WALLY'S BLOG 1964 - 2006
The 1964 to 2006 diary pages featured at the old Wallywoods.com are still waiting to get here.
Meanwhile, here's a summary I wrote as a baby.
"Yesterday the snow was thick on the ground. Thick as shit. And it was Mummy's birthday and she went into labour and called out the wrong midwife, who was horrid. She prodded us around and said I was wasn't ready so she left and the next day I was born, that's today. Whoopee. Daddy nearly feinted so the other midwife told him to go downstairs to burn Mummy's placenta in the coal oven while they pushed and pulled me out. We are so poor that the placenta helped warm the house. That was at eight o'clock this morning. I shall always hate mornings. I weigh over ten pounds and my face is fat so they call me Currant Bun because my eyes are like currants in puff-pastry. My throat is swollen and it's hard to breathe because I swallowed lots of mucus, so they tipped up my cot to get out the mucus with a straw and, whoopee, breathe that air! Soon I will get a chest infection. But the shops in Beckenham will be closed so Daddy will walk to Boots in Piccadilly and Dr Breen will give him something pink to pick up from the all night chemist. Then I will feel better. When I start to crawl they will say "watch out Atom Bomb's about!" because I will destroy everything I get hold of. I have an older brother called Michael who pouts and will go to punk concerts, but I will giggle a lot, even more than sister Lou, who is the biggest and will date soldiers from the barracks. Little brother James will pop along later and be big trouble. I will ball my eyes out on the way to Holy Trinity Infants School next to the Lambeth Palace and Mummy and Daddy will take me to a psychiatrist with a beard in a dark room. He will show me curious pictures and wait for me to talk. Then I will like school for a bit until I go to big school when I am eleven. I will be shy and grow tall and skinny because nobody will notice I had a mysterious disease and soon I will have a nervous breakdown and cry in my head. I will sit in my headmistress's car while she shows me a lovely grammar school full of well behaved children and she won't understand why I will cry even more. They will put me in Battersea County School next and then Boufouy School with thousands of children running around and I will hate it more than I can stand and try to read books in a quiet corner, if I can even find a quiet corner. Each morning Daddy will drag me out of bed because all night I will rock to and fro and try not to wake up for school. Daddy will try to teach me at home but I won't want to learn and I will be put into a tiny little school for just five odd children and I will write a space novel about the Similes and the Metaphors and the battles they fight together. We will go to France for one day and on that day I will love Maureen, but she won't love me. We will see half a horse hanging up in a shop window there and the rain and the sea will be cold. Then I will to go to Aspen House School for about a hundred and fifty other odd children in the middle of Kennington Park where I will feel sick during football matches but when I am older will stay after hours and play badminton with the headmaster and do the Masquerade puzzle in the library and try to find that treasure. I will take five exams, one of them nice and four of them horrid. In holidays from school I will learn to sweep up wood dust and Perspex dust and make coffee at Presentation Unit who make architectural models, and one pleasant day I will have money in the bank and in my trouser pockets and sometimes we will go to America or Norfolk to work and bring back more money. But until then I will go to Putney College for one horrible year to get something called an A-Level so I can get into something called an Art School. The professors and loud students will secretly call me Odd Fish, but I will hold my tongue and pass the exam with a 'C', which is not very good but not very bad. I will sit and draw boats at lunchtimes by the River Thames where it is still narrow and not dirty and decide never ever to go to Camberwell Art School after all because I will be old enough to advise myself and anyone who might listen FUCK SCHOOL FOREVER! BURN THEM ALL DOWN! and I will have trouble instead getting out of bed to be an architectural model-maker, whatever that is, until I am twenty five and almost grown up. I will always be late for work, no matter what time I go to bed. My eyes will be puffed up like puff-pastry every morning and I will feel sick and not talk but they will put up with me because I will be the arty one and the only one who can do certain things, like make the little people and trees and the Lord Mayor's horses. Unfortunately, although joyfully in short periods, I will love a model-making girl who wears no underwear and smells like flowers in heaven and I will feel as grand as anyone who ever lived and then died in the world with a smile. I will have a breakdown again and go to hospital for one long night while they patch me up. After that I will be self-employed and work all over London making special effects and silly advertisements starring Superman, for instance, wearing basketball trainers, and I will continue to buy sports cars and wonderful albums by Kate Bush and Pink Floydd and New Order and sit in the dark and listen