesn’t touch me at all but the ethics are beautiful and worthy of attention with curative and accepting tendencies. Perhaps its great inadequacy is the inability to deal with evil in this rapidly developing world, their belief in the process of reincarnation to deal with wrongdoers, quite out of pace with the reality, rapidity and gravity of our world’s plight.

I was dispatched to the States to coordinate the Fixx’s next video ‘Sunshine in the Shade’ which saw American Director Julia Haywood (Talking Heads: ‘Burning Down The House) working with a shoddy American pick up crew who spent most of their time shouting about what they were about to do rather than getting on with it! Most annoyingly as it got dark when we were to shoot most of the video there was still no stage and no illumination. I asked the gaffer to take care of it and the shouting began ‘we are gonna put up some working lights now’ bravo boys! I realised I had been spoiled having worked with the best in the business on other jobs in which I now felt more privileged than ever to have played my part.

I left the FIXX to get back to England, They were and still are cool guys and a great group but I was getting itchy feet and a couple of opportunities were coming up which suited my temperament rather more than the music management business.

Dianna before she lost her tail!

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MORROCO BY TONKA AND WOBBLING ACROSS THE CHANNEL

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My first job on getting back into the ballooning saddle was to coordinate a balloon race from England to France for HABCO in memory of Bleriot’s first crossing of the Channel.

There would be 12 participants and once launch site, sponsors in the form of Leukaemia Research and basic criteria had been established it was my job to call the flight and take care of the aftermath. Taking into account the maximum flight autonomy of the balloons, there was a very narrow angle between the directions that would get them safely across to France and ergo a lot of degrees that meant shit creek should the gas or wind run out. So we were looking for fairly specific weather windows and predictable wind conditions to get this done. In the end we waited three months for them and it required a good call system to make sure no one arrived on the two occasions when the event had to be stood down and more importantly that everything came into place once it was green lit.

It was an important event for ballooning generally and everyone made it across, not much racing involved, some got ‘lost’ in French cafes and bars, but eventually we all got back on the ferry and claimed another first for HABCO who were now the preeminent balloon operating company in the UK if not the World and by far the most adventurous.

HABCO now shared offices with sister company The Helicopter Partnership for the aerial filming work which, with Marc Wolff as a partner, was a growing and important part of our activities at the new offices in Imperial Road, Chelsea. For a while I managed the day to day business of The Helicopter Partnership setting up stunts with Bristow Helicopters for the film The Fourth Protocol and a number of commercials one of which for Polycel made me aware of the very real risks our pilots took in fulfilling the wishes of directors. On set standing by a tree as Marc and a following helicopter whisked by us clipping the grass with their blades and then rappelling the SAS onto a country house was really exciting and the thought niggled away at me to get out of office activities and into the fray full time.

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I would still rumble off on a balloon job or two and couldn’t resist the opportunity to go with Robin to my old Cambridge College, Emmanuel’s May Ball. He had his crew and my job was to take an inflatable clown and put it up at the end of the Duck pond right in front of my old rooms. An unlikely way to return to college for a Cambridge graduate but absolutely perfect! We tethered the balloon in the evening and then had to wait until morning when some lucky raffle winner or other was whisked away in it.

It was only later I realised what the clown was for. Amazingly during the night I met up with a Scottish lass who had come down from Edinburgh, climbed over the gate in traditional manner and was looking for a good time. Never one to shy way from such

opportunities, we spent part of the night animating the inflatable clown before sneaking into Shakatak’s abandoned dressing room for further caber tossing and bagpiping in better comfort before abandoning each other to our respective futures!

The next big project on the horizon was a Warren Beattie, Dustin Hoffman movie set in Morocco and part of my job was to source or build a fuel tanker and drive it down to Layunne deep in the Sahara. Yeah! I soon picked up a nice red Bedford 4.5 ton truck being sold off by Marley Tiles helicopter operation and before I knew it I was on my way to start the 7 day solo trip through France, Spain, and on to Morocco’s Deep South.

In order to work this truck I had to take a course in transportation of dangerous cargo and although it wasn’t classed as HGV as long as it wasn’t full it was subject to tachograph rules and had a governed speed of 50 mph.

I think it would be fair to refer to this speed as ‘tootling’. So it was to be a long journey and as this virtually new Tonka Toy Tanker truck was as ready for its new life as I was, we kind of bonded in our adventure and swore to each other we would make it. From Cherbourg until Spain the journey was fortunately uneventful and with my daily driving hours limited I was able to sample the food and wine as I crossed Continental Europe.

On arrival in Morocco it began to get more exacting.

If you judge a country by its beaurocracy then you must have two criteria. How dense is it, and how easy is the by-road when you have the right contacts and a few dollars.

In this case the King of Morocco had authorized the filming and one of his aides, a bustling little besuited fellow, met me on arrival after crossing the Straits of Gibraltar.

I don’t recall if we went from Algeciras to Ceuta or direct to Tangiers but now it was time for the paper-chase to begin. I followed obediently from office to office, officials poked around the truck with sticks and mirrors. The small two man tent caused some eyebrows to be raised and was clearly a concern so was registered in my passport.It was made clear to me that I would be in serious trouble if I didn’t come out with it. The fact it later blew away in a sand storm never became an issue. After running between just about every office at the terminal collecting official stamps and seals and the business of border control over, I was on my way down through Rabat and on to Casablanca where I would stay the night. The next day Agadir and on down to the Dessert City of Laayoune where Ishtar was already prizing open it’s particular Pandora’s box of movie magic to start principal photography in just a few days time.

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The last phase of the journey was the most dramatic with no visible towns despite some visible people and on one long stretch only visible fish held out for sale on sticks silhouetted by the setting sun. I had no desire to stop and find out more – neither the fish nor the stick would have served me any purpose and they could have been bait to catch little old me.

Much of the journey was across a plateau high above but close to the sea, one of those places where you simply borrow it and intrude for a while. Rich red, orange and dark brown sands and low mountains with low dunes plus the little strip of greyish blacktop with the lttle red Tonka truck coasting along as ever rather like Postman Pat! Then the fog came in and I was glad to come up behind a Club Med articulated, refrigerated truck no doubt hauling provisions down to the hotel in Laayoune. We would stop at numerous check points where papers were presented and lengthy essays written about us and our mothers by men in uniform seated behind school desks on school chairs.

I wondered if my mother would ever hear from them, ‘Madame Byrne nee Reynolds, E.T.’s about your son’ - which of course it isn’t.

Finally the Tonka and I rolled into Laayoune and docked with Ishtarbase 1’s production office where I was berated for not calling in frequently enough. Travelling alone in this way you hardly speak really, and when required the voice that emerges is sometimes unfamiliar making the need to string words together instead of mull over parallel and mainly visual thoughts in your head, somewhat demanding, Throw in a foreign language that depends on raking up schoolboy French and it becomes even stranger, so it was good to sit at the hotel bar with some of the crew and talk turkey while downing a Stork.

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The first job was to supervise the building of a heliport on the open desert location ready for the arrival of Mark in his A Star and an accompanying Bell 222 which were flying down from England, plus the later arrival of a couple of army Gazelles which would land there. Once again my engineering degree and the lack of anyone else in the company to do it meant I was trusted with this task. Never having done anything remotely similar before I began to ponder how small a stone had to be before it would blown away by the rotor wash. Either way I was basically given a few truck loads of gravel, a roller and a water bowser and without a word from me the helipad came into being. Of course anything was better than sand which even with the filters fitted to the army helicopters plays havoc with turbines and also the main and tail rotor blades when close to the

ground. As if writer/director Elaine May knew this she had a lot of helicopter scenes set close to the ground causing yet another unexpected bill to be sent in to this famous fracas of a production.

Movie making has many levels of operation which, it seems to me, don’t necessarily interact much. There is the business part of executive production in which mill the suits and bankers, backers and insurance companies, studios and accountants who sign off on the cheques. Then you have the top floor so to speak of highly paid actors, directors, DP, associate and line producers and in a nut shell the ones that carry no personal cash, have personal assistants and hide in trailers! Next are the main specialists, special effects, camera, lighting, art department, Make-up and wardrobe and the property masters and the armoury guy. All these departments have large trucks or trailers. The video assist and sound departments manage with smaller vans, Catering, honeywagons, greenmen, transportation, doctor and others have their quarters in the gunwales of this ship and, then comes the highly expensive flying department, the aerial unit usually gets no caravan, nothing except the cockpits of the machines they fly in and in this case a fuel truck – sort of modern day Tail End Charlies! Also when it comes to the credits too, how often are we the last in the cinema just to catch a glimpse of the Aerial Unit credits which usually come somewhere below the honeywagon driver and closing title writers credit or not at all as the cinema cuts the ending, cleans up and rewinds for the next ingress of popcorn bucket and Coke bearers!

But this time we also had my little tent a few chairs and a sun shade so our time out in the desert would turn out to be just as hellish anyway!

Every day we would file out from the airport, Marc in the AStar, David Paris on his first Movie in the Bell 222 both of which had been flown down from the UK, a couple of army Gazelles together with me in my Tonka tanker now brimming with Jet A1.

Most days we were called into action but on a few we just sweated it out on location while nothing at all seemed to happen. There perhaps lay a sign that all was not well with this show. But this was top tier stuff and didn’t really involve us. When it came to crew talents we were working with the best out of England with FX Associates especially close as they had been in Mexico on Green Ice and Superman III too. One knew them all too well.

Something that struck me as odd was that at the end of the day and back in the extreme comfort of the Club Med nobody would venture out into the town. Maybe it was because of the alcohol free status outside the hotel walls, or fear or just disinterest in

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anything outside their comfort zone or just a break from the locals over a Moroccan brewed Heineken and some rest. Whatever the reason, this barrack mentality isn’t for me and I would take a stool in one of the coffee houses across the street or just stroll round infusing the Arabic culture as much as I could. This wasn’t difficult as many locals worked with us and offered to show us around plus I had special contact with the guy who ran the airports fuelling depot and topped up my Tonka Tanker every once in a while.

Also the brothers who had built the helipad were from one of the few well-heeled local families. They asked me over to their place, for an evening. More ‘palace’ than ‘place’ it had a huge entertaining area low sofas, rugs, cushions and pouffes arranged in groups.

As the dancing girls got into the swing of things, tucking a little scarf into the hip of their clothes and then gyrating in the fusion belly dancing style now made famous by Shakira, my resistance began to weaken. Dianna was coming in, in a few days and I had kept it together well since leaving England, but this exotic concoction got the better of me and the night ended with much kerfuffle and hubbub as I practiced my French on Habibi’s sister and caroused her to bed. Perhaps I should have stayed in too; You don’t do that sort of thing in Morocco!

Only days later a familiar burning sensation hit home so to speak and Dianna arrived.

She was great about it all and just told everyone that I had been a naughty boy. I couldn’t really argue.

Once again floating gingerly like a butterfly, and stinging when I peed, we sort out a Jabberwocky and one good prick deserved another until death us do part.

Another evening we were invited to dine with a nomadic family who wanted to prepare a special meal for us. Although Laayounne is a well established town, the mainly nomadic population continue their tradition in the home and there is no furniture to speak of just rush mats and few luxuries. Well no luxuries, nothing that you couldn’t carry on a camel. It felt as if most could pack up their things and be off within a few minutes.

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We all sat round something which in modern theatre would be a circle and have the word table written in it. Only men partook of the main feast, which when brought in was white ricey stuff and lumps of camel meat, sweet potatoes, goat and other seasoning and ingredients that must defy labelling. I had been shown how to eat the food with my right hand (preferably the one you didn’t wipe your bum with – personally I like to alternate and do use a tissue interface, but here you would see people disappearing behind a dune

to relieve themselves with none of that just, maybe, a little bottle of water). The real reason supposedly is that Mohammed instructed his followers to eat with the right hand as all things sinister (left) pertained to the devil and therefore unclean. Then I suppose one thing lead to another.

But in reality I had little idea what the etiquette was here, surely there was more than the right/left hand thing so after a quick B’il hana wa ashifa’ (Bon appétit in Arabic) I followed suit behind my new djelaba clad friends and dug into the couscous squidged and compacted it as much as I could and brought it to my mouth. Well that was the idea anyway. After squidging away and keeping my left hand well away from the job in hand half at least of the intended food had become a mess on the back of my fist, trying then to feed it into my face another half of the remaining half ended up on my face and then half of the other half decorated my lap and feet. It was like a baby attempting to unfangle spaghetti. At this point one of the Muhammad’s across from me picked up a tasty camel toe and threw it in my direction. This had not been a custom in my house in fact it would have meant an early bath or worse. Should I smile and throw it back, laugh or drop my face in shame. Remember this is a culture where they chop off your hands for petty crime so people make the most of their appendages while they have them. I had nowhere to look in my cultural references so when in doubt do nothing and it was explained to me that I was the honoured guest and our host had selected this particular tasty morsel for me. I think he just didn’t want to see me attempting any more hand to mouth so down with the toe or whatever it was and on with the feast. All washed down afterwards with a kind of milky drink which was what I now know to be Lban, dare I say a beverage I have not since felt the need to promote or seek out (off with his toe!).

Evening meals were usually in the hotel but once in while we would go off to one of Laayounes’ better eating places, bumping into other members of crew and cast. On one memorable occasion Paul Williams the film’s composer was at the restaurant piano playing some of the music he had written. Dustin Hoffman was also present as Paul swung into the Simon and Garfunkelesque compositions he was preparing. These songs were for Hoffman and Beatty to perform in the film as a second rate duo. If that was the brief he did a good job because like the food it was good enough but not extraordinary another milestone on the short road to failure!

Between takes as it were there was also the chance for Dianna and me to take a Turkish bath at the invitation of Jamal the fuel supervisor and his wife. I had no idea what to expect as we were ushered into a dark steamy building and into our respective

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hammmammm’s. Clad only in underpants and with no towel, I was led into a gloomy dungeon full of steam and before I could say Ali Baba a couple of grinning Arabs started emptying buckets of warm water at me having instructed me to lie down on the floor.

Was this to be my comeuppance for being a naughty boy, had Jamal’s wife and Dianna schemed something? They then proceeded to have me lie on my tummy and one of them took a stroll up and down my backbone then pressure-pushed the inner sole of his foot slowly along my arm and leg muscles which was excruciating. A light thrashing and then more buckets of warm water and that was it. Never having taken naturally to massage, saunas or even water, I was left pleased to have taken part but exhausted and pink or bruised where I wasn’t brown from the sun.

Jamal and his wife then invited us to their comfortably appointed house for dinner.

During the meal I complimented jamal’s wife on her beautiful Kaftan dress and mentioned how much I liked the Djalaba’s. Whereupon a delicate Kaftan was gifted to Dianna and our host promised the next day he would give me the finest Djalaba. True to his word I still have the beautiful powder blue tunic which arrived at my hotel room a few days later, Dianna’s robe was so fine we had it on display in the house in London for a while.

Once you get into this ‘give and you will receive’ philosophy of the Arabic culture it is hard to resist, and though I had little to bestow on anyone I proceeded to part company along the way with a green guitar I had bought in Ubutuba Brazil, the tent (see it didn’t really blow away) collapsable chairs and any other things which were dispensable. The concept was an extended one in that the act of giving to one person didn’t require that person to respond directly. As a cultural practice you would receive from some while giving to others a kind of nudging continuum of cyclical philanthropy in line with the concept of those old penny archade nudging machines.

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Filming progresses like painting by numbers in order to use the locations efficiently rather than film sequential scenes, with the idea in practice that someone should know how it will all knit together. In fact there is a continual process of rough edit going on all the time to make sure in the end nothing is missed. The reasons for retakes, reshoots, standing by, or endless lighting and camera changes is normally a secret shared between director, script/continuity and DP so they are rarely questioned or explained. But there were hints that all may not be well when new arrivals in suits could be seen rushing around anxiously between the production accountants room and set looking for Mr Beatty while David kept firing the make-believe armaments on his Bell 222, FX set off lines of bullet hits in the sand, launched missiles and blew things up expensively

while Mark slid round the sky catching the action from the air - all whizzing around in apparent combat status doing what we did best. Spending lots of OPM in the name of entertainment.

The omen’s had been bad to start with, the story being that when in the early days of in-country preparations one of the requirements – a blue eyed camel - had been located and negotiated, thinking the price a tad high, the scout had turned down the deal never to find another. On returning to see if the trader would still be willing to sell it turned out this particular beast had been eaten! Eventually an articulated model was made at great expense to be abandoned in the desert on filming’s end.

Finally it was a wrap in Laayoune and time for most of the aerial unit to head home. A few last drops were drained from the Tonka and then it was back to the hotel to close the shop down. It was another sweltering day of dry heat and as I walked through reception and up to the pool area where girlfriends, wives and family were basking, my feet took over and I just walked straight into the Pool citing that ‘That’ll be that then’ A bit more desert madness ensued, wrap party included and the next day it was time to set off on the seven day drive home.

This time I would have Dianna as company which was great as I could show her some of what I had seen and also cover a different route striking out from Agadir through Fez and Marrakesh on our long tootle home.

Dianna is a cautious (as in careful) type whereas I am something of a fatalist (i.e. careless). I had learned that when travelling in Morocco the surest protection was to choose a hand of friendship from the many offered when our speed slowed below 10 miles per hour on entering town in the confidence that the hands owner would make sure we weren’t hassled by anyone else, whilst he surreptitiously guided us through his extended family’s businesses of course. I guess that could go wrong but really meeting up with cousins, uncles and friends in the souk seemed a better way to go than being endlessly hassled and pissing a whole stream of people off. The chosen one would ensure the safety of his chosen ones (us) and our vehicle, steer us towards a bargain, watch our backs and generally act as a free tour guide for his well deserved tip and commissions.

