Ramble Book

by Adam Buxton

  ‘The youngest one’s still pretty sweet,’ said Matt, ‘but the 15-year-old is a real prick most of the time now.’

  I laughed, but I thought that was a harsh thing to say, even as a joke. I couldn’t conceive of saying something similar about my wonderful fellows. ‘As long as they always know how much I love them,’ I told myself, ‘I’ll never need to joke about them being pricks, because they never will be.’

  Fast-forward ten years. My eldest son is now 16. I wouldn’t call him a real prick, but he does a very good impression of one from time to time. Though a 16-year-old boy treating his parents as if they were the world’s biggest shit bags is far from uncommon, for a FUN DAD like me, it was still a nasty shock when it began. I spun this guy around in a supermarket trolley, for crying out loud! I provided a PG introduction to the music of Pavement and other seminal indie bands and I told him his drawings and Minecraft constructions were incredible, even though many of them were offensively inept and totally impractical. What more was I supposed to do?

  The other day I asked him to sweep up the kitchen and he stared at me as if I’d just proposed selling him to sex traffickers. Looking in to see how he was doing after a few minutes, I found him long-faced, nearly crying, as he moved the broom over random sections of the floor with one hand, the other hand in his pocket (in the sweeping style of Alanis Morissette). I waited as long as I was able, then, helplessly channelling a million dead dads, I actually said the words: ‘Come on, put your back into it!’

  In moments like these I have to stop myself reminding Grumpy Longface of all those times he promised me he’d never be like this. He was the nine-year-old who thrust his hand into mine and squeezed it gently as we queued for a scary theme-park ride, and when I said, ‘Promise me you’ll never get too cool to hold my hand,’ he promised before adding, ‘I wish I could never grow up.’ I mean, this guy is a total liar.

  The bad sweeper’s brother is now 14. His default household demeanour is such a cliché of teenage truculence that one day I showed him one of Harry Enfield’s ‘Kevin the Teenager’ sketches on YouTube, thinking that seeing his shtick so precisely reproduced might give him a new perspective on it. ‘Ha-ha! Omigod, you’re right, Dad! The way he flies into a sullen rage if he isn’t allowed to do exactly what he wants! The expression of utter boredom and contempt! The pathological selfishness! Yeah, fair play, I am exactly like that sometimes, but you know that basically I love you and Mum and I’m grateful for everything you do for me, don’t you?’

  That I genuinely imagined my 14-year-old son might react that way to a ‘Kevin the Teenager’ sketch is one of the many indications I’ve had over the years that a FUN DAD is not necessarily the same thing as a GOOD DAD. The older the children get, the more I feel like neither.

  My son watched the ‘Kevin the Teenager’ sketch with no readable expression whatsoever. I may as well have been showing him a video about how to file a tax return. When it was over he nodded, then asked if he could leave. ‘Sure,’ I said, feeling bad. ‘Hey, look, I’m sorry I showed you that sketch. I thought it would be funny, but actually it was like I was using YouTube to take the piss out of you, which isn’t what I wanted to do. It’s just that, to me, it doesn’t seem long ago that you enjoyed being with us, and I would make you laugh, and you thought I was great, and then gradually all that went away and now what’s left is me telling you to take out your AirPods when I’m talking to you and that cereal doesn’t count as a healthy meal and that if you create a moat of urine around the base of the toilet, it’s reasonable to expect you to clean it up. Meanwhile, you’ve acquired the ability to see all my shortcomings, and they must be as unattractive to you as the weird pet-shop smell in your room is to me. And before too long you’ll leave home, and though you’ll come round when you need to do some washing or re-up from the cereal stash, after a while you’ll get bored of us nagging you for not looking after yourself properly, especially as me and Mum don’t really look after ourselves properly either, and then you’ll only come round at Christmas and then not even Christmas. I should know, because that’s what I did. Anyway, I thought showing you the “Kevin the Teenager” sketch might give a glimpse of all that for some reason.’

