Pete: “You should call a friend to talk about this. One of those chatty gays. They’d love something like this.”
Me: “What loveable quirks do you notice about me?”
Pete, despairingly, after a minute: “ . . . you eat a lot of yogurt.”
Me: “I eat a lot of yogurt?”
Pete: “You eat a lot of yogurt. I could call you ‘Yog.’ ”
Me, indignant: “Yog? You can’t call me Yog—that’s George Michael’s nickname. You can’t give me a nickname that’s already being used by a celebrity. You might as well call me ‘Brangelina,’ or ‘The Pelvis.’ You’re not really trying here, are you?”
Pete: “I’m so very unhappy.”
Me: “What about ‘Puffin’? It is my favorite bird—a small, round, gothic bird with a large nose. Plus it punningly acknowledges my stoner years, proving you knew me right back in the day, when I still thought there were eight days in the week, because of the Beatles. Puffin.”
Pete: “Puffin! That is good. That is very, very good. Yes. You are Puffin to me now, forever. The matter is settled to mutual satisfaction. I am wholly joyous. Do I sound sarcastic?”
Me, happily: “No. I am happy now. Bear and Puffin. That is us. We are Bear and Puffin. Goodnight, Bear.”
Pete: “Goodnight.”
Small, angry silence.
Me, eventually: “Puffin.”
Pete: “What?”
Me: “Goodnight, Puffin. Say, ‘Goodnight, Puffin.’ ”
Pete: “Goodnight, Puffin. You demented fucking bitch.”
As you can see, my domestic life now is one of joyous fulfilment. Should you ask me how this has come to be, I would quote the words of one of The Muppet Show’s greatest acts, Marvin Suggs & The Muppaphone. As Suggs plays “Witch Doctor” on the Muppaphone—a living xylophone made of Muppets, which he repeatedly bashes with small hammers, eliciting screams—he talks about the public reaction to his act.
“People ask me—what is your secret with the Muppaphone?” he says, in his strangulated, high-pitched voice. “And I say—MUTUAL LOVE AND RESPECT.”
For me and Pete, it has been much the same. And so we sail on in the deep blue bliss of marriage. But it has not always been like this. I came from a radically different background. In many, many ways, my early life resembles Angela’s Ashes, or A Child Called It. This searing account of what it was like to reach adulthood having never had a cup of tea amply illustrates the deep mental scars I still bare, bravely, today.
Note how the piece dates from a time when one still paid for the Evening Standard, and how accurate my assessment of its future proved to be. I am like some kind of media scrying bowl.
CAFFEINE—LIFEBLOOD OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
As I write this, I’m sipping at a lovely cup of tea. Obviously, in many ways, this is the least print-worthy sentence of the week. A brew is not news. Everyone drinks tea. Of course they do.
Except, until recently, me.
Yes—until last summer, I had had three cups of coffee, and maybe ten cups of tea, in my life. My whole life. I know. I know. Reading my words must be like reading the musings of a Moon Man from Mars. But what can I say—hot drinks never really happened for me. I guess I never met the right person to introduce me to tea. Or perhaps I never really felt confident enough in myself to believe anyone would want to make tea for me.
Last summer, however, we had a new kitchen put in, and as the kitchen is also where I work, I had to decamp for five weeks to the coffee shops of Crouch End with my laptop. Being sensitive, I noticed that it was the custom of these places not to ask for “a big cup of tap water, please,” but to drink their expensively vended tea, or coffee, instead. Within two weeks, I had gone from a caffeine virgin to someone who could easily knock back four lattes and as many teas in an afternoon, and I tell you this: it made me see everything in a whole new light.
Friends, we live in a caffeine world. We think in a caffeine way and we live caffeine lives. Our problems are the problems of people addled with popular hot beverages, and our thoughts are half our own, half the product of our cups. So many aspects of modern life I’d never understood before—things that had completely baffled me about society—suddenly became obvious, once I’d spent a month off my face on tea.
Take, for instance, headaches. Until I became a tea addict, I presumed that people saying “I have a headache” was simply a euphemism for wanting to opt out of an impending activity—like my father saying “I can’t—I’ve got a bone in my leg,” when I was little, and wanted him to play hide and seek.
