I’d meet a friend, Ranger in Camden. We’d drink in the Bucks Head, the Elephant or the Caernarvon Castle and watch Shakey Vic’s blues band play through to midnight. I was fresh in the city, kept my wordlies of two or three hundred in notes stuffed down the front of my jeans. When it was my turn at the rounds I had to slink to a corner and fumble for the cash. Ranger worked in bank systems and the suit he wore passed through stages of advancing grubbiness and ruin as the evening wore on. We were both tottering and shouting in the blues hall fug, before the traipse back on the Hell Worm to Tooting or Stockwell or whichever quadrant of the town owned our £50 a week rooms. I had shows to play at the weekends, but the weekdays were my own. Free to wander the endless corners and intrigues of the capital.
