Me and Madness

Hey you!  Don't read this!  It's far too self-indulgent.  Not unless you like Madness,  In which case, have a quick drink first, like I just did, to get yourself into a similarly nostalgic and sentimental state of mind.  And then, have a butcher's.

In 1981, when I was 11 and on a school trip, I discovered the magic of popular music.  Robert Hutchinson brought along a copy of Madness's 7th single, which the teachers let us play on the hotel record player.  The single reached number 7 in the charts and was called The Return of the Los Palmas 7.  When I got back home to London, I bought it.  And later that year, a new LP was released, which the 7 members of Madness agreed to assign a simple title to. '7'. (Noticing a theme yet?) My first single and my first album and the start of a (near) 40 year love for a band that has gone (dare I say, 'one step') beyond any other music in how it has wrapped its way around my life.

Over the next 5 years, until they split up in 1986, I indulged a need to buy every record they released in every format - single, album, picture disc, 12" single, imports and even cassette versions of the albums.  Most of this collection, I still possess, all in mint condition, cared for protectively.  But while I was away at university, my little brother opportunistically decided to sell the 12" singles to fund his pub visits.  He's not forgiven.

From the age of about 13, I was allowed to get the 29 bus down to Bayham Street, Camden Town, in order to buy each newly released single straight from Madness's record company, Stiff Records.  I would go down with my mate Kevin Keady and we'd be given free button badges and posters along with the records.  The badges bolstered a collection I obsessively added to every time I went to Carnaby St or Brighton promenade or Walthamstow market.  I had about 100 badges and I once put these all onto the back of my Harrington jacket; but this didn't prove to be particularly practical.  And the posters helped fill a huge amount of bedroom wall space, alongside anything I could cut out of Smash Hits magazine or obtain from any source.

Smash Hits also provided lyrics to the singles and I unleashed my inner geek to create a book of facts and lyrics and cut out pictures for every single, including each chart position (from The Prince in 1979 to Waiting for the Ghost Train in 1986, the chart placings are 16, 7, 3, 6, 3, 4, 7, 4, 7, 4, 14, 1, 4, 5, 8, 2, 5, 11, 17, 18, 21, 35, 18... most of that consigned to memory as a result of making that book).  

After one trip to Carnaby Street with Kevin Keady, to buy more Madness merchandise (and consider buying dog-tooth patterned drain-pipe trousers), we were upstairs on the 29 bus as it went along Camden Road and were stunned to see Mark 'Bedders' Bedford get on.  The Madness bassist was with two of the Belle Stars, a much less successful female version of Madness.  We shot downstairs, said hello (and what a lovely bloke he was) and I got him to autograph the back of a Madness mirror I'd just bought.

Kevin Keady remained my best friend for a short time - on account of his equal love of Madness - until he suddenly decided that he'd gone off them and was into Duran Duran.  One minute, we are watching the Madness film of how they started out (in which they play themselves), Take it or Leave It, at Enfield Town cinema, and the next minute, he's grown his fringe into a long wedge and started to show interest in girls (and girls' music, evidently).  To his credit, it kind of worked for him, he got girlfriends and I didn't, but Madness weren't worth the sacrifice, I still maintain.

Things went downhill from there.  Madness had run out of steam and they split up, just as I was moving on musically and was snobbishly heralding 'serious' rock music as superior to Madness's more jaunty, fun-loving pop sensibilities.  I probably stopped listening to them for a while in my late teens; and then in 1992, they returned to play what was intended to be one off weekend of gigs at Finsbury Park, cleverly named 'Madstock'.  By this point, I'd met my future wife.  We were engaged and having inflicted a really poor Bob Dylan gig on her in the early months of going out together, we discovered a shared love of Madness and went to Madstock with huge expectations and anticipation.  I had not been old enough to see them in concert first time around and the 6 years in which they had been absent felt like an eternity to me, as it would to anyone who found that time to fall between their 16th and 22nd birthdays.  We were not let down.  Madness were amazing and the impact of tens of thousands of fans jumping up and down caused a minor earthquake in the Finsbury Park area.

The following year, there was an easy and obvious consensus between us in regard to our choice of song for the first dance at our wedding:  It Must be Love.

Madness were back and they weren't going to go away.  Well not for long.  They would tour occasionally after this, usually around Christmas (we saw them again around the millennium at Wembley Arena) and from 1999 onwards they even managed to release albums of new music - not far off as good as their early stuff and sometimes equal to it - every  5 years or so.

