Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

  I was happy in Cornwall. I learned how to build a drystone wall (well, I watched Kate do it); I was twitching (‘Look, there’s a magpie! And another! And another!’), and I was growing heritage seed vegetables (I had some of the most bulbous ‘Chioggia’ in West Penwith). Then I’d leave my rural idyll, get on a train, and six hours later find myself spewed forth into the madness and filth of Paddington. At home I was quiet and still. At work I was manic and displaced. Slowly I became happy in neither state. The grass was always greener. I lived on the road, between here and there, in perpetual motion. Slowly my mind became as fragmented and split as my time.

  After Maestro I started doing piecemeal bits of television. I dressed as an elf for an insert on Countryfile. I contributed to various talking-heads shows, I Love The Eighties, Britain’s Best Wasps, My Top Ten Favourite Lists – that sort of thing. Then came the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Never Mind the Full Stops, a BBC4 panel show about grammar. That’s right. Grammar. You know – colons, parentheses, ellipsis – the natural springboard for comedic badinage.

  The show was hosted by Julian Fellowes before he was Mr Downton. Back then he was just Nice Posh Man in Salmon-Coloured Chinos. Julian was utterly convinced that I’d been one of the presenters on Loose Women. No matter how many times I tried to disabuse him of this notion, he resolutely clung to it.

  Julian:

  And on the panel to my right we have …

  Me:

  Sue.

  Julian:

  Yes! Hello, Sue.

  Me:

  Hello.

  Julian:

  Now you did that show at lunchtime …

  Me:

  Light Lunch.

  Julian:

  Loose Women, that’s right. There were a few of you – around a table. You’d talk about repatriating ethnic minorities and menstruation, that sort of thing …

  Me:

  You’re thinking of Jane McDonald …

  Julian:

  No, definitely you. Anyway, lovely to have you on the show. Can you start by telling us what a demonstrative pronoun is?

  Five minutes later.

  Julian:

  That’s right, David – one point to your team! The answer was indeed epanadiplosis. Now Sue, over to you … Now I don’t suppose you get many of these on Loose Women, but what’s a dangling modifier?

  While taping one of these episodes I encountered the televisual legend that is Daisy Goodwin. Daisy has a Silicon Valley mainframe for a brain and an extraordinary capacity for fusing the clever and the populist. Some of the greatest shows of the last twenty years have had her manicured hands on them. A few months later she recommended me for a one-off gastronomic history documentary called Edwardian Supersize Me.

  My co-presenter was the gorgeous choleric writer and columnist Giles Coren. I loved him from the get-go. I’d already had the honour of working with his dad, Alan, and his sister, Victoria, and meeting him merely proved there’s no such thing as a mediocre Coren. There was a weird chemistry between me and Giles – an immediate closeness that sometimes veered towards the sibling and occasionally towards the sexual. I do believe we may have snogged under a table at some point during the seventeenth century. If so, then I was a very lucky Hanoverian.

  The general gist of Edwardian Supersizers was that we dressed up in period costume and ate what posh people would eat in the early 1900s. Every day for ten days I scoffed over 5,000 calories. For breakfast there were mutton chops, devilled kidneys and eggs, followed by platters of game birds – widgeon, teal and snipe. For lunch I would stagger under the weight of roast beef and towering puddings. At dinner there would be endless bottles of plonk and the ferric tang of duck cooked in its own blood. I ate all of this while encased in an unyielding whalebone corset. My waist maintained its rigid twenty-one inches, but all that food had to go somewhere. By the end of each night a vast uni-tit of lard would form around my décolletage, on which I could rest my head as I became more and more hammered.

  Supersizers ended up running for a couple of series, with a few spin-off shows thereafter. What started off as a history documentary soon became a drinking competition with a few Wiki facts thrown in. Giles truly channelled George IV and passed out in a grate after getting hitched to my Caroline of Brunswick. I collapsed in a French chateau dressed as Marie Antoinette and had to be dragged down three flights of stairs by my ankles. Giles pissed in a bucket by his chair during a Samuel Pepys feast, and I fell face down into the lap of a respected historian and stayed there, snoring, while he told me about coffee-drinking in the Restoration period.

  That show remains one of my favourite things, extemporaneous, unpredictable and new. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the medical. For such a free-form show, it felt odd to have this heavy-handed formatting bookend. We were required to have blood tests at the beginning and end of every week to see whether or not our metabolisms had been affected by the onslaught of booze and offal we had subjected them to.

  In Victorian week the show had more of a female slant. This was the era that saw the rise of anorexia, drug addiction (laudanum) and the early stirrings of feminism, after all. Giles was delighted that his arm was not required for pin-cushion services (he is prick-averse), so I gamely rolled up my sleeves alone. My blood was duly taken; I was whisked to west London and spent a week in a farthingale, retching over a sheep’s head and drunkenly snogging a bunch of elderly contributors who’d only turned up to talk about turkey production in nineteenth-century Norfolk.

