A collection of stories covering the last half century. Stories about running away as a 15-year old to Paris, financed by my maternal grandma, when I fell in love for the first time, inheriting from her on my 21st which took me straight into the gay end of the Swinging Sixties in London. The south of France, before the fish-and-chips shops opened there, the then still-undiscovered island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean. Florence, Venice and Rome, before they put up turnstiles, you now have to pass through. How the Sixties turned into the sleazy Seventies, without us -in our coke haze- noticing. Stories about passion and love, which would last forever, but didn't. A buttercup-yellow 1954 Bentley R type. Travels over four continents, discovering South America, Asia and Australia and most importantly my life-long quest for the one-and-only. It took long enough, but I got there. Over all these years I became friends and lovers with beautiful conmen, models, rockstars and musicians; photographers and fashion-leaders -now household names, but then just starting out- who may choose now to forget they were there in the 60's, 70's and 80;s, testing the boundaries of their own and Society's tolerance. And I -surprise, surprise- lived to tell some tales. This collection of stories which cover events, fun and tragedy from the early swinging sixties and the sleazy seventies until now, rightly carries the title 'Diving into the Void', mainly because writing these stories over the last few years involved a dive into the void for me, apart from the fact that I wanted to start with a very short story I wrote, in 2009, after a very dear, courageous, gentle, dear friend of mine died. The title, by the way, is not mine; it's her title of the elegy she wrote in the last days of her life which was read at her funeral by her courageous son Lorenzo, who I have adored ever since, if I did not adore him and his father, her husband, already before. The painting on the cover, which has the same title, I painted in the weeks after her death. Most changes and events in my life were dives into the void, my paintings, my drawings, my novels, my watercolours and of course my photo-series were all a blind dive into the unknown, know-it-all that I am. So were my romantic involvements, some great, some disastrous. But I lived. So, dear reader, please read on, as there was a lot of fun, love and madness happening in the last 50 years and I call myself lucky to have survived it all, up to a certain point. Bangkok, July 2011 (this is volume 1 of my Collections of Stories)