Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down

by Jo Brand

  Palace has had a chequered history of management over the years. He may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I always had a sneaking admiration for Terry Venables, who I’ve met on a number of occasions and who seemed like good fun. I’ve got to know the staff at the club pretty well and it’s good to see the same faces when I go to a match. Much piss-taking goes on.

  I don’t often go to away games. I once went to QPR and it was well scary. There was a surging, rather pissed, large crowd and at one point I got carried along by them with my feet off the ground and couldn’t do a bloody thing about it. It put me off going to away games and made me realise how easy it was for tragedies like Heysel to happen … terrifying.

  Palace to me is a very lovable team. They’re not particularly glamorous, and their brief sojourns in the Premier League have always had a skin-of-their-teeth, temporary feel to them. These days, I go when I can and enjoy it immensely and have happy memories of many games. Weirdly, I have never seen Palace lose a match that I was at, only win or draw. I’d like to keep it that way (That’s not to say that they don’t lose — they lose all the time; I just don’t go that often!)

  Having said that Palace aren’t a particularly successful, glamorous team, I used to think the England team were the bee’s knees and now I just feel depressed when I think about them. I was so looking forward to the 2010 World Cup and fell for all the bullshit of the football pundits who said that we were in with a chance. The dire first game against the USA I put down to first-night nerves and let it pass. But then when the next two games proved to be of a similar standard, I wondered what was going on.

  I tried to blame the manager for a bit but in the end it came down to the players, who seemed to have no skill and, more importantly no enthusiasm. Our great hero Wayne Rooney seemed like someone else, i.e. me, trying to play football. Then the game against Germany happened and the last tiny drop of optimism dribbled out of me. Maybe we just have to accept we ain’t as world class as we think we are, lower our sights and accept that qualifying is enough.

  However, I did enjoy the French team’s meltdown as I’m sure did the entire Irish nation, who were kept out of qualifying for the World Cup by Thierry Henry’s gobsmacking bit of cheating.

  Matt, my other brother, who lives in Germany works in computers and is married with one son. He has had a rough couple of years. It all started when he and another man tried to lift a guy in an electric wheelchair onto a bus that did not have a raise-able platform. As Matt strained, he felt a huge crack in his spine and fell to the ground in pain — at which point the kindly bus driver just drove off.

  Matt had broken his back. The one piece of luck was that the break was outwards, and therefore thank God he wasn’t paralysed. However, he pretty much had to lie on his back for six months and was driven completely bonkers by this, as you would be.

  Some two weeks after he was finally up and about, he took his dog for a walk in the woods and a rather lary big dog went for it. So he picked his dog up and the lary dog attacked him instead. He began to fall to the ground and could not put his hand out to break his fall because he was holding the dog. Result: broken collar bone.

  Remaining faithful to the rule of three, he subsequently slipped over in the bath and broke his wrist when he hit the edge of the bath. Thankfully Matt was not had any accidents since, but I suppose he is the epitome of accident-prone.

  I met Bernie, who is now my husband, in the middle of the nineties, through a mutual friend at the Edinburgh Festival. He is a psychiatric nurse, and so from the kick-off we had plenty in common and had many long discussions about our work that no one else would have understood or been interested in. At the time, Bernie was working as a Community Psychiatric Nurse, which meant he went out of the hospital where he was based to visit people at home. This was the way that psychiatric services had been proceeding since the mid-eighties, the result of a move to gradually empty the big Victorian redbrick psychiatric hospitals in which those with mental-health problems had been separated from the rest of us.

  I’m sure I have said somewhere else that, although I think the ethos behind this admirable idea was sound, the fact remains that, especially in big towns and cities, there isn’t much of a community to speak of, thus many people have become isolated in their own homes with little support from their neighbours. Big cities are full of people who are slightly wary of one another and not quite as friendly as those in smaller communities, and most of us continue to remain suspicious of those who have had mental-health problems.

  Bernie and I immediately clicked. He is a good laugh, which is obviously very important to me, and our attitudes to most other important things are pretty similar. Back in London we began to see each other on a regular basis and a year or so down the line he asked me to marry him.

  I agreed (obviously), and we got married in Ludlow in 1997 in a small church with a handful of friends. We deliberately kept it quiet, because I did not want to face the prospect of even one uninvited photographer being present. My friends joined in the conspiracy with their usual enthusiasm. In fact, good old Waggly who was staying at a local hotel and was hyper-aware of not giving the game away when asked by the cab driver where she was going, initially said, ‘I’m not telling you.’ After he told her that would make things slightly difficult for him, she capitulated and gave him the address of the church.

  My friend Griffo went to the flower shop to get the flowers for the church, and when the shop assistant politely enquired who was getting married, she panicked and said, ‘I am.’ There then followed a rush of congratulations and questions about where it was. Of course she couldn’t remember the name of the bloody church and backed out of the place clutching her flowers trying not to look like she was completely mad.

  We actually used her tiny little Italian car as the wedding car. True to form, the lovely Griffo hadn’t cleared it out, and as I got in I crunched on a carpet of empty crisp packets and chocolate wrappers. The service was conducted by a friend of my mum’s, a woman priest, and it was her first-ever wedding, so the local vicar stood in the background making sure she didn’t cock it up.

