Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

  Michelle:

  Can I stop you there?

  Me:

  Is it gout?

  Michelle:

  It’s worse.

  Me:

  I’m in love, aren’t I?

  Michelle:

  I am rather sorry to say, yes, you are.

  Two weeks later Kate turned up at my door with a plastic bag containing a toothbrush and her purse, and Parker on a lead. Nothing more. It was all we needed. It was perfect.

  Parker was a rather different beast to Pickle. Whereas Pickle was mercurial and charismatic, Parker was lumbering and distinctly on the spectrum. Added to which her breath was a cross between closing time at Billingsgate and the mother alien in Aliens. If she licked you, you had to wash it off pronto, lest it burn your skin to the bone. But I loved her from the outset.

  We all just loved each other from the outset.

  A Shock to the System

  As you may have gathered by now, I’m not someone who understands halves, let alone how to do things by them. I probably wouldn’t recognize a half if it came up and punched me, though I’d remember the punch itself as a bit, well, half-arsed.

  In 2007 I started experiencing severe stabbing pains in the centre of my chest. I would become dizzy and then occasionally collapse. Once, after a gig in Darlington, I spent half an hour on all fours crawling down a hotel corridor trying to get to my room. In retrospect, this would probably be in the top three distressing half-hours on all fours I’ve had, and, trust me, that’s a very long list. There would be days when I’d find it hard even to walk up a single flight of stairs without my head getting foggy and my legs giving way.

  One morning after a really acute attack, I was panicked enough to head down to the A&E department of my local hospital. I was admitted to triage pretty sharpish and was duly weighed and measured before sitting down for a blood pressure test. There was a hiss of air as the armband deflated, whereupon the nurse looked quizzical.

  Nurse:

  Are you all right?

  Me:

  Well, no. Not really. That’s why, you know, I’ve come here, you know, to a hospital …

  Nurse:

  Mmm … [A long and confused silence] Are you an Olympic athlete by any chance?

  I am going to pause for a brief while, just to illustrate how ludicrous that question was.

  I loved school, mainly because I loved wearing a uniform. In uniform we were all the same, Stepford Kids in navy-blue pleats and nylon shirts. In uniform you couldn’t tell who was cool, or whose parents had money, or who was hitting puberty first or last. But in gym kit – that was another story. There is nowhere to hide in an Aertex shirt and granny pants. Trust me, I tried. In PE we were exposed and vulnerable. And I hated it.

  I knew from an early age I wasn’t cut out for sport. I successfully managed the carb loading, so I was 50 per cent of the way there, but the bit after that, the running and jumping bit, just bored the tits off me. Added to which, I’m lazy. Oh, and weak.

  My first memory of running was as a six-year-old at Catholic school playing kiss chase. I was finally collared under the vast statue of the Virgin Mary. Yes, my very first kiss took place under the baleful eye of the mother of Christ. Pathologize that, O therapists of London town …

  In my teens, at a school sports day, I ran the 100 metres. I didn’t finish it. You don’t see that very often, do you – a runner stopping before the finishing line in a sprint race. Mind you, there were mitigating circumstances. Midway, I was overtaken by my friend Karen Flanders, who was under five feet tall and heavily asthmatic, and the sight of her wheezing next to and then past me made me wee a little. That’s another reason I’m no good at physical activity – I have a singularly lame pelvic floor, and it’s liable to give way, like old plasterboard, at any given minute.

  Much of my antipathy towards sport stems from a genuine failure to understand the point of it. After all, time outside kicking things and throwing things takes you away from a song on the piano or a good book or film. Don’t get me wrong – if you throw a ball at me, I will catch it. It’s a reflex. I respond a little like Robert De Niro’s character in Awakenings. Job done. But if you throw the ball and I have to run for it – well, as far as I’m concerned that means you’ve not thrown the ball accurately enough, so why should I reward your incompetence with a return? You’re effectively asking me to patronize you, and hey, little lady, I won’t do it.

  I am as boundaried with all physical activities. I have rules. I will swim a little in the sea, as long as there is no one within five miles of the beach to catch sight of me in my cossie. As a result I have not swum since December 1976. As for swimming baths, forget it.

  ‘Hi there, stranger! Mind if I join you in that Petri dish of piss and bacteria? And hey, why don’t I strip down to my bra and pants so you can see what I look like with virtually no clothes on!’

  I did once go horse riding, but I actually like my vagina so refused to do it again. However, if you’re unhappy with your pudenda, why not hop on a pony and batter your genitals into a totally new shape! Plus, the relentless pounding motion provides its own anaesthesia so you won’t feel a thing until it’s too late!

  My dad had been sporty in his youth – although (and this is crucial) not talented and sporty. He expended an awful lot of energy, but to no real avail. He was goalkeeper for his local football team as a lad, and his claim to fame was that he dislocated every single one of his fingers while diving to make a save. If only one of those precious fingers had touched the actual ball, he could have been a legend.

