Selcuk & Ephesus

The first thing I had to do on arrival was find a place to stay. I picked a place recommended by the Lonely Planet Guide called the Australian Pension. The Aegean coastal resorts have strong connections with Australia and New Zealand because of Gallipoli. Selcuk had loads of Pansiyons (Pensions - Guesthouses) and other establishments with antipodean names. There was even a Bob Hawke Bar. My room cost 45,000TL but I can't remember very much else about the place at all except that it was good and clean and reasonably priced. It had a kind of central courtyard and all day long Morning Glory blossoms dropped from above. I remember that I got talking to two South African girls staying there called Gayl and Lola. Gayl was from Port Elizabeth and we had an interesting chat about the fact that she had an Afrikaaner boyfriend/fiancé but since she was an English speaking South African and could not speak Afrikaans his parents did not approve of her at all. There seemed to be a degree of Apartheid even between the white South Africans. Nelson Mandela had been out of prison just under seven months at this point in time.

I wasted no time and, having dumped the rucksack, I was off to see the ruins of Ephesus. Pretty impressive ruins they are too. At this stage this Blog may start to look like a photo album. That's half the point.



The Library of Celsus pictured above was, it says in a book written by the Director of the Ephesus Museum that I bought after my visit, built by Tiberius Julius Aquila as a mausoleum for his father Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus the proconsul (governor) of the Asian province of the Roman Empire, the capital of which was Ephesus, who died aged 70 in 114 AD. It took 3 years to build by which time the governor's son had also died having bequeathed 25,000 dinars to make sure 12,000 scrolls were acquired. The scrolls were kept in rows of niches on the side walls. The scrolls aren't there now. The book doesn't say what happened to them. I wonder whether they were gradually all borrowed and never returned (but of course it wasn't that kind of library). More probably they were destroyed in 262 when the Goths set fire to the interior. The book says the interior of the Library was burnt completely during the Gothic attacks in 262. It wasn't vandalism because the Vandals didn't really get going untill about 250 years later and I don't think they got as far as what is now Turkey. Had they done they would have found that Ephesus had already been vandalised.



The picture above shows the view to the Library of Celsus as you look down the Curetes Street. The Curetes were a class of priests who founded a collegium that was considered to be the largest cult in Ephesus. Their aim was to recreate the birth of Artemis Ephesia in Ortygia, near Ephesus. In mythology Curetes were semi deities. "According to mythology," writes Sellahattin Erdemgil in the book Ephesus Ruins and Museum (the book I mentioned), "while Leto, impregnated by Zeus, was giving birth to the twins, Artemis and Apollo, Curetes made a lot of noise with their weapons so that Zeus' wife Hera who was jealous of Leto, would be confused and not see the birth of the twins." As aims for groups go, recreating the scene described would have been a pretty tall order and you have got to wonder why they wanted to do it. Suppose they had succeeded, what then?



The Temple of Hadrian was dedicated to Emperor Hadrian by P. Quintilius around the year 138. The centre of the arch is adorned with the bust of Tyche, the goddess of the city and on the semi-circular frontal over the door, the figure of a maiden resembling Medusa is depicted among flowers and acanthus leaves. I know this now because I'm reading it in the book. At the time I couldn't honestly say that I knew anything other than it was worth taking a picture of as I walked down what I was blissfully unaware was Curetes Street.

I really enjoyed wandering aound the ruins. There were a lot of other tourists but it didn't spoil the experience. The weather was great. I think this was the first highlight of my journey. I strolled down the Marble Road to the the Theatre.



The view from the top down the Harbour Road was terrific. This was (and is) the best Theatre of its kind I have visited. The Harbour Road pictured below explains why Ephesus went into decline. Around the year 100 the population was around half a million and it was the largest city in Roman Asia. Gradually the harbour silted up and the sea got further and further away and the city became of increasingly less commercial importance. It is now 5 kilometres from the end of the Harbour Road to the coastline. Mind you, being sacked by Goths; reduced to rubble by earthquakes at least twice; and being sacked again by Arabs on three occasions would make you wonder if it was worth hanging about. The city was actually abandoned in the 15th Century.

Another Day and Two More Seas

I really wanted to get moving. Having been to Istanbul twice before I didn't want to hang around there too long. I didn't meet anyone at all while I was there which made the place a little less interesting. Furthermore there was very little time to waste if I was going to fit in everything I planned to see in Turkey. As it happens the next day it was raining so I went down to the docks and bought a ticket for a ferry to Izmir. Departure was 14.00.