  My dad also came up with the comedy goods when, outside the church he asked me, ‘Who’s that bloke coming up the path now?’

  ‘Only my husband-to-be, Dad,’ I replied. (Yes, he had met Bernie on numerous occasions.) It was a lovely cheery service. The organist, who also doubled as the local TV aerial fixer and was famous for scaling roofs in his bare feet, turned up in the nick of time from a job with a pair of jeans and trainers very visible under his surplice.

  Although we were relatively few, when it came to the hymns luckily we had my lovely Grandma Maisie and my Aunt Paddy who between them could up the volume to eleven and even managed to drown out the obligatory crying toddler in the background.

  For the first year or so we lived up in Shropshire in a small cottage in the middle of nowhere, but not far from the many relatives I had up there. However, it proved pretty difficult to conduct my work-life from there because of the travel aspect. It meant every piece of TV or radio I did would inevitably be in London, and therefore I was up and down like a yoyo, doing a huge amount of driving. Touring was different, because in theory, as you are going all over the country, you can start from anywhere you like so that was do-able.

  I had always wanted to have children, although it was not a completely easy ride initially I had thought there might be some problems because of my age, so when I discovered I was pregnant I was delighted. We arranged a couple of weeks’ hence to go and have an early scan at a local hospital and I was looking forward to seeing the little picture on the screen.

  We arrived, were shown into a room and the doctor began scanning. His facial expression turned from benign to worried-looking fairly quickly and he informed me that he was very sorry but, as he put it, ‘There’s nothing there.’ This is called a blighted ovum.

  I was absolutely astonished and shocked as I had not factored this possibility into my vision of the futu
re at all. We went home feeling stunned, even though the doctor had tried to put a positive spin on it by saying something like, ‘Well, at least we know you can get pregnant.’

  He was absolutely right, it didn’t take long before I did get pregnant again and I was so relieved. Things went fine until about the eleventh week, when one night while I was at home, I started to feel a bit unwell and crampy I won’t go into the gory details but it all went wrong again, and although not physically unbearable I felt really helpless and wondered if my two chances had passed. We both felt grim.

  And then one day a few weeks later as I was driving off to a gig, I listened to a radio phone-in about pregnancy and miscarriage, and a guy phoned in to say his wife had had ten miscarriages in a row and still managed to give birth to three children. I felt more hopeful again.

  So when I got pregnant a third time I tried to be positive. Things went along well, although I was told that because of my age I had a one in twenty-seven chance of giving birth to a baby with Down’s syndrome. However, tests are increasingly sophisticated and with each trip for a scan my odds improved tenfold. We decided that given that our nearest hospital was a forty-five-minute drive away and I was what they flatteringly call an ‘elderly prima gravida’ (i.e. a first-time mother over the age of thirty-five), that we would move back to London, so we could be more like a five-minute drive away from our local services.

  We found a house in South London and moved back. I had quite a nice time being pregnant, never felt sick let alone threw up, although I was more tired than I have ever been for the first few months. Obviously, there were some concerns medically because I was in my forties, but everything went as smoothly as it could.

  I also had a tour arranged which coincided with the seventh and eighth month of my pregnancy, which I was a bit worried about, plus we lost our tour manager John just before it began. So Bernie came on tour with me and it all went fine until the last gig. We arrived at a theatre which had the weirdest stage I had ever seen. It had a fairly steep sloping wooden floor covering the whole stage which they had made for their Christmas show, and my performance area was a small cut-out piece about three feet square. I was expected to somehow edge my way across this incline and jump into the little box to perform and repeat the process on the way back. Up until this point I had kept the pregnancy secret and didn’t want that to change, although I was a bit anxious I would lose my footing and roll onto the front row who were incredibly close to the stage, injuring me and them.

  After a very heated argument, there was no alternative but to go for it, so I did, very gingerly and managed to reach my hole without falling and sliding on my arse into the audience. However, I felt like a right nana stuck in my little cavity doing stand-up, and was glad to escape the venue that night.

  Our first daughter Maisie was born in 2001 at our local NHS hospital. Like our wedding, we strove to keep it quiet, although I did get a nice bunch of flowers from a tabloid newspaper congratulating me on the birth of my child — a week before it actually happened.

  There then ensued the adjustment that needs to be made when a new baby comes into the house, and I’m sure I was no different from any other woman who has just given birth — almost comatose with tiredness, anxious and feeling like I lived in a parallel universe to everyone else. But we humans are an adaptable species and we cope because we have to.

  I took six months off, then went back to a much reduced workload for a bit, which I still found hard. Being away from home for any length of time was a strain, so I tried to stay close enough to get back pretty quickly.

  I realised fairly early on that as a woman with a baby in a buggy, one becomes all but invisible and I savoured being able to walk around, visit friends and wander through our local park with virtually no hassle at all. It was great. Tempted as I was to see if I could get away with it, I never had a crack at shoplifting.

