The timing was perfect. I was always arguing with Debi about ‘her fucking boyfriend!!’ and she moaned similarly with me. Which seems fair but only from my side of things. Susan was bemoaning lack of quality time, though she didn’t say if that was ‘good quality’ or ‘shit quality’, just the time, and Ivani kept asking why I hadn’t seen her yet? And my parents were coming over, for a holiday but also to actually see their ‘baby’ who’d been absent for about 6 months from their lives. So I decided, in a benchmark decision that essentially painted the rest of my life, to run away. With my parents, to Palm Springs, picking up Ivani on the way, as Redlands University is quite near. In that American way that it ‘should’ be really near but is in fact 18 hours of hard driving away. And a fab weekend it was too, as Palm Springs is always fab.

And it would seem that this semi-pornographic Utopian dream that I was engaged in was all there was to life in California for me in 1982. Well it wasn’t. There was drink and drugs and partying too. Oh, and work. Just a little to break up the… monotony? And to pay for the lifestyle.

Spurs had won the FA Cup, again, and although I watched the first and really boring, drawn match, it was about 6 in the morning so I wasn’t singing as loudly as I had been when at Wembley the previous year. And Britain went to war with Argentina, well, Maggie did, and I was kind’a only peripherally aware of it. In America the news about Iowa corn, Florida oranges, Chicago rapists, will always take precedence over anything ‘outside’. And true, I wasn’t such a great newshound as I am now so the whole Falklands thing was kind’a outside my immediate sphere. I walked into a record store in Encino one day, just to cruise round, wearing a pair of jeans (I know you’re keen to visualise) and my Elvis Costello t-shirt, ‘a tour to Trust’, which I’d bought at the Hammersmith Odeon concert when the Trust album was released. And I walked into… Elvis Costello. I looked at his face, I looked down at the same thing on my t-shirt, back to him, he smiled, I smiled, a million words were silently exchanged, most of them from me saying ‘I’ll ALWAYS love you!!!’ and we passed. Ships in the night. And to celebrate I bought Combat Rock by the Clash. To this day I don’t think there’s ever been a more totally, every-single-fucking-track, brilliant album ever made.

And then as summer gave way to… errrr… more summer, its the only season you get in southern California, things started to wind down. Ivani went back to Brazil, Debi moved out to Santa Monica but we were still some kind’a weird undefined item that seemed so easy over there at that time, as was happening with Susan too. And then Steve and Joey, the New York ‘hit-men’ were called back to their home City by work. So as we wondered how the death rate in the Big Apple was about to turn northwards, they invited us, on the eve of their departure, to a big ‘reveal’. To know the truth. To unlock the always-locked extra bedroom!! Holy shit. Would it be safe??

Happy Sunday

A xxxx