I interviewed John Lydon once. He didn’t seem much like the scrawny, snarling creature I remembered from my adolescence, the one who shocked the nation with his language and his teeth. He said he was still upset about the death of his friend and band-mate Sid Vicious, who died of a drug overdose in a hotel room. He was talking to me about a new album, but he also talked about his childhood in a two-room slum, not far from where I live. He told me that all six members of the family shared one room. The kitchen was shared with rats. I told him that while he was screaming about anarchy in the UK, and upsetting the church, the BBC and anyone who liked the royal family, which is pretty much everyone, I was sulking in my bedroom in suburbia and sighing over Keats. He sighed over Keats too, he said. Books, he said, ‘are my one and only joy’. Music, he said, ‘is a simulation of something, but language is the greatest thing we possess’.
I never thought I would bond with a former Sex Pistol over a love of Keats. I don’t suppose he ever thought that he would be part of a band that changed a culture – and then end up living in California doing ads for butter. This, he thought, was ‘hilarious’ because butter was ‘such a politically incorrect product’. Even former Sex Pistols have to earn a living.
As I fired off emails into the ether, I thought more about some of the people I had interviewed and some of the questions I had asked. All artists, actors, musicians, composers, writers and rock stars are like Scott’s mercenaries. They swap their skills for cash. No one pays them to turn up to an office and read their email. I was beginning to realize that I could spend all day every day sitting at a desk writing emails and that it was perfectly possible that none of them would turn into anything that would keep a roof over my head.
When I was first asked to do a weekly ‘Big Interview’ in the newspaper, I thought it would be quite a challenge to find someone to talk to every week who the editor thought was famous enough to fill the slot. Editors like to feel king of the castle. They don’t like being told that their newspaper is not actually top of the pecking order when it comes to celebrities trying to plug their films or shows. This is why I ended up interviewing Jason Donovan, who had been most famous as a teen pin-up in the Australian soap opera Neighbours and then as a global pop star, but threw it all away to stuff white powder up his nose.
At his peak, he sold more than thirteen million albums. At the time I met him he was about to star in a West End version of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a musical which even a character in it calls ‘cock on a rock’. For a man who sued a magazine for saying he was gay, this was quite a move. ‘Yeah,’ he said when I asked him about it, ‘things have come full circle. Even my dad said, “How do you feel about doing this part?” I don’t think about that. I just get on and do things. I like to work.’ It was, he said, ‘very simple’. He was ‘a survivor’. He had done these things, he said, to pay his bills.
Now, for the first time, I thought of all the actors I had interviewed, and all the times I had asked them why they had taken on a part. I wondered how they had managed to be so polite. The average earnings of an actor in the UK are about £10,000. That’s about the same as the average earnings of someone who’s selfemployed. The actors I interviewed were the successful ones, but even they often struggled to find work. I’ve never interviewed Michael Caine, but he spoke for many when he said, ‘I choose the great roles, and if none of those come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don’t come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.’
Two weeks before I walked out of that office on Kensington High Street, I interviewed Minnie Driver. It was a freezing day in January, but she was wearing a sleeveless dress. She has been in films like GoldenEye, Sleepers and Grosse Pointe Blank. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Good Will Hunting but was then dumped live by Matt Damon on Oprah Winfrey’s couch. She put on a red dress, and a brave face, for the Oscars. She didn’t win one, but she managed to smile for the cameras. She always manages to smile for the cameras. She is often nominated for awards and sometimes wins them, but she still auditions ‘all the time’. She was, she told me, realistic about the options for a woman over forty in an industry dominated by looks. ‘I’ve never known the next film I’m going to do,’ she said, ‘so it’s not much of a surprise for it to be challenging.’ It was, she thought, ‘quite funny’ that people thought you had a choice. ‘Mostly,’ she said, ‘you’ve just got to bloody work, because you still have a mortgage.’