  I didn’t say any of that, obviously. What do you think I am, some kind of self-absorbed, hyper-sensitive child man who worries he’s making all the same mistakes as his own dad except in a more low-brow way?

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  One of the many worries I have about being a parent is that the life of privilege my children enjoy will make them spoilt and obnoxiously entitled. A friend of mine told me about a time he was at a busy play area in London, talking with his young son about the family’s plans for the holidays, only to have the boy shout loudly, ‘Oh, we’re not going to bloody Antigua again, are we?’

  Back when Joe and I were on the radio in 2011, another friend forwarded me an email they’d received from their 13-year-old daughter whose birthday was coming up and who wanted to ensure she got what she wanted. I asked if I could read it out on air and my friend agreed as long as I was careful to keep their daughter anonymous.

  The email read:

  If you want to spend your money wisely I suggest you stick to this list and do NOT buy anything other than the items on it, unless you see something which I may like, in which case, ask me first, otherwise don’t get it at all …

  RIHANNA TICKETS, MUST BE AT LEAST 2, ONE FOR ME AND A FRIEND.

  A NICE DRESS – LIKE MY GREY AMERICAN APPAREL ONE, BUT SLEEVELESS.

  Pretty summery top – NOT a shirt, not a tee, must be pretty, show me what it looks like first.

  Earrings – they must not be my main present though.

  BIKINI – I MUST TRY THESE ON AND RECOMMEND TO YOU, SO BE PATIENT FOR LINKS.

  Pants – from Topshop, VERY small present.

  No piece of jewellery to be my main present as it’s small and I don’t wear jewellery.

  Make-up – Possibly some foundation, but I must recommend colour, brand and type.

  Spare money? Always acceptable.

  For someone to paint my wooden desk for me – however this must be done well and cannot be my only present from this person.

  To be allowed to have the whole cupboards and put the towels etc in the chest of drawers in my room and move that into the spare room. NO books unless requested.

  FISH – MUST INCLUDE TANK, AUTOMATIC WATER CLEANER, 2 PRETTY FISH, AND DECORATIONS FOR INSIDE.

  This is pretty much everything. Stick to this list and I will be very happy in the morning. To make me as happy as possible you will need to buy me at least three of my most desired things (in CAPS).

  When my own teenagers are at their most unreachable and obnoxious, I think about this email and it cheers me up, not because they’re necessarily less spoilt, but because the girl who sent that birthday list is now in her early twenties and is charming, considerate and in no way entitled. And I’m not just saying that because she may read this.

  * * *

  A few days after the ‘Kevin the Teenager’ incident, I’m driving my 14-year-old to his friend’s house. A year ago I would have been in FUN DAD chat mode, making the most of an opportunity for a bit of one-on-one conversation time with one of my children, but a series of chippy exchanges during recent car journeys has encouraged me to scale back my ambitions. Now the AirPods nestled in his ears make it clear that, in case I’m in any doubt, conversation with his father is not top of the agenda.

  Nevertheless, I can’t help asking, ‘What are you listening to?’

  ‘Spotify,’ he sighs, continuing to look out of the window.

  ‘Yes, but I was wondering what actual music you were listening to?’

  ‘Have you heard of Q-Tip?’ he replies.

  ‘Yes, I’m familiar with Q-Tip. He’s very good. Joe always loved A Tribe Called Quest. Put it through the speakers.’ Soon ‘Breathe and Stop’ fills the car and I try to imagine how exciting those sounds must be to him, even with his tr
ying-too-hard-to-be-FUN DAD listening. I try to recall the most thrilling piece of music I heard when I was his age.

  ‘Have you heard “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the MGs?’ He shakes his head and starts tapping at his device. I look over, expecting to see him sexting or trading dank memes, but he’s on Spotify calling up “Green Onions”. Suddenly giddy with the joy of connection, I turn up the volume for the arrival of history’s most exhilaratingly primordial Hammond organ figure.

