My Best Mate

This is my best friend, Stephen. We started school together, aged 4. We played in our first band together. We have never lost touch in more than half a century. And now, all these years later, we are writing and recording music together again. Stephen lives in the south of Spain, and I used his house as Roddy's villa at the end of The Chessmen. Ironically, the imaginary studio I created at the back of his mountainside villa has actually become a reality, and it is where we are now recording. It's almost spooky how many things I have created in fiction turn into reality in life.

In the days when I used to storyline "Take The High Road", stories I wrote had an uncanny knack of becoming reality - a storyline about a character falling off a ladder and breaking his arm and that very thing happening to the actor a few weeks later; a character who had a heart attack... yes, unfortunately the actor suffered one not long after. It got to the point when actors would knock on my door and ask not to be "killed off" if they wanted out of the series. And I remember one wag asking if I would write a story where his character won the lottery.