and think about marvelous things and terrible things. At night after work I will play for pub pool teams and drink loadsa beer and and watch television until all the channels stop and go to bed and hardly ever sleep, except in the mornings, when I can hardly ever get up. I will writhe around in my sheets and wet cushions until Bob with the dreadlocks moves to somewhere called Berlin for unknown reasons with an Irish lady. That means I can live in their house in Wimbledon with Danny Flynn the poet who will introduce me to Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen and Engine, my cat, who gets run over. I will bury him in the garden in the pouring rain and my tears will pour too and round about there I will meet Amanda Jayne Scott the dancing aerobics teacher with the Finger of Death from an advertisement in a lonely hearts magazine. She will be twenty-nine and I will be her toy boy. But soon I will meet Tanja the German opare girl in Ye Olde Leather Bottle Pub and she will be just seventeen years old, until she is eighteen and I breathe a big sigh of relief. Then I will feel relieved. I will give up selling wine and delivering London Bus parts and coffee machines to sports clubs in my big white van around the Green Belt and we will go to Europe together forever. We will say good-bye to Mummy and Daddy and leave frosty England AT LONG FUCKING LAST and get off the ship in sunny Spain and dump half our clothes and shoes on a bench for the tramp at the dock to admire and take home. Then we will freeze in the night in the tent on the hard ground and have trouble getting into lorries. We will hitch-hike to south Portugal where it is warm enough and very new and only a little bit extremely boring and there we will live for a shortish six weeks. I will drive tourists around through mountains and backwards through streams, hurting their backs and drinking local schnapps at stops on the farms in a jeep in the mountains and in rivers and Tanja will work for unusual people in a restaurant. Strange as hell. But our adventure won't be forever as I will get fired for driving too fast and Tanja will get fired for something unknown and she will say "I'm going home to Germany". I will go with her but Gutersloh and her difficult parents will be tiresome as old ice-cream and soon I will depart and return like a hopeless, jobless, penniless fool to London where I will work in bars and deliver sandwiches and visit pubs once more to booze with the local losers. However, I will save a bit of money and travel around Europe again being tragic but happy and learning or not learning a thing. Some places will be lovely and some places will be nasty like Milan until I go to Berlin to visit Bob and the people will be pretty but Bob won't be home so I will go to Scandinavia. But then the money will be gone but Bob will come home to Berlin. His dreadlocks will be gone and I will stay in Lychener Street and meet the neighbours and make puppets and teach English and find some sexy girlfriends and some weird girlfriends and visit parties and take drugs which make me peculiar but have a nice time if I can remember anything the next day. I will get another broken heart and run away to a commune in France in the mountains and eat home made bread and jam for two months and dance and meditate and hold hands around the fire until a witch says I am lazy and I must go back to Berlin for ten years altogether. I will live in some squats and some other places and paint pictures on walls and I will love Krisztina the pastry cook and visit her in Budapest. I will be an artist and people will look at my pictures and laugh or get confused and my stomach will shrink and I will get even more skinny and sleep too much and get a spotty face like a currant bun and feel mostly awful. So I will go to the island near England where Mummy and Daddy live when they retire and I will live with them next to the sea for eighteen lovely lazy boring months and then fly in an aeroplane back to Berlin and build a kind of gallery called strangely enough Wallywoods and meet Sir Thomas and Mr Sudden and approximately one million other characters called Windy and Elvis and Mad Lutta and I will pretend to be an Ugly American until someone called Paradox Paul kidnaps me. We will drink more and smoke even more than before and make awful noises and make CDs nobody wishes to purchase. I will make strange exhibitions and fancy dress parties and sell bits of art nobody wishes to buy and two years later Gallery Wallywoods will turn into Art Pub Wallywoods which will not quite be the death of me until I build the last Wallywoods as big as a very big house on a frozen lake where I wonder if I will get paid for my job one day. I will squat in that very big house when they tell me to go and make a fuss and then I will live in Switzerland and marry a princess called Maya Simone Rebecca Kamala November Malfatti and then Woods and we will build a shop like a castle called Paradox Zurich Projects which will go bankrupt, whatever that means, but we will be happy like children while I build my piano guillotines and dream of great things and we will return to this place where I was born in the snow in a country called Yuk where I feel myself fade but our wonderful wonderful wonderful Matilda Joy Malfatti Woods will join us, yet forever more shall my brain be a tumefaction."