We had two children and inflicted Madness on them with ease.  Both our kids love Madness and in 2014, the 4 of us saw them at the O2, the only gig we have attended together as a whole family.  I'm not one for dancing, but Madness are one band that can push me beyond my self-conscious reluctance.  Nonetheless, it took until the encore and Night Boat to Cairo  for my daughter to convince me to join the family in dancing along.  And then when I did, she just laughed at me and asked why it looked like I was just jogging on the spot.

Madness are also the only band I would sing karoke to.  Because I can't sing.  But then, nor can Suggs really.  His voice suits the music, because it has that wonderful North London brogue that I have grown up surrounded with.  Much as my love of Madness has been all about the songs, there are additional layers to them that make them special and part of that is the North London link.  They hail from the areas around Camden Town and have imbued a plethora of North West London characteristics into their lyrics, their attitude and the visuals for their music.  Living in some of these areas as a young child, meant that the nostalgia I have as an adult is interlinked with this aspect of Madness.  For example, I lived opposite Chalk Farm tube station (location for the Absolutely LP cover), and used to walk up to Primrose Hill to play (location of the Rise and Fall LP cover).  Camden Town was another short walk away, passing the Roundhouse as we left our flats, and here is the spiritual home of the band.

Another layer of specialness for me was the much overlooked depth to their music, their completely unique blend of different styles of genre (ska, old style R and B, boogie woogie, soul, rock and roll, 60s pop with a Kinks feel to it) and the unpretentious ordinariness of the subject matter for each song, which managed to provide an insightful social (and sometimes political) commentary or convey a dark humour (or humorous darkness) that made me want to listen to them closely rather than just dance along and laugh at the funny videos like casual fans did.

Madness songs - from the well known to the obscure - still give me a tingle when I listen to them after all this time.  The way in which they have seeped into my life, had an existence beyond the turntable, and projected a character which echoes my own, make them utterly special to me.  And to share that love with my family brings me pleasure that I can't put into words.  My daughter is the one whose love of Madness equals my own and this is partly reflected by the fact that we have matching Madness tattoos.  And this shared love was best celebrated last year, when the two of us went to see their 40th anniversary gig at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, which started with a short set of those obscure B-sides and albums tracks that they would have played when first starting out in 1979.  

What more can I say?  Madness, madness, I call it GLADNESS.

Live Aid when you're 15

It's Saturday night as I write and there's a documentary on about Live Aid and I guess, maybe, as it's July, it might be an anniversary.  And it surely is, 35 years, and it made me think back to those formative teenage years when something as globally STUPENDOUS as that could have a marked effect on your life when you're 15.  There's no denying, that - despite the posthumous tales of rock star diva behaviour and the perverse incentive of a career boost outweighing the moral imperative of the exercise - Live Aid was the most significant musical event of the decade and one of those historic moments when everyone knows where they were at the time.

I was in a transition stage of my life in 1985.  Not a gender one.  A musical one.  From liking pop songs that I'd tape onto a cassette during the Sunday evening Top 40 radio show to loving  PROPER rock.  The turning point for me was U2.  I loved them at the time.  I'd just got into The Unforgettable Fire, as a result of having sold a load of dodgy pirate tapes of that album at school, sourced from a Korean contact of my Dad's.  And therefore, U2's slot at Live Aid was something I was eager to see more than any other.  In those days, believe it or not, Bono could do no wrong in my eyes.  I wanted to BE Bono.  I was similarly short, with a big nose, loved Ireland, had some poncey boots and a brown mullet. Of course, nowadays, Bono can do no right in my eyes, the gurning, supercilious, self-aggrandising, overly-earnest, hypocritical, affectation-riddled, self-righteous bore. But in 1985, when he decided that there was too much space between stage and crowd, leading to his decision to forego U2's 3rd scheduled song (the brilliant 'Sunday Bloody Sunday') to climb down and direct security to pluck a pretty girl out of the crowd so that he could hug and dance with her (she was 'getting crushed'...yeah Bono, but she was also fit, eh?) , I naively thought, THIS IS SO COOL.

U2 were the second best performers of the day.  The very best, unarguably, as everyone agrees, was Queen.  I had just got into Queen at the time, as well.   So for me, Live Aid validated my decision that U2 and Queen were the two greatest rock bands of all time, which, given my very recent introduction to rock, says absolutely nothing.  But the general consensus is that those 8 boys done good.

Unlike the bands I went on to like in the next few years.

