Ramble Book

by Adam Buxton

  Then I thought, ‘No, fuck that,’ and said, ‘Daddy, I am doing my best to keep you out of hospital and look after you here, as you said you wanted. You asked me not to let you wake up in the night again, which is why you need to take the sleeping pill. Now you call me a bully?’

  A short pause, then he mumbled, ‘I take it all back.’

  ‘Hmmm. OK,’ I said. ‘Well, see you tomorrow.’

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  Why am I telling you all this stuff? I suppose a selfish impulse to unburden myself is part of it, but people sometimes tell me they find it helpful when I discuss this kind of thing on the podcast, so I thought I shouldn’t shy away from it here. Dad felt this sort of talk cheapened moments that were meant to be kept private or sacred. Maybe he was right.

  Maybe I’ll regret writing about all this one day. But for the time being all I can do is try to connect.

  * * *

  Dad didn’t say much the day he died. I was sitting by his bed, still hoping he might rally sufficiently to deliver an inspiring farewell speech, have a crack at the meaning of life or just say, ‘I thought your song “Sausages” was very good.’ Instead, he drifted in and out of lucidity, occasionally gripping my hand softly or raising his rheumy eyes to meet mine, but obstinately refusing to get cinematic.

  By the time the district nurses arrived to hook up an automatic syringe drive for his painkillers, he was no longer gripping my hand, there was a thousand-yard stare on him and his breathing sounded like a fucked coffee percolator.

  ‘He should calm down a bit when the painkillers take effect,’ said one of the nurses as they left, but half an hour passed and his chest was rattling so much it was freaking me out. I went into the living room and to distract myself I started playing a game on my phone, a Tetris variant based on numbers that I often played before bed while listening to a podcast to wind my brain down.

  I jabbed away for a minute or two, then thought, ‘Shit! I wouldn’t want my dad to die while I was playing a phone game.’ I went back in to find his breathing had become more jerky. I held his hand, called out to him, but he didn’t register me. Now there were long pauses between sharp intakes of breath. ‘Hey, Daddy! Can you hear me? I’m right here.’ Then his face contorted and a single tear ran down his left cheek. Then he stopped breathing.

  ‘Hey, Daddy!’ I said for several minutes. ‘Where are you? Are you there? Where are you?’ Worth a try.

  Earlier that day, just when I thought he had zoned out completely, Dad slowly reached out his arm, took my hand and brought it to his face. ‘He probably wants me to wipe his mouth or scratch his ear or something,’ I thought, but to my surprise he gave my hand a kiss. ‘Oh shit!’ I thought. ‘This is it. Cinematic closure time!’

  It didn’t look as though he was going to die at that very moment, so I asked if he’d like me to read to him and looked over at the shelves filled with all the books that had made the trip from Newhaven earlier in the year. Dad gave me a trembling thumbs up. ‘How about this one?’ I said, picking out Master and Commander from a row filled with all the volumes in the same series by Patrick O’Brian. I remembered that Dad had once tried reading Master and Commander to me when I was very young, but I thought it was boring. I preferred the Mister Men books, which must have been painful for Dad, like one of my children turning their nose up at David Bowie only to get excited about Justin Bieber. I held up Master and Commander for Dad and he gave me another thumbs up.

  As soon as I began to read, the moment felt over-burdened with significance. I tried my best to give the audiobook performance of a lifetime, but within a few lines I stumbled on some nautical jargon, and when I mispronounced the name ‘Maturin’ as ‘Maturing’, Dad waved his hand emphatically for me to stop. I apologised and asked if he wanted me to continue. Feebly, he reached across and pushed the book out of my hands. I’d failed the audition for my own Moving Moment with Dying Dad scene, but, I reminded myself, he’d kissed my hand. That wasn’t nothing.

  It’s supposed to be therapeutic to write a letter to a dead loved one, so here goes:

  Dear Daddy,

  How are you? I am fine. What’s it like being dead (assuming it’s anything at all)? I bet it’s relaxing, like the feeling you get after cancelling a load of appointments and doing all your admin. Are there a lot of people playing phone games there?

  Or maybe the afterlife is a perfect moment made eternal, like the Nexus in Star Trek: Generations (except without Whoopi Goldberg with a small coffee table on her head, trying to convince you to leave). If it’s like the Nexus, I imagine you’re sat on a picnic blanket outside a little log cabin on a snowy hillside somewhere in the Tyrol. There’s a bottle of Moët chilling in the snow and you’re with that ballet dancer who broke your heart before you met Mum. You remember? The one you would mention more often than you probably ought to have done.

