Ramble Book

by Adam Buxton

  As the months passed and summer rolled round, it became clear that any fantasies I might have had about the children switching off their screens and going off on countryside adventures with their new best dog friend were not about to materialise. Instead (as usual) it was my wife who ended up doing all the work, and after a while my noninterventionist position, though clearly stated from the outset, became untenably arseholish. So one day I went for a walk up the farm tracks and between the fields behind our house and Rosie came with me.

  The first few walks were not relaxing. Rosie, desperate to run free, would strain at her lead so hard that she would half choke herself, and a few times she nearly escaped by wriggling her small skull out of her collar. We invested in a harness. That worked OK for a while, but one foggy winter afternoon Rosie spotted a piggy muntjac deer across the frosty furrows of a ploughed field and with a couple of frantic contortions she slipped free of the harness and bounded after the deer, a hairy bullet disappearing into the mist with a diminishing volley of ecstatic yips.

  I strode about, shouting for Rosie with increasing urgency as the light went, but when she still hadn’t returned after half an hour I started to entertain worst-case scenarios. These were less about Rosie’s fate and more about my family strongly disliking me and possibly even suspecting that I had deliberately lost her because deep down I was just a no-good Dog Nazi, like my dad.

  Then suddenly there she was, loping towards me out of the gloom with her tongue lolling out and her black fur wet and slick against her whippet frame. She looked like a big black rat with spidery legs, grinning. A moment of sweet relief quickly gave way to anger and, taking hold of her skinny body, I roughly reattached the harness, then stomped home in silence as she padded along behind. ‘It’s enough to have my emotional welfare tethered to a wife and three children,’ I thought hotly. ‘Now I have to worry about a dog-spider who doesn’t give a shit about anything except what she can possibly eat or destroy and expects a scritch-scratch on her tum-tum in the meantime? Well, fuck that.’

  But that was five years ago. As you know, I don’t feel like that any more.

  It started to change when Dad moved in. Feeling that his own life was running out, my father’s former extremism had been tempered by an appreciation for all living creatures. That included dogs, though Rosie was rather wary around Dad, as if she could still detect a faint Nazi whiff. Or maybe it was just the TCP. Either way, it was nice to see a softer version of Dad in Rosie’s presence, as well as being somewhat satisfying to note that her affections were not entirely indiscriminate.

  On particularly stressful days I found myself grateful for the opportunity to take to the farm tracks with Dog. By that time we’d decided that it was safe to let her off the lead, and though she would still disappear now and then, I usually got home to find her scratching at the front door. Out on the walks Rosie would bound about up ahead, looking back occasionally to check where I was, and while she gambolled and harassed the rabbit community, I got into the habit of recording voice notes on my phone.

  I would talk about how things were going with Dad, my wife, the children, Rosie and work, and often I would get home feeling unburdened and more positive. Sometimes I’d record half-formed songs or jingles – things that a few years before I might have used on the 6 Music show and it made me miss those days. Joe was too busy with film projects to do a regular show any more, but it was on my walks with Rosie that I decided I should have a go at doing my own podcast, and get beyond the fear that continuing without Cornballs in that medium would just be too embarrassingly rubbish.

  Instead, I decided I would talk to other people, and without the pressure of keeping things light and funny for live radio I thought the podcast would allow me to talk more seriously and honestly about the various hang-ups, insecurities and fears most of us grapple with every day. I was aware that for some of our old 6 Music listeners this might be less preferable than more reliable silliness, but I didn’t see why the podcast couldn’t accommodate both. Rosie agreed and The Adam Buxton Podcast became a phenomenal success, which in turn led to the commission of this extraordinary book.