Enter the world of caffeine, however, and you live in a world where your skull suddenly becomes very weak and porous, into which vexing low-level pain can seep at any minute.
Likewise, insomnia. Usually, my average span between “lights off” and dreaming of Doctor Who was under five minutes. Late at night after a busy day = going to sleep. It seemed quite basic. Now in the post-tea world, however, any cup after 4 PM provokes an unwelcome wakefulness in the center of the brain, present long after the non-caffeinated would be woozily stumbling to bed. When found in conjunction with caffeine problem three—low-level anxiety and restlessness—and what Thom Yorke of Radiohead once so accurately described as the “unborn chicken voices in my head” can cluck on until 1 or 2 AM. Just from tea! I tell you, it’s put me right off the idea of crack.
The main thing I’ve noticed, however, is how unreasonable, self-absorbed and permanently outraged caffeine has made me. The bottom line is, hot drinks turn people into pigs. Simply walking along with a take-out coffee in your hand turns you into a belligerent fantasist. You really feel like you’re a vital cast member of Sex and the City or The West Wing—when, of course, really, you’re just a schmoo with a brew heading for H&M. Knowing all this doesn’t make me any more pleasant. In the last few months, I have started arguing with people in my head.
Instance: yesterday, at Oxford Circus, I wanted to buy an Evening Standard, but only had coins. As I hovered to the side, counting my change, I had an absolutely apoplectic row with the newspaper man— but wholly and solely in my mind.
“What you giving me all this brahn money for?” he asked me, in his cockney way, in my imagination. “I’ve got a wallet—not a sack.”
“This is exactly why The Standard is going out of business!” I shouted back, as interior monologue. “This is fifty brown pennies more than I’m paying for The Metro, or the London Paper. I work for a newspaper! I know which way the wind’s blowing! It’ll all be online in three years’ time, treacle, and you’ll be in a cardboard box being wee’d on by foxes! Screw you, man. SCREW YOU!”
This furious spat was cut short by, in the actual physical world, me giving the Evening Standard man 50p in loose change, and him saying “Cheers, love,” and giving me my paper.
I had had three lattes before 11 AM.
There is a plus side to caffeine, of course. I’ve lost over ten pounds, can write a blog entry in nine minutes flat, and feel a previously undiscovered connection with the world, simply by being able to say “I could murder a brew. Tea, anyone?” to a room full of nodding people. Indeed, I would say that this feeling of finally being like everyone else is the most attractive aspect of having become a caffeine drinker. Irritable, tired, anxious and sporadically unable to see out of one eye due to migraine, I finally feel normal.
Having three columns a week in a national newspaper is a bit like having three children: you’re exhausted and grumpy all the time, can’t lose that final fifteen pounds, and you don’t understand why they can’t just crack on with it on their own and get out of your FACE.
Haha, not really! I don’t mean that! What I really mean is that it’s hard to decide which one you love the best.
The TV review allows me to have a good old natter about what we all saw on telly that week—one of the great pleasures of living on a small island that still gen
erally tends to watch one of four channels. The magazine column, meanwhile, allows me the kind of monologue that one might deliver, in a slightly slurred yet impassioned way, to a minicab driver who is doing their best to ignore you, and turn up “Alone” by Heart on Magic FM at 3 AM.
“The thing about my hupsand, right, is that his never, never gived me a nickname, razzer plazzer mazzer fazzer TWO CHILDREN AND SEVENTEEN STITCHES!!! I’ve gotten a little sick on the seatbelt but it’s fine don’t worry I’ve got a hanky, I’m just WIPING it away. Don’t look.”
Sometimes, however, despite trying to be impartial, I think that my Friday column on celebrities—the innovatively named “Celebrity Watch”—might be my favorite. It’s essentially a weekly stand-up routine about the contents of OK! magazine. It is the alternative career as a comedian I could have forged, had I not had such grave “sweating” issues that my damp underarms are visible from over fifty feet away within seconds of talking in front of more than nine people. Really, I’m just like Lenny Bruce, but shy.
