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This is the story of a dark night. This is the account of inertia in an ever-expanding universe. This is the document of wrong prevailing over healthy expectation. In my life I tilled the soil, I fed the livestock and I fetched water from the well. I was a slave to the crowing call for lunch and I gobbled passionately like a scavenging pigeon when it came, dependant on the respectful giving of a few children. I never won a general election or bagged prize scalps on Pop Idol, and by the end I never cared much for dreams.

I read somewhere once that biographies were better than autobiographies because they were written in the third person. I suppose they meant that writing an autobiography could be a bit like an inadequate talking about himself over dinner where an audience could only ascertain an unsubtle bias of trumpet-blowing and gesticulation. However, in his defence the biographer would only choose the story of a media-hero to slap on a publisher’s desk because the blithering idiot wouldn’t want to spend twenty pounds on anything else. Thus the person who sets out to write about an unglamorous second-cousin to Art Garfunkel (if he’s lucky) such as me, can only be me. Besides, when I’m at dinner parties, my trumpet is firmly lost among the worn Glenn Miller LP’s in the broom-cupboard under the stairs, as I strain to analyze syntax from my deftly concealed quotations manual between my knees. Recognize him? If you were a publishing agent in this vaunted company would you be ‘blithering’ enough to put up with the incessant wittering of a failed writer with all the finesse of a DC10? If you’re like-minded, to research the meaty bits of this book, you could catch some video footage of the Remedial Book Programme or wait for the edited highlights of Crimewatch instead of drowsily snuggling up to a hot-water bottle and a ‘good’ book about an outstanding journey of a lifetime. That could not replace the sadness and pain of this document’s honest and truthful lifetime’s journey. If you are plucky enough to mention my book at our gathering you too may have given up the ghost by page five and bluffed your way through with your equally lost rivals in time for coffee and Trivial Pursuits. I’d do it. Thus, I cannot open my written repertoire with a performance of the Grieg piano concerto on the trumpet but just be satisfied that the book does justice to me, fairly. Mission accomplished. If anyone is interested in reading the rest, my name is Robert and I tilled the soil, fed the livestock and fetched water from the well, and if I am less than loquacious I still feel free to talk about myself in the first person and that is why I have chosen to ‘have a go’ and write an autobiography.

The success of biographies stems from the subject being written about and less from the writer of the subject. In crude terms the readership wants to know the subject a little more personally than the author and this is understandable. In an autobiography the subject ought to be judged as a writer and his cards sent for if he is not adequate and didn’t send for the biographer in the first place. This is why Rio Ferdinand never wrote an autobiography. Thus if I’m honest I have to fulfill the dubious duality of being both a decent enough writer about a decent enough subject to win my readership over. My life should involve a cartload of anecdotes, sharp analysis and subtle innuendo, one might think. A single incident that made waves should not engulf the life-story for they seldom make up the whole individual. Yes, we should know what the subject did privately, but not without cancelling the light upon who that person really is. A biography of Gerald Ratner would be stale if after three years one picked up a biography and it read about a quote documenting a “bunch of crap”. That’s not all he was surely? His company was ruined by hostile media-coverage and the mass-reading public buying into the hysteria of one, albeit supersonic faux-pas. That is what should feature heavily in a book about this public figure, not that he let his pants down and did an ocean-wide moony.

Human behaviour after-all, is shared behaviour and we are all capable of doing the same worthy and worthless things. However behaviour can often be no more than an outward expression of the inner consciousness, but sometimes we forget this and in doing so don’t understand our own reasons for such actions. Does anyone really care about being honest when we are presented with food and drink we know nothing about in a restaurant? No our answer is always the same. If the wine tastes like Tizer, it’s always remarkable vintage and if the steak’s a bit tough, we forget that most of us have not much more culinary expertise than a plate of egg and chips.