  To paraphrase the adage, I want to be the person I think Rosie thinks I am, though there are times when I suspect she may just think I’m the person who takes her for walks and sneaks bits of chicken into her food and picks the goosegrass balls out of her fur in the summer and scrubs the carpet when she pisses on it, in which case I’m already the person she thinks I am. I don’t think she thinks I’m particularly nice, or kind, or clever, but if I sit down on the sofa in the kitchen she jumps up and lays her head on my lap anyway. What’s more, when I’m feeling isolated or full of self-reproach, she holds my gaze with her amber dog eyes for longer than any sane human being would, and if it’s not a meaningful connection, it’s certainly a very skilful imitation of one.

  CHAPTER 17

  1987

  It was easy to see the Beastie Boys as just three chancers from privileged backgrounds who had cynically hijacked the sounds and styles of working-class black hip-hop culture to promote their own frat-boy agenda. That wasn’t true (not entirely), but whatever they were up to, by the spring of 1987 it was working very well.

  The single ‘(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)’ and the album Licensed to Ill had brought the Beasties to the attention of a massive audience, which included people like me, who felt threatened by ‘real’ hip-hop but were happy to buy into Mike D, Ad-Rock and MCA’s whitewashed pantomime of obnoxiousness.

  For me, Joe, Louis and our pals, this opportunity for mindless steam off-letting was perfectly timed. We were taking our A levels, after which the plan seemed to be to leave school and piss about for a while before getting back to making good on our parents’ investment in our education. Joe was planning to go to film school and Louis had applied to Oxford. I knew they’d both get in and their lives would work out the way they wanted, and I envied them. I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do. Apart from hanging out with Joe, the only thing I really enjoyed was drawing.

  The one time I asked one of my tutors about art school as an option, it was explained to me that unless you were freakishly talented and got into the Slade or the Royal Academy, art school was a waste of time, somewhere thickos and slackers ended up if they couldn’t get into proper university.

  ‘Screw you and your conformist establishment sausage factory, Mr Tutor! Maybe I’ll never be a great artist, but at least I’ll be following my passion for doing passable drawings of robots and pop stars!’ I didn’t shout, having not jumped onto a table with a wild look in my eyes.

  Breathtaking realism in this still life/self-portrait from the 15-year-old A. Buxton.

  Instead, I glumly filled out the UCCA form, applied to do English at a selection of universities I was never going to get into, and tried to ignore the chasm of uncertainty that lay on the other side of the summer by fighting for my right to party.

  Meanwhile the Beastie Boys had become tabloid fodder in the UK, with British journalists taking their shtick at face value and doing their best to spread moral panic whenever possible. Although I think moral panics should be treated with suspicion and would never advocate artistic censorship, I also have to acknowledge that the Beastie Boys’ influence on me as a teenage man was almost completely negative. Their record gave me licence not only to ill, but to act on occasion like a massive prick when hanging with my homeboys. Apart from promoting a lame kind of ironic misogyny and homophobia, the Beasties were seemingly never without a six-pack of Budweiser, and that played a part in encouraging me to think of excessive beer consumption as entirely harmless man fun.

  Throughout 1987 we’d often head out to a small hill in St James’s Park and ‘shotgun’ cans of Budweiser, something we’d learned how to do from the film The Sure Thing, which starred another notorious corrupter of youth, John Cusack. ‘Shotgunning brewskis’ entailed holding the beer can upside down, punching a hole big enough for a finger to fit through at the side of the
can near the base with a sharp object, covering the hole with your mouth, then raising the can upright and pulling the tab. Then you had to glug as fast as possible as the whole beer shot down your throat in a matter of seconds. This was followed by belching, can crushing, possibly some high-fiving and a sense that you were living life to its fullest.

  There would have been shotgunning on the last night of the February half-term in 1987 after Louis, Joe, Zac, our American-exchange friend Chad and I went to see David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly at the Odeon Marble Arch.