One such person in Tangiers was particularly helpful and as he had only one eye I decided to get him another one. He wasn`t as sure as I as the eye had been gone for a while but I dragged him off to an ophthalmologist, who fitted him with a matching eye for which I handed over 75 pounds. It occurs to me now that he must have quite a lot of eyes or maybe he is in cahoots with the ophthalmologist and it’s the same eye that goes

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back and forth on a never ending round of ocular fraud. What the heck I felt good about it and it was fun!!

Otherwise we treated ourselves to many road side feasts on the trip through Northern Morocco. You would buy the meat from a butcher and have it cooked at a nearby stall, never has lamb tasted so good, or dog or penguin or goat or god knows what it was.

Tagine cooked meals are a great favourite of mine and once in Fez we decided to splash out and checked into one of the top hotels to try a tagine fit for royalty. I think it was called the Fez Palace. This dish epitomises Moroccan cuisine even more than Couscous for me and combines meats (usually lamb), sweet potatoes or fruits and distinctive spices. The tagine is typically a wide low brimmed dish with a conical lid.

Unfortunately the splashing out didn’t stop there as that night, despite a great tasting meal, I was stricken with food poisoning, ironically the only time on the trip. No wonder then that kings generally look miserable, but then having your mug on all those stamps and getting your backside licked all the time, must be demeaning to say the least.

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A picnic in France on the way home with the endearing little Bedford ‘Tonka’Tanker

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BETWEEN TIMES

Tying the knot without knotting the tie!

Marriage is a solemn thing and here we are outside the Registry office in Hounslow: Dianna and I accompanied by Manuela Zwingmann, Vaughan Oliver, Ken Corsey, Cathy Shostak,Tristan Tarrant, John Tarrant and Neil Cavanagh. Robin Byrne now more visible than in the previous affair.

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On returning to England there were a few chug along jobs which gave me the opportunity to confuse Brands Hatch with Silverstone amonst other things for the Grand Prix race were I managed to arrive with the helicopter fuel bowser to the wrong race track. plus there were some run-ins with a couple of rather uppity directors earning their bread and butter making commercials.

Where aerials are concerned it helps if there is respect and a lot of cooperation as everyone’s safety is somehow linked to the team performance of any flying unit. I brought the Stabilization rig up to Yorkshire for an aerial shoot where David Mallet was directing and as we were only, as ever, a small unit everyone was sitting at the same table for dinner discussing the next day’s shoot. His resume includes making David Bowie and Queen Videos. Although for this job I was just a driver my position in the company was more than that indicated, but when I started to chip in with comments and suggestions he looked me in the face and told me that I was just a driver and my opinions were unimportant so he wasn’t interested in what I thought. I think I should have got up from the table and tipped him off his fat arse or tipped his crab soup in his lap which is what I wanted to do. Smug burk. He certainly got no cooperation from me the next day. Maybe he was not so wrong in keeping me out of the planning, too many voices just confuse, but production logistics were becoming my speciality. It certainly made me aware that you should never judge people by appearances as he did in my case.

Going back to Green Ice I am reminded of the films initial director Anthony Simmons who was a quiet mannered writer and award winning TV documentary producer until someone stencilled his name on the back of a director’s chair. Once on set he began shouting and complaining about everyone publicly and to their face for one thing or another. It came to the point where he became isolated in his tyranny and absolutely no one, not even Colin, was in the mood to support him or cooperate beyond the absolute minimum. In the end his position became untenable and he was replaced by Lighting Cameraman Ernie Day. A cine veteran who knew the importance of cooperation at all levels in a production to achieve a directors’ goal.

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On another occasion during an aerial shoot for British Rail I was sent off to a country house in the West Country to provide fuel. The helicopter got a bit lost and couldn’t find my position (before the days of sophisticated GPS) and there was a lot of hoo haa on the radio as the helicopter came in and out of view in the distance finally arriving. Tumbling out of the back of the chopper in a bit of a fit the director started in on me but I was in no mind to be blamed for what had been someone else’s logistical cock-up, It was only by luck that I had a radio at all. I told him in no uncertain manner that although I was sorry for my part in any confusion it was not my fault that they hadn’t located the

fuelling location and I didn’t care who he was so he could stop directing his ire at me.

Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire, Greystoke) calmed down and we got on quite well after that before they took off again, tea having been served!

It was a fun time and both the aerial filming and ballooning side of things were going well for The Hot Air Balloon Company and her new sister The Helicopter Partnership. But as always there were down times and I used to fill these attending weekend markets and car boot sales initially trying to sell off loads of junk I had accumulated but eventually buying in and beginning to trade. The bulk of what I had were books, records, toys, cigarette cards, magazines and ephemera. My first Saab, a beautiful 99, became the beast of burden for these trips and I would fill its gaping hatchback to the brim with as much as I could. A hatchback, the boot lived up to its description of ample and the suspension never complained.

These markets are brilliant, especially at the one off PTA affairs where people off load treasures from their attic at give away prices. Many a story there, I also began in the same way, realising later that some of the records, and other Beatles stuff I had sold must have put a smile on the purchasers face. And I hope it did.

It soon became apparent that I needed something bigger if I was to make any impact with the books so imagine Dianna’s horror when one day I came home with an ex Oxfordshire County Mobile Library. Ideal I thought and I had traded the SAAB for it plus a bit of cash leaving us with just her Hillman Imp to go shopping in! Ironic that

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my father had also run a mobile library just after the war! In keeping with a corollary of Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s rather splendid Law that ‘Storage requirements will increase to meet storage capacity’ the library filled up to the brim with more bric-a-brac which we then set out on tables in front.

Careful with that axe Eugene!

What the hell was Dad up to?

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Marketeer? Romany? Pirate? Filmmaker?

Balloonist? Buffoon? Musician? Casanova?

Halfwit?

Hard to say what is my nature really but I have a creative spirit and do like an adventure and variety.

However green my grass I am always ready to crossover to another’s turf to seek out new challenges, experiences and change!

And there on the horizon was the perfect project 195

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HELLER

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It is still hard to take in the importance to my life of this project. It had just about everything. Next up from HABCO was to be one of my biggest challenges yet and an experience truly life-changing for all those involved.

Austrian conceptual artist Andre Heller is famous in his own country and the German language but hardly known outside. First emerging as a poet and musician he went on to gain greater fame for his massive firework creations and other well organised but highly eccentric works combining theatre, art, music, circus, dance and even garden design.

This next evolution was to be a project called Himmelszeichen or in English - The Flying Sculptures. A trio of strange looking balloons that would fly as a sculpture across the major cities of the world, at night spitting fireworks creating ‘The Bliss of Amazement’ in all who saw them. Somehow this had fallen into our lap on the recommendation of Per Lindstrand who was already building the balloons in his Thunder and Colt factory in Oswestry.

Do we or don’t we?? Technically it was unlikely that the original concept could flourish due to night flying restrictions plus the fact that propane, big flames and gunpowder do not make for good bedfellows. Quite clearly it would be next to impossible to completely fulfil this dream and something we couldn’t fix just by hanging a strobelight under the baskets!

So of course Colin took it on and passed this hot Kartoffel on to me to manage the whole shebang including hiring all crew, permissions, logistics, and wish fulfilment.

In a process of trial and elimination, we went about getting firework rigs built, borrowing embryonic night vision glasses from manufacturers Pilkington and specifying what was left to specify on the balloon equipment including strobelights and transponders, a transmitting locator which though rarely required would help our chances of cooperation in the airspace we needed to invade!

The job required skilled pilots who still had little fear but manageable egos and ground crew prepared to be away from home for a few months while we toured most of Europe.

London, Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Cologne, Venice, Naples, Rome, Turin, Bologna, Leon, Madrid, Barcelona, Zurich, Geneva, Amsterdam, Brussels, Lyons, Munich being just some of the places the balloons were to fly on the 22 city tour to promote the City of Vienna as European City of Culture 1986

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Early in the game, once we had taken delivery of the balloons and tried the night flight, with goggles dazzling and fireworks blazing away, we saw how the balloons, flying with

the wind, simply got enveloped by a cloud of noxious fumes as the fireworks worked their fire in an exploratory pre-dawn flight, in reality a time when peoples’ bliss had more to do with their own dreams than witnessing this extraordinary spectacle. The whole idea of flying at night also presented insurmountable problems despite the Hi Tec goggles and obligatory transponders and strobelights. While we felt we could do these night flights early in the morning across the dawn, the original idea of launching into dusk over cities is practically suicidal for any balloonist. in any hot conventional hot air balloon. With only a few hours of flight avaiable. With the best will in the world, landing these enormities safely in darkness even with powerful but rather clumsy night vision apparatus, spotting cables and obstacles as well as measuring distance with what was then just a monocular affair was deemed impossible. This was not a word Heller liked but one he would hear a few times during the planning of this and the later tour. It was no surprise things panned out this way and in the end Heller and his manger Stefan Ziggy Zeigner were pragmatic and finally convinced by this experimental process. At least we tried!

However one catch remained. The brief was to fly once only over each city as a group of three balloons comprising a single Sculpture. If one didn’t take off the flight didn’t count. This meant finding highly experienced pilots of a particular ilk who could work in a team and also rise to the tremendous challenge anyway of flying over some of the world’s largest cities in these technical monstrosities. It meant skill, attitude, intelligence, an insatiable taste for adventure and a compelling desire for success.

This would be like no balloon project ever and it got even more up close and personal when I decided to do the whole thing using the sophisticated campgrounds of Europe instead of hotels, which meant buying all the gear necessary for that. In part this was a budgetary decision but it was surprising to find how few suitable and available hotels there really were in many of the cities we were to visit. Popular tourist cities like Rome were overbooked already without waiting for our unpredictable date of arrival.

I figured if we had to have the balloons flying together we could probably get away with just two rescue vehicles and by combining a caravan, mobile home and tents could accommodate ourselves well enough on the trip and more easily share the driving load. I purchased a classic Winnebago motorhome from neighbours Yellowhammer advertizing agency, a roomy Iveco 3.5 ton van, two six berth caravans (the first was nicked from the company car park) and a rather unusual but nifty combination of a Volvo 240 Estate with a Rollerrack trailer on its roof which we would tow all the way round Europe other than when used during our city stays and fights. Our crew chief,

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Giles Camplin, had seen this invention on TV and when the guy came to show it to us I decided to buy not only the trailer system but the car on which it was installed. Top it all off with a handy little moped that was strapped on the back of the Winnebago and we began to take on the air of a travelling show. I put myself into contact with the relevant national aviation authorities and local balloonists and it wasn’t long before things began to fall into place though it was likely that in some places we would have no choice but to ‘cowboy’ the flight - that is do it without any authorizations – particularly in Spain and France. The fact that this would be a very high profile media spectacle went against the idea a bit but it was what local balloonists advised and finally we all agreed it was probably the only way and had little option anyway.

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So who would ‘rise’ to such a challenge and pilot these weird craft. You would think that competition pilots would be the best bet for the precision required but they are a funny old bunch and rarely step onto any stage other than the occasional small podium at the end of a championship and then it’s back to the office as usual.

My first thought and hiring was a beady eyed, slightly nervous ex-doctor and very ambitious balloonist from Bristol whom I had bantered with on occasions and felt would bring if not leadership at least drive and determination to the situation. After a brief interview David Partridge became our chief pilot and would take on the challenge of flying the Kindermond or ‘Children’s Moon’ a balloon shaped like the crescent moon with six eyes a long, out of control tubular tongue and a 5 metre long chin dipping below the basket. The fact his face perfectly reminisced the balloon further convinced me he was the right choice. Next was a stalwart of the commercial circuit who I knew well, a name at Lloyds and young country gent with a magnificent red beard, fun disposition and mild stutter. Thomas Holt Wilson would fly the Traumstation or Dream Lab translated into English but I rather liked the idea of some ‘Traum’ being involved. The fact he too had a resemblance to the balloon once again satisfied something in my quirky soul!

Finally someone to fly the multi-tentacled Drachenfisch or Dragon Fish. I opted here for a formerly well-respected pilot who had fallen from grace rather, for reasons I don’t need to mention (and can’t actually remember anyway). He had a balloon rides business near Birmingham and the fact he was almost bald so resembling the fish as well as being apparently a bit of a slippery character sealed his fate and Paul Frewer accepted my offer to go fly-fishing with us.

Andre Heller didn’t like this one and changed it for the US.

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A crew chief is an important person on any job like this but here I would need someone whose knowledge, passion and diligence would help me keep the ball rolling. He also needed to be a pilot in case we had a man down. Giles Camplin was a bit balding in front, had bright, mischevious eyes, a bushy beard and was sufficiently daft so he was the man for me. His experience was legendary having worked on most projects I had ever heard of in ballooning this coupled with his ‘normal’ job assisting a sculptor to cast bronzes gave him an art pedigree too I suppose although in discussions throughout the tour we never could agree what art was if indeed it was anything at all! The rest of the crew were made up of my wife Dianna who would look after the money side of things, Maria Roche a pretty young nurse besotted with ballooning and plenty of crewing experience plus Steve Kavanagh one of HABCO’s most experienced crewhands. To make the camping more bearable I decided to hire a cook whose brief it was, whenever possible, to prepare lunches and evening meals from local produce which we could enjoy under the awning of our Winnebago. Enter Viv Salu, an Australian Cordon Bleu trained cook. We might be camping but would spare little on good food and wine. For Hellerism read Hedonism!

Giles had come on board first in fact and had made the fireworks’ rigs as well as help me source vehicles and so on. Once Dave was involved he got well fired up and bagged a deal with fledgling clothing company ROHAN for some nifty togs. It was all coming into shape nicely, each armed with an Andre Heller engraved Swiss Army Champion

Dream Team, Motley Crew or Pantomime Cast?

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knife, cool looking ROHAN clothing and a lot of nerve we were ready to play Robins to Heller’s Batman on this extraordinary and ambitious caper.

For Heller of course the fact his sculpture consisted of registered aircraft G-BMUJ, G-BMUK and G-BMUL held little interest and the fact they were so was more of a nuisance than anything so we were asked not to refer to them as such or even be seen with other balloons if possible.

Not long after our trial flight in Hungerford the trio had a late launch into the morning skies finally landing in Romney Marshes after a great flight over London and Tower Bridge. One of the few pieces of video we salvaged.

London was an important flight but Heller wanted Venice to be the world media presentation. Budget and logistics insisted that we would need to get a few cities under our belt beforehand and so with a depleted crew we decided to take just the balloons in their IVECO and five of us in the caravan, off to the Northlands of Noggin the Nog and Nogbad the Bad. With highly successful flights over Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen, we joined with the rest of the crew and equipment in Cologne and made our way on down to Venice.

The experience of flying over increasing amounts of water in Scandinavia helped but didn’t really prepare anyone for Venice which is more water than city and the wind is out to sea.

We were a foolhardy lot though and after inflating at the Venice Aero Club, transponders programmed, radios checked and lifejackets fastened, the three balloons took to the skies, one with the help of Ziggy’s Swiss army knife as its quick release system had got jammed.

This was just one of the many uncompromising and demanding flights that were required of these intrepid pilots. On the occasion of the Venice crossing the sculptures successfully navigated down the Grand Canal, the Fish and The Moon landed on an insect infested island and Thomas managed rather incredibly to plonk his UFO down somehow inside the city. The Italian fire brigade responded to our call for help and brought the two islanders and their kit back to land at our campsite - a spectacle in itself.

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We whistled through Italy. The crew and pilots urged on by the profit sharing scheme I had put in place as much as anything, five cities in 7 days including fantastic flights in Florence, Rome, Bologna, Venice of course and Naples which was another one off amongst one offs!

I was armed with a general waiver for all the flights from Italy’s Ente Nazionale per l’Aviazione Civile, something so easy to obtain it has to have been inspired by the fact that their official and I couldn’t understand each other very well and it was probably the best way to get rid of me. Either that or he just knew everything else would be so hard I would probably give up! I enlisted the British Consulates for pointers and help in effectuating local coordination. Good of them to help really since the whole thing was a promotion for Vienna. It seemed there were no permits applicable for our sort of venture and it all came down to speaking with the most influential politician of the moment who would hark and then hopefully cause the herald angels to sing.

In Naples, once we had understood that red lights mean go, green lights mean watch out because there is traffic crossing the red light and one way meant keep going forward which in one case lead to us entering a wide road which just got narrower and narrower until we could go no further with the Winnie. That was fun!! Not!

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It was here too that the local minister for education was the man and he smoothed the way but wanted to fly. We identified two possible landing and take-off sites in Naples,

The Soccer Stadium and the Naples International Airport. So up went the Meisterverk from the Stadium and then it proceeded to float conveniently towards the Airport. Dave was in touch by radio with the control tower who despite ordering the balloons to turn 180 and depart to the north, began to realise that the three balloons really were going to interrupt traffic and land there. When asked for his finals position David’s reply was ’above your head’ as having just traversed the fuel dump he was on his way over the control tower and into the military compound.Willing crew including me rushed through checkpoints and gates and into the holding area as the balloons plopped one by one into this secure zone. We could have been shot!!! We weren’t. The minister flashed his credentials but was escorted away anyway and his camera confiscated. Another day with these extraordinary luftballons and good reason to send the next invoice! Naples?

Nailed!

We were coping well with life under canvas. The allotted bedding arrangements had all gone to pot early on with Giles snoring away in the Winebago which he shared with Paul’s six foot frame overshooting all the beds we had, I seem to remember he always slept in his boots. Dianna and I shared one of the small spring up tents, Thomas installed himself in the caravan which was now doubling as an impromptu storeroom, Dave and Maria had found it came naturally to play doctor and nurse in the small yellow tent he had brought along, while Steve had impressed Viv sufficiently that he and she also spent their nights now tucked away in one of the other small pop up tents playing Toad in the hole.

