Hi G, good to hear from you after all these years. It’s got me thinking back to what it was like before I came to Wales.
You know sometimes I think it was all a big mistake. I had a place for me in Kings College all I had to do was get through a third year sixth and improve my A levels then I could have stayed in London. [it was 1967 and ] our mutual friend was getting me in to all manner of celeb parties/events/ e.g. a press reception where I was standing inches away from George Martin and Roger Daltrey, I was driving John Peel back and forth across London in my dad’s car, I even sat cross legged on the grass in Hyde Park rubbing shoulders with Allen Ginsberg chanting Hare Krishna and for some reason I threw all that away to come to Cardiff to do a BSc and then I was dodging the teddy boys and the trams, (and the rain) for why??? I guess it was an attempt to be sensible and career oriented and also going with the flow you know you get a letter from Cardiff saying please come we have spare places. And anyway 3rd year sixth was weird and embarrassing – I did a few weeks of it before the Cardiff letter came and really I didn’t think twice about accepting.
[memo to me - one day I’ll make a big list of all the London pre-Cardiff stuff]
The writing didn’t suffer. I’d done my school mag ‘Trash’ and it’d been a success (5 years later when Warhol called one of his films Trash I was so chuffed, it’s things like that that affirm you’re on a good wavelength) and when I got to Cardiff I soon landed up working for the college newspaper/mag ‘Impact’. And then later I was arts editor and then full editor. This was great. There was a gang of us involved and we used to use our press cards to get into events and go and interview celebs who’d visit Cardiff and the Colton Hall in Bristol in fact once I managed to talk my way back stage in the Festival Hall
and go and interview Frank Zappa – it was the night that the LSE was being occupied and after the gig since we’d missed the last tube out to D’s place where we had a bed lined up we decided to go to the LSE and see if we could find a corner to sleep – umm – a couple hours stretched between 2 chairs.
So, anyway, being editor of Impact meant I could put my own poems in and C’s as well but a lot of the time I had to write all manner of weird stuff – like a careers guide! We had all this advertising booked to appear in the paper to accompany an article on careers but what the h did I know about it? …I told all the readers not to bother with a career.
C and I did a poetry performance at No Walls (Marchioness of Bute). He read out 2 of his and one of mine and I sat cross-legged on the floor and played a guitar accompaniment –
I’m getting spaced out now with all the memories flooding back so I’ll edit off now. After college I tried writing a couple sci fi short stories and sent them to Michael Moorcock’s New World Science Fiction but
they turned them both down [tho not un-encouragingly] and I guess the toll of the years and the effort to earn a crust just lead me away
from writing for a while – but that’s another story…actually I’ve remembered there was stuff going on regards how your creative
efforts can be like a anchor dragging you down and other gubbins
about distinguishing creativity from ego-aggrandisement – hum – need to think this through – some other time…
I’m wondering if that is lava-torial humour!
