Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  Moroccan food is not my absolute favourite. I was finding the endless casseroles a bit wearisome, but the simple stew that Mohammed prepared was the perfect accompaniment to the Saharan night, and I think the best meal I’ve ever had. We were naked in the desert. It’s another world and our senses were roving in the alien surroundings and our minds wandering into new speculations. We were snapped right back inside ourselves by the nourishing, warm, essential familiarity of food.

  I’ve not had that feeling in the Ivy, not even when Posh and Becks walked in.

  The desert is the best place to put telescopes. The air is dry and the darkness is absolute. The dazzling stars, a hundred thousand million billion of them, sparkled through the roof of the tent as we lay in each other’s arms. I said, ‘Will you marry me?’ and she said, ‘OK.’

  Home and Dry

  Dave had to return to England a couple of days early. I flew home from Marrakesh with my dad. He loved the aeroplane. We flew back up the African coast with the transponder unplugged. The transponder is the piece of equipment that sends regular messages to air traffic control telling them your altitude. Unless you’re taking off or landing, the altitude should never be less than five hundred feet. It’s all clearly explained in Rule V in the CAP 53 of the ANO, as any pilot will tell you. I estimate our height above sea level along the North African coast was an average of about thirty feet. It’s pretty dangerous, but on the outbound journey I hadn’t seen so much as a house or a person for a couple of hundred miles and if there was ever a time to mess with Rule V, this was it. We rocketed along the deserted beaches at head height, the cliffs above us on our right, flamingos scattering in our path. We made steep banking turns around headlands, sometimes pulling more than twice our body weights, sometimes floating out of our seats as we zoomed and dived towards home in our incredible flying machine.

  Winter was drawing in at home. In Marrakesh we’d recorded an orchestra and a couple of new songs and a lot of vocals, but the record wasn’t finished or mixed. The lorries took all the gear direct to another barn in Devon, where we added the finishing touches. I dashed between Devon, London and the Cotswolds in a rental car. Claire and I were renting a cottage on an estate in Gloucestershire. There was a river running through the garden, and chickens and peacocks pecked around. The Cotswolds was every bit as pretty as it promised from the air. The vast walled domains, the fossilised remains of astronomical wealth and power still dominate the rural landscape. The industrial revolution passed the area by almost completely.

  Claire was worried about me starting my new drinking campaign in January. She’d only known me sober. I assured her that I was very good at it.

  It was February and a nice man called Bill was saying, ‘And tell me what you remember about the party.’

  ‘Well, I remember swapping shirts with the principal dancer of the Royal Ballet Company.’

  ‘OK. Good. What next?’

  ‘I think I snogged the dog.’

  ‘Right. OK. Then what happened?’

  ‘Well, I had a row with Claire and went home. I locked her out, and when she was banging on the door, I pissed on her head from the fourth-storey window.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Well, that’s what she wants to know.’

  ‘Anything else happen?’

  ‘No, not that night, anyway.’

  Bill was kind and he listened and he helped me and I stopped drinking altogether after that and tried yoga.

  The thing that irritated me most about yoga was how expensive it was. It was sixty quid for an hour. Will Ricker was only paying thirty quid an hour to punch the crap out of Ozzie Jason. The advanced flying instructors were on much less than that. Apart from yoga, for between twenty and thirty quid you can get someone to come to your house and teach you just about anything you can think of. I’d tried an hour of ‘Japanese for Beginner’. That was twenty quid well spent. A Japanese lady came to the house, made some green tea and taught me how to say, ‘Hello, I like cheese, cheers.’ That got me by in Japan for years.

  Learning is a bargain, but I’d always shied away from music lessons. I seemed to know how to speak fluent bass guitar; it was second nature, but I had absolutely no idea what it was I was doing.

  I wanted to know more, but I was apprehensive about my bubble bursting. I’d had a bad spell cast on me by The Times Guide to Better Writing. At the time, I was writing a weekly column for Time Out, about staying in. I’d done one about my enthusiasm for jigsaw puzzles, one about bubble baths, that kind of thing. It was going well. That was when I read the book about how to write stuff even better. The features editor was waiting for a treatise on the baked potato, but once I’d crossed out all the bits that the man in the book wouldn’t have liked, there was nothing left. I couldn’t write anything for weeks. The book was very strict and authoritative and it completely undermined my confidence.