Unfortunately, the people I was emailing didn’t seem to care all that much about mine. I had hoped that some editor somewhere might give me a column or at least some regular work. I worked hard to make my emails sound ‘upbeat’. I said that I was ‘thinking of taking redundancy’ and of ‘starting something new’. Some people sent polite replies. Some people didn’t reply at all. But even the nicest emails from the nicest editors basically said this: feel free to pitch us ideas and in the unlikely event that we decide to use any of them, we’ll pay you a fraction of what you were paid before. It’s zero hours now, baby. Zero hours on what will probably turn out to be less than the minimum wage.
I spent a week researching a piece for The Spectator. It was about an organization that aimed to get young people from disadvantaged or ethnic minority backgrounds into positions of leadership. They had support from each of the party political leaders. They went on a trip to Downing Street. They had a reception at the Foreign Office and one at the Speaker’s house. I interviewed about ten of the young people and was fired up by their energy and drive. It took about ten days to research and write the piece and the fee was £250. After I filed it, the deputy editor told me that the editor had decided not to publish it. The word journalists use for a piece that has been commissioned but not published is ‘spiked’. That’s also a good word for how it feels to have to track down ten people who will now have to tell their mums not to go out and buy the magazine.
One of the young women I’d interviewed asked if I would mentor her. I didn’t feel in much of a state to advise anyone on anything, but thought it would be rude to say no. I helped her apply for a job at The Guardian. A few weeks later, she told me she’d got it. I felt like asking her if she would mentor me.
I did another piece for The Spectator. It took about a week to research and write and the fee was £250. People kept telling me to accept whatever work I could get, but I didn’t know how I was going to have the time to look for work when it seemed to take all my time and energy to earn £50 a day. If I wasn’t working, I was sending emails. If I wasn’t sending emails I was meeting ‘contacts’ for coffee or drinks. I tried to look cheerful. I tried to smile. But what I really wanted to say was: ‘rescue me!’
My mother bought me a book called Keeping Your Head After Losing Your Job. It says: ‘if you are unemployed, you are more likely to suffer a reduction in mental health, life satisfaction and objective physical well-being – and that equates to a greater risk of binge drinking, depression, anxiety and suicide’. This didn’t surprise me, but it didn’t cheer me up. Then it says that ‘your negative thoughts can be transformed’. It says that ‘this is a transition period; it does not have to be a time of depression, worry or physical deterioration’. It says that you can use ‘mindfulness’ to ‘breathe the sadness away’.
I am not a fan of ‘mindfulness’. I have tried. I have really, really tried. I was first taught it in a hut in Cambodia, by a smiley, wizened old monk. The main thing I remember, as I sat cross-legged on a very hard cushion, was trying not to think about the pain in my hips. Then there was the chi gong instructor on the holistic holiday in Skyros. Then there was the hairy American at the Thai spa I thought might be a cult. By then I was used to searching for my ‘inner smile’, but I drew the line at laughing on demand while flexing the muscles in my pelvic floor.
I know you have to practise. That’s why I sent away for piles of CDs so I can be ‘mindful’ without having to find space in my flat for a Buddhist monk. The trouble is, the voices. The boring, droning voices. The trouble i
s, the grammar. ‘Breathing,’ says the voice. ‘Sitting quietly,’ says the voice. It makes me want to yell that you can’t use the present participle to give a command.
I know mindfulness is now meant to be the answer to everything. I know HR departments now use it to calm employees down. I know Google loves it and Harvard Business School loves it and banks think it will boost their productivity and their bottom line. I know adults really do go out and buy books with titles like The Mindfulness Colouring Book. Perhaps they even buy crayons. All I can say is that breathing in and counting for six and then breathing out and counting for six and feeling the air pass out of your nostrils is not my idea of a good time.
My idea of a good time is a nice chat with someone I like over a nice glass of wine. My idea of a good time is a party. And I was damned if I was going to leave a paper I’d worked on for ten years without a party.
You don’t normally have to organize your own leaving party, but it couldn’t be helped. I found a pub round the corner from the office. I booked the room. I ordered food. I ordered wine. Normally, people’s leaving parties are open to all staff. This one wasn’t. I only invited the colleagues I liked. I only invited the bosses I liked. I can’t say it was a vast turnout for ten years on a paper, but most people I wanted to be there came.
