Good on him, though. He could have stayed at home, resenting his impediment, a cut-out of a big letter ‘s’ on his dartboard. But no. Here he was, bold as brass, out and about. He may not have been able to say the word ‘sausages’. (Or the word ‘say’, come to think of it.) But nothing – and I mean nothing – was going to stop him getting the 10.02 to Newmarket from platform nine. If memory serves, he needed a new Ethernet cable from PC World – something, he noted with a wry smile, that he could ask for safe in the knowledge that everyone involved would remain bone-dry.
And besides, if he did suddenly get a craving for sausages on his way back, he could simply bob into Morrison’s and get them from the chill cabinets. He’d never actually have to say the ‘s’ word. Unless he was insistent on buying direct from a butcher.208 In which case, just point. I know for a fact that’s what Mike Tyson does on his weekly shop. It’s either him or Toyah Wilcox anyway.
No, I liked this guy. As I pretended to have an itchy cheek so I could wipe another fleck of his spittle from my face, I understood that we all have our crosses to bear. His just happened to be a chubby tongue. It was incredible to think that the letter ‘s’, such a simple concept to even the youngest of children, was like a foreign country to this man. It was the enemy in a lifelong war his mouth was never going to win. Like a kind of oral IRA (pre-ceasefire).
Before he left he was good enough to take a photo of me, for posterity (see picture section). Sadly though, my one-man station-based sales frenzy only delayed the inevitable. Alas and alack (Roget’s again), I had failed. I started to sense something might be wrong when I received an email entitled ‘Bouncing Back is going to be pulped’. My god, this couldn’t be real. What was being proposed was nothing short of literary genocide.
I picked up the phone to Henry Chesney, my contact at the publishing company.
‘Henry, there has to be some sort of mistake here.’
‘There’s no mistake.’
‘Damn you, man, we can turn this round! I know we can.’
‘We’re not doing a raft of nationwide TV adverts, Alan.’
‘Okay then, a stunt. We’ll make a house out of a thousand copies of Bouncing Back. Then bequeath it to the homeless. We’ll be on the front page of every paper in the land (of Norwich). Though the structure may lose rigidity if it rains.’
‘The book’s being pulped tomorrow. It’s over, Alan.’
‘Henry, I’m begging you. I’m literally on my knees.’
‘It sounds like you’re driving.’
‘Okay then, not literally. Just throw me a bone here, buddy.’
‘Well if it’s any consolation you’re more than welcome to go along to the pulping.’
I hung up in an explosion of fury. Go to the pulping of my own book? How dare he? HOW DARE HE?!
I was deeply moved by what I saw at the paper mill the following day. (I did go after all. I decided to take some sandwiches and make a day of it. It seemed only right that I should pay my respects.) There was great dignity in seeing fourteen thousand copies of my own book being ferried along a conveyor belt to their certain death. As they jiggled and jaggled their way into the jaws of a state-of-the-art pulping machine, it was all I could do not to stand bolt upright and salute. Those poor bastards.
Of course this wasn’t goodbye, though, it was just au revoir. After all, my fallen brothers would soon have an exciting new life as recycled paper. Sometimes, if I was feeling a bit blue, I’d sit down in my favourite armchair with a big mug of milky coffee, shut my eyes and imagine what could have become of every trounced copy of Bouncing Back.
I like to think me and the odd fragment have met again in the years since. Yes, I like to think that very much indeed. An A4 jot-book from Rymans? A love letter from one man to his troubled bi-sexual fuck buddy? Or maybe a ream of high-grade printer paper purchased by a thriving local business. Shoved into the tummy of a Canon iP 2000, it would bide its time, until one day emerging kicking and screaming into the world, caked in the latest set of company financials. Of those three, the one I’m least keen on is the fuck buddy.
The only option I’m not prepared to risk is toilet paper. That’s why I insist on buying foreign these days, and hang the cost. If it’s not been imported, it’s not going within a yard of my exit chute. And if the shop only has British then I just make do with a wet wipe or a splash wash.