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It is extraordinary how good the European campgrounds really are and I would recommend them to anyone but on at least two occasions we did resort to the comforts of a hotel to get some washing done and feel a little less like gypsies. I think it was in Essen where we saw a notice which seemed to say the basement swimming pool was for both sexes and we could swim naked this being Germany ‘n all. ‘Nuff said as Dave, Maria, Dianna and I all plunged in au natural. Noone else was around but we did understand later that it was actually strictly forbidden to do so. The next time we were more careful in choosing the hour.

With Zurich and Geneva under our belt it was off to Spain. The vehicles were holding up well but it was alarming at times in the steep descents to see the Winnie’s brakes glowing red or its extended tail scraping along the tarmac on tight bends.

Trekking back towards home after two great off the radar flights in Spain’s Madrid and Barcelona where we all gave up tents and took refuge in the more solid vehicles to watch the most terrifying electric storm come in over the sea and flood the camp site.

Next Stop Lyons, France

Here they employed teams of motorcycle cleaners to vacuum up doggie doos. The riders wore near-luminous green overalls, and their brilliantly named ‘motocrottes’ contained vacuum cleaners that sucked up the offending mess, and also a water tank and soapy shampoo, which they immediately applied to the area where the offending item had been. This was a good sign as we laid our balloons out in a pristine and deserted city square, nipping artistically across the city and then packing our ballooons into the Iveco in record time we sloped off, police car sirens blaring in the distance, we supposed tracking us down with their menacing Pooper Scooters and art detectors.

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Another cowboy flight as the mayor had refused us permission to take off!!!

So I guess that means there’s no money for propane again!

Here too was the home of balloonist Dany Cleyet-Marrel whose help, or lack of it maybe, had set the city up for us. His crowning and recent achievement had been to suspend a raft under a balloon and lower it onto rainforest canopies to facilitate research in an otherwise inaccessible place. We visited him as he was in the throes of changing from a hot air balloon to a specially designed Lindstrand 300 airship to make the process more practical.

Only Brussels and Amsterdam to go now and we felt we had done our patrons proud.

In Brussels we weren’t allowed to fly but tethered to good effect in front of the Atonium and in Amsterdam we took off in front of the Rijksmuseum to land in fields full of cows and their pancake poohs with access strictly by boat.

At our survivors’ supper in Brussels we were proud of our achievement and tucked into the Moules and Stroopwafels with gusto. Paul wanted his crème caramel which our restaurant didn’t have. Easy go and buy one next door. Everyone happy!

Back in the UK The money worked out OK so we all got our bonuses and totting up the coverage realised that the project really had hit the mark or shilling or whatever it was in Austria in those good old days.

In recognition of our good work the Heller Organization gave us each a gold shilling in a presentation case so it must be worth something then! Their version of the Boy Scouts’ Bob-a-Job tradition I guess although I am sure such far-fetched irony was certainly never intended, but you could never tell with Ziggy.

Allzeit bereit!

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HEY STEVEN, OVER HERE!

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So how do you follow that?! Music, films, ballooning? No, the dole, hey I am not proud, that wonderful institution had financed quite a few years of my life accepting it as an artistic grant so as not to deprive a better soul of any job I would unwillingly have taken. I did do odd jobs like deliver fish for a while and ran a charcuterie warehouse both of which made me realize that ‘fresh’ and ‘sell by dates’ were in the eye of the beholder and gift of the provider rather than things cast in stone. Trundling around in a little Vauxhall van emblazoned with Bannister’s Fishmongers logos, I visited top London restaurants and hotels with my recently defrosted fresh fish and the twitchings of condemned lobsters and crabs for company. It was fun though and writing-off a consignment of Fois Gras or tubs of pate provided rich pickings for the home at times.

Soon enough it was back in the saddle for another movie. Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade to be filmed near Almeria in Spain and the aerial unit, consisting of a filming chopper and a few old biplanes, would base out of a nearby yet to be opened airport. I was hired as safety officer and Marc Wolff ’s assistant on the shoot.

Once again the Tonka Tanker was called into service and I drove this down to the location, where armed with an array of radios, an anemometer and a couple of flags, I was sent to the tower!

Flying Pictures under Marc’s expert guidance had put together a great team to acompany Tony Bianci and some of his friend’s with their old planes, two Pilatus P2 and a Stampe V4 biplane.

Many of the crew were known to us from Green Ice, Superman and Ishtar. In reality at the top level, movie making is a rarified world with few inhabitants and I was proud to find myself part of this elite band.

So there I was up in my tower supposedly controlling air traffic with the unusual feature that the the whole length of my runway was part of a set where Indie and his Dad get straffed in their Citroën 11 Légère Cabriolet by one of the Pilatus, so the actual runway was constantly crossed by Tom, his brother Dick and the occasional Harry not to mention Big Steve. It rather reminded me of a school holiday job I once had where, armed with three traffic cones and a flag, I had the job of diverting the fast lane of London’s North Circular while the central reservation had its hair cut by a tractor wielding an enormous cutting wheel! ‘May the Lord bless these cones and all whose life depends on them!

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We had different rules obviously for when aircraft were operating but whether the green flag or red flag was flying didn’t always get noticed or even understood as catering rushed across with tapas or a standby painter hurried over wielding his dirty little bristles to muck up Indiana’s car, or one of George Gibbs’s boys went about laying more gun hits while the plane came in for fuel. The great thing is at the level I was having the privilege to work at almost all the crew were complete professionals and usually anticipated or solved problems before they arose so it was rarely necessary to holler from the tower.

A moment I treasure was when Mr Spielberg called me on the radio. On replying it became clear that he was actually after the other Sean who was knocking around with the more familiar epithet ‘Connery’ – but at least we shared a few words and it somehow connects me, if rather lamely, with my most famous namesake!

It was a great movie to work on and of course we got up to some hi-jinks when no one was looking, doing time trials up and down the runway with the units’ Peugeot 205 GTI and having a go at driving the articulated lorries that had brought the planes down from England.

I was on set when they filmed the scenes where a 1917 International Mark VIII Tank ends up going over a cliff. It was interesting to see how three different sized mock-ups were edited together in the final cut.There was a giant 36 foot long realistic steel model built on an excavator chassis with a couple of Range Rover V8 engines as well as a couple of bulldozer engines to power the whole tank which weighed in at over seven tons; a two metre long radio controlled version which finally goes over the cliff and a process

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version for filming the scenes with the actors safely. One Brian Lince who sweltered in the interior and drove this monster had also been the chosen one of George Gibbs and Effects Associates who built the tank, to manipulate the head of the mechanical camel used in Ishtar if my memory serves me correctly. Clearly a specialist when it comes to an inside job when the heat is on.

To celebrate the wrap on the aerial unit, we headed off for Paella at a highly recommended restaurant a few miles from Almeria. After managing to get Tony Bianci’s tooth ache sorted at a local dentist, people believed in my apparent Spanish language advantage and trusted me to arrange this over the phone. Sadly on arrival the restaurant hadn’t taken my call seriously and enormous but empty Paelleras hung on the wall instead of bubbling expectantly over the hob in he last stage of preparation. I wasn’t crucified but you can’t hurry Paella. Fortunately for me we had ‘party’ inscribed on our evening so everyone’s patience and my insistence together with eventually a few too many complementary liquors meant we enjoyed a finale feast fit for kings.

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HELLER II

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Back in England our next big ballooning project was cooking away too with Andre Heller getting the funding to parade his Flying Sculptures around North America and as part of the process replace the Dragonfisch with a new balloon ‘Kiku’.

The job of leading this was mine if I wanted it and of course I leapt at the opportunity to travel all over the US and part of Canada visiting 32 cities as ambassadors for Vienna, once again delivering it’s ‘gift’ this time ‘to the Skies of America’.

Heller’s manager, Ziggy, called me to a breakfast meeting in London’s Dorchester hotel around this time. I have to say my respect and admiration for the man was considerable, and his way with us English amused me greatly. I had come across a priceless little book called “Doing business with the Viennese” so I was kind of ready, one guideline is not to be the first to mention the business in hand. So after introducing me to some rather fine Eggs Benedict, we exchanged pleasantries for a while and at some stage he brought up a problem he felt I had which was that I thought I was too important. Well to me I am extremely important and besides there is no way we could have pulled off all the European stunts without strong leadership especially in the artist’s absence most of the time.

I always undertsood our subservient role to the art and client, but in reality this was a ballooning project more than anything and a complicated one at that which required us to control the client a great deal and be almost entirely autonomous. I told him so and tried to explain again the complicated nature of what we were expected to achieve, the egos involved, the risks both legal and physical of flying his artist’s creation. We were the band performing his music as it were. In the end I think me being important or not wasn’t a continuing issue as I hope he realised how devoted and enthusiastic a crew he had at his disposal and the need for me to have his support in ‘directing’ the whole thing to its wished for conclusion both artistically and aeronautically.

‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ so I asked the European team if they would be interested and everyone but Paul and Steve accepted. There was no place for a cook on this occasion.

Paul was having success with his rides business and felt he couldn’t give up the time and Steve was having some mental difficulties of his own so I was pleased in a way that he declined as we had learned something of his volatile temperament during the European jaunt. However he introduced me to the idea that ‘Assumption is The Mother of All Fuck Ups’ for which I am ever grateful!

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So who would fly the new balloon? After some consultation I ignored everyone’s advice and called up Tom Donnelly, a very well known balloonist who had been a founder of Thunder Balloons with Dick Wirth and was regarded as ‘difficult’. Not long before, he had suffered a fairly serious accident flying a balloon into an Austrian mountain, sustaining serious head injuries, perfect preparation for this ordeal, I would say! He was a larger than life character though fading a bit from view and a little ‘dark’. I was delighted when he accepted my offer especially given that he echoed the appearance and demeanour of the new Kiku balloon which he would fly.Something that had figured large in my decision of his suitability in any case.

A local American completed the crew. Gregg Hammond had worked with us on Superman and was a great guy with some ballooning experience. He would help us translate and negotiate our way around the US and some of Canada. Even though we spoke the same tongue his local knowledge would prove invaluable.

The idea of the profit share was continued for all crew, but the campground approach was not. In the States hotel and motel accommodation was an easy option with plenty of availability and deals to be done, whereas few campgrounds were inner-city or even convenient for the places we would be visiting. Despite this we decided a motorhome or crewbus would be a fine way to travel the 15,000 miles in front of us and once again I opted for two retrieve vehicles, one of them towing the other. As it had functioned so well we sent the Volvo 240 and its mate the Roller Rack roof trailer on holiday to the States.

Colin and I schlepped off to New York staying in the disgustingly opulent and utterly tasteless Helmsley Palace where a tie and jacket were required for the breakfast room.

The owner Leona Helmsley later and famously went to prison for tax fraud, she must have loved that! Colin introduced me to a New York literary agent friend of his, Robert Ducas, who rented us a serviced office in his business off 5th Avenue. I soon found a small apartment and was dispatched to the US for a couple of months to set up the 32 city tour.

Where to begin? Well I had a kind of grand plan. We would invite the City mayors to accept a flight of the Flying Sculptures as a gift from the City of Vienna to the skies of America. I would also contact prominent balloonists in each city and invite them on board as local consultants for general advice and in particular to identify take-off locations and point out the methodology for the obtention of any local permissions.

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Then there was the general aviation permit. We would need a waiver to fly at low altitude in the controlled airspace of some of the busiest airports in the world. Two months didn’t seem quite enough time but I hung up my board and alongside each city put a red marker pin with all the orange and green ones still in their boxes.

My office consisted of an incredible little Kodak Diconix ink jet printer and a rather beautiful Zenith Z-180 laptop running wonderfully simple office software called Ability where I could build up a database, write letters and process budgets as well as manage my schedule to some extent and send and receive Telexes. Everything was DOS based and so easy. These days I can’t seem to do any of those things!

The day my little printer spat out its first mail merge letter and I franked 35 envelopes sending them off to the mayors’ offices was a good day. I also had my appointment with F.A.A. down in Washington and took the train down to the capital very early on in the proceedings to gauge their attitude and the level of cooperation I could expect.

Luckily, but to some extent as expected, the bods in the F.A.A. couldn’t have been more helpful, pre-homeland security and serious terrorism on home turf, they were totally up for it, so within a few days I had the general waiver we needed. I took advantage of the trip to stop off in Philadelphia and Baltimore and scout some launch sites, returning to New York convinced we could do everything. Permission to take off from behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art with its ‘Rocky Steps’ was an early coup and would prove to be the innaugural media splash for the Sculptures tour with coverage worldwide, thanks not to me but to hard working New York PR agency The Fontaine Group tasked from Vienna with the rather simplistically titled role of “media”.

Gradually the red pins turned orange and most green as I located launch sites, got the go ahead from F.S.D.O.s (Flight Safety District Offices), received mayoral gratitude and approval and won over the local balloonists who seemed excited, never having seen anything like this as special shapes were still few and far between in the U.S.

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Trying to get a permit to overfly New York was a minefield but I pressed on and got meetings with prominent parks people and city officials. Albuquerqie’s pioneering balloonist, Sid Cutter had flown over the city some years before and he ended up not in the drink as everyone expected but in the clink for a while. Hey, if we could do Venice, surely New York should be a possible somehow. Shame about the three airports, coastal location and lack of landing sights. At a memorable meeting with air traffic controllers and Tracon officias I did get permission to take off from Teterborough airport as

long as the drift was down the Hudson. Pleased with myself I also tackled the parks authorities with the hope of doing something wonderful in Central Park. Turned out the parks authority run by a Mr Henry Rice was in turmoil and even Prospect Park in Brooklyn was out of the question due to some scandal or other. In any case the bylaws were unbelievably complex for any outdoor event. Fed up with this path to nowhere, I turned towards New Jersey State Park just across the river and got permission almost immediately to mount a tether with the backdrop of the New York Skyline which would result in Heller and his creation going live nationwide on Good Morning America for about 5 minutes.

The only other city where I had a stubborn red pin, was San Francisco. The then mayor Diana Feinstein got her office to call me and say that they would be unable to accept the gift at this time. After considerable to-ing and fro-ing of phone calls I got to understand the reason. She was under the misapprehension that the City would have to build an enormous museum to house the art gift and hadn’t understood that we were just offering a one off wobble (as balloon flights are sometimes called). Eventually we would fly three hours over the bay on Navy Day, one of the most memorable flights of the whole tour.

Dianna joined me for the last two weeks of prep and boy was I glad to see her. I had been working flat out day and night with only short breaks for sleep and food. With her help I got well organised and we even found time for a trip to the movies where we saw Benji the Hunted – actually a great film! “Benji, a dog, is stranded in the wilderness trying to figure out how to get out of the bind he’s in” says one review, I could relate to that!

So with my board full of enough green pins and a route decided it was time to begin the daunting adventure that would be the Flying Sculptures Tour of the USA and Canada. I picked up The Volvo Car from New York docks and Gregg began his the long haul from Michigan in the brand new Pace Arrow mobile home picking up some spare tanks from Thunder and Colt US on the way. On arrival in Washington, Dave and Maria collected the Ryder truck rental van and installed themselves there while Dianna and I motored down and Gregg finally showed up in the motorhome; Tom, Giles and Thomas sidled in and we were ready to begin this great adventure.

Andre Heller would join us for the first leg of the tour up to Niagara Falls through Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Boston as well as an extra paid date that had been added in Springfield at some local entrepreneur’s initiative, insistence and cash. After that we would be in the hands of one of his lovely assistants, Sushma, who would accompany us for the remainder of the tour.

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At first, a little unfairly, we regarded her as a spy in the camp but of course it was essential for both sides to have someone around representing the artist to make sure we fulfilled our mandate. She would also transmit to Heller the times we were frustrated by permits or climate for example and seemed to be in one place too long. She did complain rather a lot about our living and travelling conditions but in the end we all became accustomed to each other and as the tour progressed so did her relationship with Tom Donnelly to the extent that soon after the tour a child was prduced and they lived happily ever after in Austria, well at least until they split.

Despite every attempt Washington was a place we wouldn’t be allowed to fly, not a good start. I learned too late that the local balloonist I had contacted was no favourite of the authorities there and along with the usual paranoia we had to settle for a tether in Chevy Chase Park for the media instead of the grand take-off in front of te Lincoln Memorial that we all wanted. No great shakes but from then on it became truly amazing. The flight from the Philadelphia Museum of Art a perfect setting and enormous media success with coverage worldwide not just all over America. Kim Hubbard, reporting for People Magazine and aboard Kiku, had her job made easy when Tom guided his all black and evil looking balloon into a nunnery ‘s garden causing a sensation of course, some thinking it was the devil coming to announce the end of the world, and needless to say the Director of the lunatic asylum in whose property Dave descended was understandably disbelieving when one of the inmates rushed in to his office to announce that a crescent moon with six eyes and a tongue had landed in the back yard. All was forgiven as we took tea with the nuns before scuttling back to New York and the major media event of the tour with an appearance nationwide on Good Morning America with Heller interviewed live from New Jersey State Park in front of his sculpture on an unbelievably windy tether.

Next stop Boston, and although it seems nothing now, I remember calling up local balloonist Dr Clayton Thomas from my enormous hardly-mobile phone while we sped along the highway and he answered me on his cordless handset up in a balloon he was tethering in his garden. Such miracles of communication are nothing nowadays but both communications and US banking were at a very different level of effectiveness back in 1987 when we were doing this, almost nobody had a mobile phone other than in their car cos they were just so bloody huge!

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From there we had been tasked with flying over Niagara Falls. One look at the map shows that depending on wind directions take off and landing sites could be either in the States or in Canada and that delicate situation had had to be addressed well in advance with the aviation, customs and immigration authorities of both countries. In the end we had a kind of mishmash of permits and papers which seemed to allow us to do something, so we did!

