Links
to the files of which follow the introduction below:–
All six pieces included here were written in
1976 at a time when I was turning from poetry to prose and felt the need to try
my hand at fiction, or something approximating it, to see how I fared. – Fortunately, I quickly abandoned the tendency
towards plays characterizi;ng the opening two pieces for both short and,
subsequently, long prose, but I didn't immediately abandon the alternating
dialogue form of the ensuing two pieces, since I was to write several lengthy
philosophical dialogues in the late 'seventies and early
'eighties. So even if this was a short-lived experiment,
it was a harbinger of deeper and, as far as I am concerned, better things to
come – certainly as regards the last two pieces which, though simplistic, are
properly fictional. – John O'Loughlin.
John O'Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway, the Republic
of Ireland,
of Irish- and British-born parents in 1952. Following a parental split partly due to his mother's Aldershot origins (her father, a Presbyterian from Donegal, had served in the British Army),
he was brought to England by his mother and grandmother (who with the death of her Aldershot-based husband had initially returned to Ireland after a lengthy marital absence from Athenry) in the mid-50s and, having had the benefit of private tuition from a Catholic priest, subsequently attended St. Joseph's and St. George's RC schools in Aldershot, Hants, and, with an enforced change of
denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been sent to a children's home
by his mother upon the death and repatriation of his ethnically-protective grandmother, he went on to attend first Barrow Hedges Primary School in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, and then Carshalton High School for Boys. Upon leaving the latter in pre-GCSE era 1970 with an
assortment of CSEs
(Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCEs
(General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved to London and went on, via two short-lived
jobs, to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford
Square, where, with some prior experience himself of having sat and passed (with merit) an ABRSM Gd.4 piano exam, he eventually became responsible for booking examination venues.
After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, where he had enrolled to do English and History A Levels, he returned to his former job in the West End
but, due to a combination of personal factors, left the Associated Board in 1976 and began to pursue a literary vocation which,
despite a brief spell as a computer and office-skills tutor at Hornsey Management Agency within the Hornsey YMCA in the late '80s and
early '90s, he has steadfastly continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds (1976), Cross-Purposes (1979), An Interview Reviewed (1979), Thwarted Ambitions(1980), and Sublimated Relations (1981). Since the mid-80s JOhn O'Loughlin has dedicated himself almost exclusively to
philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned several titles of a
philosophical nature, including Devil and
God (1985–6), Towards
the Supernoumenon(1987), Elemental Spectra (1988–9), Philosophical Truth (1991–2) and,
more recently, The Best
of All Possible Worlds (2008), The Centre of Truth
(2009), Insane but not Mad (2011), and Philosophic Flights of Poetic Fancy (2012).