  Confidence is the most important attribute for any kind of creative activity, a dumb self-assurance that you know better than anybody. This is something that can’t really be taught, but if you can think you’re brilliant and you can turn up on time, you can do whatever you want.

  Self-confidence is easily shattered and I was worried that analysis of my musical style would have bad consequences. Blur were playing in Bournemouth and I offered to go back to school and talk to the boys about rock and roll. I’m really glad I did. It seemed a wonderful place. I sat in on a third-year music lesson and tried to explain myself. Then they asked questions.

  ‘How does the bass affect the harmony of a piece of music?’ asked the teacher. I thought that was a very good question. I looked up to see who would answer, but everyone was looking at me. I wanted, more than anything, to say, ‘Don’t know, Sir’, but it clearly wasn’t appropriate. I said the thing about the bass, really, was that it never sounds wrong. If the bass isn’t right, everything else sounds wrong, but the bass always sounds right, even if you make a mistake. That was why bass players always looked the coolest.

  I had some piano lessons after that episode. The bass guides the harmony. That’s what it does. It guides the harmony and supports the upper voices. It was good to know, in writing.

  In Devon, horse-riding lessons were only twelve pounds and they threw in a horse as well. The Cotswolds is very horsey. Claire had been having lessons and riding quite a lot. While Damon, Dave and I were finishing the album in Devon I got up early in the mornings and drove to the local stables to try and get the hang of it. After galloping along streams in Iceland in the middle of the night, I didn’t really have any apprehension about trotting round a riding school with a hard hat on. By the end of the first week I was jumping over fences and that, I felt, was that. I could ride a horse. I really wanted to go riding with Claire. It’s definitely more dangerous than flying, and the thrill is intense. It’s an earthy, overtly sexual business, especially for women, as they thrust their pelvises around and get sweaty and start panting. The danger is a part of it, too, for sure. You can never be sure what a horse is going to do.

  Pilots want everyone to be pilots. They love taking people flying who’ve never been before. They universally encourage the novice to join the brotherhood. Horse people in Gloucestershire weren’t like that. It was the opposite kind of thing.

  I went to the local stables back at the cottage and said I wanted to go for a hack. I spent weeks going round in circles, arching my back, tucking my heels in, thrusting my pelvis. I would never have known I could jump if I hadn’t gone to Devon first. They said I was brilliant in Devon. In Gloucestershire I never made it out of the yard.

  Given a choice of not being particularly great at something, but believing I was a natural, and actually genuinely being good at something and being reserved about it, I would take the conceited option every time. It’s much more fun.

  Farmers for Fifteen Minutes

  Claire and I were married within a year of meeting each other and we set about looking for a house in the Cotswolds. I wasn’t sure if
I wanted a big one or a little one, which really confused the estate agents, who were thrown by the car, too, Claire’s old drug dealer-style BMW. It had been broken into in London, and had a cardboard passenger window as a result. It had also recently caught fire, and smelt a bit on the funny side. It always seemed to be very muddy, inside and out, and most people thought we were time-wasters when we rolled up their carriage drives in that heap. It’s just hard to care very much about cars when you have an aeroplane.

  We looked at some tarted-up, overpriced cottages. Then we started looking at houses. It was quite depressing. The figures involved were astronomical. Prices were similar to those in London. The whole world had gone mad. Houses were a million pounds. For a cool million, a price that was fairly ridiculous, all you seemed to get was a fairly nice house with a fairly big garden, nothing fit for a rock star. It didn’t make any sense at all. Surely a million pounds was enough for anything? I can clearly remember wanting to have a hundred pounds when I was young. It seemed like a good amount to be aiming for. I never dreamed I’d have a million pounds, let alone that it wouldn’t be enough.