I didn’t expect a ‘front page’ and I didn’t get one, but a kind colleague had organized a whip-round and a card. She had bought me an orchid, a delicate, white orchid. She had also bought me a box of carefully selected wines. It was the journalist’s equivalent of bread and roses. A flower for beauty, because we all need beauty, but we also need sustenance and most journalists would happily swap bread for wine.
There was no speech saying what a big loss I would be to the paper, or how much readers would miss my work. There was no speech saying that my departure was a mistake. There was, in fact, no speech, just a few kind words from that kind colleague.
At the end of the evening, there was a lot of food left uneaten. There was even quite a lot of drink left undrunk. I paid the bill. I walked out into Kensington High Street and went to an ATM to get some cash to pay for my bus. The ATM swallowed my card. I was stranded at 2 a.m. on Kensington High Street without cash or a card. In the end, a bus driver let me on the bus anyway. It was this act of kindness that made me cry.
Sex can be like broccoli
It probably isn’t a good idea to meet a young Polish man on the train, agree to go for a drink with him and then find that you seem to have invited him back to your flat. This is not what I normally do when I jump on a train at Liverpool Street, but this is what I did one night after going to some networking drinks. I always feel a bit awkward about networking. I don’t really like parties that seem to be a kind of shop, a shop where nobody knows who is buying and who is selling and what exactly is being sold. I always feel that you’re meant to be slapping people on the back and telling them that you’re ‘great’. I went round telling people that I had just been fired and was feeling terrible.
I felt a bit less terrible when a Polish man less than half my age told me, on the train at Liverpool Street, that I was beautiful. I knew he was probably just trotting out a line, but still responded in the way I know best: by asking lots of polite questions and then having a discussion about immigration. He suggested that we go for a drink. Two hours later, he was half carrying me into my flat.
A few days later, I was watching Newsnight when I heard my buzzer. ‘It’s Matteus,’ said the pale face on the video monitor. ‘We met the other night.’ I hadn’t expected a marriage proposal, but he had said he would call and he hadn’t even sent a text. I hate bad manners. I have always hated bad manners. In that moment, I felt as if I had turned from Samantha in Sex and the City to Lady Bracknell. ‘You,’ I said, before slamming down the entry phone, ‘are a very rude young man.’
My parents never taught me the etiquette of instant sex with strangers. They didn’t need it, and I’d hardly ever needed it before. They met on a hill in Heidelberg when my mother was eighteen and my father was twenty-one. My father had just finished reading classics at Cambridge. My mother was just about to go and read modern languages at Sweden’s Cambridge, Lund. My mother didn’t speak any English. My father didn’t speak any Swedish. It was, they always told us, love at first sight.
For the rest of their three-week German-language course, they wandered through the cobbled streets of the old town, quoted Goethe and talked about Kleist. Under the old bridge by the banks of the Neckar, gazing out to the castle, they kissed. By the time they parted at Cologne station, my father had said the three words that cut to the heart of things in every language, and my mother had said them back.
As soon as he got home, my father wrote to my mother. ‘I am thinking’, he wrote (in German, but my mother has translated it for me), ‘of Beethoven’s wonderful song cycle, “An die ferne Geliebte” (to the faraway beloved). Now I understand the inner meaning, the beauty, the tenderness, the melancholy. As you left Cologne, I wanted to say, like Mignon, “There, there, to that place would I go with you, beloved”. But the words had to remain unspoken.’
As soon as my mother got his letter, she wrote back. It was, she wrote (in German), ‘terrible’ to leave him in Cologne. The rails there had ‘sung’, she told him, the words of a popular song: ‘Ich hab mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren.’ I lost my heart in Heidelberg.
Five months after they met, my father sent my mother a telegram. ‘Will you marry me?’ it said in English. My mother’s reply was one word: ‘Yes.’ They married in June, three years after they met, in the white church next to my mother’s grandparents’ farm. It was set among wheat fields fringed with cornflowers and marguerites, at the foot of a hill scattered with wild roses. My mother has always loved roses. When he died, forty-seven years later, my father was still bringing her flowers.