The same is true of the subject of a biography who will probably be as lost in a restaurant or supermarket as you and me. But in establishing our similarities why does it make it necessary to relate our own shared, innate, human response in words. The reason is because people either past or present are unique. It is my belief that although we stem from the same life force I will never be a Peter Ustinov or a Jim Davidson, but depending on how life treats me, I have the potential in me to be far more or far less than these men that fate will allow. It is that kind of individual essence that I want people to read about and that which we really have and that which we really are. That’s who I am and who I can make the subject of his own gripping autobiography. He who pisses in the well has no ego.

I enrolled on a writing course once and one of the three lessons I attended was about how best to describe the passage of time in an account. The group members agreed on the whole that time should unfold from where the plot is at its height. In other words the plot should zap all around like Mick Jagger. This has a reputation for being contemporary wisdom, although is it? In the movie ‘Shine”, the child-piano-prodigy, David Helfgott begins by hammering on the glass of an Australian pub obviously distressed and for the next hour the audience is told how he arrived in such a mess. Was this so absolutely necessary? It may be a great film but starting it near the end spoils some of the surprise as from the outset we know that David Helfgott is going to crack up. And that’s contemporary wisdom.

However, not to sound like a door-to-door salesman, I write for passion, not fashion. I am as green as a small water lily in a big pond as you can see, but the standard of British writers some of whom begin their stories halfway through, do little to impress me, even though they probably consider me fair-game for the five-ninety-nine I have spent on Posh Spice’s top tips on rare foot complaints, to prove they are really necessary to the British literary scene.

In this life-story the format will be as it comes which may be confusing but certainly fresh from the memory to the page. The pivotal moment of my account may ambush without pre-warning or it may not. It is possible that I still await my pivotal moment.

I will approach this format at the beginning. I am Robert Arthur Morrison and my initials spell RAM that stands for many acronyms beside the Royal Academy of Music for which they were selected. The middle name I counted as an embarrassing expletive, especially when it lay dormant in the school register, waiting for one of my more curious mortal enemies to pounce on. In actual fact school chums who did stumble across my oft-mumbled secret were completely unruffled. It was always me who was sensitive. Mark Kingsley Hunt and Andrew Alfonso Thompson had much more to squeal about. Andy the Unflappable probably didn’t deserve Ian either, and his acronym surely enough was AIL so I wasn’t alone in my melancholia. Paul kindly mentioned, perhaps too kindly that it was cool to be called Arthur, because “look at Arthur Fonzarelli out of Happy Days”. However it was clear to me that there were no parallels at all to be drawn from myself and the Fonz. On his planet the female species were driven crazy by boys in leather and on my planet if you called “Hey!” to anyone they would shout “Hey!” back. If I tried charm that was no use either. Most girls would spit their gum to the ground, vacantly stare past me and say “Hey?” It should have been highlighted at a young age that I was to young girls what Richie Cunningham was to cardigans. Out of the two of us, I was the bigger dick. Although I was stuck with Arthur, I took no stick at all because the early eighties saw a plethora of lovable ‘Arfurs” emerge as the press called them. Since every schoolboy in my age group was hooked on Minder , I had no reason to look back, at least, not in anger.