  When it hits, I resist the temptation to watch his face as he experiences it for the first time. At the first guitar solo he nods and says, ‘It’s really good,’ and I take this as my cue to turn my head and see that he’s trying not to smile.

  ‘He’s trying not to smile!’ I say.

  He smiles.

  CHAPTER 15

  1986

  I started the new term in January 1986 nauseated at the prospect of having to see Lottie every day just a couple of weeks after she’d split up with me. It was my first experience of having to continue sharing a space, albeit a large space, with someone who had broken my heart, and every time I caught sight of her in Yard I felt poleaxed. How could she just be carrying on with her life? It was as if breaking up with me wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

  If we found ourselves in the same room, Lottie would smile and do her best to be friendly, but I acted as though she’d executed my entire family in front of me, then danced around their corpses listening to Shakatak (for younger readers, Shakatak had a number of hits in the 1980s with airy jazz-funk numbers that sounded as if they’d been rejected from a commercial for feminine hygiene products for being too insubstantial – in other words, the kind of music that would not be an appropriate accompaniment for dancing around the corpses of my dead family).

  Dad announced we could no longer afford the splendour of Earl’s Court and Mum found a small terraced house in Clapham, South London. Initially sceptical, Dad perked up when he heard the area was becoming gentrified, but when he went to look round and discovered the gentrification hadn’t yet spread to the area we planned to live in, he perked down again. To him, the house in Clapham was a step backwards, but I thought it was a bijou property with tons of character (my room used to belong to an 11-year-old disco-dancing champion and was covered in Barbie stickers), with excellent transport links to Joe Cornish (two Tube stops away in Stockwell) and convenient access to an up-and-coming metropolitan shopping hub (we were just a few hundred yards from a food, booze and hardware shop that also rented out videos).

  Our new house was also a short walk from Clapham Common, where Lottie lived, and on several occasions on my way home from a night out with friends I’d spend a while sitting on a park bench opposite her place, listening to a compilation of sad songs, staring up at her bedroom window and thinking myself romantic rather than creepy. A couple of times I was joined on my Bench of Sorrow by men who’d identified me as a possible cruising companion, and they paid for their mistake by having to listen to my tale of lost love before making their excuses and rejoining the night. At least I got to talk to someone.

  The thought of talking to my parents about anything complicated or emotional was too embarrassing, and I suspected their advice would be some form of ‘Get over it’, which I didn’t want to hear. I was more in the market for ‘Why don’t you wallow in it for a very long time?’

  Patrick was usually the person I confided in when it came to emotional matters, but he was stuck in his own romantic maelstrom and hadn’t been around so much. I tried pouring at least part of my heart out to Joe and Louis, but their response was to offer some superficial reassurance, then start laughing. They weren’t being callous; it was just unfamiliar territory for our relationship. I’m sure nowadays all teenage boys are sensitive, enlightened and always there for each other’s emotional needs, but for the average 16-year-old male back in 1986, listening to detailed accounts of heartbroken misery was not considered fun or interesting.

  It was around this time I started to become more interested in alcohol.

  With the possible exception of Louis, who was still even fresher faced than we were, most of our gang were able to get served at pubs and off-licences despite being legally underage. Booze, which had been gradually entering the picture for a couple of years, was now fuelling more and more of our get-togethers.

  I should probably say right now that this isn’t building up to me describing how I went completely off the rails and made the decision never to touch another drop. For the time being at least, I still enjoy alcohol, but I don’t drink it for the same reasons or to the same degree that I once did, unless my mum’s coming over or I have to drive the children to school. Back in the sixth form, drinking on weekends made me feel as though I was taking a holiday from the awkward and anxious parts of myself I didn’t like – but that’s why most people start drinking, isn’t it? I don’t recall any of us standing round the Track & Field arcade game at Grafton’s pub in Victoria Street and remarking on the delicate blend of flavours in their pint of Foster’s. I knew it was naughty to be drinking in a pub underage, but that just made me feel like an outlaw and added to the fun. I didn’t think about my health because, other than occasionally having to make myself sick if I got the spins and feeling a bit soft and blurry the morning after a drunken night, I didn’t think it was doing me much harm.

