When John Steinbeck tried to describe his grubby Californian coastal town in the opening to Cannery Row he bumps into the limitation of his own words. ‘How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise – the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream – be set down alive?’ Steinbeck wrote.
He might equally have been trying to capture David Tiley – a man who defies labels.