And on the subject of padding, my other two names ought to fit the impression of who I am, but I don’t suppose Robert or Morrison give an accurate assessment. The whole name suggests I could come from anywhere in the British Isles excusing Ireland. So whom am I patriotic towards? To who do I sincerely belong? One is probably completely disinterested by this, and it’s not even page five, but I have reason to announce that I belong to the English, the nation being swallowed up by an ever-growing identity crisis. Many sophisticates argue that today Englishness is presently hard to define and yet deny that it was their own ignorance of the real world that allowed this state of affairs to germinate. Who would argue that with so many nationalities and identities living under British skies that to define an Englishman would now be complex? However with the situation being so bad I would counter that it is even more difficult to define an Englishman in this country if he happens to be an Englishman! When ruminating over the Englishness question I am often gently brought back to that canny movie, “Sleuth” by playwright Antony Shaffer, which unlocks the key to being English, strangely through the words of Michael Caine’s character who is humiliated by a very blue-blooded Laurence Olivier. In Olivier’s game Caine is humiliated to a whimpering wife-snatcher, imploring for his own life not to be taken by the adversarial husband. Olivier shows no mercy. Caine is of Italian descent and cannot graduate to the English society to which he belongs. And then Caine clinches the game he is about to lose, by claiming he belongs to a “fair play and sense of humour England “ and this for me depicts my Englishness apart from other peoples living on this planet. There are Englishmen who will no doubt disagree with me upon this interpretation but generally they have no more feelings of belonging somewhere than Tommy Docherty. I propose that most English people will agree with me. Perhaps it is no mystery that as an island we are cut off from the Germans and enjoy flourishing humour and fair-play! Yikes! Although my home has always been in England, the cities up and down the country and those in which I have lived do not necessarily imply a common bond of heritage. England can surely be as diverse as it is divided. The western counties and the eastern counties speak the same tongue but are no nearer to a common identity than North or South Korea. If Alan Whicker campaigned for Truro to be twinned with Lowestoft, it would probably be met with approval on both sides of the M11, but in local government, east doesn’t mean the East End but the Soviet Union. There is a lot more to east meets west than frozen turkeys and cider apples. Why do English authorities continue to forage links with a commonwealth of nations while keeping its regional traditions foreign to its inhabitants.

London moreover, has more identities than telephone wires and yet finally the boundaries are the same for him as would be for a Dorsetshire weaver with each citizen currently dependant on a handful of friends that cut him off from somebody else’s handful of friends. Is that not life I hear you ask, but perhaps London is the odd man out because here life never slows down, whereas maybe other townships  pace a more even pattern. Here, big city life defines what life is. It is difficult to say if that’s good. Some prefer the hectic open highway to the sedate and safe avenues of strawberry sponge recipes. The world here has over eight million creatures but occasionally through phone calls, only a couple of trusted friends can help him believe in the decency of his habitat again. In London, with so many inhabitants, most of us subconsciously switch off from our love affair with the real Big Brother except the girl in the packed train carriage whose mobile is definitely switched on.

London is a big city in England. However in the rear view mirrors of politicians it has to have become England in the last few decades, principally because, such is democracy in this country that a politician can quite effectively sell himself here and still be elected somewhere in the North East, helping himself to another five year stint in Number Ten with a terrifying propensity to do ‘the right thing’ with Iraq. Does he only ever show up in Newcastle in emergencies? No. Why should he? However in defence of our custodians at least they can say they might have been to the north which is more than I can say for the media. The press is London, and that’s why it is full of bastards: I’ll leave the reader to decide which one is ‘it’. The national press write about London - not Newcastle or Rotherham, unless it is something really silly or something that worries them personally. Journalists have stopped realizing that what they term ‘stories’, are not as unique as the subjects. Magazines are not real life. For example when an opinion poll predicts that two thousand people want Gordon Brown to be the next Prime Minister, the broadcasters assume that is what we really want, and that’s in black and white. However, it pays to understand that those petitioned may change their minds if a hypothetical Gordon puts up income tax and closes two hundred hospitals. With their influence, what would happen if the gutter press decided to publicly lynch poor hypothetical Gordon. How would the opinion poll read next time? With the politicians based in London and the press shadowboxing every move, the press believe they have the power to shape the identity of Britain into yes and no camps; they believe this city is the country, but they have much to do before they condition identity. In London there is a pressing need to conform in order to survive. The inner state of consciousness that affords the opportunities people crave sinks more than it swims. It is not a question of soul-searching until one finds the Holy Grail, the answer is simple. I have been with more interesting children than graduates, I have known godlier alcoholics than clergymen, (partly because it was their round.) and I have enjoyed the company of more talented writers than BBC soap opera teams have devised in three decades.