Within a year of Live Aid, I started my obsession with Bob Dylan.  This might have been delayed, had I seen him perform that night.  He was the closing act of the US leg of the concert.  He went on stage with Keith Richard and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones and the three of them had only about half an hour's rehearsal beforehand.  In true Dylan style, he then made a bad situation worse, by telling Keith and Ronnie, once on stage, that he wanted to play completely different songs, which they hadn't rehearsed.  Inevitably, the result was execrable. And, given Bob's pretty atrocious 1980s (though that's a non-devotee's opinion, not mine), Live Aid proceeded to be the shit cherry on a big fat cake made of shit for Bob in that decade.

I was also a year away from getting into Bowie, but at least he he did a decent set.  It was a bit 80s, and Bowie unfairly got a lot of stick for being too 80s in the 80s, until he died, when people started to celebrate how well he adapted to the times.  And I was also a year away from liking Led Zeppelin, who fell flat in the first of two (kind of) reunions since splitting after John Bonham's death in 1980.  They roped in Phil Collins on drums, possibly the most mis-cast drummer they could have agreed to use, and blamed him for their crap performance.  (I mean, Stairway to Heaven needs bud-a-dum, bud-a dum, bud-a dum-dum dummmm, and not a bu-dup, bu-dup, bu-dup, bu-dup, bu-dup,)

But going back to the whole concept of knowing where you were at a certain time, I was mostly in my bedroom, but had a short spell in North Mid's A&E department.  During an act that I was less interested in (and there were several, The Boomtown Rats most notably, because let's face it, Geldof's own band were WAY out of their league) I decided to re-arrange the posters on my bedroom wall.  In the process, the pin bit of a drawing pin drove its way through the flat head bit as I pushed it into the wall and so it ended up embedded in my thumb.  That part of the pin had a thickened end and so you couldn't simply ease it out as smoothly as it went in.  My Dad took some pliers to it to pull it out, but I felt faint and wouldn't let him, asking to go a hospital instead where they would have a less crude method of extraction.  At the hospital, they used pliers to pull the thing out.  Bastards.  It hurt like hell.  But it was quick and I was soon back watching Live Aid.

I'm not sure anything like Live Aid can happen again.  The sheer scale of it, relative to its time, was way beyond what was thought possible then.  The line-up of artists has been unequalled since and these days we are beyond even having that many iconic artists available to snort coke backstage, lap up expensive gifts on their riders, treble their records sales, demand everyone vacates the area around a port-a-loo so that they can take a shit without their straining being overheard (Madonna, apparently). ...er, I mean, iconic artist available to freely gift their services to save the lives of starving Ethiopians.  But then, that fact just helps to make Live Aid a one off.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 12 - Another School trip, ghosts, Adam and the Ants and Harringtons)

Junior 4 was all about trying to be cool.

My best friends (both now and in the years before Junior 4), John and Darren, were abandoned by me in favour of Robert Hutchinson and Gerard Lynch, who I considered to be the coolest kids in the class.  The girls all loved Hutch, he had that air of confidence and looked like a ten year old baby-faced David Soul, only, he was a bit of a short-arse and, if I'm honest, consequently chubby in the way that a baby is before it starts walking.  Puppy fat, maybe.  Or short-arsed kid chubbiness, stored up energy ready for when he grows tall, which he never did.  Robert knew about proper pop music and so did Gerard.  And they both understood fashion.  No one in our class even thought about fashion before that.  Maybe the girls did, but I wouldn't have known that and I doubt it, looking back.  But Robert and Gerard both declared themselves to be 'Rude Boys' and each owned a Harrington.  Gerard also had a Crombie and was tall enough to carry off the much longer coat.  Robert would have looked like something from Michael Bentine's Potty Time in a Crombie.  Anyway, I wanted to fit in and persuaded my parents to buy me a Harrington.  (Incidentally, my Dad bought me another one for my 50th birthday last month, knowing that I am both nostalgic and a creature of habit).  We were the Harrington gang and sometimes Robert suggested we turn our jackets inside out so that the iconic red tartan lining was fully on show on the outside.  At this point, my effort to fit in failed somewhat.  Robert and Gerard had plain white lining on the inside of their sleeves.  I had bright green.  That was embarrassing.  I looked like a Scottish racing jockey.

Despite the green sleeves, they agreed that I could be in a room with them on the school trip that summer.  That was where my temporary abandonment of Darren and John was most treacherously realised, having been in a room with them in Combe Martin the previous two years.  This year the holiday location switched to Lympsham in Somerset and there were 6 of us in that room, 6 of us self-styled coolest kids in the class, with our Harringtons and with Robert as our leader.  The holiday was brilliant, especially as somehow I had got over my chronic travel sickness and didn't puke once on the coach the whole time,  which was fortunate given how much my jacket meant to me.  I'd have been mortified if the outside ended up as bright green as the inner sleeves.

