When Ronnie Rogers enrolled for a course at the local Mechanics Institute in 1963 he was stunned to see that the chap standing ahead of him in the queue (the son of a naval officer who would make his mark as a Professor of Dilettante Studies at the University of the North Circular) was wearing a pair of jeans. In those days there was much uncertainty about whether turning up at a public institution in jeans was a way of 'taking the piss' or constituted the quintessence of cool. Ronnie was even more taken aback when the cool dude jeans wearer
introduced himself and shook hands. (Even today suit-wearing academics continue to be taken aback when the aristocrat they have invited to give a lecture turns up wearing jeans.)
The zeitgeist of the Mechanics Institute at this time - a heady brew of conservative traditionalism, anarcho-Marxism and self-seeking individualism - helped change Ronnie's life for good. He drifted further away from his prefab estate roots and came close to gravitating towards one of those de-centred and deracinated identities which was the cause of much existential anguish and political floundering during the next decades.
Ronnie signed up for the famous 'Bath PPE' course in politics, economics, and philosophy.
(While the 'Oxbridge PPE' opens doors to The Establishment, the 'Bath PPE' opens doors to Drinking Establishments.) Ronnie then went off to the Arty Little Cinema with the naval officer's son to watch Citizen Kane (1941).
Charles Foster Kane was a power-hungry newspaper tycoon with an American passport and a half-concealed Australian identity. In the film's deathbed scene Kane whispers the word 'Rosebud'. 'Rosebud' was the name of the sled he had been playing with as a young child a few moments before his mother called him into the house. He was then sent away from his home, with the beloved sled being left abandoned in the garden.
When the Arty Little Cinema's screening of Citizen Kane ended Ronnie Rogers wondered whether the bearings that had been bestowed on him by a benevolent slice of history might soon be lost. Perhaps his own prefab had been his 'Rosebud'. This feeling of the dye having been cast was to stay with him for years to come.

Prison was Maxim Gorky's university, and the Arty Little Cinema was Ronnie Roger's. Tucked away in the quiet alley that led to the elite weightlifting gym - Le Club Musculation -it opened on the fortieth anniversary of the first public showing of film in Paris in 1896. Ronnie's driving ambition - he called it "the fierce urgency of now" - was to review films in New York for Vanity Fair. He posted a formidable work of fiction (it was called 'My CV') off to America, signed up for
evening classes at the local technical college, bought a duffle coat, drifted along to jazz nights at the Bell Inn, and sipped glasses of barley water in what 'Tubby' Lard called "that citadel of posers" - the Salamander coffee bar - while leafing through a red and white covered 1962 edition of Yevtushenko's poems.
There was one Yevtuschenko poem which held Ronnie Rogers in its grip for the next seven years. In 'Encounter' the poet describes how he was once sat in the aerodrome cafe in Copenhagen, a place where "everything was brilliance and comfort." Then he saw an old man with a white beard (a beard stained with flecks of blood from hundreds of ' I am a hell of a tough guy' hunting expeditions) plough "a furrow through the crowded room." When he reached the bar the old man with a white beard demanded a Russian vodka. He waved "away soda with a 'No'."
The old man was Ernest Hemingway.
Within two months Ronnie Rogers had grown a beard of his own. He strode into the Bell Inn and demanded a Russian vodka. (but had to make do with a pint of scrumpy instead.) Ronnie had to wait for a vodka until another time, but in that moment he knew he had left his beloved Twiverton behind perhaps for good. He had succumbed to the charms, limited as they were, of the arty wing of the neighbouring city's petty bourgeoisie (semi-intellectual segment.)
Residents on the prefab estate furrowed their brows. They could sense he was losing it.

Swansea born Richard 'Beau' Nash (like the old man a couple of centuries later) was a Welshman who took the sleepy backwater of Bath by storm. This dazzling dandy and talented cultural entrepreneur - Beau Nash, not the old man - became Master of Ceremonies in 1704, and over a span of fifty-eight years used his flair, charm and panache to smooth away a few of the rough edges of this brawling/belching/elbow-them-out-of-your-way cut-throat urban jungle.
When an art-deco cinema opened in the city in 1929 it had to be named the Beau Nash. The doormen it employed might have been expected to try and emulate some of the original Master of Ceremonies' qualities of flair and panache. Au contraire! as the slick salesman in prefab number forty-six would be sure to say. So when they overheard 'Tubby' Lard making a joky aside about having plenty of razor blades ready to slash a few of the cinema's seats led to us all being given an immediate life ban. (Unknown to 'Tubby' a band of razor-slashing Teddy Boys had paid a visit to this very cinema just a few hours before!)
This meant our future cinema visits had to be confined to the Fort Rum Cinema (built in 1934 to double up as an air-hanger), the 1930s' constructed Arty Little Cinema and Willowby Road Cinema based in Goldfield Park. (By a strange coincidence George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) mentions a Willowby Road which was "not definitely slummy, only dingy and depressing.") In April 1942 an air-shelter opposite the Willowby Road Cinema took a direct hit in the Bath Blitz and seventeen people were killed. Twenty years later the cinema was bulldozed down and a supermarket was built on its site. Goldfield Park has been on a downward slide ever since.
After hearing about the air shelter bombing 'Tubby' Lard complained of feeling ill whenever he visited the cinema in Willowby Road. He decided to go on long walks in Pennyquick Woods instead. And it was during one of these Pennyquick Woods walks that 'Tubby' first hit on the Buddhist idea of imagining he was watching the movie of his own life. 'Tubby' has been going for long walks and watching this favourite movie ever since.