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Introduction to From Paris to Golders Green/Gallant festivities

The various sections of "From Paris to Golders Green" provide a stark contrast between my psychological state during the first half of my time at Westfield College, London, where I studied for a BA degree in French and Drama between 1981 and '85, and that during my final year. They also treat, in "Paris Will Always be Paris", on the intervening sojourn to the city of my Bohemian dreams.

"Gallant Festivities" was based on two pages of informal journal notes dating from 1982-'83. Consisting of two parts, the first refers to revels enjoyed in the wake of a performance at college of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" in which I'd played Feste the Fool, a role very close to my heart in its combination of tenderness and causticity. The second was formed out of an assortment of diary entries from 83, some made in response to another night of merryment following the performance of a play, this time of Lorca's "Blood Wedding". Both evoke the carefree hedonism that marked my golden years at Westfield, a college then in its twilight time prior to being incorporated into Queen Mary on east London's grim Mile End Road, far, far from the semi-pastoral beauty of Hampstead.
I like to see my first two Westfield years as symbolic of an entire decade given over to giddy excess, with disaster approaching just beyond the horizon. In a general sense this came in the shape of Black Monday the stock market crash of Monday the 19th of October 1987, which could be said to have put paid to the spirit of the eighties just as effectively as the Great Crash of 1929 had spelled the end of the "greatest, gaudiest spree in history". As to myself in particular it manifested as slow psychic disintegration, process whose onset I tend to date from my arrival in Paris just days before my 28th birthday in autumn 1983.

Gallant Festivities

It was my evening,
That's for sure -
At last I'm good
At something -
27 years old
I may be, but
"I've heard all
about you"
"I have to meet
That guy"
"Spot the
Equity card"
"It's your aura, Carl"
I even signed
One of Phil's friends'
Programmes -
"When are you going
To be a superstar?"
Said Luce
A few days ago -
That seemed to be
The question
On everyone's lips.
"You got Feste perfectly,
Just how I
envisaged it"
"Not only when
You're onstage
but off too!"
At last, at last, at last
I'm good at something

And so the party
I danced first with P.,
"...Don't go away..."
Chloe called me...
I listened
To her problems
References
To my "innocent face"
Livvy said:
"S. seems Elusive
But is in fact,
Accessible;
You're the opposite -
You give to everyone
But are incapable
Of giving in particular."
M. was comparing me
To June M.
Descriptions by AN:
"She does not dare
To be herself"
Everything I'd always
Wanted to be,
I now am
"She lives
On the reflections
Of herself"
Partly of truth,
"In the eyes
Of others"
"...So long, Carl..."
"There is no June
To grasp and know"
Partly of myth.
I get kept getting up to dance

Learn more about this author, Carl Halling.
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