Where does he get the inspiration for such poetry? – I foolishly ask.
"Basically having sat on a series of mind potties in infancy."
Eh? I don’t quite follow you Ted. Do you mean where one collects experiences?
"No! I`m just saying that the need to do that sort of thing is probably rooted in something unsatisfactory about the infancy."
"I think anybody who actually needs to make art or performance is basically sick and mostly basically unhappy or twisted.
Anyway the kind of performance and the king of art and the kind of music that has anything for me is generally not there just to pleasure people but is obviously a screaming necessity of the people involved to do it. A compulsion, if you like; a need to do that kind of thing."
So is he unhappy?
"Er, I`m not grossly happy all the time. I don`t claim to have a good day every day from start to finish. I mean, have a nice day everyday from start to finish. Can`t claim that, no."
Ted Milton reckons that he performs to pass the time or alternatively because he enjoys it – there must be a difference there somewhere.
"What else could I do, I mean actually I think about it sometimes and realize that probably I`m only capable of doing some kind of permutation of what I`m doing at the moment, because there is nothing else I`d care to do really."
Not so. As well as the spell along with the rest of the mafia at Wimpy, Mr. Milton has also been by turns – deck chair attendant on Brighton beach, bus conductor, and park attendant in Holland Park.
"I had this idea, because actually I used to write a lot of poems about park life. In fact I used a sequence out of one those poems sort of stuck in the middle of a song:
The Little Death.
"In Milton`s academy of je ne sain quoi,
you gotta keep a secret,
I say to the lady that`s walking in the dark.
Grey light falls from propellers and fills all
The park. "