The room Kim rented in a Muswell Hill flat was tiny. It was filled to bursting point with books and videos and magazines; stills from strange movies were Blu-Tacked to the walls. There was a bed, a small table with an electric typewriter (his typewriter had a name, but that’s Kim’s story, not mine), a chair, a television, a VCR.

Kim could watch, and not just watch but enjoy, the most awful movies. He had and doubtless still has a pretty photographic memory: plots and actors and trivia, high culture and low. He knows everything.

Kim was a great reviewer, and a fine critic. (Reviewers tell you whether or not a film’s the kind of thing you’d like if you like that kind of thing. Critics, good ones anyway, tell you what you’ve seen.) He seemed to spend much of his life (when he wasn’t writing, or watching old videos) in film screenings.

I started going to screenings too. I was very hungry, very young, and was amazed that if I wrote something about the films, or even meant to write something about them one day, I could see films without paying—and they gave you chicken legs and sausages and glasses of white wine. And because I was going to screenings with Kim, I wound up accumulating a couple of film columns.

All through the eighties we wrote together, mostly humor. Quite a lot of it was even funny. Once—and only once—we tried to write straight fiction together, three hundred words each on a turnabout basis. It was a story about a vampire girl picking someone up in a nightclub. It was terrible, and we never attempted it again.

Not like that, anyway.

Together, and later, as part of the somewhat amorphous entity known as the Peace and Love Corporation we wrote many hundreds of articles for dozens of publications. We told the world who Jack the Ripper really was. We blew the whistle on computer dating. We wrote what was perhaps the definitive guide to becoming a Mad Scientist (and Ruling the World).

It’s more fun to look back on the things we didn’t do: I remember plotting a computer game, the object of which was to find out who you were before your head exploded. We did it on spec, for a man who claimed to have invented the Swear Box. (It was a box that sat on your desk and said fuck or shit when you pressed a button.)

We plotted four cheap movies for a cheap movie director who wanted plots for cheap films. Kim later turned some of the plots into novels. They were probably better novels than they would have been low-budget movies.

Of course, by that time, we were part of the aforementioned Peace and Love Corporation.

The Peace and Love Corporation, which was never a corporation, although it was a bank account, and had nothing really to do with either Peace or Love, although I think on the whole we were pretty much in favor of both of them, was formed, more or less, during a party. We weren’t at the party—it was being held in Kim’s flat by his landlord. But we—Kim, Stefan Jaworczyn, Eugene Byrne and myself—were on sleeping bags in Kim’s room, listening to the party going on down the hall. Kim had the bed.