Now this was an experience I can recommend. The ferry was very comfortable indeed. What's more, I immediately met somebody I knew. I bumped into a girl called Louise with whom I had been to 6th Form College. As a matter of fact I'm sure that at one time she had been my mate Brendan's girlfriend. A respectable time after they had finished with eachother I recall that she and I had an encounter in a bedroom in Dave "Bunny" Warren's house. Many years later while I was waiting for my Law Society finals results I recall we had a brief dalliance too. I remember her letting me get her completely naked only to find there wasn't much further we could go at that particular time. So it was a little strange to bump into her and her new husband, Peter, on this ferry.

I also got into conversation, or tried to get into conversation with a man called Baghban Bashi. I had noticed him sitting with his children behind me. What caught my attention was that he had discovered the flash unit for his camera was not working. I watched him unfold a hankerchief and then painstakingly take apart the flash unit laying each tiny component on the handkerchief. He then carefully put it all back together again after repairing whatever it was that had broken and it worked again. This impressed me at the time and has remained with me. There is no way I could even have contemplated such a task then nor now. Things like flash units when they stop working are not considered worth repairing. Unless you knew what you were doing it would be pointless to try and the cost of having anyone else do it for you would far outweigh the cost of simply buying a new one. So it sort of amazed me that he had the patience and skill to take the thing apart and then reassemble it in the way he did.

I managed to get to speak with Baghban at the ferry's bar. I discovered he was from Tehran, Iran. He told me was travelling back to Iran overland from Greece where his brother was studying. He said he was driving a white Land Rover which he had collected from his brother. He had his wife and children with him. They had their own cay (tea), almonds and pistachio nuts taken from Iran to Greece and back. He was fascinated by the SW radio Robin and Donna had given me and offered me $150 for it. He had a couple of Efes Pilsens and opened up a bit. I discovered he had been an F14 Fighter pilot during the Iran/Iraq war. He didn't say much but was quite gloomy about life under the Mullahs in Iran. He was a good guy, you could tell.

The Ferry was an overnight sailing from Istanbul along the Golden Horn into the sea of Marmara and into the Aegean Sea. One of the bulkier items that I'd packed was a sleeping bag. It was a very thin one. I think it was called a moon bag. The selling point, apart from it's small size when rolled up, was the fact it had some kind of metallic thermal lining that was supposed to have been a bi-product of the Space Program. Now that I think about it I recall that I also had a sleeping bag liner (I was really well equipped). So at some stage I was able to stretch out between the seats and get a good night's sleep. The ferry docked in Izmir the following morning shortly before 9.00.

My destination was Selcuk being the closest place to Efes. I was not going there for the Pilsen but to visit the ruins of Ephesus.

Istanbul, Turkey

The flight must have been fairly uneventful after the plane eventually took off for the second time. I can't recall any part of it. Neither can I remember landing or the process of coming though passport control etc. I took a taxi, or taksi, to a hotel mentioned in the Lonely Planet Guide. If I still had the book I'd be able to tell you exactly where it was. It was the Otel Rio and my room cost 50,000 lire per night.

What I do remember is that the room I had was on an upper floor. The building had a kind of light well. I'm not sure how to describe this properly but effectively the building was hollow so that light came from the roof down to the ground floor. Each room had an internal window onto this shaft which probably improved the ventillation too. It meant that you could hear what was going on in the rooms on other floors and a couple of floors below me there was quite a lot of noise coming from one particular room. I couldn't say for sure but my guess was that the occupants were Russian.

I only say this because of the way the evening developed. At first there was just talking, quite loud talking but obviously friendly conversation. It was clear that the men and I think there were only two of them, were drinking. There was a series of toasts. Glasses clinked and I imagined a bottle of vodka being lifted to refill the glasses continuously. The talking became more animated and the men seemed to be telling each other funny stories, at least there was a fair bit of laughter. The drinking continued and the men became more agitated in their conversation. One of them must have said something that upset the other and they began to shout loudly at eachother. There was the sound of furniture falling over and some sort of a scuffle. After that the two of them were crying together and there was more clinking of glasses until I suppose they both passed out.