The potential to make it happen for oneself is present in many, many people, but for the majority it doesn’t. Local Councils of London will wheel out the usual excuses of racism, sexism and anything that fits into a Marxist conspiracy theory, but the fault is ultimately with a shortfall of individuality. By this I am not saying that the Great American Dream is available to everyone who lives in the ghetto but it is important for all people to realize their responsibility to themselves and not forget their potential. Sometimes to conform is inevitable. On a black housing estate a young man may conform to the stereotype that society is racist and that he will never work. He may then conform to join a gang and become involved in crime and spend some time behind bars. He may well have had potential. Where did it go wrong? He conformed to the ideology that society is wicked and racist before he had conformed to the inevitability of black street crime. If he had rehearsed his attitude first the fruit may have been different. The answer therefore is not to non-conform but to not conform in the right places. However I accept that there will usually be a price for being of a single mind.

Throughout my life I have been unable to conform intellectually. I was not what you could call a rebel because I didn’t conform to a rebel. Sometimes to be a rebel when growing up one had to be a conservative. That was my intellectual rebellion. Therefore as time went by, I lost my accent, I began to study Shakespeare and I sunk the odd glass of real ale. The price was twofold. I lost popularity with stupid people and I gained popularity with the rest. I began to acquire the middle-class label from the stupid people which didn’t really fit my modest circumstances, and so I was keen to shed this label more than Judy Finnegan not because I’d suffer from being seen as a capitalist extortionist as Judy thinks she is, but because I always identified with the background of the working man’s lifestyle. I was always intellectual however and felt more of a responsibility to the truth than to my background. As my intellect prompted me to speak the language I love properly and try against all the odds to be a little more sophisticated, I paid the price of resentment, not from people who knew me but from people who didn’t know me. In fact some institutions are so sworn to equality that French Revolutionaries had less militancy towards their counter-revolutionaries. So, my intellectual rebellion did lead to prejudice but has not cost me truth, which Judy Finnegan might not tell you as she drops her aitches in avoidance of the truth being known about her background. This media philosophy held dear among football commentators and holiday presenters was all started by Alan Davies alias Jonathan Creek a couple of years back when ‘e dropped the t on the word ‘complicated’ in the Nat West adver’. Soon I heard the Classic FM, D.J Jamie Crick drop the ‘t’ on Bey-hoven. It was a good job Beethoven couldn’t hear him. I was speechless. Was this Jamie Crick or Jonathan Creek? Answers on a postcard please to Dick van Dyke.

It is impossible to deny however that a person can be judged more upon outward appearance than inner truth and may be considered free of blame if he allows the outside world to affect his inner self. So while I comb back my skinhead crop of blond hair and tighten the buckles on my braces, I will refer again to what seems to be a frisson of resentment welling up inside London’s black communities. In inner London there are successful black people and there are those who are not. Those who are successful have jobs, a sense of humour and fair-play and they are fully absorbed into the British way of life. Those who are not successful are so isolated that they have allowed their outward sense of social injustice, however laudable, to affect their inner spirit and so they become segregated into pockets of gangs with their own indecipherable street slangs, and even drug or gun crime. Who is responsible for this segregation? It is not the so-called racist system for in London there are more equal opportunities for blacks than anyone else; it is not racist violence because sadly for every Steven Laurence there are umpteen more unreported black murders in London; and it is certainly not because the lot of a black man is any worse than of a white man. What is happening is that London’s black community is allowing the traditional prejudices of the past swallow the truth of a much more equal and fairer present; they are allowing a real identity with hostile history to cloud their own inner judgment of a real, but docile present and they, and no-one else, must let go and take responsibility for this. However if this were a perfect world it would be easy to forgive and forget. A so-called religious value like this falls well on stony ground in the most religious of societies. If the Palestinians refuse to let go, how can we?

However if I untangle my copper braces which may well have truly strangled me, it may be worthwhile to point out that all sorts of appearances leave a strong impression on the inner sanctum in an everyday sense. If we are not black, we may be fat or ugly or disabled and for these we may be judged to be lazy or stupid or depressed. And then we may allow ourselves to become lazy, stupid and depressed even if we are not fat or ugly or disabled in a severe manner. We must allow the world to change with our opinion and not let our opinion be changed by the world.

