Benefit Street, Brighton.

  Apart from a rather cryptic post on my Twitter a/c that I had finally found a shrink, I've been in retreat for a couple of months. But this time it's not just because of the usual bi-polar incident. It's because I can't write. I can't read either. Ergo I'm not able to research. I'm unable to do anything creative. It's impossible to leave the house before the early afternoon. Time became fluid & has now slipped out the door; and I can't do anything creative to occupy my mind. In other words, I've lost the plot on how to, well, live my life. Now, managing bi-polar since I was a child, I've learnt that every so often there comes a point I'm unable to live a normal life & need a bit of help: this is the point at which one is admitted to hospital.  That point arrived about 6 years ago. And since then my meds have not been reviewed or altered; I've not had access to a shrink, and was only able to have 6 counselling sessions. I lea...

  When I was 16 I was living a double life. During term-time I was a convent Boarder in a rather posh school in Australia. I was 'too young' for most things; I wore my hair in two skinny plaits; clumped about in sensible school-shoes; and and was condescended to by everyone in the world who was over 17. But during the long Summer Holidays and the shorter ones in between, I flew home to my tropical island in the sun and lived my real life. In this world I rarely wore shoes; my hair - which had never in my life been cut - flowed freely down my back and over my bum and I wore a frangipani or hibiscus behind one ear. In this world I had been driving for the past two years; smoked cigarettes socially, was rather knowledgeable about wines and whiskey, and was treated no differently to anyone else. It was in this world that my father, asked to do a spot in the annual Xmas Concert down at the Army barracks, airily informed all and sundry that he would be accompanied by his Glamorous As...

  When my father was 16 he ran away and joined the circus. Yep - wanted to lead with that line to get this over and done with: - it isn't just a cliche, or a tired plot line. Some people really have , in real life, and from time to time, done it - and my father, George Simcox was one of them. Even people who are aware that this can be a fact rather than a fiction, looking at George would doubt it.   He was so much the stereotypical RAF Officer the idea was ludicrous. His hands were always impeccably manicured, his blue-black hair Brylcreamed into submission but for a stray, somewhat romantic, recalcitrant lock. Like Hugh Grant's.  In his youth he looked a bit like David Niven in all those WW2 movies (" a mean little moustache" my mother always said about that incarnation.) In his middle years, when he and Jimmy Edwards were fighting The Battle of The 'Tache, (which developed into The HandleBar Club still going strong here in Brighton I discovered to my joy. ) he...

I was 26 when I wrote my first autobiography. I didn't market it as an autobiography, of course. Who's going to believe that by the age of 26 anyone would have enough material to fill a book?  The m/s kept coming back unread  because novice authors are not considered skilled enough to write in the first person - so said all the agents in South Africa at the time. On opening up the 5th refusal citing this as the reason, I kinda lost it, strode to my computer and wrote back that I didn't give a damn what some people could or could not do - only in what I could do. And I bloody well COULD write in the first person.  Thus began a wonderful relationship with Frances Bond who became my agent, and remained so until her untimely death.  But, we didn't see eye to eye on her perception of two of the characters - Phil and George.  She kept telling me to tone them down, and insisted that they were OTT as characters and the kinds of things that happened to them were so biza...

   Yes, I do mean Alice as in Alice in Wonderland. She  who, 150 years later, was to inspire plot-lines for Soaps and B-Grades with the (now) evergreen It Was All a Dream- ending for years to come. And the reason I am referring to Alice is because, until those hot days we had recently, I never had completely understood how, on a hot summer's day, anyone could really fall asleep under a tree? Not that I ever breathed this puzzlement to a soul: nothing I had ever read, seen or heard over an increasingly longer period of time, seemed to indicate there was a flaw in this reasoning. Everyone else obviously understood.  As this has undoubtedly been the status quo for around three quarters of a rather peripatetic life, one sometimes one has to get a grip on asking too many questions. The line people draw between eagerly intelligent fact gathering, and total imbecility, is shorter than you may realise. But now, finally, like a bucket of iced-water over the head, I discove...

The day I learned that Billy Connolly shared my utter contempt, my revulsion, my deepest loathing for the colour beige, I think I fell a little bit in love with him. Because to me, beige is the colour of all white underwear after a few turns in the washing-machine. It's the colour snowy white pillow cases turn, so your bold black & white colour scheme exists only in your imagination after a couple of months. Beige is also the colour of the underneaths of things: the underneath of your most dashingly upholstered sofa is beige. As are the underneaths of my own arms in winter. Beige too, is renowned for being the colour of stodge: suet dumplings, porridge, sliced bread labelled 'wholewheat', and custard that you make from cornflour because you've run out of Birds gaily familiar yellow powder. It's also the colour of tie-dyed 'white-bits' when you use Household Bleach to strip colour. Or when it splashes on your clothes - so that instead of looking interesti...

I've started to write this particular blog four (4!) times already. Each time I did so the very clear plan in my head for what I intended to say was clear.  But somewhere in the pathway from mind to fingers something went seriously awry.  With vague astonishment I discovered I had found it necessary to give a two page amusing account of walking in to my first room full of students in a Chinese University in Draft No. 1.  Draft No. 2 became a bit of a re-cap of the state of my mental health which began at the age of 12.  I'd only got to about the year 2000 after 1,500 words. I was sure I'd got it pegged by the time I began the 3rd draft and cunningly stopped after the first two sentences to see that my fingers were getting the message and doing as bidden. Well, at least this time they'd started off obediently - they were indeed typing about Twitter, and Followers, and  Positivity. It was only after the need to pee had desperately stifled all thought ...

I've often read how people shape their image on social media in order to appeal to a certain demographic, or a particular social strata, or to construct a desired persona for one's peers. And I've always thought - well no-one could accuse me of that.  I blab out the sorts of things which other people find best not talked about, and I write when the Black dogs on my shoulder and when I'm going to take over the world, and show little embarrassment for either. Yet, I have never written as myself in my life. I don't mean that I've hidden things. It's just that one is always constrained:by editors, by "policy", by the body which pays out, by the institution to which one belongs. Because then, overshadowing all, come the kids. At first you worry about the other mums'n'dads - will they still let their kids come over on play dates if they ever read about me bonking on the Prime Minister's desk? Then it's "Will the kids be sc...