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  Unlike Alien, which frightened me in a fun way, the fear I got watching The Fly was altogether more disturbing, a nauseating dread of disease, disfigurement and physical decay, albeit leavened by Jeff Goldblum’s top-notch handwork. The part I found most upsetting was the scene in the bathroom when Goldblum’s scientist character Seth Brundle, having accidentally fused his DNA with that of a housefly after stepping into a teleporter together, was studying the progress of his physical transformation from Sexy Jeff to hideous Brundlefly with mounting alarm. There were groans of revulsion sprinkled with a few chuckles in the audience when he squeezed the tip of a finger and it squirted at the mirror like a popped zit, but as Jeff peeled away a rotten fingernail with a breathless wince, the mood became more sombre. And that was before the ear came off.

  As I watched The Fly for the first time, the bathroom disintegration scene evoked the alarming indignities of going through puberty and the constant worry that my body was changing in ways that were not ‘normal’, let alone aesthetically pleasing.

  Watching The Fly again more recently, the scene played out as an allegory for the physical process of ageing and the moments – increasingly frequent after my dad’s death – when I catch sight of myself in the bathroom mirror and it’s breathless wince time. Only the relatively slow pace of the deterioration prevents full-flailing panic, but essentially, I’m Brundlefly, except that instead of sharing the teleporter with a fly, I shared it, as we all do, with that stupid old bastard Father Time.

  Sub-Ramble

  Despite being Brundlefly, I’ve found the benefits of being older outweigh the disadvantages, and though my vanity is not deserting me at the same pace as my cowardly hair, it’s not the source of frequent discomfort it would have been in 1987. So that’s nice.

  * * *

  We emerged from the Odeon Marble Arch somewhat frazzled.

  Chad announced that his grandad had a place about a 10-minute walk from the cinema and he was away. Good one, Chad’s grandad! We stayed up all night at Chad’s grandad’s pad, listening to Licensed to Ill and drinking irresponsibly. Chad told us he’d had sex in the flat the night before with an actual woman!

  They’d needed some lubrication, but all Chad could find was his grandad’s Badedas, which unsurprisingly had led to copious pine-fresh genital foam production.

  It was the most grown-up story I’d heard up to that point. We put on ‘She’s Crafty’ one more time to celebrate and raided the ashtray to see if there were any smokable butts.

  The next morning we staggered out of Chad’s grandad’s pad to get the Tube into school. Before taking the stairs down to Bond Street station, Louis asked us to wait a second, then, with commuters hurrying past, he leaned slightly over the pavement curb and nonchalantly let free an unbroken stream of puke that became known as ‘The Column of Vomit’ when recalled thereafter. Then he looked up, clapped his hands once and pointed the way down to the Tube. I admit that I was impressed. It took us all about three days to fully recover.

  So yes, I’m adding the Beastie Boys and John Cusack to my list of people to blame for turning me into a little alcoholic dick, but Bruce Robinson probably played a part, too.

  During the Easter break in 1987 Patrick and I went to see Robinson’s film Withnail and I, a tale about two out-of-work actors trying to escape the squalor of their lives in 1960s London by drinking booze, taking drugs and going for a weekend in the country. Keen for something to take our minds off our respective teenage troubles and unprepared for how funny the film was going to be, Patrick and I got a bit hysterical as we watched, though Patrick was more expressive.

  By the time an extremely inebriated Withnail was trying to use a washing-up liquid bottle filled with child’s piss to prove to the police he wasn’t guilty of drink driving, Patrick had started rocking back and forth in his cinema seat until the whole row shook. The look of vacant, childlike confusion on Richard E. Grant’s face when Withnail is busted using the pee-pee bottle then caused Patrick to flop right off his seat and begin literally rolling in the aisle (or, indeed, ROFL-ing).

  Bruce Robinson presumably trusted that the audience for Withnail and I would understand that the film wasn’t intended as a set of guidelines for a healthy and happy life, but for one 17-year-old short, hairy, overemotional audience member the idea of chemically blocking out an indifferent world with your best friend at your side was very appealing. Sure, the hangovers, paranoia and general sense of decay didn’t look fun, but overall Withnail and I confirmed my growing suspicion that existence was more entertaining once you’d drifted into the arena of the un-sober.