Dianna was a great companion on these trips and looking after the money and payments relieved me of a great burden enabling me to focus more fully on the logistics and leadership of the team. Her English and my Spanish were meeting somewhere in the middle but when customs asked us if we had any animals on board and I introduced her as my pet it turned out there was a serious untapped hole in our lingua franca. As far as she was concerned I had called her a dog and that was it. The subtlety of double entendre and fact that calling someone ‘pet’ is a term of affection in certain parts of England didn’t wash. Of course explaining made it worse and to this day she hasn’t forgiven me. Sorry ducks!

We stayed on in Canada with the hope of flying over Toronto but instead spent three frustrating days at the Island Airport watching our little met balloons hurtle towards Toronto’s deadly spikyness the CN Tower, then the tallest tower in the world. Images of KIKU dangling from the antenna or the Jellyfish wrapping its tentacles around the viewing platform left the pilots uninspired so to speak. While I strummed away on a little headless Steinberger six string through my Tom Stoltz designed Rockman headset amp both acquired in New York, all three pilots played their Jokers.

I had instituted the ‘ºJoker’ on the European trip as a form of cop out so that if a pilot felt for whatever reason he would prefer not to fly a particular day then he just had to say so. No questioning or reasons needed to be given. We were all keen to go ahead and obviously the peer pressure as well as ego and personal finances were strong influences but in ballooning there is a well known saying that it is better to be down on the ground wishing you were up in the air than up in the air wishing you were on the ground.

Actually the first time a joker was employed was by a flu-ridden David Partridge in Copenhagen at the start of the European tour and we didn’t even complain when it turned out he had, had his map upside down!

Off to Newmarket, a town to the horth of Toronto, and a rather bland cross country flight which got us paid but we were never satisfied unless we hit the goalposts which meant flying over the landmark area that defined most cities, typically that meant the

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centre. Sometimes by taking off in between these imaginary goalposts this was easily achieved but usually it meant a long flight with good navigation by our pilots and a committed landing in the first open space that presented itself.

Out of Canada and our travels really began. Ahead of us Chicago, Minneapolis St Paul, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Columbus, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Atlanta, Montgomery, Birmingham, St Louis, Memphis, Louisville, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Denver, Tampa, Miami, San Jose, San Diego, Dallas, Houston, Nashville. Pittsburgh, Cleveland. We could miss out only three of these according to our contract with the artist Every flight was a traffic stopping, eye-popping event, news helicopters would divert, the whole concept was brilliant and ahead of its time, nothing has ever been done since which even comes near to the purity of it. Nowadays it would almost certainly be impossible to get permissions to do such a tour with Homeland Security and the Patriot Act smothering most large expressions of this kind.

Our adventures continued with a strange vocabulary passing between us balloonists unintelligible to an outsider. The moon’s chin catching the post, ripping open donuts, emptying rabbits ears, the tail on the moon exploding, The moon’s tongue, the UFO has landed in the glass factory, The teapot is in a tree. The rabbit is over the moon and the strawberry is being towed to the bank, like images drawn from Lear’s Book of Nonsense!

San Francisco provided perhaps the epic flight of the tourwith its immense bay and moody Alcatraz island passing below giving the opportunity for the longest ever flight these balloons made. Local balloonists had rarely managed this crossing always being plagued with SF’s famous fog. But on an unusually clear day we set off from Crissy Field at the feet of the Golden Gate bridge and the flight concluded with Thomas being towed ashore by boat, Tom landing in an industrial compound protected by Rotweillers and The Moon drifting to shore in Oakland to impale itself on a seafront lamppost. An amazing flight but, despite being Navy Day and after almost three hours in the air, less than usual coverage.

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Vienna´s P.R. agency The Fontaine Group did a great job getting millions of dollars of coverage overall which isn’t easy given the vaguaries of ballooning, but they had the habit of changing their personnel just when their travelling rep had got the hang of things which was always a hiccup and this was one of those days. Shame as it is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular balloon flights ever made.

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It was while in San Francisco that we coincided with the date for honouring a commitment made to the USAF Top Gun School in Montgomery Alabama to attend one of their annual events. They had agreed to fly us from where ever we were in the country and then return us using a National Guard Hercules for the purpose. Little did they or we realise that we would be as far away from them as we would ever be on the date in question.

Our brief was to fly a city once and move on, so the projected schedule widened accordingly, but military might prevailed and we were summoned to a nearby air base and, leaving our vehicles and most of our frippery behind us, flown down to Montgomery, Alabama passing through some of America’s most amazing scenery and at low level, just us our balloons and a jolly National Guard aircrew.

On arrival we were treated like royalty and shown to our quarters. A later briefing indicated that this day had been chosen using all the statistics and wizardry available and we were assured low winds, so when the next day it blew a hoolie even 5 star generals and the folks in charge of the Black Hawk development program had to accept the sad reality. We were invited to play golf to kill some time and I am convinced I also managed to kill a basking terrapin in one of the course’s little lakes (well it bounced off something into the bank) and had a lot of fun making an absolute fool of myself having no experience or talent for this game. I have a feeling the Montgolfieros live on to this day in the 19th hole where of course we were able to show more prowess!!

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We did manage to inflate the UFO behind the Base’s Orchestra in the evening for the hanger ball and the next day all was forgiven when we took to the air in a splendid flight.

In a hurry to get back on the road, we were told that the National Guard had sent the Hercules off to rescue a baby which made me think whale or elephant but no it was homosapien and our return would be delayed for a day or two. Our deal called for some financial penalties in this case but in the end high level negotiations between me and the generals got an agreement to drop us off in Albuquerque for a day to realise our flight there and then haul us back to San Francisco. Guess what? We had coincided with the world famous Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, no way this could have been planned into the logistics but Tom had an open door there from the organizers who would never forget a really horrific accident there only five years before when Dick Wirth his business partner in Thunder Balloons and much loved ballooning character had plunged to his death along with his girlfriend from an exploding home made balloon.

We were greeted in Albuquerque with three pickups, extra crew and the news that the next day had been named Vienna Day in honour of the project, even turning up out of the blue as we did.

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Given that we only had twenty four hours to play with I was keen to try and get the flight in that evening but unfortunately the winds said no. So it was off to one of the many social events laid on for all the participants and public.

There I am watching a band playing, gin and tonic in hand and suddenly I get a warm, gush of liquid spreading all over my back. Turning round I see Sitting Bull’s Great Grandson, Puking Pig, clasping two pint mugs of beer, vomit dripping down his face and a rather hopeless look somewhere between apology and who the fuck are you white man. Kimosabe Tonto, I say!

As part of the deal to come to Albuquerque I had rashly promised all the flight crew a balloon flight and though it hadn’t happened yet I think they were impressed by my rather boldfaced confidence. One of them immediately took me off to my room where I changed and he went about the business of laundering my clothes and ironing them in time for the morning. True to my word I somehow got them all a flight just after the

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extraordinary Flying Sculpture balloons took to the air alone drifting over the laid out multitude of regular balloons (thus complying in grand style with our artist’s request not to fly with other balloons) inaugurating Vienna Day in spectacular fashion. Later that same day we were back in the Hercules passing over the launch field once again starting our journey back to San Francisco, which took us through amazing scenery at low level most of the trip. The National Guard pilot looking agreeably silly in his colourful inflatable balloon hat, guided his aircraft north west to reunite us with or vehicles and drop us back into our schedule.

Our Hercules pilot, next stop Rosswell

Next stop, missing out San Jose,, a rather shoddy flight near Disney land and then on to Phoenix and into Texas where we made two amazing flights in Dallas and Houston.

The balloonists and people we met were supportive and friendly all the way through but it wasn’t till we got to New Orleans that we found another part of America that is truly magical.

This flight was going to be incredible if we could pull it off. Just look at the place: dykes; sea; River; swamps; that enormous lake. On arrival we were entertained by New Orleans family, the Colemans. We had met up with a relation of theirs during the negotiations concerning our visit to Montgomery. They laid on a true New Orleans’ welcome and went on to provide all hotel accommodation free during our stay... Standing in the cosy kitchen of a relatively modest St Charles Avenue house that backed onto Audubon Park, tucking onto delicious soft shell crabs piled onto newspaper in traditional Cajun style.

With the iconic streetcar clattering past just outside the front porch, it was indeed as local boy Louis Armstrong sang so beautifully, ‘A Wonderful World’.

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The Colemans owned banks and hotels so weren’t short of a bob but they weren’t ostentatious at all and some of the kindest and most fun people I have ever met. Later

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All aboard for a paddle down the Mississippi

after finishing the tour Dianna and I were offered their house to go and wrap things up, while they were away on holiday.

The morning after the flight, which had Tom in Kiku landing in a tree and David and Thomas landing in the same park just short of a certain ditching in the vast Lake Pontchatrain, I had an urge to call home. My main communication medium to England was via Telex with one of a few short messages: ‘successfully flew such and such a city, send invoice to Ziggy; or ‘please put more money on my Diner’s card’! We had no call in number as the cell phone required a change of provider most times we crossed state lines which made us hard to reach and beyond that we hardly communicated with base outside the Telex via my computer through Teecom Gold. It had been a few weeks since I had called my mum and dad which I did just after the terrible hurricanes of 1987 bashed and bruised much of Southern UK especially the ancient forests, uprooting trees that had stood for centuries, The seven trees that gave Sevenoaks its name being reduced to one, for example!

Dad was the most helpful person you could imagine and put his collection of chain saws into action for himself and many others. At seventy two he seemed as fit as one of his old fiddles. So it was a shock to hear Mum’s weak voice at the end of the phone telling me he had gone upstairs for a rest and died the day before I called. Apparently it had something to do with a mix-up in his medicines, but once again I found myself far from home and responsable for this enormous project which I would clearly have to abandon for a while to be with Mum and help with the arrangements.

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I briefed the team and saw them on their way to our next stop Birmingham and then I was on a plane back to England where we were diverted to Manchester instead of landing in London’s Heathrow. My much travelled body thought nothing of hiring a car and soaking up another 200 miles down to Royston.

My father and I had come to a late reckoning of souls after he retired and I enjoyed seeing him find happiness in retirement, never bored, mostly jolly in his way and deeply in love with my Mum who it turned out he secretly married only a while before, making an ‘honest woman of her after so many years together.

Does that mean I am no longer a bastard then?!

Although not practicing any religion, I think he finally freed himself from the tag of lapsed Catholic having had a strict monastic education at Belmont Abbey Boarding School under the headmastership of one Dom Absolum Lightbound and laboured with guilt it seemed most of his life. In the small town that was Royston where he had become a popular figure reconciling to simpler persuasions, even building the local parish church’s crib and generally lending a hand wherever he could. My mum, for many years a lab assistant at the local middle school, was an able watercolour painter and also a pillar of the school and part of the Royston community even though they lived on the farm just a few miles out of town.

The funeral was well attended and I realised how much my father had meant to many people. The fact the first three letters of the word funeral are totally out of context still doesn’t take away the reality that funerals are important social events in your life and serve to catch up with old friends, sometimes learning things about the dearly departed that you didn’t know and now could never ask.

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The younger of my half-brothers Tom dropped in on behalf of Dad’s former family just ‘to make sure it was true’ but said with a smile. Even so he couldn’t have felt any real love for a man who deserted him at a young age and then turned him away from his door when he came to visit. I feel you Tommy!!!

So it was back to the States after a few days by which time the team had flown Atlanta and everything was unravelling as Tom and Dave especially were rivalling to steer the crew their way with the idea that I would probably not be back at least for some time – who were they kidding. Soon put a stop to that I can tell you!

The final decision to fly or not always rests with the individual pilot whatever stage of the proceedings. I would set it all up and they had their jokers to play whenever they wished to, no questions asked, but in Indianapolis they were faffing about and being indecisive, the balloons were all laid out, there were some threatening clouds but the forecast was promising. I told them I had called the press but if they decided I would call it off. No jokers in site but they still had the option of pulling that red deflation cord.

I took them up to that line perhaps closer than I should have and maybe overstepped it.

Ultimately that afternoon flight was without incident but dramatic pictures in the press the next day showed them taking off into a darkening sky.

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The resulting mood was similarly dark so I procured some fine champagne and when we got back to the hotel I had a bottle of Dom Perignon sent up to each room. Later at dinner Dave and Tom Donnelly came down with wicked smiles on their faces but Thomas Wilson didn’t appear for quite a while. He was still pissed off at me and I asked him if he enjoyed his bubbly. What bubbly? Turns out there was another Thomas Wilson in the hotel who must have felt pleasantly surprised at such an unexpected gift.

So I bought another bottle, negotiated corkage with the waiter and we consumed it over dinner. Expensive flight that but it showed my error and served to reinforce the correctness of the practice to leave that sacred space of decision to fly a little wider maybe and 100% in the hands of those who were putting themselves at risk and not force the issue. So many accidents are brought about by pressure to fly or excess of confidence of one kind or another. I had been wrong to test their willingness in this way although as I said, and they knew, they could still pull the red line and deflate at any time but they were proud and it would have meant loss of face.

Memphis found us presented with the keys to the City and before we knew it we were rolling into our last city: Saint Louis. Should we or should we not fly the balloons under the famous arch. This became the dilemma which we then spent our time pondering.

The FSDO said we wouldn’t, the pilots said we should and I knew we could. I wasn’t sure. We had come so far by being obedient and following the rules so to speak it would be a shame to get into trouble now but what a spectacular finish. Truly in the ‘spirit’ of St Louis perhaps we should, there really was no risk. We tried to get permission to take off at the base but it was being returfed so no luck there. In the end the winds decided for us and the Arch remained an unpenetrated balloon virgin, but we did take the rather weird ride up its lifts and escalators to take in the view!

Now it was time for home. We had triumphed over the odds in many ways and it just left me to write all the farewells and letters of appreciation, as well as return vehicles and equipment, In St Louis we made our farewells and most of the crew went their separate ways. Just one last exhibition of the Dragon Fish, brought along as back up but yet to be flown. When the trustees of the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art heard of the existence of the third balloon, they put in a special request to exhibit it outside the Museum. I had Giles take care of that and we were done. We had brought all our equipment there too to be shipped home, Volvo and all.

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In recognition of my apparent celebrity I had a horse race named after me at the New Orleans race course. Leaving the Zenith computer/Diconix/Ability triumvirate chundering away with all the thank yous, we were driven down to the racecourse where I had to borrow an undersized jacket for the presentation and looked just dreadful, total exhaustion not helping. The stay at the Coleman’s was magical. We occupied a guest apartment over the garage and the house staff kept an eye on us and I felt just fine.

Life’s a Pleasure and Love’s a Dream/Way down South in New Orleans which along with Chicago and San Francisco are places I would love to revisit.

The Sculptures never toured again, but this wasn’t the last we would see of them. There were plans to take them to Japan and Asia which never came to fruition but we did finally exhibit them in Vienna as well as Barcelona and again in Holland. Much later we took them to Moscow where they were inflated in Red Square as part of a film for the Paris EuroDisney opening. They also had a role in the science fiction movie Slipstream and the Jellyfish image was used to promote an enzyme.

The last I know they were rotting away in a leaky container in Bristol. Maybe they will appear at Christies one day!

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HOT SNOWFLAKE & A ROAD TRIP

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A further adventure with Andre Heller was in taking a huge Snowflake balloon to Berlin’s Wittenbergplatz for a week as part of some cultural event. I don’t think we ever understood quite what we were doing there but we certainly knew it was bloody cold. Giles, David, and I spent hours in the platz with this monstrous flake lunging fom side to side.. No amounts of Gluewein or hot chocolate could keep toes from freezing in our Moon Boots. Eventually people appeared with placards and the populous started running protests around the balloon over this ridiculous extravagance (it was government funded). Job done we sloped off back to England. This was still in times of the recent aperture of the border and although people were not being shot anymore for crossing from East to West Berlin, there was tension and uncertainty with the inhuman wall still standing. As this social dyke still held back enormous political change there was so much to see and so little time but I did take the subway and cross Checkpoint Charly to sneak a peek at Eastern Germany surprised to see all the bullet holes and completely different social climate in the East restrained by the as yet un-toppled and redundant Wall already transformed into an enormous art gallery with its powerful, often humerous messages and,images.

It was also where Giles and David and I got to see a live sex act - good old gasping Gretel and well hung Hansel gave it their all but it was quite a weird spectacle really, as they hovered above us in a large net while we sipped Pilsen and got approached by hefty Gretchens. Otherwise it was all Kartoffel, Schnitzel, Sauerkraut and Wurst. Ever prepared to make a fool of myself one day coming in from the extreme cold we ordered hot chocolate and I did something I had always wanted to do, just started stirring away at the cup until all the contents were out of the cup and spread over the table. I think we were asked to ausfart or something of the sort. Now I think of it that probably happened in Vienna!

Spot the snowflake!

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Flying Pictures was getting considerable work with the Stabilization camera system developed by aerial cameraman Ron Goodman I was asked to go along to help with a series of advertisements for Freixnet. This required filming in Barcelona, Paris and Venice and I would be driving the equipment down to Spain and then across to Venice finishing up in Paris for the final shots. That is a long way! We were given Ron’s Dodge 3500 Ram van to do this in and Dianna accompanied me on the trip. The Dodge is not the most stable of vehicles but it is fast so it was an intense journey as ever against the clock.We had a great time in Spain soaking up Barcelona’s incredible Gaudi architecture especially La Sagrada Familia Cathedral before striking out to Venice.

As we approached Italy the road became a series of tunnels and bridges with tremendous cross winds that required a rather brave approach at whatever speed so that when leaving the tunnels you had to steer into the crosswind and then back off entering the tunnels.