  Things are OK in Norfolk. Every few weeks Rosie and I walk over to visit your grave and make sure it’s all in order. We don’t want BaaadDad fans to cover it with graffiti, love locks, stickers, friendship bracelets and other trinkets, the way they did with Jim Morrison. None so far, you’ll be relieved to hear. At Christmas I pour some Courvoisier down for you, but Rosie usually licks it up. It was good to see you and Rosie getting along in those final months, cos when we were little you used to be a real Dog Nazi, remember?

  Sometimes I chat to your headstone and Rosie looks at me as if to say, ‘You know he’s dead and ghosts don’t exist, don’t you?’ You certainly haven’t sent me any ghostly signs since you’ve been gone, so I think she’s probably right. If you were a ghost, I imagine you’d possess my laptop and start leaving comments about my bad grammar and striking through sentences you didn’t like. And pretty much the whole of this last chapter would be out. I’d have to upgrade to the latest operating system to get rid of you, which I don’t want to do because I’m worried it would affect the functionality of too many applications I rely on for BUG and the podcast.

  I know we didn’t have that much of a relationship in the last 20 years, but I wanted you to know, I thought you were the best when I was growing up. Funny and nice and clever and important. Remember when we went to New York and you said you’d forgotten to lock the safe where you kept all your expensive cameras, fancy bottles of wine and other priceless treasure?You decided to fly back to London on Concorde, lock the safe, then get the next Concorde back to New York the same day. We all thought that was pretty cool at the time. Now it seems to be the work of a madman, but it contributed to that feeling we had as children that as long as you were around, everything could be sorted and everything would be OK.

  What a great feeling that was. I’m lucky to have had it, and I was always grateful for it, even when I eventually found out it wasn’t real and you were as flawed as the rest of us. Even when you seemed disappointed by how everything turned out, even when you used to wear very short shorts and sit on your camping stool with your legs apart, so that one of your saggy old nuts popped out. Even then.

  I do miss that feeling. I sometimes feel frightened since you left. Frightened I’m doing a bad job of bringing up my children, frightened I’m too weak-willed to be a better person and frightened of deteriorating and dying fretful. But that’s just sometimes. Most of the time I’m all-round amazing – at least, that’s what Rosie thinks. For example, I’ve been cooking some vegan and vegetarian meals. They’re much nicer than I thought they would be, although it has meant I feel justified eating more cakes and biscuits. Also, I read a lot more books nowadays, though you’d probably think they were shit. There’s other amazing stuff, but that’s all that comes to mind just now.

  Perhaps when I’m lying in my deathbed, I’ll get one of my children to read to me, the way I did with you, remember? I won’t ask them to read Master and Commander, though. They can read from Ramble Book by Adam Buxton. I hear it’s great for deathbeds.

  Anyway, thanks, Daddy. I love you. Bye.

  Adam

  PHOTO S
ECTION

  Dad giving it maximum smoulder aged 18 as a newly commissioned subaltern in the Royal Artillery, 1942.

  Dad took this picture of me, aged two, standing on a wall overlooking the Grand Canyon in 1971. Mum still can’t look at it.

  The Buxton family c. 1981. Left to right: David, Nigel (worried that the photographer is aiming too low), Adam, Valerie and Clare.

  Dad took this one of me walking into Yard at Westminster in 1984. I was too embarrassed to stop and pose so I’m a bit blurry, and then the picture was accidentally double-exposed with a sunset. Sorry.

  Joe, A. Buckles and Mark Sainsbury (in the background), catching up on Cahiers du Cinéma in a Paris photo booth, 1988.

  ‘Yup, we’re holding one of the most important films of the twentieth century.’ Adam and Joe with Twitch, 1986.

  Halloween party at Joe’s house, 1986. Left to right: Louis Theroux as Hat Ghost; Joe Cornish as Count Gas Mask; Mark Sainsbury as Video Nasty (with VHS tape and bandages); Ben Walden said he was Freddy Krueger, and we never got to the bottom of what Guy Gadney was supposed to be. I was taking the picture dressed as a cool vampire, I think. There were no other guests.

  A page from my 1987 diary, featuring a newspaper picture from one of the ‘Toff Balls’ fashionable at the time, a drawing of my history teacher warning me that I was going to screw up my exams (which I did) and me and Joe posing in the photo booth at St James’s Park Tube station.

  Me and school friend Zac Sandler buried beneath some of his favourite records and comics. Taken by Joe after seeing Do the Right Thing in 1989.

  Behind the bar, London, 1989. If only I still had that shirt.

  Aged 25 in my Clapham bedroom/second-hand tech dungeon after leaving art school in 1994. I’m saying, ‘Mum! Can you not take pictures of me while I’m making experimental video pieces for Takeover TV?’

  Me, Joe and Louis in 1995, aged around 26, enjoying our traditional Christmas Eve get-together at my parents’ place in Clapham.

