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avant Introduction It could justifiably be stated that we are currently living in a Western World whose moral world view owes much to values which until recently were associated with progressives oper...

First (Versified) Fragments Wicked Cahoots When he made his first personal appearance in the dirty alley on someone else's rusty bike, screaming along in a cloud of dust it rendered us all speec...

Ch.1. Sometime in the early 21st Century, anyone carefully contemplating the life of David Cristiansen would be forgiven for thinking of him as a loser. In fact not just a loser but a king-size loser...

Soon after returning from Spain in the summer of 1972, David Cristiansen was launched by his dad on what could be called an intensive programme of self-improvement. Through home study and with the he...

Ch. 3. The summer of '74 was one of the most blissful David Cristiansen ever spent at the beautiful little former fishing village of Santiago de la Ribera; and there were a good few of those. Man...

Ch. 4 David Cristiansen's final trip with the Thames Division of the Royal Naval Reserve came towards the end of the summer of 1977. And while his best oppo Lofty O'Shea wasn't on board...

ChapterFive A few weeks after Sleeping Beauty had culminated at the Buxton Opera House over Christmas 1979, David Cristiansen appeared in A Midsummer Night's Dream atboth the Bristol and London O...

Luke the Drifter and the Birth of Country It's widely accepted that singer and songwriter Hank Williams is Country Music's single most revered figure, and among the most influential popular...

Most students of world literature would surely agree that Goethe's famous epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, has exerted a quite incalculable influence on the evolution of the Weste...

The great Anglo-American Modernist poet T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) had strong links to the East Coast, and specifically New England, that most spiritually English of American regions, a distinction it sh...

Prunella Ransome was a fey and hauntingly vulnerable redheaded beauty who only made a handful of feature films, and never achieved the major stardom she so richly deserved. However, she was absolutel...

Muss It was in the glittering Paris of the 1830s that a certain French Romantic poet, playwright and novelist of noble birth by the name of Alfred Charles de Musset-Pathay came close to having the ex...

David Cristiansen returned to Leftfield College in the autumn of 1984, and it may be that it was soon after this that his recent past started haunting him for the first time. After all, was it not on...

1993?1993? David Cristiansen struggled on with the Post Graduate Certificate in Education throughout the earliest days of 1993. And he did so while rehearsing for a couple of tiny parts for a play bas...

AnnWatt The Scots-Irish Sept of Watt My father Patrick Clancy Halling joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London. And during this time, he served in the...

The Twilight of an Actor Photos by Jane Whitton A few months after appearing in Jim Cartwright's bitter-sweet two-hander Two, I performed in one final play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the char...

The Spawn of the Swinging Sixties Chapter One Born on the Goldhawk Road Introduction: Born on the Goldhawk Road and Wicked Cahoots could be said to set the scene for the entire work, a kind of experi...

Chapter Two Snapshots from a Child's West London Introduction Snapshots, the second and last of two pieces based on my childhood in the West London of the 1960s, is not so much a story, as fragm...

The Spawn of the Swinging Sixties Chapter Three Those Gambolling Baby Boomers Introduction * Those Gambolling Baby Boomers, the first of a series of seventies-themed pieces, tells how I came to be con...

The Spawn of the Swinging Sixties Chapter Four An Innocent on the Reeperbahn Introduction An Innocent on the Reeperbahn, the second piece in a series of seventies-themed writings takes place in 1973 a...

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