The hotel in which we stayed was reputedly haunted.  And we believed this, after all, we were all Catholics, so we were open to all sorts of superstitious nonsense.  Originally the building had been a farmhouse and our room was built on an annex where the dairy had once been.  This became significant once the spooky story gathered some meat and we were told that the ghost was a milk maid.  Someone then claimed to have looked through the frosted glass of our bedroom door to see the silhouette of a woman bending over as if milking a cow (I imagine if we were older and more worldly, we would have interpreted this rather more crudely).  If that wasn't scary enough, I then imagined - as I twisted the handle of the door leading to our corridor - that someone on the other side of the door was turning it back forcefully and yet, as that door also had glass in it, I could see no one there.  I totally pooed myself and ran back to the main building armed with this addition to the story of the haunting.

This holiday proved a rite of passage for me, though.  It was when I got into PROPER MUSIC thanks to Robert bringing with him two 45" singles to play at the party.  The first was Adam and the Ants, Kings of the Wild Frontier.  The second - and more in keeping with the Harringtons - was Madness, The Return of the Los Palmas 7.  I was blown away by both and became a fan for life of Madness and an obsessive Adam Ant fan for at least a year afterwards, much to my Dad's discomfort and concern over my sexuality, once the posters of this obvious 'poofter' in make-up went up on my wall.

On the last evening, each room had to perform an act for all the other kids.  John and Darren's room mimed along to a Beatles song, while we did the same for Kings of the Wild Frontier, just to highlight the chasm in coolness.  However, in a moment of self-conscious awkwardness reminiscent of my green sleeves, I was instructed by Robert to be 'on piano'.  There is of course no bloody piano on that song, so I felt like a bit of a prick.  We Ants weren't even allowed to put the famous white stripe across our noses, as only Adam had this, the Ants didn't, as Robert pointed out.  And Robert was Adam Ant.  Gerard was guitarist, Marco Pirroni.  And I was just the prick on piano that wasn't in the song.  Robert might have looked the coolest, but at least he suffered for his art.  As I discovered later, when I tried it myself, applying a thick white line of toothpaste over your cheeks and nose sends a wave of stinging mintiness into your eyes that hurts like buggery.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 11 - School trip to Combe Martin, the double bed, Dutch ovens and a nuclear waste vomit)

Combe Martin is a coastal village in North Devon and it provided the destination for our primary school's summer trips in 1979 and 1980.  The experience has ingrained itself on our collective memory, like seeing a Granny's bloomers on the bus, with that same mixture of comedy and horror.

The key source for the horror was the sleeping situation.  Four ten year old boys.  Three beds.  I know it sounds like a priest's midnight party, but fortunately our Catholic school had not invited any along to supervise.  It required a practical solution.  Three of us - me, John and Darren (still my best mates today, in spite of Combe Martin, or maybe because of it!) -  were joined by another John (there were 7 of them in the class).  The deal was that everyone had to have a spell with one other boy in the double bed and the other nights in a single; and that you kept your pyjamas on in the double (as if you wouldn't); and put pillows down the middle.  As for farting, well, there were no boundaries there and John was eager to perform a 'Dutch Oven' on anyone sharing the double with him.

Anyone sharing a double bed with a brutally malevolent farter like John discovered that it was almost as bad as sharing a seat on the coach with me.  My inclination towards vomiting on account of debilitating car (and coach) sickness in the 70s was as inevitable and as unavoidable as Ollie Reed being drunk on a TV chat show.  My stomach started to stir after about an hour, no matter where on the coach I'd sit or if I'd been sucking on enough of those boiled sweets that came in a round tin full of icing sugar to look like a hamster.  Given that we travelled from North London to Devon and back, and was on and off the coach for excursions every day of the week, my throat ended up with more hot bodily fluid flowing through it than a Port-a-loo at a spicy food festival.  I threw up on EVERY single journey.  I have to lay some of the blame on your average 1970s coach, with no air-con and rubbish suspension, but the packed lunches provided for us really didn't help.  SPAM, I worked out, is HAM which makes you SPEW, hence the portmanteau.  And that other invidious culinary invention, sandwich spread, just looks like pig sick, so naturally made you think of puking up as soon as you looked at it.  But I was my own worse enemy the time we had a day out to Exeter Cathedral (the other side of Devon from Combe Martin).  I washed a Mint Choc Chip Cornetto down with a can of lime-flavoured fizzy drink just before boarding the coach and the very moment I stepped off it back at the hotel, I unleashed a bright green torrent that looked like it would require a clean up from people in radiation suits.  You didn't want to ever tell a teacher when you were feeling sick, because they would give you a sick bag, which as we all know, was so-called not so much for what it was meant to catch, but more for what it already smelt like.  