  For the next decade or so I had more or less the same attitude to alcohol that my parents and many of their friends did: that you only had a problem if you regularly started your day with eight cans of Special Brew on a park bench, talking to yourself and trying to punch people, but if the sun was past the yard arm, it was happy hour! And then there was smoking …

  Mum and Dad had both smoked cigarettes but had stopped when I was still little, and by the time I was 15 I was a strident, self-righteous anti-smoker, loudly contemptuous of school friends who had begun to dabble, thinking them dreadful posers.

  Then, on our family trip to China in 1985, I’d been wandering through a street market one day in Guangzhou looking for some edgy souvenirs to take back to school, when next to a display of lock knives a table filled with packets of cigarettes caught my eye. They were beautifully and intricately designed – all brightly coloured dragons and flowers – and in those days there wasn’t a single warning or decaying body part in sight. I bought three packets for the equivalent of 15p and back at school I gave one to Patrick and one to Joe as a kind of joke.

  Then late one night at school, in my single study at the very top of the house, I took a break from Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, crawled onto the low-walled, sloping section of roof outside my window and lit up my first cigarette while listening to ‘The Funeral Party’ by The Cure on my Walkman. It was completely revolting – the cigarette, not The Cure. I was relieved. ‘I guess I’m not a smoker,’ I thought. But the next time we had a weekend boozing session I took the pack with me as a prop, and after a couple of drinks I tried another. This time it wasn’t so bad. In fact, when taken with alcohol the overall effect was rather pleasant and immediately made me feel complex and adult, which of course was the object of the exercise.

  I still have a few minutes of home video shot around this time of a fairly typical Saturday-night excursion beginning with Joe and Louis messing about on a Northern Line train before getting off at Leicester Square and meeting Ben at Burger King for a Coke and a smoke while leafing through Time Out and deciding what film to see. That night it was Jean-Jacques Beineix’s (Bay-nex) epically saucy drama of doomed romance, Betty Blue.

  When the long, energetic sex scene that opens the film was finally over and our teenage trousers were beginning to slacken, most of the people sat in the smoking section (the right-hand side of the auditorium) lit up a cigarette. Everyone laughed because in those days it was common knowledge that after you’d had a bonk you had a ciggie. Though we were all virgins, we got the joke and sparked up, too, feeling very sophisticated for doing so, and after another scene in which Betty and friends
drank Tequila Slammers, we stayed up late into the night at Ben’s place in Kentish Town (his mum was away) and did the same.

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  Part of me wishes I could go back and rescue the 16-year-old Buckles from a time in which so many self-destructive urges were normalised and glamorised, and set him on an altogether more salubrious path. But 16-year-old Buckles, once he’d got over the excitement of finding out time travel was real, would probably tell 50-year-old Buckles to stop being a hypocrite and fuck off back to his own far-from-perfect time and concentrate on doing a decent job with his own children, who as I type are probably busy finding their own ways to do the ‘wrong’ thing, as teenagers always will.

  Can I blame my parents for not giving me better guidance when it came to love and other intoxicants? I’d love to, but they were busy with their own shit, and anyway, as one of my school reports once pointed out, I had the capacity to be ‘sly and underhand’ and was adept at keeping Mum and Dad in the dark when it came to most of my bad behaviour. But maybe I wouldn’t, have been so sneaky if I hadn’t been sent to boarding school. Or if I’d never been born. One way or another, I’m pretty sure it was my parents’ fault.

  * * *

  The Ghost of You Clings

  As far as I was aware, Roxy Music were just old guys in dinner jackets who hung around with beautiful, much younger women at boring-looking parties on the French Riviera (where the DJ would probably be playing Roxy Music). ‘You should listen to the early stuff,’ said Patrick, so when the Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music compilation Street Life was released in 1986, I gave it a go.