  When Paul McGann’s Marwood character finally cleans up his act and breaks away from Withnail’s disastrous, self-pitying orbit, I was thinking, ‘No! Don’t leave! Stay with your friend and keep boozing. That was the fun part.’

  Bada Bada Bada Sa-wing Bada!

  My anxieties about joining the adult world and being left behind by my friends were further tweaked by Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

  There’s an odd scene halfway through the film, out of step with the goofiness elsewhere, when Ferris, Sloane and Cameron visit the Art Institute of Chicago and tag along with a group of much younger children who are there on a school trip, holding hands with them as they’re marched through the gallery by their teacher. The three friends break away to take in the art at their own pace as what sounds like library music from an advert for life insurance plays on the soundtrack (it’s actually an instrumental cover of The Smiths’ ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ by The Dream Academy).

  Ferris and Sloane kiss in front of some stained glass by Chagall while Cameron reckons with Georges Seurat’s pointillist banger A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It’s the one with all the people hanging out on a sunny day by the banks of the River Seine in the late 19th century. Top hats and long sleeves for the men, umbrellas and big-booty dresses for the women. Everyone together, everyone alone, see?

  Cameron fixates on the little girl near the centre of the painting. She’s the only figure looking directly at the viewer, making a connection the adults around her have ceased to make. Cameron hovers somewhere in between: no longer a child being looked after, not yet an adult in charge of his own life, but an interloper able to see the adult world for what it is: a place as superficial and absurd as the hand signals of stock-exchange workers, fathers who buy expensive cars then never drive them and dead-eyed teachers calling the roll like malfunctioning automatons: ‘Bueller … Bueller … Bueller … Bueller …’

  I could certainly relate to that sense of antechamber blues and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to go through into that next big hall from which the sound of serious conversations reverberated, along with the noise of business being done, football crowds, fashion shows, political rallies and hospitals.

  And yet Ferris uses all his guile to convince that Eighties movie staple, the snooty maître d’, that he’s Abe Froman, the sausage king of Chicago, just so he can gain access to the stuffy-looking adult playground of the Chez Luis restaurant. I mean, make up your mind. Is it superficial and absurd or do you love it?

  I wasn’t crazy about Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on first viewing. I thought Ferris was a bit of a smarmy git and his girlfriend Sloane was exactly the kind of person who would never have given me the time of day in real life, but in Ferris’s friendship with the less adventurous Cameron I saw para
llels to my relationship with Joe.

  One summery evening during our last term, Cornballs, who had just passed his driving test, turned up at school in his parents’ maroon Volvo 340 and we went for a drive round the West End listening to an Orange Juice compilation. ‘Can you hear me calling from afar, / As you drive uptown in his daddy’s car?’ said one of the songs.

  ‘This is a very appropriate song,’ I said.

  ‘I picked it specially,’ smiled Joe. Did that mean he had picked it specially or not?

  It was exciting to be driving around with no adults in the car, but it was also disconcerting. Joe, six months older than me, seemed like the cockier, cleverer Ferris to my more timid Cameron quite often, and with him at the wheel of an actual car the contrast was more than usually pronounced.

  ‘What do you think we’ll be doing in ten years?’ I said at one point.

  ‘Well, I’m going to be making movies,’ replied Joe.

  ‘Yeah, but do you think we’ll still be friends?’ I asked, hoping the question didn’t sound as heavily freighted as it was.

  ‘I don’t know, man. Probably not,’ said Joe as we rounded Trafalgar Square and headed back towards Westminster.

  Party Time

  As the end of our time at Westminster loomed and the days grew longer and hotter, I was getting used to a strange new grown-up feeling: colossal anticlimax. The supposedly life-ending A-level exams I’d dreaded for so long finally arrived and people from our year drifted into school when they had a paper to sit, buggered off again afterwards and life just carried on. Gradually all the familiar groups I used to bounce between in Yard dwindled and disappeared.