  We went to look at a farm that was for sale for a million and a half. The numbers were scary, but for half as much money again you got about twenty times as much. The rambling farmhouse sat in two hundred acres. It came with half a mile of the river Evenlode and three woods. It had a little lake with an island in the middle. The title included modern barns, decaying outbuildings, stables, an orchard, ancient wells and a walled garden. There were piles of tyres and heaps of manure and all the inevitable junk and jetsam that accumulates in barnyards. There was even a cricket pitch indicated on an old map of the land. It was the complete, unabridged, bundled country-life package.

  The owner was the first person we’d met on our quest who clearly didn’t want to sell his house. He loved the place, but he was getting too old to be running a farm. The cellar was full of his cherished tropical fish, cichlids, and he showed us them first. There were a confusing number of rooms - attics and pantries abounded. There was a welcoming comfy generosity about the place. We walked over the land with the man, Mr Taplin. I’d started to like him the moment we arrived. He was particularly pleased about the drains, and we kept stopping to inspect pipes, soakaways and trenches. In London you flush the loo and that’s the business dealt with. Out here it was just the beginning of an epic journey. The foul waste pipe ran under the garden and through the farmyard to a septic tank. The purified effluent from the septic tank discharged into a gully. The gully, sprouting lilies and irises, ran past the Dutch barn and expelled into the primary ditch. The ditch gradually became more of a stream as it converged with the outputs of the rainwater run-off manifold and the field drain matrices. He said he’d show us the field drains if we wanted to inspect them, but that they were quite complex. The main ditch neatly bisected the farm, taking a scenic detour through the lake. On the far side of the lake it resumed its journey, towards the Evenlode and, once in the Evenlode and heading for London, the matter was out of our hands.

  Then he showed us where his favourite horse was buried. It was a sunny spring day, and I’d known since before I’d got out of the car that I wanted to live here. It was perfect. Mr Taplin’s car, which we’d parked next to, was of a similar vintage and in similar condition to our own.

  Claire wanted to see the woods. So did I. We walked over the heath. A large number of big black birds were circling and whirling over one end. ‘Wow,’ we said, ‘look at all those birds!’

  ‘Well, I’ve not been at ’em for a couple of years,’ Mr Taplin said. ‘They want taking care of.’

  ‘What do you feed them on?’

  ‘Feed ’em? No, take care of ’em. Let ’em ’ave it!’

  I’d been a vegetarian for seventeen years. ‘What do you mean, let ’em ’ave it?’

  ‘Well, I come down with the twelve-bore, and let ’em ’ave it.’

  Apart from shooting the birds, he seemed like a really nice man. He smoked Embassy Number Six and painted in watercolours. He was unhurried and peaceful, enjoying the moments as they sailed past.

  For many years the property had been a notable shorthorn dairy cattle farm, but mad cow disease and foot and mouth had brought it to its knees. It was a wreck, but we loved it.

  The house in Mercer Street had a balcony with some window boxes, but no garden. I sold the house and Dave bought the aeroplane and we bought the farm. It was going to be quite a leap up to two hundred acres.

  12

  beginnings and endings

  Geronimo

  Claire got pregnant in a castle on our honeymoon, which was the best thing yet. The worst thing about the early stages of pregnancy is that it’s practically all you can think about, but you’re not supposed to tell anybody. I thought it was obvious anyway. We had to go to Marks & Spencer every week to get bigger bras, and pants. It’s best not to tell anyone the news in the first twelve weeks, because a quarter of pregnancies miscarry in the early stages. If all looks good at the twelve-week scan, you’re in with a good shot. At that stage you get graphs and comparative statistics on the likelihood of various aspects of the foetus being ‘normal’. Normality was a condition I had been shirking all my adult life. I suddenly found myself longing and wishing for something absolutely typical. I wanted everything about the baby and the pregnancy to be as ordinary as possible. The more in the middle of a line something was, the better I felt about it.

  I think it is impossible for anybody with a vivid sense of reason to know how they would feel about continuing a pregnancy with complications until confronted with the situation.

