Excerpt from Kev's Autobiograpy:"The Nearly Man"

I think it was the summer of 1968. We had such glorious summers then,the summer holidays contrived to last forever, as we used to doss about in the woods and have water fights , seemingly for weeks on end.
The summers seem shorter now, or is just the greyness of adulthood grumpily descending on my rose-coloured spectacles?

There was Pim, a fairly studious boy, but just on the right side of cool, his Dad used to be a Cinder Track rider, and he had the pictures to prove it , which gave him a certain credibility amongst the rest of us.

There was Bake, academically challenged at this stage of his young life, but I always felt he could have been a footballer. When we used to play in the street, with our coats thrown down as goalposts, you simply could not get the ball off him.

There was Fos, he lived a good few doors away from us, actually around a bend in the road so you couldn`t even see his house! Add to this the fact that he went to a different school to the rest of us and was fully one
year older, and you had a very mysterious boy indeed.

Then there was me. Schoolwork and I were not particularly comfortable bedfellows, and my forays into sports always left a lot to be desired.
In fact I don`t recall excelling in any particular area at that time of my life, except perhaps for being very adept at avoiding tidying my bedroom!

Regardless of our idiosynchracies, we were together, the four of us, through those endless summers, Kev, Pim, Bake and Fos, messing about as only kids can, our lives, unblemished, stretching ahead of us.


It seemed in those days that you could still wander anywhere without fear, explore the woods and stay out until dusk with only the mildest reprimand from your parents. As I get older, I mourn the passing of that age , the
innocence and the freedom that went with it.

It was on one such typically english suburban summers day that Fos paid me a visit.
"I`m forming a group, do you want to join?" he said, studying me from behind his National Health specs.
"What sort of group?" I countered, expecting another one of Fos`s fiendishly clever Secret Agent clubs he was in the habit of creating.

{These involved various activities to occupy would-be secret agents, such as
shadowing practice, where two or more spotty ten-year-old boys would follow a woman up the street, convinced that they couldn`t be seen because they were observing her through eye-holes cut in a newspaper, eventually forcing the poor woman to sprint for the nearest shop, convinced she had wandered into the village of the damned!

There were aptitude tests too, along the lines of; You are trapped in a sealed room, the door is locked, and poisonous gas is flooding in through the only vent. The room contains only a coffee table on which stands a houseplant and a paperclip How do you escape? The answer, according to Fos and obviously inspired by a warped interest in first year biology, was to hold the houseplant to your nose, the theory being that you could buy yourself time by inhaling the oxygen the plant gave off as a by product of its growth cycle, allowing you to leisurely fashion a precision lock-picking device from the paper clip with which to facilitate your triumphant egress, James Bond eat your heart out!}

Kev Moore

The Palace that Moved

By way of an introduction to this piece, I should make it clear that it is my recollection, in as far as it was possible, of a dream. It was Miki's idea that I should try and and convert it into prose. Some years ago she used to catalogue all her dreams, and I found the idea fascinating. So here it is....


The drummer turned around.
"I didn’t recognise you without your beard“ I said.
"Then how did you know it was me?“ he replied.
I pushed my way through the crowds in the dressing room, and was suddenly out in the sunlight in what may have been Palma harbour.
I began to make my way up a steep, steep hill, the midday sun sapping my energy, beating down relentlessly on my back.

I crested the summit and gazed down at the Blue-black marble edifice shrouded by a great cedar canopy that I instinctively knew was the Palace. It seemed I had arrived as they were closing it up. Two men, guards, I supposed, went around securing doors and windows.

Suddenly, strangely, two guards took up position at the far corners of the gigantic edifice and pushed....amazingly, the entire structure glided, sleek and fast along gossamer-thin rails and into a gigantic hole in the hillside, a massive hanger door coming down silently to mark its passing, closing with a sound like the softest kiss.

I walked back down the hill and tried to enter one of the ancilliary buildings that had been seemingly abandoned by the Palace as it had glided mysteriously away.. I checked my step as I looked carefully at the marble tiles of the entranceway....they were morphing, tile after tile hurtling by in some kind of hysterical race, constantly in a state of flux, and then, gradually slowing and assuming a solid form.

When I felt the flux state had passed, I cautiously entered, and in the atrium was confronted by fabulous gardens with lush rockpools and water channels. I wanted to dive into one of the channels to see where it would take me , but was unable to do so.

As I walked on, I came upon a vast area of white marble pools, all cascading into each other. I was dressed for some reason, in only grey boxers, and slipped into the water, effortlessly sliding from one to the next, over and over, finally reaching a water chute which took me into the depths of the building. I climbed out of the waterway, dripping wet, and discovered I was adjacent to a basement office. Feeling a little self-conscious, I resolved to get out fast, before anyone saw me. I made my way down the stairs, down, and down, but at the bottom, I found only a dead end, and a dirty tiled floor on which rested a disused multigym, a relic of a broken new years resolution, perhaps.

I retraced my steps upwards again, and passed on the stairwell, an old derelict who had clasped to his chest a strange, emaciated child. The childs big, round eyes bored into mine as the two strange companions descended below me.

I quickly passed the landing where the office was, still in my dripping boxers, and eventually found at ground level, a small triangular window that I managed to squeeze out of.

I clambered up the muddy hillside, aware of two young girls singing a strange nursery rhyme just ahead of me. I suddenly felt some trepidation about being discovered in the presence of these children, in such a state of undress as I was. I hurried on past them, further up the hill. Turning, I looked down and saw that it had not in fact been the girls singing, but a small folk group, set up and playing to no-one in particular, their peculiar brand of music, with a repetitive, haunting refrain.

Up, up, I climbed, and eventually, gasping for breath, looked down on the majestic sweeping arc of the bay, golden sand underscored by an azure sea, the hi-rise and villas like granite stubble growing down to meet it. And I wondered.......

Is this really Palma?

Kev Moore

The Bird and the Forgotten

The great train grumbled into Braunschweig station, almost reluctant to break its journey through the heartland of Eastern Germany. Grey green, grey green, it went, the sprawling farmlands contrasting sharply with the gunmetal urban decay of its forgotten towns.

I sat in my compartment, contemplating the day. A long day, filled with the miasma of endless travel that would take me from post-communist poverty to the sun-kissed shores of Spain. Eventually.

After a cursory glance along the platform, I returned my gaze to the novel I had wisely brought along to forestall the boredom, when suddenly a soft thud and a flurry of feathers in my peripheral vision caused me to look again.

A tiny, imperceptible mark on the carriage window was the only clue.....I looked down and saw a still, feathered form on the platform.

Then, slowly, very slowly, it began to regain its wits, and sat, stunned, alone and abandoned on the platform, a sparrow of sorts, I think, though ornithology is not one of my strong points.

It looked like a confused traveller that had alighted at the wrong stop. More than a little frightened, it glanced around worriedly. The train made ready for departure., and I found myself urging it to wait, that I could longer observe and witness the outcome for this poor unfortunate.

It became apparent that it was severely injured, for it moved not an inch, and the feet of a thousand impatient travellers were perilously close.

The train conductor paced backwards, carriage by carriage, he strode purposefully along the platform. I held my breath...he signaled the impending departure, as he walked, backwards, backwards, his boots coming down mere millimetres from the bird.

I realised then....such a metaphor for modern life and the victims that fall beneath the cracks. Powerless to alter their destiny....ignored by the masses...and life on the slenderest of threads.

Kev Moore