Tony's Life and Times

Since I started this blog about myself, apparently 91 pages have been read by someone in Russia..... This fascinates me, since to the best of my knowledge I don't know anyone in Russia. Please, please oh Russian, could you drop me a line (comments widow below) and let me know who you are, I am dying to know who it is in Russia that is interested in what I have done with my life... would make my day, so please do say Hi.

Before I started working at the Roundhouse, I had also briefly ventured into the world of film making.  And had landed myself a job as a Model Maker at Shepperton Studios, where most of the James Bond films had been made, among many thousands of other films, both good and bad. I was really rather excited to be given this job, as I imagined it would be a very romantic sort of work, mixing with film stars and seeing how films are really made.  Well I discovered the second of those things, but most certainly not the first. On my first day at this new job, I was greeted at the gate by the guy who was to be my boss, and taken to the Model Makers workshop and introduced to the exciting work I should be doing there...  Which turned out to be making extremely accurate short lengths of ceiling mouldings in clay, which were then taken from me, sent to the mould makers shop, where fibre glass moulds were made from my master, and then lengths of  the ceiling moulds were...

During my years at the Roundhouse we had the most amazing range of shows, from enormous film festivals, film crews shooting films, classical concerts, both ancient and contemporary, musicals, Shakespeare in a variety of styles, rock concerts, conferences, dance theatre and so on, the list is actually way too long to remember. Most shows were either one day events or only stayed with us for a month or so. Thus the change overs were long and frequent. I have never worked so hard in my life as I did there. Some of the events we had do remain firmly in my memory, others have disappeared in the mists of time, which for some of them is a kindness to put it mildly as they were so unbelievably awful they deserve no better. For the fun of it I shall describe some of those that did stick in my memory and the events surrounding them over a number of posts during the coming weeks. Some of these descriptions will be short, and only mention things that stood out about a p...

After living very happily in Amsterdam for some 20 odd years on the Water Rat and becoming Dutch citizens, making lots of very good friends and generally having a very positive experience in that most friendly and beautiful of cities, we decided to follow an earlier dream and move ourselves to France. It had long been our plan to move to France once Jake's schooling was over – And this happened a bit sooner than we had anticipated, so we felt free to move on with our plans in about 1996 or 1997. First we had to sell Water Rat in order to free up some capital, so, hurriedly finishing the 20 year process of making her habitable, we put her on the market. An interesting experience to put it mildly, about 90% of the people who wanted to have a look at her had no interest in buying her, but were merely interested to see what the inside of a house boat looked like. So we found ourselves showing these rubberneckers around our home, and had to put up with all manner of idiot...

For some reason, I always wanted to ride on motor bikes when I was a kid. No idea why this was so, as lets be honest, in so many ways they are vastly inferior to cars, but they do have something about them. For me it started when I was 16 – which in those days was the earliest age you could ride a motorbike in the UK. So with the reluctant agreement of Russ and Lorraine, and the enthusiastic (and financial) assistance of Gerry – my real father – shortly after my 16 th birthday I found myself the proud owner of about the smallest motorbike you could buy in those days, a BSA Bantam. It cost all of £ 50, by the way. Me on my Bantam ( No idea why the fancy costume), and David on his Tiger Cub..... This thing with its 2 stroke 125cc engine could just about manage to achieve 70 mph downhill with a following wind. It had a headlight that would have shamed a firefly, so at night I had to try and keep up with cars going in the same direction as I was, in order t...

Whilst Amsterdam has to be one of my absolute favourite cities in the world (and I have seen a lot of them), it wasn't all nice, friendly and enjoyable experiences as a city while we lived there. When we arrived there first, a largish section of the city was experiencing serious riots from people who resented the destruction of whole sections of the city to build the metro.    Owing to the fact that Amsterdam is built on sand, they couldn't simply drill the tunnels under all the houses and streets, but instead had to demolish all the houses along the route of the metro tunnels, build the sections of tunnel on the thus cleared surface, then sink them to the depth they wanted them to be at.. Clever engineering, but...................  Which a hell of a lot of people felt strongly was a lousy idea, and made their feelings very apparent by means of running battles with the Dutch riot police, a charming section of the police force known as the Mobile Units.  A...

So, we had sold Mjojo, bought the Water Rat and solved Jake's sleeping problems satisfactorily, so felt no further need to get divorced. Basically all was well in our lives at this point, except that poor old Jake required regular hospital visits and endless tests to ensure all was well with his health. This carried on for a number of years, and was painful and tedious, and somewhat worrying as well obviously. However, after some years of this it was suddenly declared that the whole thing was something of a mistake and in fact Jake was a perfectly healthy little boy, and had no further need of endless tests and medicine. My Mother with Jake Whilst we were of course somewhat pissed off that we had been forced to go through what was certainly a worrying time with him, we were also vastly relieved to know that Jake was as he should be, and would no longer be the plaything of all manner of medical specialists, and could settle down to becoming a perfectly normal ...

Shortly after I started work at the Roundhouse, the Rolling Stones decided to put on a concert in Hyde Park which is in the centre of London for those of you who don't know where that park is. So as frequently happened, a lot of my guys at the Roundhouse were asked to work on this gig, variously as lighting, sound or security crews.    My luck meant that I was asked to work on the security side of the concert, which chiefly meant standing at the entrance to the back stage area, with a list of people who had been given invitations to be there, and name tags to give them. You would imagine that this job would be a real no brainer, on the list, let 'em in, not on the list, don't let 'em in, simple eh?   Well forget that idea.  I very quickly discovered that no end of self-important people who felt they should be cluttering up the back and sides of the stage but had by some unbelievable oversight not been sent an invitation started to turn up, mostly w...

In 1955, when I was thus about 13, Russ somehow or other got a couple of tickets to the Premier of the film "The Dam Busters".  A suitably heroic film about a bunch of RAF bomber crews who by means of a sort of bouncing ball shaped bomb managed to destroy three major dams in Germany to disrupt Germany's production capacity. The opening was pretty standard stuff for a premier, red carpet, huge crowds to gaze at the various stars who were there  And less standard, Russ and myself also going in along the red carpet. I am not sure how this came about, but we were introduced to David Niven on that red carpet, and I have two memories of him... Firstly that he was very tall, and second he had extremely large and hairy hands. Just thought you might like to know this amazing pair of facts.....

After some time living happily on Mjojo in Sixhaven, we decided to move to a cheaper mooring, so we wandered around the water's edges of Amsterdam, and found a place that seemed to meet our needs, and was much cheaper than Sixhaven, a ship yard on Nieuwendammerdijk in Amsterdam North, so we untied Mjojo and motored happily off to our new home in the northern half of Amsterdam. There the three of us (Jake, Lotty and I) got on with or lives peacefully enough, Lotty still working for Elsevier, I happily making models on Mojo and Jake simply doing what some babies do.... i.e never sleeping for more than about 2 hours at a time, and screaming his head off whenever we tried to get him to go to sleep. Jake actually asleep Our stay on this mooring was cut short in rather dramatic fashion, one night at about 1 a.m the ship yard went up in flames. All very dramatic with fire engines, police and huge flames. We hurriedly cast Mjojo loose and motored out to the middle of ...