I woke early. It was a Monday morning and I was in Instanbul. I had been to the city before and limited my sightseeing. It was right at the beginning of the trip and I felt a little self conscious on my own. I was immediately aware that I was in the Orient. Istanbul is an international melting pot. Somehow Africans in flowing robes didn't look out of place like they sometimes do on Oxford Street. They seemed to have something in common with the locals. I don't know but there was a possibility that even in Istanbul they might have been able to converse with business associates in some version of arabic that all of them understood. It wasn't hard to imagine that they were traders who had come by various routes whether by sea from Egypt or overland through the Middle East laden with goods and treasures from all over the African Continent to trade in this gateway to Europe.




In fact this was still Europe. The Bosphorus is the dividing line between the continents of Europe and Asia. On my second day I decided to take a trip up the Bosphorus and the picture below shows "Rumelihisarı" a fortress on the European side of the straits originally built by Sultan Mehmet II in 4 months and 16 days between April 15 1452 and 31 August 1452. It makes you wonder about the speed of modern construction projects. Just up the road from here they've been building a retail development which is to house a Debenhams Department Store amongst other things. I'm sure it has already taken three times longer than that and it is nowhere near finished.



Below is a picture of a "yalı". These were residences built in 18th and 19th centuries where well to do families would resort for some part of the year. I've no idea how old the one in this picture might be. A time-share it ain't.



I seem to remember writing a postcard to my parents while I was on this ferry ride up the Bosphorus. I wish I knew where I went, I wasn't entirely sure where I was going. I got off at one point but couldn't say for sure where. It was peaceful.

Buy One Take-Off, Get One Free!

I had never been to London Heathrow before. What did strike me was how little space there was between the entrance doors and the check-in desks. Perhaps it is my memory playing tricks on me but it seemed like it was about 5 yards. It was very cramped. There was hardly room to move. There were hundreds of people with mountains of luggage shuffling about and there seemed to be pillars to negotiate too. It wasn't the sort of place anyone would want to hang around and so I said my goodbyes to Brian and Emma and I checked in.

I suppose my slightly reddened eyes could have been mistaken for those of someone who had just said a tearful goodbye. My slightly hazy fazed demeanour was probably not unusual either. The fact was that I was more than slightly stoned and didn't really have a clue what was going on but no-one noticed. I checked my rucksack into the hold and took that step through passport control into the departure lounge. I didn't buy any duty free. I had enough to carry and fags were going to be cheap in Turkey anyway.

Things are very different today. All this was before the era of the mobile phone. Today I would have probably spent the last 45 minutes before boarding the plane making last minute calls to all and sundry on a tiny handset that would have replaced my Walkman and my camera. I'm sure I did make a couple of calls from a public telephone to call home and say a final goodbye but otherwise I just must have wandered around aimlessly until it was time to go to the Gate.

Of course mobile phones did exist. Who can forget the phone Michael Douglas had as Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street"?That film came out just 3 years before I set off. I don't think I could have carried anything else with me and certainly not a phone that weighed nearly 2lbs!

Everything was bigger back then. In a way the world was bigger back then too. Once I got on the plane I was unreachable except by post. I had left a list of poste restante addresses with friends and relatives so that I could get some news while I was away but that was it. The cost of international telephone calls would have been out of the question on a budget. It is not the same now with internet cafés and VOIP. I'm not sure the trip I was about to take would have been quite such an adventure today.

So I boarded the plane and it took off. About 10 minutes into the flight it became clear that the plane was flying in circles. It wasn't actually going anywhere. Eventually there was an announcement by the Captain that we were returning to Heathrow because there was a technical problem. It crossed my mind that it would be something of a tragedy for my trip to end in a plane crash at Heathrow without having been anywhere at all. It obviously didn't happen or I wouldn't be tapping this out today. After flying in a holding pattern for another 10 minutes or so the pilot got a chance to land again and about 30 minutes later the rush you get as the plane hurtles down the runway and takes off was repeated and this time we didn't turn back.

Time To Go

So that was it. The months of planning were at last at an end. Everything was in place. There was nothing else that I could do. I'd had all the jabs, bought all the essential and a lot of unecessary kit and was fully packed; and all with a whole day to spare. I have absolutely no idea what I did on the Saturday before I set off. If anyone can remember I'd be glad to know.

Sunday 9 September 1990 dawned and I was on my way. The first leg was from Brian's in Muswell Hill to Heathrow. Emma came too. She was due to set off on her own trip some time later. There was a suggestion that we might meet up when I got to Australia. Brian drove to the Airport. I was really nervous. This was a step into the unknown. It wasn't excitement I felt. It was fear. What was I doing? Okay, so I had done some sort of independent travelling before. Both times it was to to Turkey and on both occasions it was with Emma. This time I was alone. My heart was certainly beating much faster than usual by the time Brian parked the car. In those pre 9/11 days you didn't have to check in until 2 hours before take-off. We were a bit early. It wasn't my idea but it might not have been entirely sensible to have decided to have a quick smoke in the car before going down to the check-in area. When we did get down there the trepidation was verging on paranoia. How stupid would I look if I wasn't allowed through check-in because I was obviously under the influence of something? How would I explain that? I needn't have worried. I looked pretty stupid anyway. Just look at the picture! The problem with rather too much time to plan something is that every last detail is covered. Look at all the stuff I had with me! I did need everything. At least, I thought I did. When I think about it I did use practically all of the kit I took with me and if I had been doing the same thing now I'm not sure what I would have left behind.

Time Is Running Out

The next day I picked up my tickets from GoldAir. Now it was real. There was no turning back from this point. I ordered some Turkish cash. I had to be at London Heathrow Terminal 2 at 11.00am on 9 September.

Despite the fact that I had arranged to let the flat there was the little matter of advising the Nationwide that I was proposing to part with possession of it. I needed the building society's consent. I had to chase them up about that. I went to Dick and Chris' for dinner up in Highgate. Over the next few days I packed up the flat and my notes say I moved out on 1 September. I went home to Gresford where my brother Hugo helped me do a spreadsheet to present to the bank to ensure that they stayed onside whatever happened. These were turbulent times in terms of interest rates. I needed to set up arrangements to be able to collect cash and travellers cheques at various places on my route and felt I had to demonstrate that I had worked out what the effect on my budget might be if interest rates were to go up. They were cool about everything and the various transfers were put in place. I said goodbye to all and sundry at home and set off back to London on 5 September.

I stayed that night at Brian's. Emma came over too. There's a note in the filofax that indicates that Emma and I must have been on pretty good terms notwithstanding that we were no longer an item.

Brian had suffered a break in to his flat. Someone had basically smashed their way through the plasterboard next to his flat door. What was strange was that nothing had been stolen. The mystery of how the guy in the ground floor flat had acquired the music recording and production equipment was revealed. It seems that shortly after this guy had moved into his flat he had replaced one of the windows. In doing so the window sill had been removed and beneath it was a plastic tube. In the tube was a vast quantity of white powder! Clearly the person who had "left" it there had come back looking for it.

The reason that we stayed with Brian was because the next day we were going to Lowestoft where Brian wanted to shoot a scene for another film. Emma was to be in it. There was a maze in this place Brian knew and he wanted to shoot a scene in it. The effect was to be a continuous shot ending with Emma being in the centre of the maze. I think he intended to shoot the scene backwards (from the end to the beginning) and then play it the other way round and quicker when the film was projected. The effect was to have the viewer whizzed though to the centre of the maze. It was the kind of shot that you need three hands to do (unless you had one of those tracks they mount cameras on in film sets, which we didn't have). So my role was as the "focus puller". We did it but I have no idea whether Brian's film project came to anything. Emma and Brian are pictured here on location in Lowestoft (how exciting does that sound?!). In Brian's hands is his prized Eumig.

I completed the Shorthold Tenancy agreement with Geraint and Tina on Friday 7 September and had my last Hepatitis jab and got the Doctor to sign my Anti AIDS and Hepatitis kit so that I could dispel any concerns about having needles in my rucksack whenever I crossed a border and went through customs.

27 August 1990

There's nothing in my filofax except a note to remind me that it was my birthday. It's not as if it was any old birthday. It was my 30th. I must have done something. If I did I can't remember what it was. I did get a great practical present from Robin and Donna - a Philips portable short wave radio so that I could keep abreast of world events while I was away

More Preparations

Puffing away in my little flat punching lists into my Amstrad, I continued fine tuning the plans for my trip. At the same time I closed the place down. I drafted a Shorthold tenancy agreement and met up with Geraint and Tina meeting them on the Friday following the Measures Gig at Leicester Square tube station. During the week I arranged for the 11 years worth of Private Eye magazines I had somehow accumulated to be bound into books at a book binding place off the Holloway Road called Collis Bird & Withey. While down there I found a sort of stationery wholesale place and got myself some really nice photo-albums to put the pictures from the trip in. How's that for forward planning? I've still got the albums. They are pristine. I never got round to putting any pictures in them. It's not as easy as posting stuff on this blog.