This “Celebrity Watch” was devoted entirely to the outright honking clown-car insanity of the memorial service for the late Michael Jackson—an extraordinary event which, for all who saw it, will live on in their unhappy, gibbering minds forever. For those who haven’t read “Celebrity Watch” before—a massive demographic that includes my mother and at least one senior management figure at The Times, who refers to it as “that number thing”—it takes the format of a Top Ten countdown, simply because it requires far less structure and skill to write something as a Top Ten countdown. And I refer to myself throughout in the third person as “CW”—short for “Celebrity Watch”—because I like giving the impression of being a mysterious, powerful celebrity-judging organization ratifying all this stuff in a scientific manner, rather than the reality: someone in their bathrobe typing away while eating endless amounts of Miniature Celebrations. Snickers are my preference. The nuts are like a healthy protein.
CELEBRITY WATCH SPECIAL: MICHAEL JACKSON’S MEMORIAL
Ten. UP. The Jackson Four. It was the first suggestion that not only was this going to be an unusual memorial service, but one so gigantic, random and barking that the viewer at home would often have to touch their legs, say, or look at a kettle—saying, “These are the normal things. I must remember what the normal things are.”
Michael Jackson’s $15,000 golden casket was carried into the arena, on the shoulders of Jackson’s brothers, as a choir sang—perhaps ominously, in view of the open-casket funeral tradition—“We Will See the King.” Jackson’s brothers, you couldn’t help but note, were all wearing a single, white, rhinestone-studded glove—Jackson’s signature accessory-motif, aside from a full-face mask, and/or enraged chimp. To put this into context, it’s a bit like if all the pallbearers at Elvis’s funeral had all been wearing big plastic quiffs and doing that wobbly thing Elvis did with his legs. Amazing.
Nine. DOWN. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. In the ultimate “Good luck with that!” moment of 2009 so far, Congresswoman Lee took it upon herself to be the one who would mention both Jackson’s $22m out-of-court settlement to Jordy Chandler, and 2005’s seven counts of child sexual abuse, and two counts of administering an intoxicating agent in order to commit the felony. But in a good way.
“As a representative of Congress, we understand the constitution. We know that people are innocent until proved otherwise!” Lee said, trying to sort out that whole “persistent pedophile rumors” thing in a couple of breezy sentences, in front of Jackson’s children.
Personally, CW would have played it marginally safer, and done a nice reading of “Stop All the Clocks” instead.
Eight. UP. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Magic Johnson—helpfully described to we Limey viewers by Paul Gambacini as “playing for the Lakers, the Manchester United of America”—appeared to walk up to the podium with two agendas: 1) To respectfully honor the life and times of the late Michael Jackson. 2) To try and mention Kentucky Fried Chicken in a positive manner as many times as possible.
“I went to Michael’s house—and the chef brought Michael out a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. I was like Michael—you have Kentucky Fried Chicken! That was the greatest moment of my life . . . we had such a great time, sitting on the floor, eating that bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. God bless you Michael!”
Seven. DOWN. P. Diddy. P. Diddy—who some of we more old-fashioned types may insist on still referring to as “Puff Daddy,” his original, stupid made-up name—also attended the memorial. Being a man of the twenty-first century, Diddy [@iamdiddy] keeps Twitter up to date with his movements at all times. The entry for the day before the funeral read, “I haven’t been to sleep yet! LOL. I’m still at the after-party from last night! No sign of quitting!” There was a quick tone change with the subsequent two Tweets: “I’m at the memorial. RIP Michael Jackson,” and “Just left the funeral. So sad!! RIP MJ!!!!” The next day, however, it was very much back business as usual, with the—presumably lunch-inspired—“I love sweet tarts!!!”
Interesting Diddy point: both “sweet tarts,” and the burial of the King of Pop, warranted three exclamation marks.
Six. DOWN. Brooke Shields. Giving a weeping testimonial that appeared to go on for nearly three days, Shields’s aim was to try and convey to the audience what the man she had known was like. Unfortunately, the man she had known was Michael Jackson, and every anecdote she had sounded like a cross between the kind of dream you have when you’ve got chickenpox, and something she was making up in order to get him into even more trouble.
