I moved back into the Clays Lane complex for my last year in college, not being quite ready for married life. The yellow circle above is in the wrong place as my house was in fact to the left of the footpath going up from the road. I had a magnificent view over the gypsy (sorry traveller) site and the container terminal. As I write this a van was reversing outside... beep beep beep... that took me right back to the racket that used to emanate from outside my room. Luckily I had a substantial ghetto blaster which took the edge off it until some toerag managed to open my ground floor window and half inch it. The house had a washing machine - the first week I was there I did a wash and managed to boil to nothing all my clothes.

The people I shared the house with were an interesting bunch - a motorcycling policewoman in the making, a Mancunian innocent and a junkie, also at some point a folkie busker-type who would jump at the opportunity for a communcal sing-song. It was a perfect sitcom.In the summer I got a job with Schweppes delivering soft drinks around London. That was fun. I used to cycle to the base in West Ham, that is until the junkie or one of his idiot friends decided to have a laugh and slash my bike tyre at 2 in the morning. I had to fix it in the middle of the night then slept with my bike in my room for a while. It was shortly after that the bike disappeared completely when I'd left it in the courtyard for a short time... It all still rankles.

The policewoman in the making had a funny turn once and had to go to Homerton Hospital. Being the most mature of the bunch I was pulled in as the responsible adult. Except everyone assumed I was in a relationship with her and proceeded to expose parts of her not insubstantial anatomy to me that I really wasn't prepared for.

The inncoent (and his brother) were wide eyed about living in London. They clearly hadn't been exposed to very much and didn't have the filter on that stopped them embarrassing others if not themselves. We used to talk late at night about what really should have been private things... well they did anyway!

And it was at Howarth Court that my big life switch happened when one evening there was a knock at my door and I opened it to find the chunky form of Mike Newton. He had heard that I had a BBC Computer and wanted to see it in action. Mike had studied Music Technology at LCP and was keen to do something with music and computers. It was this very moment which shaped my future life as I set off on the course that would take me to Camden Town with Take Note, Activation and Pulse... and where I would meet Eddie, Karen and Janie.

Things have chanced a bit since 1984...: