The Mark II Jaguar, silver, red leather, flew across Moreland Road and straight through a red light. It was seven in the morning. I was driving blind into the rising sun. I saw nothing else, let alone a couple of peripheral red orbs. I should have been more attentive. I should have driven slower. I should have been dead. Plenty of crooks in swinging 1960s London used Mark II Jaguars as getaway cars, and crashed them, and ended up maimed or worse. I kept going. The maternity hospital was a faint brutalist silhouette in the distance. Last day of January, 1977. I’d stayed awake the previous night with a Haig on ice and the late movie - Vertigo - on TV, waiting for the phone to ring. It was good. I had stared at the screen without wanting to throw a brick through it, and even the ads were kind of acceptable, corny but with none of the sanctimonious rationalisations that sell everything from cans of tuna to cars these days. The television itself was a chunky four-legged mid-seventies model...
We drove down from the artists’ colony and headed south west through the foothill-underpinned and heavily treed suburbs of Montmorency (which always reminded me, when I drove through it, of the fox-terrier in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat ), Macleod and Rosanna; and then the road flattened out and we were back in the inner-city grid heading for a warehouse in the back street of a used-to-be working class suburb, where once men hacked and sawed and planed and amber-shellacked, and made things of lasting beauty and utility that would never be placed on the street for the hard rubbish collection. And there it was: an old sawtooth-topped factory of red brick. It was such a caricature you could almost see it breathing in and out, cartoonishly, along with the let’s work soundtrack, and workers inside putting tops on jars in hundredfold unison. Now, endless decades later, the sun dropped below the building's zigzag roof making a glowing halo around its jagged perimeter. It was se...