The weekend came around again pretty quickly and it appears that we all went up to Hampstead for the last night of the open air classical concerts at the Kenwood Bowl. I know there were fireworks. It says so in my filofax. I can't remember but I dare say they accompanied the finale to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. We used to go to these concerts every year and memories of them all run into each other. It wasn't the music you went for but the picnic beforehand, the booze and the smoking. The fireworks were always good too especially after the booze and smoking.

I do have one memory from a Kenwood concert that sticks out from many years before. I can recall standing in the queue for entry tickets with Steve, Debbie, Simon Hackett and Lynne. In those days we were all prodigious Benson & Hedges smokers. Please bear in mind that were out in the open air. The entrance to the concert area was about 200 yards from Kenwood House. When all is said and done we were standing in a line in the middle of a field. I lit up a Benson and a woman turned and said in a cross and snooty way "Do you mind?". It was only Claire Rayner! She was in front of me downwind.

I did mind, by the way. I wouldn't have minded so much if it had been anyone else but what were the chances of happening to be standing right behind Claire Rayner? She came over on TV as being very caring and understanding, do you remember? It seems lighting up a fag when she is immediately downwind reveals a different side to Claire. A side she kept hidden from her millions of viewers. An abrupt, terse not to say rude side that wasn't very nice. I didn't do it on purpose! It is not as if I lit up and thought "I know! I'll blow this smoke at Claire Rayner who happens to be standing in front of me in this queue" is it? It's lucky for her that it was me she had snapped at. I could have been someone else. someone slightly unhinged who could have taken grave offence at being asked whether he minded. Her supercilious sneer might've been on the other side of her face if I had decked her, eh?! What would she have made of that?

As it was, I just said I was sorry. Lucky call, Claire! How could you have known how I might have reacted? I suppose she had a point. It isn't much fun breathing in someone else's cigarette smoke. I recognise this now. Sorry, Claire.

And The Beat Goes On

The next week is also completely blank in my Filofax. Basically everyone else was working. It was a time to get used to being entirely self reliant and to do what I wanted. I made appointments for more vaccinations and arranged a prescription for Maloprim (pyrimethamine and dapsone) and Nivaquine (chloroquine sulphate) chemoprophylactic anti-malaria tablets. I didn't do much research into anti-malarial medicines. I think it was the Medical Centre on the Holloway Road that issued the prescription. Long after my return I discovered that I might have been very lucky that these tablets had been prescribed rather than something called Larium which had had drastic side effects on the mental health of some people taking it. So well done them and lucky me.

On Saturday 18 August 1990 came the gig to cap them all. The band that might have been the last to play the Purple Pussycat in Finchley, regulars at the Dublin Castle in Camden town, the incomparable:

The Measures a.k.a The Imperial Measures. They are (left to right) Simon Plent, Trevor Clarke and Brian McIlvenny. Trev and Brian have been mentioned before. To tell the truth I couldn't honestly say that I knew Simon. I only ever met him when we went to see the Measures. The three of them were a band way back in the late 70's long before I ever met Brian or Trev. At that time their band was called The Vamps. Brian's version of events is that just before they went to their respective colleges they got into a studio and cut a 7'' 3 track EP on red vinyl. They sent it to Mike Reid who had the breakfast show on Radio 1 and a few weeks later he made it his record of the week. The problem was that by the time he did that the band had effectively split up. The record had an instruction on it to ring a telephone number if you wanted to get hold of a copy and it seems Brian's mum's phone was ringing off the hook!

If they hadn't all just gone their separate ways who knows what might have been? I think Brian told me that they had 300 records pressed. Brian's mum obviously didn't sell them all because Brian gave me a copy. I've got it in my iTunes now. I must apologise here for stealing the artwork from the web page I found for both my iTunes coverflow and this posting. The url for the site is http://www.detour-records.co.uk/vamps.htm.

I'm a bit hazy about where the Measures gig was that day. I think it might have been in a rehearsal space in Hornsey somewhere. On this occasion the band was a foursome. They had recently recruited a keyboards player. I wasn't sure about this addition. I'm sure there was nothing wrong with the technique but I just thought the keyboards sounded a bit thin or "shrill". I like a "fatter" sound. I do remember that I had bought a crate of Efes Pilsen (Turkish lager) for general consumption and the band performed a tight set including some of their standards for an invited audience. I've got a tape of most of it - recorded on my then new Walkman and it is my intention to transfer it into my iTunes at some point. Simon was the lead vocalist with Trev and Brian supporting but there were a couple of numbers including "Sleeping In My Suit" and "I'm A Hog For You" where Trev took the lead vocals. I think they were my favourites.

After this special concert I think we went back to my flat and finished off the Efes Pilsen.

Muswell Hillbillies

The last few weeks before the off was, when I look back on it, jam packed with live music. On Sunday 12 August 1990 we all went to Alexandra Palace (Ally Pally) for the last night of the Town & Country Club's 5th Birthday celebrations. The advertised programme had an up and coming Irish band called The 4 of Us and Squeeze on the bill but the main attraction was the Kinks. We arrived in time to see The 4 of Us principally because Brian was very enthusiastic about them. To my mind they took themselves a little bit too seriously. I had bought a couple of their CD singles beforehand but having seen them was not as enthusiastic as Brian. Squeeze didn't make the show (they must have cancelled) but the Kinks did. Frankly they were a bit disappointing too. They were by this time a band that were still very big in the USA where they were effectively a heavy rock outfit. I've been told that rather than Ray Davies being the leading member of the band it was his brother Dave who was the main driving force. According to my mate Steve he was/is quite mad. In fact I am now lead to believe he is no longer with us. His musical influence tended towards metal. Ally Pally wan't the greatest venue either. At one point Ray Davies came to the mike and said "I suppose you want to hear the old stuff?" The crowd went wild to which he said "Well, if we were going to play that stuff we'd be in Vegas". They did however play a medley of their big hits which went down well enough. It would have been a much better gig if they had played more of their well known numbers. It was the climax of the Town & Country Club's 5th Birthday celebrations and it would have more fitting. Never mind.

Empty Space

It is a sign of my very poor journal keeping that the next 10 days have no entries in them at all. I can only suppose that I spent my time compiling lists of things I would need to take with me on the trip and getting ready to leave the flat. At some stage I know I walked to Stroud Green where I purchased my camera. Brian had spotted it second-hand in a shop there. It was a fully mechanical Pentax K1000. The classic student camera. No gizmos or features. I also got a zoom lens. I know I also went up and down Tottenham Court Road looking for a Walkman and chose a smashing Aiwa model with radio and recording function. Lastly, I bought a small travel alarm clock. I ordered a mosquito net, neat deet (kills mosquitos on contact) and an anti AIDS and Hepatitis kit from Medical Advisory Services for Travellers Abroad consisting of hypodermic syringes and such like so that if I needed an injection while I was away I could ensure that they used my clean needles. I never had to use this kit and when I think about it if the occasion had arisen there would be a good chance that I would have been unconscious and unable to insist on the use of my needles or just wouldn't have had them with me at the time. I also bought a whistle.

Exotic Animals, Tropical Diseases, Film and Pizza

Having walked past London Zoo the day before I decided that would I go there. I walked again. I could take my time. To tell the truth I soon remembered that I don't like Zoos very much. The animals always look out of place and some of them look downright miserable. The picture posted below (taken on a previous visit some years before) says it all. What is a Rhino doing in a concrete environment?


So after the Zoo I walked down Camden High Street to Mornington Crescent Tube Station where I took a left and hiked down to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, at least I seem to recall that it was in the direction of Kings Cross. Anyway I got the first of my pre-exposure vaccinations for Rabies there.

I have to admit that I am referring to very sparse notes in the remains of a Filofax I had at the time. I've still got the Filofax but I haven't ever been very good at writing down appointments or keeping a diary. The next note for 1st August 1990 says "Brian's Rushes. Pizza".

Brian is Brian J. McIlvenny. He was then and is now a photographer. He was, in order to support himself and his art, working in a studio in Notting Hill Gate (I think) where his job involved, among other things, duplicating slides for the advertising industry. As a result he did have the use of the studio facilities to pursue his own artistic enterprises from time to time. Brian was making a short film. I can't remember what these "rushes" were. This was his second film (not counting the footage he took at the Town & Country Club B52's concert some while before which he converted into a video with "Bushfire" as the soundtrack).