  In his forties he took up golf because it was an excellent way, as he put it, ‘to get away from all you women’. I remembered this, and so in my thirties, when keen to ‘get away from all you women’ I gave it a go. MISTAKE. It turns out that the golf course is like a living-history documentary, where men dress up in diamond-patterned jumpers and adopt the gender posturings of the 1970s.

  I have set foot on links twice and both times have resulted in explosive arguments. The second time, I was following a friend around a course when some twonk in plus fours made a ‘hilarious’ comment about us having a hole in one, or some such. Needless to say, the red mist came down and I ended up chasing him in a golf buggy until I was overcome with laughter. It’s amazing how quickly a high-tensile situation can be defused by a ride in an open-sided electric vehicle.

  Throughout most of my adolescence until my mid-thirties, I evaluated all sporting activities according to how likely it was I’d be able to smoke while doing them. I first took up smoking when I was sixteen and was immediately in love with it. It remains one of the very few things I was ever any good at. For this reason, I was a huge fan of rounders. I would always be picked last for the team, and would march delightedly to the outfield. While everyone else slugged away with ball and bat in the centre of things, I’d spark up a Marlboro and find out what base my fellow fielders had got to at the weekend.

  I am digressing. You get my point. I don’t do sport. And so, with that in mind, let’s return to the A&E department and the triage nurse’s question.

  Nurse:

  Are you an Olympic athlete by any chance?

  I slowly survey my sprawling midriff.

  Me:

  No. No, I’m not.

  Nurse:

  You’re sure you’re not in training?

  Me:

 
Absolutely sure.

  Nurse:

  Gosh. Well, in that case you’re technically dead. I’m flummoxed. I’ve never seen a reading like that. Let me get someone …

  Less than five minutes later I was wheeled into the resuscitation unit. By now I felt woozy and confused. Next to me lay a fifty-something man out for the count, getting his pinstriped suit cut from his body with a pair of surgical shears. There was the squirt of gel as lubricant was applied to the paddles followed by the mandatory holler of ‘Stand clear!’

  The patient spasmed for a second, then was still, then suddenly sat bolt upright.

  ‘I’M AN ESTATE AGENT!’ he bellowed, before collapsing back down again.

  The estate agent was deemed drunk and given some IV fluids, but he remained an estate agent, for which, sadly, there is still no cure. I, however, proved a somewhat more mysterious case and so was kept in overnight for observation.

  Kate arrived to find me rigged up to drips and nebulizers and lay in the bed with me until the staff finally chucked her out at around midnight.

  The next morning when she phoned, I immediately knew something was wrong. I pushed her and pushed her to tell me what was up, and she finally gave way. She had come home from the hospital, put the dogs to bed and was just getting ready to go to sleep herself when there was an almighty crash at the front window. She ran to the front of the flat to find a man in motorbike leathers and full-face visor smashing his way through the lounge. His two accomplices were revving their scooters outside.

  Kate didn’t get to the end of the story before I was unclipping my oxygen monitors and peeling the electrodes from my chest. It didn’t matter what the doctors wanted or what tests they had planned, I was going home. I arrived to find shards of window glass littering the flat. The dogs were still shaking from the ordeal. Kate was doing her best to appear stoical, but I could see the upset beneath.

  I know what it is like to feel unsafe. I have been in a nasty relationship and know what it is like for the ground to feel unpredictable and volatile. All I wanted was to get her away. Perhaps to get me away too. To get us away.

  What might you have done after a burglary? What pragmatic steps might you have taken? Fixed another lock on the door? Joined the Neighbourhood Watch?

  We sold up and moved to a farm in Cornwall.

  The Nuts End Up at the Bottom

  The track to the house was long and unmade. A tombola of gravel churned against the underside of the car as we bumped along. The estate agent had told us to take a look ourselves – it was so far out of town that she couldn’t be bothered to attend the viewing.

  We had only got halfway down the track when I knew I wanted to live there. By the time the house itself came into view, I was phoning to make an offer. It was a futile gesture as that part of the world has never had, and will never have, mobile reception. In fact, in that part of the world it’s widely believed that electricity comes in buckets from the Magic Well.

  The ridge of the slate roof undulated like a wave and the guttering below clung to it for dear life. Inside it stank of damp, the staircase was rotten and most of the downstairs had been pine clad then painted in a deep-orange stain. No matter. I loved it. It wormed its way into my heart and it has never left. As the conveyancing rumbled on, I sat at my desk in London and made plans. Kate would paint, and I would … I would … well, I’d have a vegetable garden and keep chickens. I could make artisanal chutney! Bespoke jams! Unusual pestos!

  It was going to be heaven.

  The day we arrived the entire neighbourhood came to say hello, including several artists, a semi-professional water diviner and a white witch. I’m a fan of white witches. After telling me my aura was pink, she winked and said, ‘You’re in the right place. The South West is like a Christmas stocking – all the nuts end up at the bottom.’ And with those words of wisdom, she turned on her ruby slippers and left.