We simply belted along taking badly signed roadworks and mountain switchbacks in our stride and one time when finally we did slip into a car park for something to eat I eased into an available space, stopped, leant back in my seat as you do and, forgetting to take the van out of drive, eased further forward into the car in front of me. Twat, Sorry guv!

A brief photographic pause between trying not to not kill ourselves!

But all went well and we made it round in the same number of pieces we set off as. The Dodge dodging rather than ramming at least most of the time!

Somewhere along the way back in Tuscany I had a sip of Averna and was besotted with its treacly bitter taste.

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There are some drinks that just complete the ‘picture’ if you consider the picture the

complete combination of smells, colours, tastes, shapes, proportions attitudes and sights that are battling to modify your own cultural default settings. Averna was perfect in Northern Italy and I bought into it bringing a few bottles home. But this like Vinho Verde in Portugal, Ouzo in Greece, Heidelberg Wine in the Black Forest, Rioja in Spain or Sotol in Chihuahua which are just brilliant en situ but somehow, for me, without the accompanying pongs, pips and squeaks of origin don’t settle so well losing something of their magic in any other environment. Some are quickly pardoned like Sotol for example.

In those days I really loved driving and took each and any opportunity to do so. Farn Farn The AutoByrne they called me (well they didn’t - actually someone at the balloon company got it into themselves to call me Sawney Bean after the mythical Scottish cannibal)

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ALL SHIT-SHAPED & BRISTOL FASHION

Hot, heavy and steamy!

My favourite picture of the NP Balloon

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Things were going well and life full of rich experiences, but I wanted more control over when I worked more than anything. There were long times of quiet which didn’t suit me at all as I would turn up the control on my collecting dial, drink a bit too much and get bored and skint. Meanwhile Dianna was learning English properly, and we tried a sandwich round which would have been a great success if we had kept at it. She was also attending a make-up course for cine and generally kept being a great companion.

I had inherited my dad’s minivan and Dianna still had his friend’ Charlie Farrell’s old Hillman Imp. Two heaps of junk if ever you like. But it meant we were mobile. I was trying to keep up with my son Robin’s development but it was difficult to be the devoted parent he needed, neither absentee nor in-situ parenting being in my blood at that time it seemed. We spent time together when I was around but it was clear he was slipping away from my ways and inevitably finding his own solutions. He was a latchkey kid growing up in Kingston and playing second fiddle to his mum`s career and love life soon finding himself enmeshed in the local street culture, poor sod, but it has made him the man he is today, determined and brave!

That relationship was about to become more distant still as, in the absence of work from Flying Pictures (as the fusion of HABCO and The Helicopter Partnership was now called), the idea of setting up my own company was beginning to find form. The Sculptures had been such a success that I felt continuing the working partnership with David Partridge would be fruitful and as he was now shacked up with Maria Roche in Bristol and we had all worked together a lot of the cutting of teeth had been done, surely we had the basis of a team?

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Dianna wasn’t so sure but we started looking for a place to live and I commuted weekly to Bristol where we put together the company, brochure and strategy we would follow,

with the idea of building on all our experience and continuing the sort of work we had been doing with emphasis to start with anyway on commercial ballooning which seemed to be full of challenging, exciting opportunities in those days.

Air 2 Air Ltd started life working from David’s kitchen table, migrating to an attic room in his house and on aquiring our first bit of serious business, taking over his basement.

At this time the Electricity companies were privatizing and the generating conglomerate that had been formed decided to use a balloon as part of it’s advertizing campaign. It was a well fought battle to secure this contract and as a fresh and talented company we had all they needed, so won the day.

They were great to work with, seemed to have unlimited budgets and invested in excellent equipment. The National Power Cooling Tower and its two other conventional balloons built by Cameron Balloons in Bristol became a familiar sight at events, in the media and the skies of Great Britain as we played our part in Maggie Thatcher’s transformation of Britain.

As a result the company began to achieve objectives, paying us a salary and enabling the move to larger and excellent premises in Coronation Road.

Early on Dianna and I took the decision to buy a property in Bristol and re-mortgaged my house at 27 Brentford’s Eastbourne Road moving to 72 Cotswold Road in Bedminster’s Windmill Hill, Bristol while renting out the Brentford House.

Once we were ensconced in the ways of Bristol I wondered if perhaps once again I had blundered. Property prices carried on tumbling and our houses were eventually worth less than the two mortgages put together which was uncomfortable. Early on I was referred to by a friend of Dave’s as the weak partner in Air 2 Air even though I had given up a lot and committed all I had to the venture. It was a slippery slope of falling selfesteem but we were enrichened by new relationships with people whom I still feel love and respect for: Toby Strauss, Jo Foster, Annie Eveson, Nick Sargent, Clare Hell yeah, Tony Dowding, Andy Francis and Blethyn Richards to name just a few.

In balance, it is difficult for me to look back on that time as anything but five years wasted. I had rather burned my bridges, with Flying Pictures and, even though we maintained a good relationship, nobody being indispensable, others took on the roles that would formerly have come my way.

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Fully committed, I needed to give Air 2 Air its time. We cooperated on a few projects with Flying Pictures including taking the Flying Sculptures – which Stephan Seigner had assigned to us by then - to Moscow’s Red Square (strangely enough as part of a Flying Pictures project) to film a sensuround project for the opening of Eurodisney; we also gave shape to the first National Ballooning Championships in Italy, worked with Dudley Moore in a Tesco Commercial and put together a rather beautiful photo shoot for Martell Brandy in Italy. The National Power contract was brilliant and after a while South West Electricity also signed up for a Balloon, so on the surface it all looked rosy.

I managed to shine occasionally, particularly proud of the first exclusively special shaped balloon festival ever at Cardiff castle for Harlech Television (HTV), It was fantastic including the inflation of some historic balloons by the Balloon Preservation Society and a bold collaboration with Blethyn Richards that produced one of the best balloon glows I have ever witnessed. For me the event was perfection but it was never repeated due, in part, to profound changes in how TV companies like HTV were to operate.

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We were lucky to be invited to one of Malcolm Forbes bashes at his French Chateau in Balleroy. Every year he would invite luminaries from the media as house guests and put on a spectacular display of the many special shape balloon envoys he had built for his travels to foreign countries as unofficial ambassador for the USA touring with

his Harley Davidsons. A parrot for Brazil, Minaret for Pakistan, Suleiman for Persia, Sphynx for Egypt, Faberge Egg for Russia and so on. Mixing this collective display with other ballooning luminaries gave us the chance to rub shoulders with the likes of Joan Rivers, Walter Cronkite and the rest of the Forbes family. Malcolm Forbes had just died but his son Steve had taken on the mantle of family affairs and would later run for US president.

We also sold a specially adapted balloon to IMAX for a project to film Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda. For which Dave would be pilot. Off went the balloon and off went David but no sooner had they arrived than off went the country in a horrific and frenzied, genocidal debacle. Abandoning the balloon, the crew was back within days. It took two years for things to settle down and for the balloon to be returned after surviving in a barn during these horrendous massacres.

An airship contract for Kraft in Germany was something of a coup as we had no airship, relying on The Virgin Airship and Balloon Company to provide the service, well enough to have the contract renewed for a further six months.

At times the business looked very promising and I was optimistic we would soon be up there with the big two: Virgin ABC and Flying Pictures but in reality I wasn’t sure how this was all going to end up. Very early on Maria Roche had made it clear that she had no interest in working with Dianna, surprising as they had discussed it on the tours and formed part of our decision to commit to life in Bristol. Instead she teamed up with an old friend of David’s and went ahead with the same balloon decoration business idea developed with her, leaving Dianna to think again. This made working relationships a little tetchy at times and the power-base in the company rather lopsided as by then Maria had become a pilot and also did the accounts!

Dave and I always got on well and he was a high performance partner flying the National Power Balloon. I was generally in the office. We developed a system called Balloon Base which was a database of balloons for hire in the UK whether for projects or rides. We didn’t offer rides ourselves to any degree but began selling tickets Nationwide quite successfully on an agency basis, the first company to operate this way. The rest of the time I would be looking for more business and chasing up the leads that came in. We competed for Rupert Bear, Radio One, The Converse Boot and a few other important ballooning contracts but I realised we needed some slicker sales techniques to close the deals and decided to look for a consultant, finding him in the form of Ray Wilson who had proved his worth in business and had his own balloon so knew something of the

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activity. With full encouragement from me he analyzed our business and identified a weakness which he said was me – another feather in my crap then!

He regarded me as too negative in failing to believe it was possible to achieve five new contracts in a year. My experience with Flying Pictures, who had a mainly reactive approach to selling. and observations of the marketplace where perhaps five valuable contracts entered the scene annually divided between individuals and the other big companies as well as a few up and comers. showed me the importance of a different approach than simply knocking on doors. and cold calling I am an optimist but also a realist so I found it hard to live a lie so to speak even if that is the modus operandi of successful sales. If this was the basis of my weakness or negativeness then I have no argument as securing balloon advertising contracts is a slow and indeterminate business especially in the English climate as Air 2 Air’s own future performance would show.

By now Dianna had given birth to an unexpected arrival who we named Pablo. During this time we were burgled twice, had all our vehicles stolen and were watching our properties devalue almost daily. My recently acquired Saab 900 Turbo which I enjoyed greatly was taken for a joy-ride and although recovered the same day, the engine had been thrashed and smoking badly it eventually gave up the ghost at a motorway services to be sold for 20 quid scrap.

Dianna made the most of our time in Bristol making her own friends and finding occasional work sometimes with Bristol Knitwear a company run by a local Pakistani millionaire.

He eventually contracted us to provide a grand opening and logo for his new premises and we did a great job with the Raj of Jaipur’s former Rolls Royce, fireworks, a roofless

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London Bus and jazz band, plus a prominent female Pakistani BBC announcer to cut the ribbon and more. So much so that for his next corporate endeavour we were planning another event where I planned to stage an East meets West cowboy style shoot out under the M42 flyover near where Easton meets Weston and had pencilled the Milky Bar Kid and a stagecoach as well as writing a song for the commercial, The idea being to simulate blowing open the doors of the guys new venture ‘The Company Store’ for which I had also lined up Garth Inns a good friend from FX Associates. Didn’t happen but it was a fantastic idea and lives on in my head as if it really happened!

Dianna and I were struggling a bit with our relationship too, so when she became pregnant with our second child it seemed better she spend time in Mexico with her family than hang around in Bristol with little support system and during the summer months when the company would be very busy during the final days of her pregnancy.

We were to separate for what was to be almost a year.

I began losing weight and seeing the girls I knew in Bristol in a different light. Or maybe I just felt different, I don’t really know. The allure of beautiful Jo Foster and intriguing Annie Eveson as well as our bubbly neighbour Clare had me looking for their companionship to help me find myself again. Whether this was to help me serve Dianna better or just serve myself didn’t seem to matter then - I was acting out my alter ego of pirate!

Reading poetry with Jo or talking NLP and discovering Wittgenstein’s complicated philosophy and the significance of language with Annie or just chatting with Clare would pull me in and out of focus. Jo’s natural companionship and fun, intelligent lifestyle helped invigorate my thoughts, Annie’s insights and mastery of NLP showed me I was someone who lived totally in the present and Clare’s simple friendship and unabashed consultations about sex – as if age made me an expert - made me feel that I could recover from all this Bristol bullshit. But how and with whom, God knows. Good constants at this time were friends Toby Strauss and especially Nick Sargent, floating in his own kind of disequilibrium. At the end of ‘91 everything was getting confusing. I had become besotted with Annie for whom I was off her list ticking hardly any boxes as someone she could fall in love with - too old, too many kids, married, skint - I must have pushed a few buttons though cos we still spent a lot of time together even whizzing off to Agadir in Morocco for an end of year holiday. It was here that she convinced me to stop hiding behind my beard and I was strapped into a back street barbers chair and hacked to bits. Anyway soon it was time for me to scarper over to Mexico and meet my daughter, la Srta. Ana Cristina Byrne Marin and reunite with Pablo and Dianna.

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Neighbours Tony and Clare decided they would come too and off we went. Luckily I had managed to sell the Brentford house to the incumbent lodgers but at 30% less than the value it had only three years before. So we had a little bit of money after levelling off the Bristol mortgage.

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The holiday was strangely perfect even though Dianna and I came to the conclusion that we should throw in the towel and go our separate ways afterwards. It seemed Tony an Claire also decided to split – must have been the always rather rank Acapulco air that did it.

Leaving Dianna in Mexico on my return to England everything just went bonkers. It turned out David and Ray had taken some decisions and I was to be bought out – in the end for a reasonable sum at least. I well remember my last job with Air 2 Air manning a stand at a trade show in London. Professional as ever I represented the company enthusiastically but on the last day I swore to myself I was going to get laid as catharsis to all that muted hipocracy and unbelievably at a party, I managed to do just that. Just shows what real determination can achieve!

Dianna came back to England to sign the divorce papers and it turned out Tony, who had stayed on a while in Mexico, had proposed living with her in Mexico so off she went to London to stay with him and get things ready for the move. Arrggh!!! What the fuck was going on! Yes. Every step was a consequence of another but was I really so sure about the way this was going?

The worst news of all was that my Mum had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She had previously had part of her colon removed but that was quite a few years back so when on a routine six monthly check up her specialist - the rather aptly named Dr Smelly had found the cancer invading her liver and declared her beyond repair, her predicted life expectancy of 3 to 6 months was a great shock. She had been so active since Dad passed away travelling abroad, buying a time share in Malta, painting a lot with trips to Bruges and elsewhere, enjoying life accomplishing many of the things she never could while Dad was around in their safe but happy, parochial haven since retirement.

Now it was time to point her optimism towards this cancer and she went at it with a vengeance consuming all kinds of juices, in particular beetroot, and seeking out alternative medicine and treatments, in the end adding a year to her life and holding back the progress and pains of this particularly grim reaper with reasonable success.

Only in the last few weeks did she require morphine before succumbing to the swish of the scythe early in 1993.

In her last years before needing help herself, she had taken on young Robin in all his adolescent turmoil. Maybe she loved him to death as he was a difficult lodger at 13, almost uncontainable and certainly unable to understand the opportunity she was

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giving him other than to challenge and milk her emotions and finances, testing her tolerance to extremes. He inevitably gravitated towards people he could relate to in Royston which in the end outdid anything Mum could do. He was inextricably locked into his peer group and only time, and a lot of it, was going to pull him through to a life with any semblance of civility and prosperity. It wasn’t long before he toppled further into the dark recesses of London’s drug culture and were it not for his own mother’s firm shoulders as support he probably would have become just another casualty of late twentieth century London’s moral decline.

Some of the things he witnessed and took part in were terrible and as an adolescent fixed him for good. He realised just in time I think that he had to get out of this but to this day many of his associates and friends are only a step away from the prison door whether it be from inside or out, and the temptation when things go bad to fall back into a life of petty crime is evident. I hope for him and his two lovely children’s sake he gets lucky and can make something of his life.

I pleaded with Dianna to give us another chance. I felt such guilt about how Robin had developed without the family he deserved and couldn’t bear the thought of failing my new bright, young, beautiful children in the same way even though Tony was a lovely devoted guy and may well have made a better substitute. I also saw in myself a need for these precious little beings and the love and respect that Dianna had for me and I for her despite everything. She agreed to give it a go and for some of the same reasons. She had been brought up by a single mother struggling alone to make ends meet and had no knowledge of her father whom she only found out was still alive at the age of twenty one.

He had been a truck driver and married Dianna’s mother Elvira while being married to someone else. With Dianna yet to be born, her parents separated and her mum decided to tell her that he was dead. In fact Major Jorge Marin was very much alive and one of Mexican President Lopez Mateos’ security chiefs. He could have helped a lot with Dianna’s education and upbringing but proud strong woman that Elvira Reyes is, she preferred to raise Dianna and her older brother Marco Antonio on her own.

At a very young age Dianna left school, got a number of jobs and helped her mother build the family home in Tlalnepantla, a large town to the North of Mexico City, swallowed up by urban expansion during recent years.

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Dianna returned to Mexico from Bristol, where she had come alone, with the idea of bringing the kids back to Bristol fairly soon while I decided how to proceed with my life’s mess. My buy out from Air 2 Air was for a fair sum and at least gave us some

capital, but even so I could not bring it upon myself to shake David’s hand at the end, feeling cheated, worthless and confused. The company went on to finalize contracts with Radio One and Converse in large part as a result of my work as these were already in the pipeline. I and others predicted they would go under in two years and they did, selling out to Virgin Airship and Balloon Company, claiming only one further contract with Pringle jumpers after our split as far as I know. David eventually returned to doctoring after a short period tending some interesting Airship and Balloon projects.

Turning the page it was time to move on and see all this as an opportunity. I decided to invest in myself and joined Bristol’s Welsh Back Gym to get my mind and body into better shape. Also buying a SAAB 9000 with some of my spoils to take me there.

This was now my third in a line of SAAB’s from the 99 through the 900 to this magnificent understated but powerful and sophisticated car. I absolutely loved it.

Despite having Swansea bay harbour pilots only a couple of generations back in never met uncles Capn Jim Byrne and Capn Brynley Byrne, I have never been drawn to the water, perhaps as a Sagittarian I am more about fire and earth, but I welcomed the opportunity to accompany Toby Strauss and his dad for sea trials in his lovingly restored yacht once all the varnish had dried and it was time for such a test. We set off down the Avon and into the Bristol Channel with the intention of visiting the Isle of Lundy and some other coastal towns. My Dad had often talked about Lundy and it was always a place that aroused my curiosity, Puffins, postage stamps and all We arrived in the evening and Toby cast anchor in its lee deciding to pass the night there. I don’t recall him tuning into the Shipping Forecast but it was quite frightening when in the middle of the night we had slipped anchor and were drifting slowly onto the rocks. The warning scraping sounds of the centreboard alerted us and he was able to put things right. We did step ashore on Lundy the next day and it is the first and only time I have ever been on an island so small. With its locked in special community it reminded me perhaps just a little of my early farm life having just a few families interacting with little interference from outside. Then we went on to Lynmouth which 40 years earlier had

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been scene for one of the worst flooding disasters in England’s memory but was actually a rather lovely little village with a good pub. Just what we salts thrive on.