This was not a helpful model on the dating front. I needed help as a teenager, and I didn’t know where to get it. When I was eleven, I swapped the mixed primary school on the estate where I grew up for a girls’ grammar school. I learnt a lot about the Treaty of Versailles and cattle ranching in Argentina. I didn’t learn much about boys. My friend Lucy and I felt that our only hope was the twice-yearly barn dance at the local boys’ grammar school. We spent months planning our outfits. My brown corduroy pinafore got me a dance with a spotty boy called Nick, but it didn’t lead to anything you could call a date.
When we were fourteen, a friend of my brother’s invited him to a youth club. My brother said that Lucy and I could go, too. A youth club, we were pretty sure, would have boys. This youth club had a tall dark boy called Andy, and a tall blond boy called Pete and a spiky-haired boy called Ian and a curly-haired boy called Howard. This youth club was also, unfortunately, attached to a Baptist church, but by the time we realized exactly what this meant it was too late. Andy and Pete and Ian and Howard had all given their lives to Jesus. Before long, Lucy and I had, too. Jesus loved us, we learnt, and wanted us to devote ourselves to him. We were not, in other words, allowed to touch the boys.
By the time I told God to fuck off and out of my life, I was twenty-six. I’m sorry about the language – and it’s a very long story – but this is literally what I did. I was still a virgin. I had had one boyfriend, for five weeks. When he dumped me, when I was nineteen, my father said, ‘It will probably take you years to get over it.’ It was a good way of making sure that it did.
It isn’t easy to enter the dating arena when you have almost no experience of it, very little confidence and are terrified of sex. When I finally did get going, I felt as if I was slipping around on a frozen pond while Olympic figure skaters whizzed around me, slicing secret codes in the ice. I had no idea how you were meant to show a man that you were interested. I didn’t understand why no one ever seemed to ask me out. It was quite a shock to find out, when I was twenty-nine, that some of my male colleagues called me ‘the ice maiden’.
When I was thirty-six, I joined a dating agency called Dra
wing Down the Moon. The name, apparently, came from a Greek myth, where one god falls in love with another god who doesn’t fall in love with him. The keen god goes to the Moon Goddess, who makes a clay statue of the other god and weaves a magic spell. Hey presto! A successful love match, if you can call a match successful when it’s based on coercion and deceit. I didn’t know about the myth, but I was ready to draw down a moon, drink the blood of a virgin, or do what I did do, which was pay a big fee, to get a boyfriend. I hoped to get one of the ‘thinking people’ the agency said it specialized in, ideally someone tall, handsome and bright. To have a good chance of catching one of these, you had to go into their office, flick through lever-arch files of single men and choose ten lucky candidates to get your photo in the post.
I used a photo that a friend had taken of me on holiday in Goa. When I look at it now, I think of Nora Ephron. Nora Ephron wrote my all-time favourite rom com, When Harry Met Sally. We went to see it as a family on Boxing Day just after it came out. When Meg Ryan bit into a sandwich and then pretended to have a screaming orgasm in a New York diner, my father coughed and we all stared firmly at the screen.
‘Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five’, said Ephron in her book of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck, ‘you will be nostalgic for by the age of forty-five.’ With the benefit of that span and more, I can say there really wasn’t much wrong with how I looked when I was thirty-five. I wouldn’t go quite as far as Ephron in saying ‘I wish I had worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six’, but I do wish I hadn’t wasted quite so much time fretting over tiny flaws.
In a good batch of a mail-out to ten men, two or three would get back. I met a man whose breath smelled like a dog. I forced myself to go on a few dates with him, but even the girl at the dating agency said he was ‘dull as ditchwater’. I met a man who forgot everything I told him and then told me he’d had ECT. I met a man who slicked his hair back like Michael Douglas in Wall Street and took his lapdog on gourmet holidays round the South of France.
The Art of Not Falling Apart Page 4