  Me and Cornballs in 1999 (aged 30) doing press for the third series of The Adam and Joe Show.

  My Teletubbies-themed TX card for series two of The Adam and Joe Show in 1997.

  Me and Dad in the front room in Clapham doing a photoshoot for The Times newspaper’s Relative Values feature in 1998. Dad was always a good sport in these situations.

  ‘You’re very beautiful.’ BaaadDad at Tribal Gathering festival in 1997.

  Louis Theroux and BaaadDad in the moshpit for a Foo Fighters show at V97.

  Me and Rosie. Speaking in tongues. Norfolk, 2017.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Hey! Welcome back. You made it. Well done.

  I’ve no idea why I didn’t write a book years ago. It’s so easy. Especially this kind of book. You just remember some funny things and a few sad things and write them down, then the editor (Jack Fogg) comes to your house after you’ve missed a few deadlines and says, ‘These lists of your favourite albums and films are great, but maybe you could flesh them out a bit?’ And that’s it.

  Nevertheless, there were times during the process of putting this book together when I started to wonder if it would join my failed TV pilots in the ‘Didn’t Quite Happen’ bin. In those moments my special personality recipe of low self-esteem and high self-regard may have made me challenging to work with, be friends with, be related to and live with. I just checked with my wife and she’s saying ‘Nooo!’ in a rather sarcastic and unbecoming fashion.

  Anyway, in the hope of maintaining some of my relationships a while longer, I should probably thank some people who have helped with this book, directly or indirectly.

  Here we go …

  Thanks to my mum, my brother and sister, who let me say what I wanted here, though I’m sure they could all tell you some very different stories about Dad, and about what I was like to grow up with. Thanks as well to Aunty Jessica, my Californian cousins and my in-laws Harry, Sophy, Marilyn and Edward.

  Thanks to my kind and generous friends, especially those who pop up in this book one way or another: Joe, Annabel, Mark, Zivi, Louis, Nancy, Dan, Garth, Woz, Lottie, Jo, Chris, Patrick, Zac, Ben W., Alison, Guy, Chad, Tom H., Ben H., Miriam, Bill Muggs, Jonathan, Jane, Emily, Edgar, Simon, Maureen and every member of The Best Band in the World.

  Thanks to those who have helped me make an actual living from my ludicrous mouthings over the years: Chiggy, Emily, Becca and all at PBJ, Séamus, Matt, Anneka and all at Acast, Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato, Peter Grimsdale, Stephanie Calman, James Stirling, all at Sue Terry, Louise Stephens, David Knight and the BUG team.

  Thanks to everyone at HarperCollins, especially Holly Kyte for her insightful copy-editing, Isabel Prodger for her publicity skills, Orlando Mowbray for his mastery of marketing (sorry I came off Twitter just before the book came out, Orlando), Fionnuala Barrett for audio-book production, Terence Caven for book layout and Simeon Greenaway for cover design.

  Special thanks to my editor Jack Fogg, who turned the torture into genuine fun.

  Thanks to Luke Drozd for his magnificent posters and book plates.

  Thanks to Helen Green for creating the artwork and the illustrations for this book with typical speed and professionalism. Helen draws the way I always wished I could draw. She draws Bowie the way I feel about him.

  Thanks to the people that keep my fortunate life on the rails: Janice, Charlotte, Becca, Jonathan, Felicity and Ross. Thanks to great teachers everywhere, especially Mr Kendrick, Mr Field, Ms Miller, Mr Stewart and Mr Benenson. Thanks to doctors and nurses, especially in the NHS. Thanks to smiley train conductors, rubbish collectors, good cops, silly comedians, scientists working to save the planet … shit, this list is getting out of hand. OK, I’ll wrap it up.

  I hope that, despite my carping, my gratitude to my dad has come across. And Zavid, too, of course. Also buried inside this book is my love for my children, Rosie and my wife, without whom none of this would mean anything. Sitting around and laughing with you all is the happiest I get.

  Right, that’s enough of that.

  I sometimes read books like this and think, ‘How could they have possibly remembered all that stuff? Are they just making it up?’ In my case I used a combination of diaries, videos and voice notes to recall specific details, though of course I probably got some things wrong or misremembered in the course of trying to make sense of certain incidents. The thing that proved almost magically effective when it came to unlocking many of the memories in here was music. I found that if I looked back at the UK charts for any given period in the Eighties, the songs would bring back a flood of precise details about what I was doing at the time.

  For playlists containing a lot of the music mentioned in this book visit Spotify and search for therealadambuxton.

  There are also videos and other bits and pieces on my website: adam-buxton.co.uk and on Joe’s Instagram: mrjoecornish.

  OK, now I really am going. Thanks. Bye.

  Adam Buxton, March 2020

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