Never mind all that, though, because I actually had a really good day at the paper mill. I would say it was easily the level of a very good school trip. Ignore all those people who say pulping is just a matter of chucking loads of books into a big bin, then letting a massive mechanical fist duff them all up into a papery porridge. It is that, but it’s also a highly technical industrial process.
By the end of my time there I felt I’d really come to understand it. ‘If books really do need to be destroyed,’ I screamed at the foreman over the deafening roar of machinery. ‘This is definitely the most humane way of doing it.’
He didn’t hear me but it didn’t matter. I’d made my point. Call me an old softy, but as a memento I asked if I could take home a doggy bag of Bouncing Back slurry. To my delight, the foreman agreed and that bag now has pride of place at the back of my attic.
204 Press play on Track 36. I love the shiny black legs!
205 ‘Clemence: practising goalie throws by hurling kids over hedge.’
206 He wasn’t dropping stones into a well.
207 Press play on Track 37.
208 Richard Madeley is one such person. He’ll never consume meat unless he’s seen it be handled by a trained butcher first. And preferably been to – or seen a video of – its slaughter.
Chapter 29
Good Grief
I KEPT MY EMOTIONS in check during the pulping.209 It wasn’t easy, but you draw on all your experience and I’d been attending funerals since I was eight.210 In recent years I’d been to the send-offs of Tony Hayers (chief commissioning editor of BBC Television), Chris Feather (chief commissioning editor of BBC Television), Mum and Dad (my mum and dad), and [DON’T KNOW NAME] (the racist mother of the woman who works for me).
In the case of the latter, I immediately gave my assistant 36 hours off. I swung by the hospital to explain the terms and conditions to her.
‘I’m giving you 36 hours off, whether you like it or not.’
She didn’t reply, which could have been rudeness but was more likely to be because her mother’s body was still warm, I reasoned.
‘What was that? “Can all those hours be taken in one go?”’ I knew she’d said no such thing, but I was keen to try to make this as interactive as possible. ‘Good question,’ I continued. ‘No they mustn’t be used all in one go. Instead the allotted hours may be taken at any time in the next month, but in units of no more than three hours.’
This system – flexi-grief, you might call it – may sound odd, but I knew the blues could strike at any moment. Just like a young chimp raised by humans, your grief can seem totally under control. But one day that grief will reach adolescence and dish out a frenzied and unprovoked simian beat-down, I explained as we accompanied Mum to the mortuary (her mum, not mine).
What would happen if a person took a straight 36 hours off but then grief hit when that person was back at work doing, I dunno, her employer’s quarterly underwear shop?211 You can’t very well just wipe your nose on his ice-white cellular briefs and carry on as if nothing has happened. Marks offer a wonderfully forgiving returns policy but even they would draw the line at snotted grundies.
And how glad I was that I had insisted on spreading those 36 hours across the month, because we had problems a couple of weeks after the death. My assistant was busy double-checking my Sainsbury’s receipt for any instances of over-charging. I just saw a flicker on her face. I leaned over.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes. I thought they’d diddled you on the kidney beans but …’
‘No, I don’t mean that. You looked like you were about to cry.’ I demons
trated this by doing a sad face then lifting my fist to my eye and waggling it.
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘Good. I just wanted to check on you,’ I said in an ‘arm around the shoulder’ kind of way, although there was absolutely no physical contact between us. ‘Because your lip was wobbling. It looked like you were, y’know, thinking of things you should’ve said.’
Suddenly my assistant burst into tears. So she had been upset after all. The little fibber! I didn’t mind, though, she was a mum down. I pointed to a box.
‘Tuck into those tissues. They’re laced with aloe vera so you can be as rough on your nose as you want.’
In the end she found the whole thing harder than anticipated. I’d said she could take 36 hours overall, but when we totted it up at the end of the month, it came to almost 40!!! In other words my assistant had loved her mum 12% more than I’d calculated. That was fine, though, not a problem at all. Ultimately, you can’t precisely gauge amounts of sadness. And I actually wanted to help with the healing process. Not least because it was dragging me down a bit.
I got her straight back to work. To start the healing process, I had her buy and assemble, then disassemble and return, a gas barbeque.212 What she didn’t know was that I already had one, I was just trying to keep her mind off things. Namely her racist mum, or lack thereof. But every cloud has a silver lining, and I suppose my assistant’s loss is the black community’s gain. Not that life is ever quite so clear-cut. She may have been one of the most profoundly prejudiced people this side of Eugene Terre’Blanche, but she also cooked an excellent shepherd’s pie. Shades of grey, everybody, shades of grey.
Both of my own parents are also thoroughly dead. I have to be honest and say I wasn’t too cut up when Poppa213 passed on. Our relationship had been so complex I could write a book on it. (What do you reckon, HarperCollins?!)214 For a time I was determined not to shed a tear over him, so if ever I felt myself welling up – useful tip this – I’d just think of all the bad things about him. I soon felt better. It’s not what he would have wanted, but in a way that helped.
The first and worst death of the lot was Mum’s. It’s hard to describe what it’s like to lose your mother. But HarperCollins have insisted I try. Their suggestion is that I think back to how I felt at the time of her death and use words that relate to or convey those emotions. So where to begin? Well unlike someone else’s mum, she certainly wasn’t racist! She really didn’t agree with any of that stuff. In fact she hated racists as much as she hated homosexuals.
My relationship with her went way back, although we weren’t close right from day one. During those long hard months in the womb, she’d been less my mother and more my house. I didn’t interact with her, I just lived inside her. And then when I’d made good my escape from her cervix (see Chapter One) she’d become less my mum and more my canteen. Although her teats weren’t much of a chef – it was milk every day for goodness sake!
But it was as the years rolled on, as I began to crawl, walk and then express myself through dance, that things began to blossom. She was my friend, my cheerleader, my protector-in-chief. And we remained close until the onset of my difficult adolescent years. I remember we entered choppy waters pretty much as soon as my balls dropped. By the time I was 16 our relationship had broken down to such an extent that I’d rarely even let her do my blackheads.
Yet when I had asserted my independence and emerged from my mum’s considerable shadow (I mean this metaphorically, although she was fat – the poor woman looked like someone had blown her up with a bike pump),215 our relationship began to improve.
In my BBC days no one was more proud of my success. She would absolutely insist on watching Knowing Me Knowing You if she was at home when it was on. It was different when I returned to radio. She didn’t listen to Norfolk Nights (on too late), Up With the Partridge (on too early) or Mid-Morning Matters (dead), but it didn’t matter. I knew she only ever wanted the best for me. And I’m sure the same is true today. If there’s a radio in heaven I’m sure she’ll be up there listening, providing my show doesn’t clash with Today, Start the Week or The Archers, which is what God would listen to.
Sadly, I can’t say the same for Father, who is probably in a different place.216
To preserve her dignity I’d rather not say what she died from, but suffice to say the family was forced to ask some rather uncomfortable questions about what she used to get up to in her spare time. When they’d finally brought her body back from Hull (don’t ask) and the coroner had concluded his post-mortem (long story), we were free to arrange the kind of funeral we knew she would have wanted, minus the open casket (believe me, you don’t want to know).
With Dad in no fit state to do anything, I agreed to say a few words at the service. I’d felt absolutely fine in the hearse. In fact I’d enjoyed the ride. It was a mint-condition Daimler Lauderlette Vanden Plas with slide-out occasional seats, allowing generous room for up to five mourners who would easily drown out the hushed whisper of the smooth straight-six engine. I would have loved to have seen what kind of speed it could have reached on the open road, but the undertaker was not to be persuaded. (And quite right too.) All in all, though, very nice. But as soon as I got into the church it all went wrong. I went to pieces like a dropped jigsaw.
After a few minutes of being cuddled by Great Aunt Susie, we’d managed to reduce my crying down to a manageable sob. Then it was time to give the speech. I took a deep breath, gritted (grat?) my teeth and just spoke from the heart.