A case in point was the story of how, the night before Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding, she and Jackson broke into Taylor’s room as she slept, to look at the wedding dress, as Michael—a thirty-three-year-old black, straight man—was too excited to wait until the morning. The next day, at the wedding, Shields and Jackson “pretended to be the mother and father of [Elizabeth Taylor]. It sounds weird,” Shields concluded, looking rather wild-eyed, “but we made it real!”
You think? Like CW has said once before today—good luck with that!
Five. UP. Diana Ross and Elizabeth Taylor. Both the pivotal gay icons in Jackson’s life were absent from the memorial service—preferring to issue personal statements on the day instead.
Taylor commented that she did not want to be part of the “Whoopla”—an important coining of a new word, given that mankind did not previously have a term for “Memorial service where the corpse’s daughter will ‘close the show’ by being herded onto a stage, weeping, while her uncles comfort her by stroking her with rhinestone gloves.”
Ross, meanwhile, had different fish to fry. Following the unexpected revelation that Jackson had wanted custody of his children to go to her—inspiring thoughts of some screwball Motown version of Baby Boom, with Ross as Diane Keaton—it seemed as if Ross’s message made her position on the matter very clear.
“I will be here [in her own home, not at the funeral, very far away from everything, particularly the children] whenever they need me [to lend them $20s, or give them advice on floor-length, fish-tail cocktail dresses and backcombing]” Ross clarified.
Four. UP. Paul Gambaccini and Trevor Nelson. As the BBC’s commentators for the memorial service, Gambo and Nelson were put in a slightly invidious position—given that what they were commenting on did, more often than not, prompt the simple, straight-forward reaction, “Holy moly, have I really just seen an ‘In Memoriam’ photo-montage where a shot of Michael Jackson shaking hands with Nelson Mandela was immediately followed by a picture of Michael Jackson shaking hands with Kermit the Frog?”
In the event, Gambaccini and Nelson managed quite well—even filling the half-hour technical difficulties with this peerless piece of speculation on which celebrity would cry first: “Either Jennifer Hudson [who recently had three members of her family murdered by her estranged brother-in-law], or Usher. He’s very young,” Gambaccini said, w
isely.
Three. DOWN. Usher. Well, Paul Gambacini turned out to be a veritable Nostradamus of celebrity grief: Usher did cry during his version of “Gone Too Soon.” Usher—who, ironically, was not cast as an usher during the event—appeared to have some manner of odd, compulsive moment during his number: leaving the stage, he walked down to Jackson’s coffin, and touched the side of it briefly, before, in some manner of trance, he kind of jiggled the lid a bit. Almost as if he were checking the quality of the hinges.
Ironically, Celebrity Watch can imagine Usher using “Jiggle the Lid” as the title of his next album. It has a tone of urban suggestiveness.
Two. UP. The Mirror. In a week where the entire media went, “Right, he’s dead now, and none of his relatives have the time, money or inclination left to sue us, so we can just print absolutely anything that comes into our minds. Any old crazy s**t. Chimps, sperm, drugs, ghosts. The lot. Woot!”—The Mirror won a close-fought battle for “Most wholly unnecessary and ancillary bullet-point.”
Relaying how Jackson was to be buried without his brain, due to the requirements of the autopsy, The Mirror spared no detail—including, with no little relish, the phrase, “The brain will be placed in a plastic bucket.”
At the end, on a separate line, the report concluded: “Michael Jackson starred in the 1978 musical The Wiz as the Scarecrow—playing the character without a brain.”
One. DOWN. Shaheen Jafargholi. If Michael Jackson died “of” anything, it was—and I think we’re all in agreement here—a combination of being treated as a cross between a sideshow and a demi-god for possessing such unearthly talent; working an adult career from the age of six onwards; fetishishing his own ruined childhood to the point where it drove him insane, and then having that insanity in a media spotlight so remorseless, there are entire wars that have been given less coverage than the changing colors of Michael Jackson’s skin.
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