  As Giles wrapped for the week, lucky bastard, I got sent to the clinic to discover how my body chemistry had shifted over the last seven days. The doctor, formerly upbeat and open, had seemed shifty during filming. We completed the shoot whereupon she asked if she could have a word in private. It turned out one of my readings was off. Like off-the-chart off. Prolactin. Bloody prolactin. You make it when you’re stressed. If you’re really stressed you can show readings of up to 23 or so. If you’re pregnant (the hormone is produced during pregnancy) it can get up to nearly 400.

  My reading was 3200.

  I explained that I wasn’t stressed. I explained that I wasn’t pregnant.

  Then she explained I had a brain tumour.

  The littlest things freak me out – arriving late for a meeting, not having the right pen to hand, being mistaken for a Loose Women presenter. But when life gets properly hardcore, I have the strangest ability to relax. Maybe I enjoy the fact that finally, finally something is out of my control.

  And so I was perfectly calm as I walked into the deserted nuclear medicine unit at my local hospital. Calm while they scanned my bones. Calmer still as the magnets clanged and clanked around my ears as my body lay strapped to a table. I was even calm, six weeks later, when the time came for me to see the consultant to get my results.

  The best way to tell a woman she can’t have children

  Consultant:

  Hi. Are you Susan?

  Me:

  Yes.

  Consultant:

  It’s lovely to meet you. I’m Mr X and I’m the endocrinology consultant here. Now, do step inside and have a seat. OK, well, I imagine you have an awful lot of questions, and I’m happy to answer all of them as fully and comprehensively as I can. Let me tell you what we do know first of all. You OK?

 
Me:

  Yes. Yes. It’s just a little weird.

  Consultant:

  Of course. Hospitals are deeply scary places if you’re not familiar with them. Try not to worry because you’re in very safe hands. Now we have the results of your blood tests and scans. You have a micro-prolactinoma, which is a tumour of your pituitary gland. Now the great news is that it is benign, and that it won’t require surgery. The only issues that arise from this tumour are that you are more susceptible to osteoporosis and that it causes fertility issues …

  Fade to black.

  NOT the best way to tell a woman she can’t have children

  Consultant:

  Hi, right. Let’s have a look at your scans. So, there’s your pituitary there, right in the middle of your head. And see that lump? That’s a tumour. Don’t need to take it out; we can keep an eye on it by looking at your bloods and monitoring you regularly. Now, you married?

  Me:

  No.

  Consultant:

  Boyfriend?

  Me:

  No. I’m gay.

  Consultant:

  Oh, OK. Well that makes it easier. You’re most likely infertile. You can’t have kids.

  Fade to black.

  That’s how I found out.

  I was fine for about twenty minutes. Fine to rebook another appointment, head down the stairs to the exit and greet the late-spring sunshine. Fine to buy a grande latte from a tax-avoiding multinational and walk, sipping it, up the hill home. I was fine right up to the point my flat came into view, then I slumped down on my front step, shaking. I rang Kate.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m upset,’ I sobbed. ‘It’s not like it was on my mind to have kids. I wasn’t planning it. It wasn’t on my horizon. It’s just so brutal though – the reality that there’s nothing more than me. I’m it. I’m the end of the line …’

  She listened. Occasionally she interjected. But mainly she listened.

  I cried myself hoarse till my eyes ran on empty. Then I hung up, opened the front door and let Pickle lick the tears from my face.

  All Cats Are Grey

  It’s a summer’s morning, 11 June 2008 to be precise, and I’m driving through wide, faceless south London streets. The radio is on, a phone-in show, and an adenoidal presenter with too much jolly in his genes is wittering down the microphone. It’s the usual fare, a dollop of banality, a splash of whimsy and a heavy dose of censorious middle-aged morality.

  ‘What would you do if you woke up and it was 2049?’

  ‘Water – good thing or bad thing? Let us know. Call 0207 …’

  ‘What is the point of cats? You know the number – 0207 …’

  I am making the trip to see my grandmother, Granny Smith – who, like her fruit namesake, is crisp and bitter but a firm favourite nonetheless. She has just turned one hundred years old, and my entire family is congregating at her old people’s home. This may or may not be the thing that finally pushes her over the edge.

  The radio is still blaring: ‘So our topic this morning – what’s the most unusual thing you’ve done for love?’

  I switch it off as I pull up outside the residential home – a loveless, anonymous red-brick on the edge of Kent.

  Inside, there is the smell of overcooked greens and a million heavy exhalations. Snooker blares from the television. A dozen eyes gaze in a myopic haze in the general direction of the screen. In the distance I can hear the sound of a bewildered man refusing to take his meds.

  I am met in the hall by a sprightly lady called Judy.

  ‘You here to see Lil?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply.

