Where the Halling Valley River Lies, Carl Halling [urban books to read txt] 📗

Mr Denmark 1979, a comic monstrosity created for him by Ariana. Among those appearing on the bill were comedienne, Jo Brand, in her then incarnation of The Sea Monster, comedy satirist, Rory Bremner, and Renaissance Man, Patrick Marber, initially a stand-up, but best known today as an award-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter.
The Denmark character went down so well at the benefit that he wrote an entire show around him based on the premise that winning a Scandinavian male beauty contest in 1979 had altered the balance of his mind.
Thence he’d became convinced he’d been at the forefront of pretty well every major cultural development since the dawn of Pop, only to be cravenly ripped off by Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Punks, Rappers and so on.
And in its modest way, it helped to fuel the thriving comedic school of self-delusion which could also be said to include Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge and Ricky Gervais’ David Brent.
Later in ’87, he started rehearsals for Ariana for a Catalonian play – to be directed by Ariana – apparently set in pre-revolutionary France, although Ariana updated it to the late 19th Century, with a setting reminiscent of Wilde’s "Dorian Gray" or Lorrain’s “Monsieur de Phocas”.
And it received some fair reviews…with David being singled out for modest praise in the London Times among other periodicals, but rather than capitalise on this modest success, he decided to start work instead as a teacher at the Tellegen School of English in London’s Oxford Street.
He did so at the behest of his closest friend, Huw Owen, the Swansea native who’d served as the model for Robert Fitzroy-Square in their Silverhill band, Z Cars, but who was now working as a Tellegen teacher. Besides which, he’d already undergone a week’s training with them and been offered a job.
And for David, being a Tellegen teacher was the perfect dream job…providing him with a social life on a plate, as well as enough money to finance the hours he spent each evening in the Champion public house in Wells Street.
There, some time after 7.30, once the final class had ended, student and teacher alike would meet to drink and talk and laugh and do as they wished until closing time; and he’d usually leave at about 10.30 to catch the last train home from Waterloo, although, sometimes he'd miss it and have to catch a later train. At other times, there'd be a party to go to, or the Telegen disco…which would take place at Jacqueline’s Night Club in nearby Soho.
Most of the teachers socialised with their own kind, while David preferred the company of the students, although this situation was to become modified by 1990, when his friends were being chosen from among both the teaching and student bodies. But at night, it would be almost impossible to extricate him from his circle of favourites from Italy, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Poland, France…fact which proved irksome to his good friends, Stan and Noddy, at a certain stage in his short-lived career at Tellegen.
For Stan, a Tellegen teacher and resting actor, and Noddy, a young student from the great city of Sao Paolo in Brazil, were trying to organise rehearsals for a band they were supposed to be getting together, but thanks to David’s dilatory attitude, this never happened despite some early promise, as Noddy was a gifted guitarist, and Stan a potentially good front man.
But David continued to discard precious opportunities as if it were so much stinking refuse…little suspecting that he was shoring up the kind of heartbreak that stems from unfulfilled promise, and which caused Jamie Tyrone to quote from Dante Gabriel Rossetti in “A Long Day’s Journey into Night”, while clearly describing himself:
“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell;”
As well as the perpetual party lifestyle, He spent his spare cash on clothes, cassettes, books, and of course, rent, that is, during those brief few months he spent as a tenant in Hanwell, West London at the house of a friend of his fathers’ from the London session world, Rich Evans.
Rich was a small, dark, bearded, always nattily dressed professional fiddler, whose life, lived close to the edge, but with the absolute minimum of effort, incarnated a kind of preternatural Celtic cool that while alarming was yet deeply charismatic.
He also spent several hundreds of pounds being initiated into the art of self-hypnosis by a Harley Street doctor who specialised in hypnotherapy and nutritional medicine…this, in the hope of finding a solution not just to his alcoholism, but the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to which he was increasingly prey in the late 1980s.
Yet, despite the drinking and the OCD, his primary emotional condition was one of utter exaltation and enraptured joy of life, which was what made it so hard for him to accept that he wouldn’t be returning to Tellegen’s in 1990. But it was his own fault, because he’d left without warning early in the year, and then later decided he wanted to return, despite having earlier refused an offer to do so from the school itself.
So, reluctantly delivered from a job he genuinely loved, he revived his acting career thanks once again to the influence of his dear friend Ariana.
She suggested he might like to play Feste for a production of "Twelfth Night", to be staged in the summer at the Jacksons Lane theatre in North London, and so after a successful audition for the director, Sandy Stein, he set about re-learning Feste's lines, and arranging the songs according to the original primitive melodies.