I had (in a very minor way) collaborated in Brian's first film, his entry in a competition to make an advertisement for Absolut Vodka. Brian's film was called "Absolut Fantasy". It was made during the spring and early summer, before he got his second-hand Eumig 8mm camera, and was a stop-motion animation made using slides. The only reason I was involved was because Brian had, as mentioned earlier, injured his shoulder earlier in the year in dry ski slope accident (causing him to have to pull out of a skiing holiday to Bulgaria) and needed help in lifting heavy items.

Brian's budget for Absolut Fantasy cannot have been more than about £200 and most of that was transferring his efforts onto film at the Kodak processing laboratory in Denham. Brian was up against entries made by staff at advertising agencies with access to every technical gadget available and whose entries might have cost £250,000 if they had had to be paid for. It is an absolute triumph (no pun intended) that Brian's film came 9th. I think Harold Woodruff did the soundtrack. He lived on the ground floor in Brian's building in Muswell Hill. Brian told me it was packed with top notch musical equipment and the guy made a living doing music for corporate videos and such like. At the time Brian had no idea how this guy had managed to acquire so much expensive electronic equipment but there it all was, very handily in the ground floor flat of his building! The competition climaxed with screenings of the top 20 entries. I was there. Time Out previewed the event as set out below (click on it to read it).


I can't remember what the reference to Pizza means. I can only imagine that once Brian and I had finished whatever it was that we had been doing we had a pizza. It was probably a deep dish pizza with ground beef, chilli and extra anchovies. They were always very tasty but hardly worth making a diary note about.

Tickets and Cricket

I arranged my tickets through a Bucket Shop called Goldair operating from 321-322 Linen Hall on Regent Street. My itinerary was to be Turkey (again) then India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Indonesia, Hongkong and China and back to London. All in the tickets cost £1,150. On top of that there was insurance to pay to cover the whole trip. I had to arrange the various visas that would be required. None were necessary for Turkey but I needed one for India and Nepal, Thailand and Australia.

There's only so much you can do in advance. I had sorted out the Indian visa by post in early July having got the Australian visa at the end of May and decided to get Nepali and Thai visas while on the road. Any others that might be needed could be dealt with as and when the need arose.

So having nothing to do I decided to go to watch England playing India at Lords. It was the 5th day of a Test Match. Tickets were reduced because the match was practically over. In their first innings England had made their highest ever Test score against India thanks in large part to Graham Gooch's highest ever score of 333. I had been listening to the match on the radio and it sounded interesting. Given the high scoring by both sides there was a chance that India might pull off an amazing win.

I didn't have a car anymore and it was a lovely day so I decided to walk to Lords. From the top end of the Holloway Road I walked down to the Camden Road, then all the way to Camden Town and from there round Regents Park to Lords. It took a little longer than I had thought it might. I also might have left a bit later than I had intended. The probability is that I had, having nothing important to do, started the day with an exotic cheroot. The walk may therefore have been a little loose limbed. I was listening to the TMS coverage on my headphones and arrived a short time after the match had started. It was about a 4 and a half mile walk and took about 1 hour and 20 minutes. I have to say I felt quite virtuous in having walked it.


I had never been to a cricket match before. I have never been to one since. I gained admittance but was surprised to be told that before I could take my seat in the stand I would have to wait until the end of the over as if it were a play or a classical music performance. When I was finally allowed to sit down I was very disappointed. I have to say that I don't understand what all the fuss is about. From where I was (and I don't think there was a vantage point much nearer given that all the action was in the middle of the pitch) I could see hardly anything.

It made me wonder why I had not been allowed to take my seat until the break between overs. I mean, if I could hardly make out what was happening in the middle, what could they see going on in the stands? It was like watching something through the wrong end of a telescope. I did wonder why people bothered. I had been to catch a glimpse of rising young star Sachin Tendulkar. I think I did see him but from where I was sitting he seemed to be about 6" tall. After watching for a couple of hours I wrote the idea off as a mistake. Honestly, you get a better view listening to the commentary on the radio!

I walked into the West End instead. I needed some new trainers which I found on Oxford Street.