Hilary Pym was male. However, this wasn’t immediately obvious to the casual observer.

I inherited him when I became Deputy Editor of Disc - not the journal of excruciating spinal misalignments but Melody Maker’s little sister, a lightweight weekly newspaper devoted to the frothier end of the 1970s musical continuum.

I was neither confident nor experienced enough to demand the right of veto over staff appointments so I had to play the hand I was dealt.

This included a hideous trio of vixens, hard-bitten old pros who were more groupies than journalists and who shared a fascination for celebrity foible and excess.

Then there was Miles Cross-Mincing, an engaging queen who once took me along to a Chelsea hotel to watch him flirt with ‘Uncle Lou’ (Reed), Andy Warhol’s famous poison gnome. 

I soon grew bored and began to fiddle with a cheap Spanish guitar, for which I had my wrist slapped firmly by the gnome. I was silently indignant. I was a better guitarist than he was, which is probably why he got so ratty.

Hilary was dark and short with short, dark hair. Undeniably on the androgynous side of masculine and beefy.

On Day 2 of my Deputy Editorship, he requested an interview. “The thing is,” (he shifted awkwardly from one small and, it must be said, rather feminine foot to the other), “every week I get whole sacks of mail address to Ms Hilary Pym. And…and…well, I want you to give me a picture by-line.” 

“I’m afraid that’s contrary to… er…editorial policy,” I blustered. It was, but he looked so forlorn, I caved in.

I called in a favour from a freelance photographer who’d bought an estate in Ireland with what we’d paid him over the previous year.  “Take your time,” I briefed him. “Experiment. Remember, he’s got to look manly. In fact, butch to the point of scary. I don’t want sensitive, I don’t want reflective. I want the jutting chin and the steely eye. Got it?”

After a day’s shoot in the docklands of East London, I spent hours sorting through endless contact sheets of grainy black and white shots of Hilary squinting and grimacing on derelict cranes and rusty fire escapes. 

In all but two of these shots, he looked as if he’d been cast as the lead in a controversial production by the Royal Court.  Of Mary Poppins.

With a heavy heart I laid out his moody likeness next to his column.  He seemed satisfied enough and I assumed the issue had been successfully resolved. But a week later, he requested another interview.  He looked decidedly sheepish as he closed my office door carefully behind him. “About the picture by-line,” he said. “Can we drop it?”

That week, he explained, the volume of mail addressed to Ms. Hilary Pym had doubled.

I didn’t stay long at Disc. The Vixens made my life intolerable. They’d deduced, correctly, that I was completely unqualified for the job. Scepticism soon blossomed into scorn and then blatant insubordination. I was faced with a choice: I could strap my typewriter around my neck and jump out of my 5th floor window into Fleet Street, or I could resign.

I stayed in touch with Hilary Pym. In fact, before long, I found myself living with him.

Shirani Maria Assunta Perera left me. I spent the summer in the garden on a diet of valium and Breaker malt liquor, waiting for her to come home.

Unbeknown to me, she’d just moved up two flats to live with our neighbour, a removals contractor who’d expelled his young wife to make room for mine.

Shirani Maria Assunta Perera must have gazed down often from her window and seen me comatose on the lawn amidst a sea of empty pill packets. It’s a good job I was too pissed to glimpse her through the net curtains or I would have beaten her brains out with a garden gnome.

One evening, my friend Robbie Perry came round to cheer me up. The trouble was, Robby was a depressive with a failed career in music, a disabled child and a marriage on the rocks. I offered him a valium as he sobbed into his Breaker, then we swayed down Streatham Hill to the Indian restaurant where he fainted face-first in his biryani.

When it became too cold to sleep on the lawn, I sold the flat and moved in to Hilary’s place in Tooting.

It was a purpose-built apartment – the purpose, apparently, being to provide affordable accommodation for The Borrowers.

Between us we possessed three items of furniture: an upright piano, my bed (which was an inch longer than my room) and an ironing board that doubled as a buffet bar.

Hilary lived on a diet of All Bran which arrived daily by post from Bournemouth. Nobody had told his mother you could buy it in London.

He’d set up a regular order with the milkman, but hadn’t grasped the principle of returning the empties. By the time it dawned on him, he was too embarrassed to start. So every time I opened a cupboard, I was battered half to death by an avalanche of milk bottles.

We existed in this fashion, like a couple of Penitent monks, until Hilary found a girlfriend. She was Chinese, he told me, and ‘really beautiful’.

In fact she was from Singapore and pug ugly. In the three months I held down the role of gooseberry, I never once saw her smile.

Some months after I’d fled, Hilary called me. “Andy, you know how you always said I should leave Disc because I was going nowhere and I deserved something with real prospects?  Well, I’ve finally gone and done it, and I thought you should be the first to know.”

“That’s great, Hilary,” I replied. “So what are you doing now?”

He paused a moment to ensure the proper dramatic impact.

“I’m Chief Reporter on Amateur Organist magazine.”