Yet, if the play itself was pure joy to be involved in, the same can’t be said for the train journeys to and from Highgate for rehearsals, for it was during these lengthy trips across the capital that David started feeling the need to inure himself as never before against what he saw as nocturnal London's ever-present aura of menace.
It’s likely that years of hard living were finally starting to take their toll on his nervous system, for in addition to alcohol and nicotine, he'd been ingesting industrial strength doses of caffeine for years, initially in tablet form, and then in the shape of the coffee cocktails he liked to swill one after the other before afternoon classes at Tellegen’s.
This may go some way towards explaining the sheer paranoia which ultimately caused him to start drinking on the way to rehearsals, and then for the first time in his life as a professional actor, during rehearsals. However, he promised Sandy he’d not touch a drop for the actual performances, and was as good as his word. Although each performance was succeeded by some serious partying on his part…with most of the cast members joining him in the revels.
And his hyperkinetic performance was well-received, with one well-spoken Englishwoman even went so far as to tell him he was the finest Feste she'd ever seen…and what a pity she wasn’t a passing casting director; but then serendipitous incidents of this kind may have happened to other people…but never to poor David Cristiansen.
Later in 1990, he began another PGCE course, this time at the former West London College of Further Education based in East Twickenham, taking up residence in nearby Isleworth.
He began quite promisingly, fitting in well, and making good friends, and as might be expected, excelled in drama and physical education. And he was abstinent by day, while on those rare occasions he did drink, it was just a question of a pint or so with lunch.
He’d mentally determined to complete the course, and yet on the verge of his period of teaching practice, he found himself to be desperately behind in his preparation, and so provisionally removed himself in order to decide whether it was worth his staying on or not.
In the event he chose to quit, but rather than return to his parents' home, he stayed on in Isleworth to rekindle his five-year old career as a deliverer of novelty telegrams, while continuing to work as a walk-on artist.
He also became half of a musical duo formed with a slim young Mancunian with reddish blond hair and brilliant light green eyes who rejoiced in the name of Simon de Wynter, although his true surname reflected his roots in northern England.
They began as buskers in Leicester Square, before settling down for rehearsals in the hope of getting some gigs, their repertoire a mixture of Rock and Roll and Motown classics, as well as a host of originals, mostly written by Simon, but with one or two contributions by David. He wanted to call the band Venus Xtravaganza, but in the end, they settled for Simon's choice of The Unknowns, that is if they ever called anything at all. And unknown is what they remained which for poor David was simply business as usual.
Then, early in ‘91, he took off to the seaside town of Hastings for a month or so to attempt to pass a course in teaching English as a foreign language in a beautiful old town that's since become a major London overspill area.
To this end, he worked like a Trojan but he was struggling terribly, tormented by OCD and its endless demands on his time and energies in the shape of rituals both physical and mental, and while he didn't drink at all during the day, at night he was sometimes so stoned he was incoherent.
Predictably, perhaps, he was failed, and when he asked the authorities if they might reconsider, he was informed that their decision was final. It was a bit of a let-down for him for sure, but he'd loved his time in Hastings, even while continuing the search for some kind of spiritual solution to his mental troubles which led him to a "church" which was far, far from the kind he’d come ultimately to seek out.
At least part of the reason for his torment may be provided by the following extracts from a letter his mother wrote him during a fascinating but fruitless sojourn:
"...I had a chance to look at your library...I could not believe what I saw. These very strange books, beyond my comprehension, most of them, and I thought what a dissipation of a good mind that thought it right to read such matters...I feel very deeply that you have up to your present state, almost ruined your mind. Your happy, smiling face has left you, your humorous nature, ditto, your spirited state of mind, your cheerful, sunny, exuberant well-being, all gone. Too much thought given to the unhappiness and sad state of others (often those you can not help, in any way)...I've said recently that I am convinced that anyone can get oneself into a state of agitation or distress or anxiety by thinking or reading about, or witnessing unpleasant things, and the only thing to do is to, as much as possible, avoid such matters, to not let them get hold in the mind. Your fertile mind has led you astray. Why, and how?"
How many millions of mothers over the course of the centuries have asked this of offspring who've been inexplicably drawn to the shadow lands of life only to lose their way back to sanity? Only God knows. Most of course, successfully make the journey back before settling into a normal mode of life, but the danger of becoming lost is always there, especially for those who remain in the shadows far beyond adolescence.