What To-Do
Hello And Goodbye is intended to be a sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, sometimes saddening account of my first 35 years. It is always intended to be entertaining.
It’s historic too, as I observe Britain’s radical changes from the 1950s to the 1980s – from the days of post-war rationing to the glorious emergence of The Beatles to the strike-ridden days of 1978 and early years of Thatcher’s government.
Early chapters focus on my early childhood in EOKA-affected Cyprus in the 1950s and then Malaya for two years. I realise what a privileged childhood I led as the British Empire declined.
After university at UCL I taught at Holland Park in West London, then the most controversial comprehensive school in the country – before spending five years working on papers in Central and West London during IRA-bombing times. They included The Paddington Mercury.
Numerous encounters with figures more known than me feature in this memoir of my journey: including John Lennon, the group Genesis, newspaper editor Harold Evans, Sex Pistol Glen Matlock – as well as politicians Ken Livingstone and Rhodes Boyson.