  Claire’s older brother Robert was physically disabled and he only lived until he was four. She sometimes says she can remember stealing his toys and then she goes quiet. Our consultant wanted to know exactly what was wrong with Robert, but we couldn’t trace his medical history and we only had one photograph of him. From what we could piece together, he had a genetic condition. When we spotted an unmistakable little willy on the scan, and it was clear we were having a boy, things went into overdrive. A Harley Street genetic specialist explained there was a fifty-fifty chance that Claire would be able to have healthy male offspring. It took him about an hour and lots of new words to explain why. Claire had to have her DNA flown to Switzerland for testing. At the time when we should have been breaking the happy news, we had even more to think about, but the little racing heartbeat had become the most precious thing in the world.

  I liked the doctor. I like experts. I never met a true expert I didn’t like. Knowledge is an irresistible, benign enchantment. Genetics wasn’t as well understood when Robert was alive, so it was difficult to know what the exact cause of his troubles might have been. It might not have had a name, back then. In Switzerland, they were looking for translocated XX anomalies. That was the main worry.

  We went back to see the doctor and he said Claire’s XX department was all located fine and dandy. I stood outside of myself for a moment. We’d both become preoccupied with the possibility of having to face a difficult decision. I suddenly found I had a lot to say, more than ever before. I couldn’t stop talking. I felt weightless. Claire was cracking a huge smile. The doctor was enjoying the moment and we blethered for ages. He reckoned it was all going to be fine but we still shouldn’t tell anyone until all the results were back, but that was really just a formality.

  Then there was a phone call saying he wanted to see us again. I went into a bit of a panic. Why did he want to see us again? He said it was all Jim Dandy. There was nothing left to say on the matter, just loose ends to tie up. We didn’t have to go and see him about million-to-one-shot loose ends unless there was bad news. I couldn’t keep my cool. We got the first appointment we could and sat on the edge of our seats staring at him wide-eyed, the two of us.

  ‘Everything OK?’ he said. We both pointed out he was the best one to tell us that. ‘Oh, yes. No worries there, nothing to worry about. Just, you know, wanted to see how you were getting on, all
part of the service, ahem.’

  I felt my bodyweight disappear again, but as I floated down this rendezvous suddenly all seemed a bit pointless. The guy was a gene specialist, not a midwife. Midwives are the people you talk to about sore bosoms, milkshake cravings and all that stuff. My genetic make-up was doing fine thanks, no problems there as far as I could tell at the moment, doctor, cheers. Claire’s DNA was evidently scrubbing up OK, too, so really, all fine. All fine in the gene department, thanks very much.

  As we were leaving he asked if he could have a couple of tickets for the Blur gig at Brixton Academy!

  The Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth in St John’s Wood, ‘John and Lizzie’s’ to its guests, often has more paparazzi in attendance outside than patients on the wards within. Among the photographed it’s the most fashionable private hospital to launch your latest progeny. The Portland Hospital is still the hip place to get your ears tested, and I wouldn’t go anywhere else, but for celebrity childbirth it’s got to be John & Lizzie’s. They have very big baths on the birthing unit, almost as big as the ones in the Mercer Hotel. They sell the candlelit New Age homoeopathic, yogaromatherapy delivery package. These things are all popular among famous women.

  We started going to visualisation classes. The idea of the ‘Visualisation for Childbirth’ course is to form a clear picture of what the birth is going to be like, so that you know what to expect and you’re not wildly dreading a big painful unknown. It definitely helped take some of Claire’s fears away. We lay on big cushions in a fug of ylang-ylang and sandalwood, imaginizing calm taxi rides to familiar surroundings, soft music playing at the birth centre, a nice big lovely bath, and then a most wonderful natural, extraordinary thing happening. We went into great detail. I often happily dozed off in the sessions. It harked back to childhood bedtimes. There’s a part of the brain that just can’t resist stories, the same part that likes experts. We seem to need them and there’s something about visualisation that’s better than television, or films. It’s like a very intimate, tailor-made radio play and it casts the listener in the lead role. I thought the acupuncture business Claire was having was probably bunk and people who talk about ‘energy’ are, frankly, silly, but there was something fair and simple about this kind of hocus-pocus. Of course it all went out of the window when the contractions kicked in.