How did I get there? What took me to Goa all those years ago? It was not the beginning by any means nor was it the end. It would take forever to find the true beginning. I sometimes think that the beginning was born in a recurring dream I had when I was a small boy. In the dream I seemed to be traveling. I couldn't see where I was going. I just knew I was moving. I could feel that I was moving. Sometimes the feeling was as if the surface travelled was smooth and sometimes bumpy. I recall having the same dream a few times. It wasn't a dream I had all the time but sometimes and then not again. The feeling was by then deep in my subconscious mind. I grew up and was distracted so that I never had time to bring that feeling back to the surface.I found time while laid up in bed and off work for eight days. At the time I was working as the head of the Conveyancing and Contract Services section in the Legal Department at the London Borogh of Sutton. It was a job that I don't think I was really qualified to do. I had been encouraged to apply for it as there was no internal candidate. I had been reassured that there wasn't much chance that I would get it. As it turned out I was the only solicitor who had applied for the job. Al the other candidates were Legal Executives. It was offered to me. I took the job. It was a promotion and the salary was much better than I had been getting.
I was living in a small top floor flat on Marlborough Road towards the top end of the Holloway Road. The area was called Upper Holloway but it was practically Archway. I had bought the flat about two years before jointly with my then girlfriend Emma. We had separated amicably. She had told me that she wanted to end it and I had not put up much of a fight. I had the feeling that something was wrong after she had been on a holiday visiting a girlfriend who worked in Val d'Isere. I never asked but I think that something happened while she was away that had made her examine our relationship. Maybe she'd had an affair or something.
She was a cook at the Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus in the West End. The theatre was then home to the hit musical Les Miserables. I was a local authority solicitor living in North London and working right across the City and practically out the other side in Sutton. It was a very long journey to work and sometimes an even longer one coming back. I suppose I was continually knackered. It was not the work so much as the commuting that took it out of me.
Our relationship had been a whirlwind romance of sorts. At least it had developed quickly. Emma was living with a friend in Clapham. I had been sharing a basement flat with my mate Steve which was technically in Highgate. It didn't feel much like Highgate, it wasn't in the village, it was on the Archway Road just accross from the Winchester Hall Tavern. Steve and I were still living like students in this flat which was a bit of a dump. It was so much of a dump in fact that we had gone on a rent strike after the building was bought from the Wheel Propoerty Company (a.k.a Mrs Wheeler) by a so-called Housing Association which did nothing to improve it. I still have a file of copy correspondence with Mr Julian Henscher. In the end the Housing Association agreed to let us off the rent if we left. I had saved up the rent I owed and thus had a lump sum to pay my share of a deposit for the flat that Emma and I decided to buy. I somehow doubt Steve had saved the rent that he hadn't paid. He went to Putney to stay with Debbie with whom he has been ever since, a very wise move.