During the trip Toby had us take the customary 4 hour watches at the wheel and apply ourselves to all the sheets and sails and it was serene magic to be alone on deck at the helm, slipping through the waves at night while the others rested. Perhaps I could be a pirate after all!

It wasn’t my only such outing, a little later I was invited to go on a yawl – a two masted sail boat – for a weekend down near Dartmouth. Fascinating stuff working as a team of 8 people catching the wind and sailing along to nowhere in particular. My only previous experiences had been with Toby and an earlier short trip on Marc Wolff ’s boat. I can’t claim to have developed any sea legs or yearnings for more but have great admiration for friends Treasure Hunt cameraman Graham Berry and his wife Belinda who actually sold their house, bought a boat and spent about four years roaming the oceans cruising the Caribbean and crossing the Atlantic a number of times. Mike Batt - who composed Bright Eyes - did the same, probably to get as far away from his bigger success - the Wombles’ of Wimbledon - as he could.

But what about me, what would I do next?

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JORDAN

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Fitter, I began to find myself again. With the influence of daily exercise the washing up and hoovering got done without pause, plus I was more alert and primed. Richard Branson’s, Virgin Airship and Balloon Company approached me to manage a fantastic project which was right up my street. A Champion of Champions Balloon Rally in Jordan as part of King Hussein’s birthday celebrations. Certain death at the gibbet or worse complete loss of reputation if I screwed up.

Perfect.

I was in shape, I was hungry and I needed just such a project to strut my stuff and get back on track emotionally. ABC’s Mike Kendrick and Mark Lockwood virtually gave me carte blanche (actually it was carte crème - lovely thick cream bonded paper embossed with a golden crown most of which I still have as all communications were by fax and phone!) to invite the Champions, sort out the locals and set up the logistics while they would executive produce the show, lock in a few key participants and concentrate on media.

It would bring ballooning to Jordan, the first ever such event in that country and less than two years after Desert Storm devastated Jordan’s neighbour Iraq. Jordan cleverly remaining militarily neutral. Life was getting back to normal without the shackling effect of kowtowing to or accommodating a debilitating business partner. David was probably thinking the same way about me!

I took an office in Jo Fosters and Pat Daniel’s Outright PR building in Whiteladies Road Bristol. They had become firm friends when they bought a balloon I helped design, adding the pop art motifs, for Outright. Dave taught Jo and Toby, her boyfriend, how to fly.

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This was all before the days of email when faxes ruled if you were lucky. I would stay up all hours send thousands of pages and spend time on the phone coaxing ballooning’s best into acceptance and finally completing my quota of 50 champions. Apart from traditional country champions we had the pilot who had flown most countries, another who had flown the most wheelchair passengers, Joe Kittinger, Per Lindstrand and Don Cameron came along. Even future celebrities like Bertrand Piccard were there with his hang glider -yet to complete the historic round the world Breitling flight. Once we had a few ‘names’ on the list my task got easier as I included them in the info packs and others began to feel this was something not to be missed. In particular David Levin decided ‘not to let politics or religion get in the way of a good party’. Three visits to Amman and we were ready to roll. Rather than try and recall everything I shall rely here on an article I wrote for the British ballooning magazine Aerostat which sums it all up rather well: Over to me then!

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The dead waters of the world’s lowest sea were skimming just twenty feet below the belly of the Super Puma ferrying us back to Amman through ‘theme park’ Jordan. We had been on a final scout to Wadi Rum ... scene of the forthcoming Royal Jordanian Balloon Rally. I just hope our highly decorated pilot didn’t sneeze and leave us all decorating the headlines, we were aleady flying below mean sea level as it was!

The cabin bristled with dignitaries: the Minister and the secretary General of Tourism and Antiquities who were ultimately responsible for the event; Royal Jordanian Airlines’ president and Marketing director, the principal sponsors; the General Manager of the Intercontinental Hotel responsible for food and other hotel services in Wadi Rum; the head of International Traders ABC’s business partners in this caper, even our pilot was Head of the Air Force who was along with other senior military security and protocol officers who would be providing infrastructure, transport and communication.

“Rumm the magnificent... vast echoing and Godlike... a procession way greater than imagination...the crimson sunset burned on its stupendous cliffs and slanted ladders of hazy fire down its walled avenue”. Well that’s how T.E. Lawrence saw it in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the basis for the film Lawrence of Arabia, much of which was shot in this region three and a half hours from Amman.

Nine kilometres long and tapering from five to one kilometre in width, this amazing desert valley is rimmed by towering cliffs and has a paved road running its length arriving at a small Bedouin village. The government Rest House and Visitor Centre there usually caters for a handful of rock climbers and hikers, but this event would see it temporarily elevated to five star serviced accommodation for over 300 people during a week.

‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’Rock formation in Wadi Rum named in honour of T.E. Lawrence’s book

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The Jordan Intercontinental sent thirty staff and four trailer loads of bedding, food, tables, chairs, volley balls, computers, cutlery, a PA system, signing, fridges, a complete

kitchen, and two polystyrene camels. International Traders people pitched a field of marigold coloured tents the size of windsocks for us to sleep in and plumbed in a couple of shower and toilet blocks.

At my first meeting with Nasris Atalla - The Secretary General of Tourism - back in July, I was asked for a shopping list of requirements that would ensure the events success. As this amounted to almost everything, the resulting 39 steps ranged from fifty 4x4 chase vehicles, 30,000 litres of fuel and emergency helicopters to spare photocopier toner, sewage disposal, an electricity supply and free entry visas.

I also proposed that the event be about five miles before the village where the valley was wider and allowed taking off from the road, more freedom of flying within the valley, better retrieving logistics and more opportunities for the press. Not a popular recommendation as it would mean setting up a whole reception and viewing infrastructure at the location. Had I known then the eternal problems I would have with buses, which we would now depend on to unite crews from the village with balloons from the army camp at the Wadi’s entrance 25 kilometres away, I might have kept to the original idea of flying by the village even with its other limitations.

Much was supplied by the army , Under the personal supervision of their extremely charming commander–in-chief (rather alarmingly referred to as the Basher though now, better informed, I realise he was the ‘Pasha’) we were provided with Land Rovers in various sizes and states of repair, rescue trucks, articulated lorries, communications and an army encampment of 150 men.

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At an early stage I insisted on high octane bulk fuel for this formula one Grand Prix of ballooning. After numerous assurances that there was only butane and certainly no road tanker to transport it, thirty massive tankers materialised at the Jordan Refinery and I was introduced to Hazem ‘Hazchem’ Hamouri their mischievous Scrabble playing, special projects manager. Sanction busting 98% pure propane (as in fact all Jordan’s fuel) was to be collected from Iraq. Persistence had paid off. It seemed never before had propane been imported and certainly not for our purposes.

Purfield the manaphonificent and Mark ‘Lockers’ Lockwood for cameraderie

To make sure the gas flowed into our fuel tanks, I asked for the best in the business ‘Travel Gas’ for onsite help and so it was that their technical director Michael Green was welcomed into the Jordanian butane brotherhood, Lawrencised into Michael Agbad and drank a lot of sweet tea without his shoes on gobbling on the proffered pomegranate seeds like a native.

Another pillar of this unusual outpost was to be Competitions Director Les Purfield.

He boldly went to Jordan with a set of mutilated FAI rules and bubble jetted his way through in impressive style especially when Mark Lockwood and I lost our voices. A fine fellow indeed.

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Balloonists were soon arriving in Amman from all over the globe. First to show up was Jean Marie Hutois and his team. Taking advantage of the free air-freighting and tickets from Royal Jordanian and incredible cooperation from the Ministry of Tourism and

Antiquities who were generally on a huge promotional roll at the time, he was to get some unique pictures featuring his Moet Chandon Cork balloon at Petra before the event.

By the 12th of November everyone had checked into the Intercontinental in Amman and the next morning all set off by bus for Wadi Rum. Buses were to become the bane of my existence and these three kicked off by stopping at every family owned watering hole between Amman and the Wadi. I had gone ahead with an advance team to Wadi Rum where Graham Dorrell lead a crew of ABC’s finest in craning fifty balloons from the four army trucks onto Land Rovers.

Eventually the buses turned up, I leapt enthusiastically on board, opened my mouth to greet everyone and could hardly utter a sound my throat was so dry. Nevermind someone took over and all the tanks were filled, fans prepared and kit checked. We were later to enjoy one of many terrific meals from the desert kitchens of the Intercon.

Andy Elson on the right

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So after months of preparation we arrived at the great day. After a test flight in the morning the pace hotted up with the King’s imminent arrival. He went amongst the people and then took his place at the front of the Royal tent with his wife Queen Noor and the Queen of Spain. After an evocative display by the wallaby mounted troops of the Desert Patrol, the wind calmed and despite being midday the balloons fulfilled the wishes of many as they rose into the sky. Smiles all round, the main purpose of our mission achieved.

Look at the hump on that!

From then on it was downhill all the way. The suave sophisticated hotel managers of Amman metamorphosed into bewhiskered hubble-bubbling desert rats. Hard boiled eggs and Frankfurters became breakfast; balloonists became Arabs and Arabs became balloonists - the distinctive kofyr headgear was donned by the in-crowd and, much to the amusement of many, I would occasionally be seen walking round hand in hand with the general in command of the troops as we discussed the issues of the day.

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One of these occured when an American balloonist’s wife complained to me that her retrieve vehicle driver had acted improperly towards her. On raising the matter with the general he said he would bang him on the head and kill him! The issue went no further as even Mrs Wronged felt such justice was a little extreme.

There were competitive flights now in the morning and afternoon but I had programmed one day off for the teams and international press so we could all visit Petra and Aqaba, Jordan’s Red sea resort town. So we were able to gawp at the Rose Red City on the one hand and the Red Sea Sun on another as well as rent a couple of rooms and grab a refreshing shower.

At Aqaba I was fortunate in joining the unlikely snorkelling party of Don Cameron, Phil Dunnington, Tony Pinner, Kevin Meehan, Mark Lockwood, Jackie Underwood and my mate Nick Sargent, along as one of my assistants. the other being David Jenkins. We all hopped aboard a little glass bottomed boat and set off for a good marinating in the famed clear waters of the Red Sea. First stop was for a can of petrol which our helmsman who we shall call Abdulla carefully transferred into the fuel tank, The Red Sea and his eye in more or less equal measure.

This clearly upset him as you would expect whether for damaging the ecosystem, causing himself bodily harm or simply his inaccuracy or more probably all three plus looking stupid! Anyway he sailored on until an hour later he pulled in and moored his craft about 50 metres from the main road to South Arabia. A kind of aquatic layby. We could have taken a bus!!!

After some had and some hadn’t taken to the water (I fell asleep on the boat) we headed back to the Aqua Marina Club. Along the way I got drenched and the man known as Abdulla chopped the top of his thumb off in the prop. Strangely a good time was had by all with the exception perhaps of Abdulla.

I am assured the flying was amazing and the competition well fought but I was more caught up with the daily duties of making sure things went as smoothly as they could do in the accommodation of our guests, leaving all the other stuff with Les, Mike and Mark.

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I think the best part for the balloonists was in enjoying the broader aspects of not shaving (especially the chaps) eating generally amazing food, no telly, amazing company and sampling the special magic of desert culture that made Lawrence of Arabia weird.

Something must have rubbed off on Dave Bareford and Lindsay Muir who managed

to get the sand out of there orifices and go on to victory in Japan’s famous Saga meet immediately afterwards.

No longer will the guidebooks be limited to describing Wadi Rum in terms of Lawrence of Arabia. Now they have the legend of charioteers in fire breathing flying machines, battling it out for world supremacy. One with a Flower Pot on his head - Contact Andy Elson.

As for the awards, Texan Steve Jones won the first prize of 3000 dollars and the King’s trophy. The ever popular Tomas Fink came second and the effervescent Ad Haarhuis third. These prizes and a beautiful commemorative plaque to everyone were presented at a grand banquet hosted by Queen Noor in Kan Zaman – a restored castellated village outside Amman. I had thrown out the original idea of a celebration dinner in the Intercon Hotel’s lobby once we came across this incredible place and my insistence paid off once again.

Other curiosities, Joe Kittinger celebrated his wedding anniversary, Per Lindstrand was awarded the Don Cameron Vest for most difficult retrieve, The Jordanian helicopter pilots received the DHL Lawrence award for acting in the true spirit of the event having rescued Per and Peter Vizzard received a complimentary weekend for two at any Intercontinental Hotel for coming furthest to be there.

In large measure the event was successful because King Hussein was loved and respected so much by his people and this was all about him. There was an often expressed and very genuine wish to please him which could make the impossible happen. Unfortunately the king was never scheduled to spend a night in one of our tents which despite the chocolates on the down pillows didn’t quite live up to the description of the luxury tented accommodation that we had been promised.

As a postscript to the event the Royal Jordanian Balloon went on to open up a balloon rides operation in the Wadi and I have met people since who have adventured to Jordan and been flying in it. Two years after our event, the same balloon with Per Lindstrand at the controls ascended to 41,300 feet releasing a hang-glider piloted by Judy Leden enabling her to break the existing record for such a feat. Although there were a couple of attempts to repeat the balloon event, sadly there has been no real continuity. It would be nice one day to repeat the champion of champions Rally though. even if it was somewhere else.

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SHUTTING UP SHOP

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True to her word Dianna came back with our two lovely children and we spent our last Christmas in Bristol. I tried to carry on with my business in Whiteladies Road looking to Blethwyn Richards as a possible ally in developing it. After a few months, I counted the number of times he sat at the desk I was renting for him. Once. This was going nowhere and on top of that Jo went off on holiday to Majorca with my nemesis from Air 2 Air, Ray Wilson of all people which made things very awkward indeed between us as she started dating him. To say she deserved better would be unfair but it plucked her out of my small circle of available friends. She went on to marry him! Babies were produced!!!

Annie Eveson was looking at my mate Nick Sargent for a date and wouldn’t even speak to me; however she was as much off his list as I was hers! She eventually ran off with a tractor driver from Glastonbury who I have to suppose ticked all the boxes, pushed all her buttons and ploughed a good furrow!

Nick meanwhile was a good friend moving too to Windmill Hill and continuing his musical career. He was conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent’s grandson and we had originally met when he asked me to sing on some jingles for Shropshire Radio in the London days.

Moving to Bristol, we had got back in touch and he accompanied me to Jordan and also on the trip to Moscow with the Sculptures as well as a bit of balloon crewing for Air 2 Air. However it was time to be realistic and finally declare Bristol a failed experiment. Maybe I expected too much of me or my associates, or perhaps real success was just around too many corners and I am impatient. Whatever way I looked at it, big changes were now on the horizon. Not least of which was caused by Mum’s rapidly failing health.

Dianna and I, along with Mum’s sister Peggy and Liza Moore were together with her on the farm when she finally slipped away. I had never witnessed anyone actually die.

In the last moments as I sat next to her bed listening to the weak breathing of this once reactive, coherent, loving being, I wondered what she was thinking there, hardly with us. I don’t think she was in any way conscious or dreaming or wanting to communicate or aware that her battle had been lost. I am sure she never accepted that. She didn’t want to go, but there was no strength there anymore and after a while of gentle but erratic breaths, she inhaled weakly once more with what they rightly refer to as the death rattle in her throat as her lungs began to fill with liquid, and stopped functioning. After a few seconds another attempt with all that had kept her alive these 70 years, the rhythm 272

in her body, the rhythm in her soul, the last beat of that big heart of hers and the little whisp of air that entered and departed her throat without leaving it’s precious cargo of oxygen. Then she just lay still, no twitching, no more, nothing. So easy, it was almost as if nothing had changed, just that she had taken a break from breathing for a while and normal service would be resumed as soon as possible. How I wished that could be the case. There she was, the person who had brought me into the world, fought my corners, nurtured me, admired me and shared so much laughter in her life with so many others too. Just still and I suppose at peace if being dead is that.

Calamitous, inevitable and sad for those left behind. A moment that awaits us all however it is we take our leave of this world.

Liza took Dianna for a walk down the farm’s long back lane called the Belt and we all adjusted to what had happened, popping next door to farmer Tim and his wife Beryl to share the news of her passing and then starting in on those difficult phone calls which we had prepared on a list. With every call a pause and a choked voice thanking me for letting them know, sympathizing over my loss and wanting to be informed of the funeral arrangements. It wasn’t really a surprise to most, Mum’s decline in the last few weeks had been marked and it was clear she would only last a short while but still it was a shock. Switching off that light in my heart left more darkness. Now with both my parents and my only close brother gone I was very much cut loose and under my own steam with few around, if any, who related to me in the way close family does.

We decided to stay on at the farm for a while. Well really it was a decision made for us as I had to close down mum’s affairs, sort out the burial and clear the house which had been my parents home on a peppercorn rent for so many years, meaning they had never sought to invest in a house paying a year what most people paid a week!!

When I was fifteen we had moved across the road from the Hovel to the smaller half of Flint Hall. The former owner of the farm an elderly lady who we all called Hibby sold up to the Hortons and moved back to Hampstead. Dad maintained a close friendship with her for the rest of her life taking care of some of her business interests and running her around when she needed some general help. In thanks for my Dad’s constant help in her final years, she surprisingly gifted him a five storey house near Royston Railway Station on her death. For him, with no money to invest in much needed repairs, this was just another headache, so he sold it on at next to nothing preferring an easy last few years himself without the worry of such a commitment. At least he had a few more bob in his pocket.

