Dom's Rambles

One of the most enduring memories of my regular sojourns to London during 1986 and the early part of 1987 is of the above loon, one Mr Stanley Green, parading up and down Oxford Street (read more about him here). One evening my then girlfriend and I found ourselves sat opposite Mr Green on a tube train whereupon she pointed out – and between fits of badly suppressed giggling - that he was the spitting image of my old man.
The paternal side of my family always was shrouded in mystery - perhaps this is why. Perhaps Stanley Green was my long lost uncle.
Closer to home, and on a more contemporary level, there are a frightening number of people I’ve known who have gone barking mad over the years. Hardly a month goes by without me bumping into a former member of Lincoln's boho set who I haven't seen for years and who turns out to be either suffering from, or getting over, a bout of some catastrophic mental illness or other.
This is not a coincidence and rather begs a certain question – a question which has been at the centre of one of the great drunken pub debates of our time: