Benefit Street, Brighton.

  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...