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The Hovel

Old Holloways’ school friend Geoffrey Wilkinson, who by now had inherited the farm on the death of his own father, allowed me to stay on for as long as I wanted for which I am eternally grateful.

Mum was laid to rest next to Dad and in the same graveyard as Liam. My parents have matching tiles with their silhouettes on and Liam is just marked by a simple wooden cross. I have never been back to see these graves. What’s the point they mean nothing. A garden bench I had made at school and which had survived many years in our garden, was placed with a plaque John Whitehead kindly made outside The Hovel overlooking the sweeping landscape up to the remote pylons on the hill. Also means nothing but what do you do!!!

I was left with photographs, memories, a blocked toilet and a cellar full of junk as well as all the chattels of full lives that accumulate shelf by shelf, cupboard by cupboard, drawer by drawer.

Almost any item that I picked up held a memory, it could be a spoon or plate or book or towel, one of dad’s tools anything. An unspoken voice labelling its familiarity. A clock, a painting, an instrument, a shovel the bloody lawn mowers and chain saws, a badly hung door, a tree. And the blocked toilet.

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A thought that had been forming for a while began maturing. With few commitments or sentimental anchors, it was time to leave these shores and try our luck in Mexico.

Why not?? No obvious prospects in England, a little money tucked away from my savings and the buyout as well as a small inheritance from my my parents of 14000

West Cottage

pounds. It was now or never. I had a strong feeling that England was becoming too difficult and frustrating for me, much as I savoured its child benefit, free health care and the dole which I had consumed whenever needed.

We decided to stay for the six months of summer in the place that had nourished my early life hoping to find some peace and structure in our lives, also giving our kids the chance for a bit of country life and air after Bristol and Mexico. It was to be a beautiful and settling time the kids spent much of their time running around naked, learning to ride bikes, picnicking in the garden, paddling and running amok with almost complete freedom and safety. During what was a perfect summer, we let the simplicity and bounty of country life dominate and enrich us. I kept in touch with the immediate world doing the occasional errand for John Whitehead delivering fans and shafts all over the place in our SAAB 9000, but really wanted to absorb as much as I could from the farm before leaving England forever. A few friends came over, Michael and Sheena, Giles and his wife Mandy, Howard from PFTR and his family arrived during a holiday home from Canada where he now lived. It was a happy, simple time.

Dianna used her initiative and went off to study with a company called First Impressions near Cambridge and started giving consultancies on clothing and make-up. I on the other hand took to baking, reading and wondering how to whittle down two houses worth of stuff into an essential exportable package.

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Tim Darcy long time manager of Flint Hall Farm

The Bristol House had stayed empty with the idea of selling it quickly, but the property market still had not finished its tremendous plunge and nobody was buying. Besides it was painful accepting the losses. We eventually sold it a year later for 60% of what we paid for it, barely covering the loan we had taken out at purchase. Another 8 years would pass before some kind of recovery took place once again skyrocketing prices into another realm, but we could never have waited that long. Anyone who tells me you can’t lose with property gets sharp shrift I can tell you!!!

Those six months were idyllic, despite having to ship stuff off to auction or charity shops and sell off a vast collection of books taking mine and Dad’s together along with the innards of my mobile library and probably some of his. Even once we had sold off the better stuff and decided what to keep, it still required a transit van to come and take away what remained to a local charity shop leaving sufficient to start a small bookshop in Mexico if fortune took us in that direction.

One sale that stays in my mind is the day a very nice book-dealer friend of Liza’s, came from London to pick out the best in Dad’s collection. While his rather aloof daughter swung in a hammock in the garden this kind gentleman made his selection and we came to the negotiation. I had brought him a cup of tea and at the moment we agreed a price for Dad’s Argosies, Dylan Thomas First Editions and so on the cup fell off its handle spilling the tea all over the floor. Once again as with the guitar moment Dad must have been disgusted at the price but not had the tea fall over the books in question.

I believe the price was fair, I had done my research. Sorry Dad! 100’s of then worthless 78’s (that had prompted me at infant school to boast that my Dad 276

had hundreds of records never mind Elvis Presley’s 20) A lot of interesting LP’s of Dylan Thomas, The Goons and so on were sold through carefully placed announcements as were a fair number of my Cigarette and trade cards and a couple of guitars. The furniture slowly went to auction and in the end we were down to what we felt we could ship to Mexico. The silver canon lighter fetched little as did a pretty good collection of Beatles memorabilia. A silver christening cup was the star piece at 120 pounds. One historic old painting that had lived above our mantelpiece and was valuable theatre memorabilia according to Dad, a pram (see way above) and a complete extended run of War Illustrated ended up being abandoned at the auction house for either failing to obtain any bids or in the case of the pram being inadmissible on health and safety grounds.

Walks in the woods, log fires, long summer days, it was a wonderful way to say goodbye to England.

Soon the day came to cut the cord and really leave. The SAAB 9000 found a good home with John Whitehead and a great friend of ours BBC Childrens’ Programme producer Michael Forte offered to ferry us and our luggage, mostly guitars and other valuables, down to London. We left behind a huge collection of furniture, books, kitchenware and clothes packed away in Tea chests in one of the more rat proof barns not knowing when or how we would be reunited with any of it, if ever!

Later that night in the Heathrow Sheraton we held a cocktail party to say goodbye.

Many came and it was a great if bitter sweet reunion and farewell with a good many of the friends we would be leaving behind probably never to see again.

The great Alan Bown, Ready, Set, Gone (well us anyway and him more finally in 2014)!

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Taking off on BA’s recently renewed service to Mexico City, Dianna was keen to be closer to her family and I had absolutely no regrets, excited from the outset about starting from scratch in a new country with my beautiful, talented and persistently supportive wife and two fabulous young children. We left behind good friends who wished us well and I hoped would understand and stay friends. I wondered how son Robin would cope in my absence. Hurtling over the North Atlantic towards an uncertain future, we were not alone with Dianna’s family already getting ready to meet us at the airport. I prayed I wouldn’t let any of these people down.

I was reminded that I had flown out from Mexico in 1982 on BA’s last flight for 10 years – ‘we will only be gone for a couple of years’ they had announced to the accompaniment of a mariachi band

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HOLD TIGHT KIDS THIS COULD GET BUMPY

Plan? No plan! - Was there ever?

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PICTURES

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Hey Rob, you got the blues?

Chelsea!!!!!

(Gibson ES335 and Levin Goliath)

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Pulling the birds from an early age

With half brother over from Borneo

Mixed feelings soon turned to loathing!

Seany Poppins

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Peter Young ‘The Writer’, John Aston ‘The Gardener’and two innocent young Welsh lads

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Clockwork Orange meets Chucky

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They called her the Firestarter! Just off to the pub mum do you need anything?

Nice picture of Mum and Dad

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Tots and their bots, Nick Horton, and me stuck in the mud, Pablo and Cristy enjoying the freedom of life on a farm.

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Easy as falling off a chair. Simplest way to get a cheap laugh1

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Here I am ready for rugby, ready for a scoot and ready for a hoot but unfortunately not ready for a hiking tour round France cos nobody told me to travel light and I was back within three days, tins of meat balls still un opened.Wimp!

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Two pictures where I am supposed to know what I am doing, poking water with a stick in Cambridge as I punt Dianna’s mum Elvira under Magdalen Bridge, and vandalising the lawn in Royston, all on the same day it would seem!

Yellow Leb!

Cool!

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With Marc at The Mill in Cornwall, A rare photo of Blethyn Richards at work, Robin and Claire Byrne being Welsh. And here come John Tarrant and David Ulm to have Christmas Dinner in Brentford, Dave had just bought a house across the road and was well pissed when we moved off to Bristol!!

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On receiving the electricity bill, “Honest I only used the hairdryer once this month�

The last day I saw Dad alive was when Dave Partridge kindly took him and Mum for a ride in a balloon over Flint Hall Farm.

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Vaughan Oliver gets the upper hand but Robin Byrne’s skinhead training stands him in good stead.

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Atypical photos of Marc Wolff, who normally has the rotorblades somewhere above his head, seen here fiddling with the tail rotor on his watermill (rotor off to one side) and also straddling a lawn mower with, of course, its blades below. Meanwhile Pablo, me and Marc’s daughter Lilly pretend to be grass

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Sometimes my life on a stick meant pole position Cicely Hammod. A great family friend who looked after me, and Dad, while Liam was being born. A kind of Godmother I suppose had I ever been baptised which I wasn’t

At which point the donkey took off down the towpath like a horse.

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Good old John Whitehead

Tony Pearce

Long time friend of Dad’s, crossword collaborator and chain smoker Charlie Farrel

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Oops!! guess who started the fire and awaits his fate!

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me in a dicky seat

dish of the day

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The done thing

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BACKGROUND It is early 2008 and at 18 and 16 years our children are by now at an age when it is unlikely we would holiday together again. We decide to make an epic summer trip back from Mexico to the UK to check in on relatives, as many friends as we could fit in and of course the ‘Old Country’. This would be the first time Dianna or the kids had been back since leaving in 1993.

I had been invited to a school reunion, where we would be going back almost 50 years and it was a poignant moment too as one of our dearest friends Mike Latimer had recently lost his wife Sheena, (well he knew where she was but she wasn’t saying much!). These tripled with the fact that I was the grandfather of Robin’s young boys Martell and Harley who probably still wonder who this rather useless figure is, hidden away in a foreign country with their equally inaccessible aunty Christy and uncle Pablo.

It was a good moment to break open the piggy bank and go back. I worked hard to make sure we packed as much as we could into the trip and in many ways it speaks more about our past than our present or future so I have decided to include it as part of this offering.

It also gives a reassuring glow to what has been a great few years in Mexico where we have achieved many things we never imagined as well as adapted to a culture and country that hangs on by its finger nails. Fortunately these are more like predatory talons. We hang on too, living near Mexico City, riding the storms but enjoying most of the ride!!

What follows, with few amendments, was written in response to such an incredibly enriching trip which I didn’t want to forget in any detail. culated it then amongst those mentioned

but am glad

I cir-

to include it here

too as a reminder that you are what you become and life is what you make it, so enjoy what you have and live each precious, unrepeatable moment Sean NB: My thanks wouldn’t be complete in this context if I didn’t pass on my gratitude to the Vauxhall Vectra which gave us a trouble-free and safe ride on our journey

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It’s been a while since we got back from:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm

Yes you guessed it ….. Heathrow, Terminal 4!

Almost immediately I opened this short note and ever since I have woken daily to the reveille call of a neighbour’s chicken with the determination to finish putting pen to paper (as it were or perhaps as it was) and thank everyone for helping make the Byrne tour of England first a strong desire, then a possibility and finally a wonderful reality.

But you know how it is – concise became considerable - round and round, up and down, in and out, back and forth, computer glitch and before you know it - ‘poof ‘ - back with the chicken.

First of all an apology - I mean what a horror – chums of old that you thought were confined to the new territories, rear ugly heads and offer to turn back time and crash through your otherwise orderly or acceptably disorderly life. People you have managed to do perfectly well without for many years appear en masse and eat your food, drink your wine, dent your sofa, chortle at your jokes, throw in an insult or two, stuff down all the Cherry Bakewells and then quickly move on, leaving soiled sheets and pillows, rekindled sentiments, unnecessary revived memories and the stark realizations that we have all grown far too old, far too quickly and that some things will never change!

Those less domestically challenged, meeting in the anonymity of restaurant, pub, motorway services or street corner were immediately bombarded by a flurry of dull wit

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with little or no protection from over-punning and the underpinnings of almost forgotten, barely cherished, shared memories with me luxuriating in the mother-tonguiness of it all!

Stirring happenstance indeed with something for everyone.

Well let me say that from our side we had a blast. The whole visit to England was incredible and so much more than we ever hoped for. Almost everyone was home/in/ about/available/conscious/coherent. It was as much a surprise to us as it must have been to you but let’s hold the Internet responsible for almost everything. A few probing e-mails, hire car and plane tickets all obtained in the click of a mouse, and tick of a tock, fate cast to the wind with only windmills’ whirr or divots of doubt.

We managed to coincide with Mandela’s Birthday Concert, Wimbledon, Glastonbury, Henley Regatta , the British Grand Prix and even the fantastic Radiohead live in London, The fact we didn’t get to any of these great events shows how busy we were making our own story, but this has only steeled our resolve to do better another year so watch out – we’ll be back if not in dribs then surely in drabs.

Our trip really starts on the evening of the 19th June at the QBP – Queen’s Birthday Party – in the British Ambassador to Mexico’s residence where British creativity was celebrated. In well-deserved if somewhat smug style (‘hit the world running’ was that year’s UK slogan) we had a fashion show and music bubbling away from Radiohead, Coldplay, Joy Division, Amy Winehouse et al and showings of some new British films – a good primer that left us wanting the real thing.

Brackets open with BA flight 242 arriving almost on time and us trundling off round the M25 (including first of many stops at South Mimms Services) for an afternoon rendezvous with old schoolmates from the 50’s in Barley - a consummate English village coddling its angst and pearls behind hedge and thatch in the rolling Hertfordshire hills.

We had all attended the extraordinary and inspiring Holloways school which prepared us well for an idyllic world that I personally am still looking for! So we celebrated this – apple-bobbing, lots of memorabilia, memories of country walks, shaggy old sheepdogs and then Kenzie’s fish and chips appeared for our first English feast. Faces and bodies all fast-forwarded but everyone still somehow the same jolly soul, many looking very much as I remember their parents did.

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Those responsible please step forward Mike, Maggie, Geoffrey, Michael and Sarah Lou

Me and Bobby McGee alias Michael Richmond

Enjoying the long hours of daylight we slip over to my birthplace and the last place we lived before coming to Mexico, arriving at Flint Hall Farm in Royston at 10 pm to the surprise of long time farm manager Tim D’Arcy, his wife Beryl and son Kevin. Caught up on all the social thistles and farm news – stories well told by Beryl.

Next morning the rather pricey B&B in Barkway delivered as full an English breakfast as you could wish for and with great relish. Brilliant weather.

Off to Kingston and my son Robin his girlfriend Bev and kids Harley and Martel. Uncle Pablo and Auntie Cristy helped Grandpa Sean up the stairs and a good time was had by all! The first time we had all been together.

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Good luck Robin!

We went to The Tower and the fantastic new South Bank with its Eye, Globe and Millennium Bridge, flying the Eye and buying typical souvenirs and eating beans and sausages, reacquainting with Branston pickle, gooseberries, rhubarb, Ginger Nut biscuits, cream teas, Maltesers, Munchies, unsmoked bacon, cider, wild strawberries, stinging nettles.

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Took the opportunity to wonder rather than marvel at the generally ghastly over-priced art in Christies’ June 30th Contemporary Art sale 7602 preview with its striking if ludicrously priced pieces.

Balloon Flower (Magenta) Lovely Mr. Koons 16,300,000 Euros

Naked Portrait with Reflection Thank you Mr. Freud 14,900,000 Euros

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Damien Hirst ‘Untitled’ £421,250 All a bit fishy if you ask me

Mark Rothko Black,White, Blue £2,505,250 So it is!

Gober & Levine Untitled’ sculpture £457,250 (How many sculptors does it take to change a lightbulb)

Yashimoto Nara ‘Fuck’ £237,250 Of course!

Dianna Byrne Little shoes and bags with perfumes (withdrawn)

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But beat this for pure unadulterated hype (get out a magnifying glass you have to work for this stuff) Lucio Fontana Concetto spazziale, Attese £1,161,250

For Lucio Fontana, slashing the canvas was an act of creation, not destruction. In that simple gesture, Fontana opened up the redundant surface of the canvas to a realm of new possibilities. This was his Gordian Knot-like solution to the enigma that had faced him for so long: in the modern age, the Space Age, where can art go? What should the pictures of the age of rockets look like?

Concetto spaziale, Attese appears to answer that question. The three vertical slashes have a calligraphic simplicity and elegance that borders on the iconic. Yet there is no image. There is not even abstraction. Instead, Fontana has turned the canvas into a portal, for the slashed hole implies that there is some scope for travel to the other side. In this sense, his decision to break through to the other side of the picture surface reflects the change in perspective that space travel introduced to the world. Over a century earlier, Man had seen the Earth from the air, but by the time Concetto spaziale, Attese was executed, Man had broken free of gravity and had seen the planet from the Cosmos. The slashes in this work are the artist’s equivalent. By creating these spatial, Fontana has made us aware of the three-dimensional nature of the canvas as an object. It is no longer the flat plane upon which the drama of art plays itself out, but is instead an object, a sculpture-like entity-- Fontana has introduced us to this new perspective.

By pointing to the three-dimensionality of the canvas as an object, Fontana betrays his origins as a sculptor, not a painter. Early in his career he had been a monumental sculptor in Argentina, following in his father’s footsteps, and he continued this later in Italy. But even in the 1950s, he had begun to interest himself in other media, in works on paper and on canvas. It was perhaps his training as a sculptor that led him to investigate and disrupt the flatness of these media. Initially, he pierced these with holes which appeared like punctures, hinting at a frenetic violence in their creation. But in the so-called Attese, where slashes replaced these holes, he introduced a sense of refinement.The clean edges of these cuts and the implicit rhythm within their gestural sweep down the canvas fill the work with an elegance that hints at the ballet-like act of their creation.