  That afternoon, as a spectacular sea mist rolled in, we headed to the local shop to get firelighters. On returning we found a brace of partridge nailed to the front door, with a long trail of blood dripping down the paintwork. I remain unclear as to whether it was a neighbour’s way of saying hello or the Cornish mafia’s version of the horse’s head in the bed.

  I had imagined heaven, and indeed it was. It was heaven for exactly four days. Because the week I moved there the work phone started ringing again.

  Music, Maestra, Please

  As a child I believed that piano lessons, like everything else related to education and self-improvement, were to be endured. I knew what suffering was; after all I was brought up a Catholic. I’d read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and so knew how to accept my lot with a silent and resolute dignity. Playing the piano was simply something I ‘should do’ – another unexamined, unemotional achievement on the way to adulthood.

  Once a week, every week, I would get out of the car, leather satchel flapping in the wind, and wander down the path to Mrs Green’s house. The door would open, there would be a gust of boiled cabbage, and a kindly, frail old woman with a single Nanny McPhee tooth would usher me into her lounge. I’d sit at the piano, place my hands in the grooves of yellowed ivory, invent an ever-more elaborate illness which had impeded my practice that week, then inflict an hour’s worth of broken scales, faltering arpeggios and syncopated Mozart on her. Poor, poor Mrs Green.

  I passed all my grades by the time I was fourteen, due, quite frankly, to my teacher’s persistence rather than any real talent on my part. And yet, despite those certificates, I couldn’t do the one thing any decent musician would want to do – play a tune. Outside the rigours of the Associated Board syllabus, the three-minute exercises in technique to which I had become accustomed, I was utterly stuck.

  Then along came Michiyo Onoue, beautiful, bright and talented – just the sort of lovely girl that other girls love to hate. Aged just fifteen, she sat down at the rickety piano at school assembly – a spot previously ruled by me – and played Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu. Perfectly. Musically. It was as if she had exposed me for the faker I was. I never played the piano again. I never played anything again.

  So, it’s 2008. I am in Cornwall. The work phone is ringing.* I am deep in a raised bed, using a tape measure to make sure my borlotti bean seedlings are planted exactly twenty-five centimetres apart. I am nothing if not my father’s daughter.

  The job on offer was a show called Maestro, a music commission for BBC2 in which eight people compete to learn the basics of conducting an orchestra. I said no. My turning down interesting jobs on successful shows will become a motif, as you shall see.† Thankfully, my amazing friend/agent Debi Allen persuaded me to change my mind by repeatedly shouting ‘You’re wrong’ at various hours of the day and night. A few weeks later I left Cornwall early one morning to begin filming.

  I turned up in Britain’s sexiest town – Watford – in what I now, with hindsight, see was a DISGUSTING shirt. There was a crowd assembling outside the concert hall, including my fellow contestants:

  King of the swing, the adorable Peter Snow

  Suave and sophisticated Katie Derham

  Evergreen beauty, actress and cake mogul Jane Asher

  Man-explosion Goldie

  Gentleman and clown extraordinaire Bradley Walsh

  Eternal Hutch David Soul

  Handsome cheese-botherer Alex James

  Inside the hall there was the sound of the orchestra warming up: a wheeze of horns, the bubbling of clarinets, the knife-edge finessing of strings. It’s a sound that immediately heightens my senses. It’s a sound that says, Something amazing is about to happen.

  We were each handed
sheet music for a famous piece. The tunes were universally known, so it wasn’t too onerous for those unfamiliar with scores. Five of us knew how to read music. The remaining three, who happened to be the professional musicians of the group, didn’t. I got Johann Strauss’s waltz, ‘The Blue Danube’ – you know, the one that’s always on when you inadvertently come across Classic FM. It’s a majestic piece of writing, but we’ve oversung and overplayed it into little more than a cliché. Now it sounds like something that might have been dreamed up to advertise a Kia Picanto.

  We barely had a moment to collect our thoughts before we were herded one by one into the concert hall like Brahms to the slaughter. Peter was first. He had been given the tune from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, more commonly known as ‘Music for Lord Sugar to sack people to’. Bradley and I glued our ears to the door to listen. Surely the Human Swingometer would be a genius conductor, yet the noise within sounded less like star-crossed lovers and more like a fight in a squeezebox museum.

  Then it was my turn. There was a suck from the weighted door as I pushed it open, puncturing the seal on the assembled musicians inside. The orchestra. I’d never seen one up close. The nearest I’d been was the darkest reaches of the dress circle in the Fairfield Halls when Arthur Davison’s Family Concerts came to Croydon when I was a kid. I remember an old man standing in a crucifix shape at the head of a bunch of monochromatic dervishes, all blowing, bowing and bashing the hell out of their instruments. It was exhilarating. So exhilarating that the combination of too much excitement and a face-full of ice lollies meant I was fast asleep within the first five minutes.