However in what seems a bold understanding of life, I feel I must drop down naked in front of a steel mirror and pick out all the warts I am sanctimoniously hammering the rest of the world for having. In truth, at 34 I wouldn’t claim to be an expert with answers tucked up a magic sleeve; no sensible thirty something would. However I do know something about human frailties and human strengths for in shining the mirror toward me, I reflect an attitude of which a lazy, stupid, ugly and thoroughly displeased person should be. In other words I share the bondage of human frailty and tie myself in the knots of Taurean stubbornness and the reason I know this is because I may have been like this longer than anyone else.

When I look in my mirror I can literally see a thousand different faces staring back at me, and they all belong to the same person. One day I might scrutinize deliberately for an expression I yearn to find, another day my big, blue eyes may seem like they have protracted into my skull, and so on. As I stand rather blue with cold now in front of my mirror I laugh without dignity at the peculiar shape of my left leg and how the thigh muscle is curved like a banana. With paranoia I look my stomach in the eye like two boxers squaring up; I say to it: “You dare flop out when I have another cup of tea.” But it will. I have defeated my own philosophy by allowing it to defeat me. Well, almost.

When I look in the mirror sometimes I am carried back to lessons in ‘zimmer sechs’ and our Crystal Palace supporting German teacher, a double whammy if ever there was one. This particular individual was like a genial Father Christmas dressed in tight Farah’s so I gave him less respect as a person than as a teacher. He was probably somewhere in his mid-forties and in my sheltered naivety I swore that I would never develop an overhanging mid-rift to disguise the fact that my spindly legs could fit into size 28 slacks. For I was 14 and I would die for my appearance and even boasting a waistline four inches more slender than my German master didn’t drain my confidence exactly, and I was confident not least because I was top of his class!

The key determinant in physical growth from adolescence to adulthood is the food and drink we consume. As a teenager I was blissfully unaware of this damning lesson and thought I would be sporty for life. My mother prepared very good meals for my younger sister, my father and myself in those days and although I was indecently addicted to junk food, my pennies would only spare me a rare treat at the Catford Mcdonalds. My lager drinking days had not yet begun, so my intake was on hold, particular as lager and junk food are usually served in unison. These days it is not uncommon to find junk food served in pubs, so that those that can’t stagger to their local kebab house now don’t have to. If I go back to the 14 year old staring back at me in my mirror, I will remember that for him a Chinese takeaway was a luxury, but when I trade innocence for the truth of the present I remember that I have a freezer full of the stuff and a dozen double negatives in the brain instructing me to glide past the chicken satay before I fall prey to the sweet and sour selection. And then instead of staring at my belly through a cocked eye it seems to be staring back at me saying, “You shouldn’t treat me like this you big ape.” This is the price of capitalist responsibility; it is called freedom and it is called choice and it is the Mecca for every human soul. However as every child wishes he had more freedom to choose every adult has more selection because he has more money. When an adult has more money he has the freedom to abdicate his self-responsibility and spend it on Chinese takeaways. With the population over sizing quicker than it takes to down two Big Macs, it is worth reminding oneself that with choice there comes more choice. We must be aware of extremity.

It is tempting in adulthood’s formative years to agree to what you think you want rather than what you actually need. In my case I couldn’t say no to chocolate and along with no culinary knowledge it proved to be my nemesis. It is true of many new adults that as hormones change so does metabolism. I knew that if you said yes to three Mars bars when you were fourteen, you could burn the energy off in the school playground. I didn’t know, however that if you said yes to three Mars bars by the time you were twenty you were too sluggish to do anything about it, except have another three Mars bars or appear on Strictly Come Dancing. My inexperience was such that when I put on three stones within a month of starting university, I didn’t conclude that it could be a poor diet, because save for my mother’s excellent home-cooking, my diet had always been poor. Later my experience tells me that but for family mealtimes, the situation could have happened more rapidly than it did. The dawn raids on a petrol station’s refrigerated pasties, which I ate cold, were of consummate taste to the undergraduate and usually a result of polishing off the Rice Krispies the previous evening. The pickled salad lingering in a stew of steaming kebab grease under my bed was only available in emergencies, like when the garage was empty.