As a sculptor, then, Fontana introduced us to the concept that the canvas is itself an object in three-dimensional space; but in fact, it is in another sense that Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attese is truly spatial or three-dimensional: it is not the canvas, but the holes inside it that are Fontana’s true work of art. With his smooth and elegant slash, he has sculpted space itself, creating an area that at the moment is held in place by the canvas.To sculpt with space as a raw material-- what could be more apt in the Space Age? Discussing this new perspective, the Second Spatial Manifesto declared that: ‘If the artist, locked in his tower, once represented himself and his astonishment and saw the landscape through his windows and then, having come down from the castles into the cities, he mixed with other men and saw from close-up the trees and the objects, now, today, we spatial artists have escaped from the cities, we have shattered our shell, our physical crust, and we have looked at ourselves from above, photographing the earth from rockets in flight’ (signed by G. Dova, L. Fontana, B. Joppolo, G. Kaisserlian, M. Milani, A Tullier, Milan, March 1948, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh.cat., Milan, 1998, p.118).

Fontana’s desire to create an art that remains relevant to the era of scientific discoveries in which he lived is evident in the gestures with which he created Concetto spaziale, Attese.The slashes, the movements of the arm and the knife, are themselves an artwork that exists not only in Space, but also in Time, a tribute to the world of science post-Einstein. The gesture, the opening of that space, is something that is not immortal but which, through its very irrevocability, is nonetheless eternal: ‘The work of art is destroyed by time.

‘When, in the final blaze of the universe, time and space no longer exist, there will be no memory of the monuments erected by man, although not a single hair on his head will have been lost. ‘But we do not intend to abolish the art of the past or to stop life: we want painting to escape from its frame and sculpture from its bell-jar. An expression of aerial art of a minute is as if it lasts a thousand years, an eternity’ (ibid., p.118).

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Poking our heads up the arse of modern art at a much publicized Christies Auction Rooms’ view, was a good precursor to meeting up with Vaughan Oliver at the V&A where some of his work is on permanent exhibition. We then went round in spirals eventually finding lunch at Spago in South Ken with Vaughan but not Ken (Corsey – a fellow ex-lodger from our Brentford house - was at Wimbledon and couldn’t come). Ate Italian served by late smiling Pole then off to Vaughan’s teepee in Garrett Lane, Wandsworth for a tea and a pee.

Heads up for Vaughan

Cheese for the camera

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Vaughan’s unique and iconic work with 4AD records especially have made him an important and inspirational figure in modern graphic design.

Vaughan kindly inscribing a book dedicated to his oeuvre Up on the top deck through Fleet Street, The Strand, spot Cherry Blair pronouncing in Trafalgar Square, Hamleys, Soho, Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Street, Marble Arch, slip into Edgeware Road and left through Connaught Place then Connught Square into Connaught Street but no Jeannette Obstoj at number 45. Waiting a while at the Duke of Kendall across the street, recognise an old face whose name I miraculously remembered (Will) still fixing clocks at number 24!

Then best Indian takeaway ever in Finchley with clicking children and Bosco, Vera and Chris Barton reliving and reviling as one does on these occasions.

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Fabio, Gabriela, Christy and Jose Guadalupe

‘Click’ Walter, Mildred, Busker,Veronica and Tim Nostalgic drive-bys of past homes in Royston, Cambridge, Connaught Street nr Marble Arch, Brentford and Bristol and simply traveling between all the places we visited was mostly traffic-free and enjoyable apart from the remortgage inducing fill-ups – UK petrol 4 x the cost of Mexican stuff.

Stops at South Mimms Services became unavoidable thus supporting the location, location, location maxim of any successful eatery. Buy Coldplay’s new album Viva la Vida supposedly inspired by a Frida Kahlo painting

Kentucky Fried Cousins

Favoured few

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It was also the convenient scene of a long overdue reunion with my closest cousins Michael and Shelagh and their families. Turns out Peter Barrett Shelagh’s husband is now a children’s author!

As we left, an opportune sighting in the car park of two Bond Mini-car three-wheelers coming back from a rally up north. Our grandparents had one and there are now only 200 or so on the road apparently – so there’s a coincidence if you like. Haven’t seen one of these death traps since my grandad was at the wheel 40 odd years ago!

cherry

vainilla Picked up a Morgan Super Sport 1:43 scale model (just like the one in Rowberrow - see later) for my three-wheeler collection that the Birdman had in wonderful quintessentially English Thame while visiting him at his Old Candle Factory home there. Out came the Bullnose for Cristy’s first ever driving lesson and lots of other old gems too!

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Staying at Robin’s was a well-lived couple who had just driven their Rolls Royce Silver Spirit all the way from South Africa to London. The Van Ginkels flew out the day we arrived but not before sharing a great pub lunch and a few stories.

Robin gave up his bed for us and disappeared into the garage to sleep with the bullnose after a hearty lamb dinner!

First lesson - look left turn right

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Robin was in great form and surrounded by all the bicycles, cars, lawnmowers, books, clocks, watches, and other paraphernalia that have also come to stay and help make his such a colourful life. Looking forward to his book, a lofty tome it will be for sure) Next day, as we were setting off, a film crew arrived with ex British Balloon and Airship Club president Anthony Smith, now in his 80’s, to talk with Robin about his next adventure crossing the ocean using drainpipes for flotation. Can’t see Robin in drainpipes but Anthony went on to complete the extraordinary journey in 2011 just three year before his death at age 88.

Time to meet up with Tom Donnelly and Gregg Hammond which took us to York and a budget-busting stay at Middlethope Hall Hotel. This was a rather grand reminder of another type of Englishness – The plus-four, huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ era has gone but much of that spirit lingers on here (Tom pointed out the ha ha – he was always good at things like that). The ubiquitous Polish serving staff, and sandwiches rounded off a brief if reduced get together for some flying sculptors (Tom Donnelly, Gregg Hammond over from the US, Dianna and me)! Amazing how memories of the Flying Sculptures tours vary though.

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Andre Heller’s Kiku & Dreamstation part of the Flying Sculpture.

Where are/is they/it now?

Gregg Hammond´s beautiful handcrafted Indian flutes

A brisk stroll next day along the city walls and tea at Betty’s famous tea rooms then Gregg and Monica set off by train to pursue a California dream in Woollacombe scattering native Indian flutes behind them as they went, Tom legged it back to Sprotborough and we slithered down the A1 towards southern comforts.

Horde unrepelled by York’s City wall

A warm Cameron Balloons welcome by the late hours skeleton staff of Colin, Julia, Alan, Craig and Andy – left with bags of spares and the gift of a well worn Breitling jacket from project director Alan Noble which I shall of course treasure and not wash.

Thanks Alan. I actually managed to leave it hanging in the loo at Colin Prescot’s house for a couple of years which must have been a sore reminder that Breitling beat his equally well prepared Cable and Wireless effort to circumnavigate the Globe.

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Middlethorpe Hall and ha ha A lover of boot sales, the West Country offered up one of its biggest which found Dianna and me at six am browsing in light drizzle amongst the discards! We found some good bargains - small shoes for Dianna’s collection and junk for mine as well as yet a few more booooks. Surprisingly these affairs don’t happen in Mexico – probably a good thing!

Fate stepped in and we stepped into a fete The next day mingling with locals and taking tea at the Rowberrow village church fete – which really was so much better than death and s.howed English quirkiness at its very

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best – even a few real three-wheelers on show and a Bugatti. We loved it (didn’t we?).

Bugatti Royale turning heads

Accompanied for skittles and tea at the Fete by Bristol friend Nick Sargent and his crew joining us for lunch from Clevedon at Rowberrow’s Swan Inn. There too Clare, Lionel, Gabrielle and Jessica who allowed us to share their lovely Draycot home for a couple of nights.

The girls

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Mr. and Mrs. Thompson

The pin the tail on the donkey game at the fete

It seemed that everyone is writing or has written books or had books written about them and every family has a drummer in their midst as we have in Pablo. Also plentiful pets – 9+ chocolate labs, a poodle, two Bull terriers, a free-balling hamster, three cats and Gertrude to name just a few!

The Alan Bown Setting I looked forward to reading Jeff Bannister’s book ‘The Alan Bown Set, Before and Beyond’ recounting the life and times of my old music business mate and manager Alan Bown with his reminiscences on all the brilliant musicians and events that he encourage, created and experienced in his long career. Sadly he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s nasty discovery but keeping it together. Good luck dear friends. (The

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Last Post sounded for Alan on the on the 19 December 2014 R.I.P. old friend)

Alan and Jean were our last port of call before bowling off down to Stockbridge to see Colin, Susie and Polly Prescot in their idyllic cottage tucked away in the Hampshire woodlands and visiting Flying Pics for a chinwag. Great to see Andy Elson again too who was down from Bath to check out a Topshot surveillance system. Another card of a different pack!

<= Gertrude At the end of our whirlwind trip, we got lazy in Pond House and imposed totally enjoying a couple of nights and a bit of winding down, chatting and sampling the scrumptious SusieQuisine.

Returning knackered on the home flight - which acted as a closing bracket for the incredibly vital and powerfully invigorating experience that this trip meant for our family - we were sorry to be going back to Mexico so soon. I love Mexico but it is a world apart from eccentric/Stately England and although we are well settled here we felt completely at home in the UK whether sipping tea in Betty’s, in the local with the Holmer Green amateur dramatic society, sitting in an English Garden, ‘riding’ the Routemaster down Oxford street, ‘taking’ the tube, ‘hailing’ a cab, or marveling at the greenery, scenery and machinery of New Britain (sorry – liked the rhyme). I guess good weather and long days flavoured and favoured our impression somewhat.

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What an amazing crowd! It was great to see such an abundance of well-being and happiness putting any longer teeth, graying hair, troubles and losses in perspective. What unites all of us without exception is a proclivity for fun and smiles rather than frowns and rants. We laugh a lot! Failing memory generally hasn’t hit, but I see those little reading glasses ‘pinzed’ on quite a few ‘nez’ these days!

Our best times were those spent in the company of all these friends and the memory of people and their places is etched on my mind hopefully forever. We never seemed to stop grinning - I am now!

One person greatly missed was Sheena Latimer who passed away suddenly a short time before our trip. She was a wonderful and unique woman and a strong reason for realizing our journey had been a wish to spend some time with our dear friend and her husband, Michael,. He was also fending off serious illness as he dealt gallantly with his profound loss. Their son Rupert joined us for a great meal and we spent a fun and stimulating evening together as always. Sadly no photos though (and now no Michael either since 2011).

The chance for Dianna, the kids and I to be together for so long gave us a chance to understand each other better too.

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Hey Pete, great the way that Tomtom thingy keeps bringing us back here.

Thank you to everyone who put us up or put up with us or who made time for us and made our time so incredible and complete. A special thanks to Peter and Diane in Holmer Green who unwisely offered their house as a ‘base’ together with their Tom Tom SatNav which meant we were always going to find our way ‘HOME’ – how I relied on that little monkey (I don’t mean you Peter!)

As I suppose the Tomtom might say – ‘cross the ocean and take the first exit’ which we have done. Often when first switched on it would indicate – ‘turn round at the first opportunity’ Who knows when we shall follow that simple direction!

Love to absolutely everyone and thanks for all the kindnesses, tolerance, company and friendship.

Los Byrnes Sean, Dianna, Pablo and Cristy

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The soldier When I die, think only this of me: That thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of Englandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke (with apologies)

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FOUR POEMS AND A THOUGHT

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* I am about to recount the farewell account that was given by a clown when he left a little town and put his best foot forward. suffice it to say he’s not there today but somehow still he remains IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII The Clown’s Farewell IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII A feast was laid out on a table of oak For a clown’s farewell to the local townsfolk With fruits in abundance and plenty to spare Much merry was made and done as was dared The ale overflowed, the wine never ended Cider was drunk and the girls were up-ended By men doing dances, and flashing their muscles As young ragamuffins just tumbled and tussled Waving his joker, the jester was hearty He never expected so handsome a party And tears found his cheek as he pondered his lot Had he made people happy who were otherwise not?

He picked up his voice having silenced the crowd Then choosing words carefully he spoke out aloud Oh Farewell good people So long my fine friends I love you and leave you A piece of my heart Parting’s sweet sorrow Well that’s just not me But I’m happy I’m off Where I finish, I start The Small twists of fate The journeys we make Crissing and crossing Make each life an art So, thanks for the memories And thanks for the fun

Here I will stay I’m not going away A big part of me Is embedded in thee And aches for the past I’m no iconoclast So my life rearranges Really nothing changes Things that bind us together with no care for the weather twixt here and there-after full of love but much dafter That’s quite enough for me What more can there be

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The Baldock Sporren toss the caber, ink stained sheet, fat love, tough love, own two feet, compass turning, musty groves, find direction, fish and loaves, toppling world, cracking crust, quakes and quandries, what to trust: mates and mums and pop and drums and shiny skies and blue fruit gums, short shorts, old shirts and ipod shuffles, popcorn, flicks, and crisps or ruffles. the nuclear clock, unclear block, the huffington post, wikileaks and beans on toast, a beer or two a match the spokes on yer bike young man for a night with the blokes, or the girls or the game or the stars or alone or whatever yer fancy. the much oiled scottish bard Willy Mcnilly coined a phrase â&#x20AC;&#x153;Och moony, trust in the Baldock Sporren, Tis a lacky lad who coddles him thus.â&#x20AC;?

I think he was right!

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PULL ME UP AND PUSH ME OVER PULL ME UP AND PUSH ME OVER ONE HUNDRED TIMES LET ME FALL INTO THE QUAKING MAELSTROM THAT INSECURES ME FIZZING FUSE RUNNING TO EXPLODE IN MY HEAD TO FIND ONLY A HOLLOW EMPTIED SHELL WITHOUT POWDER MY IDENTITY DEFINED BY WHAT GOES ON AROUND ME MY REASONS UNCLEAR AND MY WISHES UNDONE I OPEN MY MOUTH, MY EARS, MY EYES, MY HEART SO THAT THE WINDS OF CHANCE CAN EXPLORE MY EMPTINESS BUT THEY ONLY RATTLE THE SHUTTERS, MOVE ON SEEING NO OPPORTUNITY THERE NO RIVER FLOWS IN THAT DRY CREEK NO ABUNDANCE, NO HOPE SULLEN AND SUNKEN TUNNELING DOWN AND DOWN LIGHT CAN ONLY ELUDE SUCH SEEKING SUBMERGED IN SPIRALS OF USELESSNESS COILED LIKE A DEAD SNAKE, SKIN SHED FOR THE LAST TIME DRIED AND RASPING BREATH WITH SOLICE IN SLEEP RESTING TO CONTINUE THE EXPLORATION OF DEEP UNSATISFACTION I SEE YOU YOU DREAMERS HOPERS,WISHERS,TRAWLERS OF THE MOMENT HOPING FOR UNCLAIMED OPORTUNITY UNCLAIMED CHANCES TO SUCCEED LIKE A GAME SHOW, A MINUTE TO WIN IT A LIFE TIME DEPENDS ON EVERY CHANCE BUT WHEN THE DANCE IS OVER AND MUSCLES FORGET THEIR RYTHMN THE DESIRE TO KILL SUBSIDES,THE REASON TO LIVE DIES THEN WHAT? ONCE YOU HAVE SCOOPED UP YOUR CHANCES ONCE YOU HAVE BLOWN YOUR FORTUNE ONCE YOU DWINDLE FROM CONSIDERATION WHEN EXPERIENCE IS ONLY A HAZZARD WHAT THEN?

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It’s Coming Back Remembering Days and its pies, cakes and trays of fresh bread, just off High Street in front of a haberdashers nook full of yarn and needles a mere mortal shuffle across the market place from Newling’s undertaking whose top hat and tails led their handsome hearse down many a sad farewell’s memory lanes.

The carriage adorned with flowers from Pigg’s nursery and attended by, amongst others, Mr Green, part time fireman and owner of the Toy shop, he had also born many up the Parish church path for a final sorrowful parting. Later Herts and Cambs reported in ‘The Crow’, a life become a list so many words aged and dated.

Sharing a corner of the Royston Cross with Logsdon’s garaje, Mrs Kirkham behind the counter of her family’s Sweet Shop tending sherbet dips, peardrops, Walls and Lyons ices, liquorish sticks and humbugs all waiting to be licked out of shape, would read of such passings and later gossip with the neighbouring Kenzies as they opened the Chippie for the lunch trade.

Such is life and death in and of a second generation, changeling post war town called Royston astride county boundary, earthly meridian and a little cave.

‘Roasia Town’ thinking itself named after a Royal Stone due to the King James’s Hunting Lodge but dwindling energetically into the future and fading indifferently into the past perhaps enjoying a novelty cappucino in Dino’s caff as generations fall like seeds from a tree and flow like sand to a distant sea.

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REGENESIS The sea so beautiful, The sun so pure The valley so confident. The bay so secure All the buildings like the flowers, that face to the sun If there is a God, Here his work is done And we with our wisdom, adornments sublime Dots on the landscape, living our time Believe we possess all this world and its beauty The deeds and the statutes over-riding our duty To respect every morsel and moment we savour Not sully it all with the kind of behaviour That abuses our advantage as the dominant species Laying the law like cats litter faecies And so the regenesis, Rapid decline Time to accept it and time to resign Ourselves to a humbler simpler world design Where sharing is everything, greed a crime The gracious reward – a happier time United we stand, Or divided we fall.

Do we all pull together. Or cower in the stall When it is all too late saying: ‘I told you so’ Words are cheap, And life’s even cheaper The world’s overheating, And there goes the beeper!

I’ve never believed in God bless us all In fact I’ve never believed in God much at all Let evil prevail and all sins wash away?

I’m sorry my friends but this God’s had his day And so much the better, No more speak His name No more hanging judges, Or heads hung in shame For we are our saviour, Nothing more nothing less And our World is demanding a change of address

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THERE YOU GO

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