  Our second daughter Eliza was born in 2002, and despite our newly gained experience, it was a challenge coping with a baby and a toddler a year and a half apart. However, despite a lack of sleep, an increase in irritability and nights stretching to the length of a week, it was so lovely I didn’t care.

  Our daughters are now seven and nine, and happy at their local schools. It is slightly strange for them, I think, that I have a recognisable face, but they seem very pragmatic about it and handle the approaches I get from strangers with an admirable aplomb.

  The Girls

  I have a simple philosophy when it comes to my children: I keep them out of the limelight. When I see reality shows on TV with celebrities’ children in them, I feel rather sorry for the kids. It’s not their choice to be there in front of a camera. I was very impressed, for example, when the oldest Osbourne daughter chose not to take part in the reality show about Sharon, Ozzy Jack and Kelly It’s certainly worked for her. I don’t even know her name and have no idea what she looks like.

  I am constantly invited to events with the children, such as film premières, and it all looks so generous, exciting and fun. But, to use a hoary old cliché, there really is ‘no such thing as a free lunch’ and in payment for you having a lovely free day out, the press and the organisation entertaining you demand a piece of your life. And that means photos of the children and an encroachment into your family that I’m not prepared to countenance. When they’re older and have more of an idea about things, they may berate me for this, but at the moment I feel I’m doing the right thing.

  So that was a rather long-winded way of telling you that I am not going to furnish you with every personal detail of my daughters’ development. I kept diaries during the first year of their lives and looking back through them, I realise what hard work it was, how tired I was, and also how anxious I was a lot of the time. I felt I was floundering about with not nearly as much knowledge as I needed. And because families are so far-flung these days, one cannot rely on the extended family in the way one used to be able to, and that goes for on-tap advice and support. Also, given that I was one of the dreaded ‘older mothers’, that inevitably meant that my own parents were not quite as sprightly as they would have been, had I been a bit younger. And because they live miles away they weren’t on hand to take a turn round the park or do a bit of babysitting.

  But I’m sure the first few years of our kids’ lives were no different for us than for any other couples with young children. My diaries repeat over and over again that I was exhausted, up three or four times a night and ignorant of the right things to do:

  E bought Maisie a Sex Pistols T-shirt that was pooed on within minutes.

  Completely forgot about my bloody Nursing Times column.

  Maisie blocked up, can’t sleep, she’s bloody exhausted. Me too.

  Trying to think of ideas for novel, head feels like muzzy sponge in which ideas cannot germinate.

  Trying to write, but head full of mashed potato because I am a mother.

  Ordered pizza again.

  Eliza up till 4. Me desperate to close my eyes, she desperate to play.

  Bloody awful headache.

  Midwife came round. So pleased to see her … like a cross between the AA and a lifeboat.

  Heard a story about a woman leaving her baby in car seat on roof of car and driving off. (It was OK, she stopped in time.) Feel I could have managed that in my semi-comatose state.

  Sounds a bit grim, doesn’t it? But, of course, babies are designed to be so delightful that you just cope and it does get easier as they grow older. I remember asking a friend what her well-earned holiday in Spain with her toddler was like, only to be told, ‘I spent two weeks following her up and down some treacherous stone steps.’

  I can easily identify with that. Once babies become mobile, you find yourself following them every minute of the day as accidents lie in wait round every corner. Then that gets easier too, once they realise that sticking their head down the toilet or playing in the knife drawer will only bring tears.

  I spent a lot of time in the park with the girls, which is an
odd mixture of stressful and a bit boring, if I’m honest. They never want to leave! Even if you go with a friend, it’s odds on their child will want to play right up the other end of the playground so you don’t get much of a chance for adult conversation. Having said all that, I would have done an ‘old woman who lived in a shoe’ and had loads of kids if I wasn’t so advanced in years.

  As the kids approached school age the outside world began to encroach on them and it dawned slowly that I was slightly different from other mums. I can never forget Maisie coming home from school one day and asking me, ‘Are you Jo Brand?’ ‘What makes you say that?’ I asked. ‘Everyone says you are,’ she replied — and I had to admit I was.

  I don’t really have typical days, but just recently at the beginning of this year I had so much to stuff into each day that I wondered if I was going to cope. Not only was I filming Getting On, the NHS comedy series, but I was also doing a programme called Book Club for Channel Four as well as trying to help the Labour Party shore up their potential vote, which was descending faster than a scary ride at Alton Towers.

  One particular day — 8 February 2010, nearly finished me off …

  5.30 a.m. I wander round in a semi-coma trying to remember what I need to take for filming Getting On. Everyone is still asleep as I attempt to find some clothes that don’t look as if I’ve just slept in them. I also need two sets of posh clothes for the Book Club on Channel Four, which I am filming after Getting On this evening. Look in posh clothes wardrobe and am forced to pick out some tops which I hate, as all of the others are either not clean or gathering dust in the dry cleaner’s which I very rarely get to because I forget I’ve dropped stuff in there. Find something hideous and stuff it in a bag knowing that the charming wardrobe woman, Mia, at Book Club will run an iron over them for me.