‘I stand before you all today to talk about a woman I can describe in just two words: my Mummy.’
But when I started recounting how she used to let me lick the spoon when she was making cakes or gravy, it all got too much. I became so grief-stricken I barely knew what I was saying. For a while I thought I was broadcasting. Uncle Pete said that at one point I tried to introduce ‘Cool for Cats’ by Squeeze.
I can’t recall much about the wake either. To be honest I was in a bit of a daze. I remember eating a great many chicken drumsticks and someone coming up to me and telling me I mustn’t forget to have some fibre too. He said the last thing I wanted was to be bereaved and bunged up. And he was right. To this day that’s advice I always pass on to mourners who I see failing to eat sufficient roughage in the immediate aftermath of the death of a loved one.
After the burial things slowly got better. For the first couple of days I used to visit the grave every day. My schedule soon got in the way, though, so then I’d start sending my assistant as my graveside representative. She was visiting her mum anyway, and the bus connections between the two graveyards were really quite good considering how far apart they were.
Besides, I reasoned that, as a believer, my assistant derived more meaning from graveside grieving than I did. Not that I’m a non-believer as such. I’m pretty open-minded about the possibility of an afterlife, although I always think of heaven as a kind of members club for do-gooders. White bean bags, 24-hour room service, fat babies with wings, pointing at other fat babies playing compact harps. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good stuff. If you find it comforting, go there.
I don’t go down to the cemetery at all these days unless I happen to be passing. In which case I’ll take flowers. The beauty of her headstone is that it’s located on the main thoroughfare through the graveyard. So if I’m pushed for time I can open my passenger-side window and throw the flowers out without stopping. That might sound crass, but in many ways it’s a tribute to Mum because she was a real stickler for punctuality. Not that the flowers always land in the right place. Quite often they end up on the grave of Dan ‘loving father and loyal husband’ Faversham. Occasionally other mourners will see this happening and frown. I can only assume they think I’m a predatory gay with a fetish for the dead. And I know that would have made Mum chuckle.
209 Press play on Track 38.
210 The first one I ever went to was that of my dog, Barney the dog. He lost his life at the hands of an ice-cream van. I de
cided to bury him in the back garden but it had been a very hot July and the earth was rock-hard. I managed to dig a hole big enough for his head but then had to give up. It looked like he was digging for a bone; a bone that, sadly, he would never get to chew on.
211 Always M&S, unless finances were tight. In which case, I’d cut the budget and send her to Next.
212 A Phoenix Stainless Steel 4 Burner. It’s actually a lovely bit of kit. And with a cooking surface of 70cm x 45cm it allows the adventurous host to try his hand at any type of food. Play it safe with sausages, or become the talk of the town with a delicious spatchcocked chicken? The choice is yours.
213 I never actually called him Poppa but it just looks cool on the page.
214 Seriously, let me know because I can easily turn round a mis-lit book: – e.g., 1968: Summer of Hate (For Me) or Locked in the Larder.
215 But she was fat in a nice way. She wouldn’t have looked out of place on a packet of Aunt Bessie’s Yorkshire Puds.
216 Hell.
Chapter 30
Classic House
BEFORE CHANNEL 4’S INSUFFERABLE Grand Designs programme, few people realised that it was possible or legal to build your own home. Apart from me. My project was in the works a full six months before the first transmission of the show, and I defy anyone to prove otherwise.
Unlike the deeply unpleasant couples who appear on Grand Designs, I wanted to create the perfect home rather than an art installation with a built-in toilet. So, working with a team of expensive architects, I asked them to duplicate exactly the design used by Redrow homes, with a soupcon of Barrett thrown in around the porch area. Imagine Henry 8th had commissioned, nay ordered, Redrow and Barrett to create a modern 21st-century house for a pre-renaissance fat king using the efficiencies of modern techniques combined with a Tudor brick quality (a sort of Hampton Court fit for a Norfolk Conservative), that’s the effect I was going for.217
Partridge, Alan Page 21