  ‘She’s a slouch that one – only a hundred. I did that last year. It’s a breeze! I’ll go see if I can root out the little darling.’

  This is the first time I have heard my grandmother referred to as a ‘little darling’. Granny Smith is a redoubtable bag of paper-thin skin full of bile and piss and grit, who has sloughed off war (twice), cancer (twice) and the death of her beloved husband Stan (once, obviously) to get to this point. Whatever she is, she is certainly not a little darling …

  Judy bounces around the communal lounge like a new-born gazelle, enquiring about Grandma’s whereabouts. I watch her dart here and there, sharp as a tack and bright as a button.

  She returns.

  ‘They’ve found her. They’ve wheeled her outside to get some air. Shall I show you through?’

  Grandma is indeed outside, in the garden, where she sits surrounded by my family in her wheelchair. I am late. I am always late. She winks at me as I bend to kiss her, and as I do I breathe in the familiar top note of lily of the valley mixed with cheap carbolic, a scent that takes me back to a time and place before words came and got in the way of everything.

  She looks older – it’s only been a few months since I last saw her, but she looks older. From the side you can see the milky sheen of developing cataracts, and a wobble of goitrous chin that makes me grin. That’s coming for me one day, I think, and then I stop grinning.

  We crowd around her chair and have our photo taken. There’s me, David, Lynne, Michelle and Mum. Gran is holding something and beaming proudly. It’s a card from the Queen.

  ‘What’s this?’ I say, staring at the cheap paper. ‘Is that it?’

  I’m genuinely shocked. Her Majesty’s signature is photocopied – the whole thing mass-produced and impersonal. It’s a far cry from the romantic notions you have of the ‘telegram’.

  ‘Well that’s not worth waiting a hundred years for,’ I scoff, almost offended on her behalf.

  But Grandma isn’t laughing. Grandma isn’t joining in. In fact she is totally silent.

  And then I realize that this isn’t just a card to her.

  Grandma’s father hailed from Leipzig, her mum from Moscow, and she was born (one of eight children) in Riga, Latvia. The family fled from the pogroms, and for a while her dad was interned in the Isle of Wight. During the war a Quaker couple took her and her sister on holiday to the seaside but, on finding out they had German blood, deliberately starved them. It scarred her for life and taught her to conceal her identity, her ethnicity. It was wrong to be foreign, it was wrong to be Ashkenazi. Right up until her death she would staunchly deny she was Jewish, though when drunk (which was most of the time, courtesy of Harvey’s Bristol Cream) she would launch into snatches of Yiddish.

  So it isn’t just a card; it’s so much more than that. For her, an immigrant, it is everything – validation, acceptance, authentication. It says, I belong. I belong because the Queen, the head of state, says so. And here’s the proof.

  Gran moved into the home in 1994, just after Granddad died, and it quickly became clear she wasn’t built for communal living. Firstly she was a racist and secondly she was hard of hearing, which meant that every time she felt like giving her views on benefit claimants or Labour’s ‘open door’ policy, she did so in the LOUDEST VOICE IMAGINABLE. She was that particular breed of immigrant who felt, with absolute conviction, that the UK government should have left the gates open just long enough for her to enter the country, and then shut and bolted them immediately behind her so that no one else could come in.

  And I mean no one else. The best thing you could say about her attitude to foreigners was that she was an equal-opportunities hater, meaning no particular group was singled out more than the other. Having said that, there was something particularly painful about the way she described and referred to any nurses of colour.

 
‘Get me the nurse,’ she’d demand, annoyed, as I wheeled her around.

  ‘Do you mean May?’ I’d enquire.

  ‘Is she the chocolate one?’

  I’d remain silent for a while, gritting my teeth, remembering something from Sunday school way back, something about hating the sin, not the sinner.

  ‘Grandma, she’s from–’

  ‘Milk chocolate? That one? No, not that one – the Bourneville one.’

  As she carried on, yelling her way through the various cocoa-solid options, I would let loose my grip on her wheelchair, and off she would drift, away from me. Sometimes, in these situations, the best way to get an errant pensioner to behave is to just roll them down a ramp into the sun room, where they can bake under the hermetically sealed uPVC windows until penitent.

  Coming out to a grandparent is one of the most toe-curling, awful experiences of one’s life. Having to shout one’s sexual proclivities into the impaired ear of a nonagenarian surely ranks in anyone’s list of top-ten worst moments. Now imagine that same pensioner is losing her memory …

  Towards the end of her hundredth year Granny Smith started to become more and more forgetful. I’m reluctant to use the word dementia, as she could still recall with pinpoint accuracy the price of a pair of mules she bought in Colchester in 1968. But the past, and the people who inhabited it, was becoming increasingly hazy, blurred and vignetted by age. This meant that every time I saw her, I had to come out to her in a process I liked to call

  GROUNDHOG GAY.

  Every time I made the pilgrimage to her bedside, it was the same painful routine.

  Me: