Chapter One

I first went mad about a girl. I thought we were soulmates, but she left me for another land. This was over forty years ago. And then came the hell’s angels chapters.  

Ever since then I’ve been up and down like a bride’s nightie, or more precisely, like a whore’s drawers. 

My first breakdown happened when the girl took a job with Italian state television RAI and went to visit the bedside of the Italian guy she’d left for me, who’d almost been killed in a motorbike accident. I got it into my fevered imagination that his astral being was wrestling with mine for possession of her. Then she went to India with a TV crew. They were involved in a car crash, and she took off on her own to explore the subcontinent, a life-long ambition of hers, leaving me to reach out for her across the searing miles through space-time, fuelled by cannabis and tracks from my record collection played at full volume in the bedsit in Islington I shared with Jorge, a long-suffering political refugee from Argentina and Fergus my Scottish blood-brother. At this time my sole means of support was the £8 a week I earned collecting pools coupons from the less salubrious parts of Camden Town.  

I had it in my head that she was the owl and I was the bear and that together we were the indissoluble BearOwl that had to be together and constituted a powerful psychic being, but since she was incommunicado all I could do was astrally project in order to try and locate her. Kinda crazy. In the process I somehow got involved in trying to restore the British Empire in galactic space-time under the command of my dead grandfather, whom I had never met, but a hero of mine who had been an Admiral in the Royal Navy and alongside him the Duke of Wellington, another role model. I was a bit of a throwback. 

Eventually, after I had been painstakingly released from a police station in Hemel Hempstead by my sister after taking a cab to Hertfordshire with no money and resorted to eating her socks at UCLH to prove my sanity, then fleeing home to resume my mission, a lady turned up and asked if I would like a juicy steak. My answer was in the affirmative. The next thing I knew I was in the psychiatric ward of the Whittington Hospital where all they had in the kitchen was cornflakes. And I was locked in. 

The TV talked directly to me, and my cousin gave me a transistor radio which I played at full volume, harking on the synergy of the lyrics with my quest. When a fellow inmate demanded that I turn it down I refused, so he wrapped a steel chair around my head breaking my nose. With two black eyes and in my standard issue dressing gown and pyjamas, I kicked my way out through the fire escape and boarded the underground at Archway station. At Tufnell Park a couple of huge policemen approached me enquiringly. “What do you do, sir?” They said. “I’m an inventor”. I replied boldly. “And what have you invented lately?” They asked. And I replied, “True Love!” as they escorted me off the train and into another police station. 

This initial misadventure was ascribed to hypomania. I had never had serious dealings with a hippo and after due consideration I was later categorised as a manic depressive, subsequently softened to Bipolar 1, and I was drugged accordingly. At that time in the early days of the DSM criteria (according to a podcast I heard on the World Service, so it must be true), there were only two diagnoses available to psychiatrists: the one I now enjoyed and schizophrenia. The palette of possible disorders for them to choose from has since apparently expanded to over 300, so the world has grown more interesting and complicated, it would seem. 

Then I tumbled down many metaphorical flights of stairs into a deep depression. The world was grey and empty, bereft of my intoxicating illusions and driving along the road I longed to collide with an oncoming vehicle and experience sweet extinction. But kindly relatives in Yorkshire with a large farm where my family had a house, The Motor House, gave me a job tending sheep and crashing tractors. The only thing I didn’t like about it were the early starts. 

And then six months later it was whispered by my Downs Syndrome cousin, Docky, who was a devil with the ladies, that she had come home. It was true. And I nestled in the long grass with her. 

But I’d been saving up and a friend from university had offered me a job with his mother’s touring opera company who were then in Paris. My beloved had affairs to attend to and perhaps partly to prove a point, I took the job, and we arranged to reunite finally in Tuscany, and I left for the continent feeling young and carefree, having purchased a copy of Hugo’s Teach Yourself Italian by way of insurance. 

Then I fell totally in love with Italy, which seemed to be a more sophisticated version of Spain, where I had been born and spent some of my formative years. I quickly became fairly fluent in Italian – though with a Spanish accent – working as a set builder with Opera Barga, a small seasonal concern run by my friend’s mother in the mountains outside Lucca. It was a magical dream and I waited for my beloved to join me, and I waited. Then one day I got a postcard telling me that she’d taken a job as a lady’s companion and gone walkabout again, so I took off on a tragical mystery tour of Italy and Greece with an Italian friend I’d made. 

I ended up penniless on the streets of Rome begging for small change from passing nuns. Giorgio, a crony I acquired there, said there was a job for me on his farm in the Dolomites, so I scraped together enough for a ticket to the end of the line and found myself in a no-horse town with unmetalled roads. I went into the bar Giorgio had described and asked after his estate. The entire place erupted in laughter. I was by no means the first to be sent on that wild goose chase. And I came back spitting feathers. 

Back in Milan I hawked myself about in the hope of finding employment. I even resorted to attempting to become a private detective. All to no avail. But my travelling companion from Lucca bailed me out by repaying a loan, and then I was offered the chance to go sailing in the Mediterranean on a yacht that the impresario of the opera company shared with a friend. And that was glorious. “Ancora l’ancora Giacamo!” became my command on board as I was vouchsafed responsibility for the anchor. I had never been so happy. We sailed to Sardinia and then on to Corsica where they turned back, but by now I was fully resolved to spend my life on the waves. 

I beseeched a berth on every moored yacht in Ajacio harbour. And I stumbled on one, the Sarah, a gaff rigged Norfolk cutter captained by a giant Viking of a man and his mate, Paul. And Sarah just happened to be the name of the woman who’d broken my heart. 

I spent a last night with my Italian friends at a restaurant in town and as I left a Corsican separatist bomb went off in the locale. But I wasn’t bothered. I raced down the quay to my new billet elated and ready for any adventure. It was then that a kerb crawler drew up alongside and offered me a lift. I should have said no, but I was gung ho. And after that experience my self revulsion knew no limits and I became depressively psychotic, convinced that the spirits of my ancestors were weeping in loathing for me. Back on board the Sarah I fumbled clumsily with a razor drawing copious blood from my wrists. When my new skipper caught me trying to happlessly bandage my wounds he punched me violently for my pains bursting the blood vessels in my eye and after getting stitched up by a kindly nurse at the hospital, who didn’t ask too many questions, I was sent up the mast in a bosun’s chair to sandpaper and varnish the spars. 

I bought the skipper ‘Slowhand’ by Eric Clapton and took Paul to a blousy brothel in a vain effort to restore my amour propre, which culminated in trying to escape through the bathroom window to avoid the heavies who were justly determined to make me pay for the dreadful champagne the ‘young ladies’ had been quaffing. 

Nonetheless, the yacht was on its way to Greece, the owner wouldn’t countenance a third crew member and I had thoroughly disgraced myself, so I was soon on the ignominious ferry to France.