The final night of each trip was celebrated with a disco.  Some boys plucked up the courage to dance with the girls, which was always a strange sight, as at that age girls tend to be taller.  Were we among those brave, confident boys?  The four of us, who shared a double bed, with one of us a serial puker?  Of course not, we hid under the table the whole time.

The hotel we stayed at in Combe Martin has long gone, but the spirit of those trips SHALL live on, because my 50th birthday present from my wife was to book me, John and Darren into another hotel in Combe Martin for a nostalgic re-enactment.  And she booked the 3 of us into a room with just one single bed and one double.  Oh dear.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 10 - Diamond socks, rubbish songs, Steve's spits and pissing up the wall)

It felt like a rite of passage, moving from infants into juniors, the other side of the school, with all the big kids, scary.  And for the first time we had a male teacher.  Which felt more grown up.  Mr C_____ managed to fit my Dad's contemptuous view of male primary school teachers, insofar as he WAS "wetter than a pair of pissed-in pants".  The evidence was plain on first sight.  The corduroy trousers, the yellow diamond-patterned socks, the soft shoes that looked like they were made of macaroons dipped in tea.  And he played guitar and piano, as in those days before portable stereos it was a prerequisite for primary schools to have at least one competent musician.  His most ubiquitously played song was something so sickly sweet and mawkishly sentimental that even at the age of 7 you'd cringe every time you were made to sing it.  The words were:

    Friends, I will remember you, think of you, pray for you,

    When another day is through, I'll still be friends with you.

And Mr C____ claimed that he wrote it.  It took me about 30 years to find out that John Denver did.

Singing was something we did LOADS of in school, especially hymns, most of which were dirges, as the Catholic Church preferred something more solemn than the Church of England's frivolous melodic nonsense.  But I hated singing and mimed every time.  It was even worse if you had to stand next to Steve A____ who had a speech impediment (just one of many afflictions) in which he SSHHHed his S's.  I had the misfortune to be next to him once when we sang Boney M's 'When a Child is Born'.  Imagine the saliva-soaking from this verse:

    A shilent wisshh shails the sheven sheas

    The windsh of schange whishper in the treesh

    And the wallsh of doubt tumble tosshed and torn

    Thish comesh to passh when a child ish born

I'm not sure a song exists with such frequent use of the letter S and if he wasn't as limp as a Willow Tree (another of my Dad's analogies) I would have suspected Mr C____ of choosing that song with Shteve in mind.  Not that Steve had the slightest self-consciousness about his lisp.  If he did, he wouldn't have constantly run around the playground pretending to be his heroes - the Shix Million Dollar Man or Kenny Dalglisshh.  Poor old Steve.  He was quite smelly too.  And fat.  And in the remedial group.  And a motor bike once went right into him as he crossed Bowes Road without looking and bounced straight off, sending the rider to the ground, while Steve merely rubbed his leg and said, "Ouch".

Back to the whole excitement thing about joining the juniors...  We got to play in the big playground, or rather we didn't because Junior 4 and Junior 3 dominated it with football, so we just ran around the fringes or stayed in the grassy area where girls skipped and sang songs (Mr C____ was probably dying to join in).  We also got to use the big boys' toilet, the novelty being that it had a urinal.  Not individual ones.  One of those shared metal ones, where if you stood too close you'd get splash back all over your light grey jumper and not much darker grey trousers.  There was a clip halfway up the water pipe above the urinal where it was fixed to the wall and we had competitions to see who could piss high enough to hit it.  You had to get your distance from the urinal right, not just the angle, otherwise you'd end up pissing in your own face in an effort to point your willy too far upwards.  It might be that Steve did this quite often.  It would explain a lot about the smell coming off his jumper.

I don't remember much more about Junior 1 with Mr C____, except that me and my best mates John and Darren were in top group for Times Tables and the following year we skipped Junior 2 and went into Junior 3.  Our parents probably had us ear-marked for Oxbridge from that moment onwards.  But having recently seen a class photo of Junior 3 with less than 20 kids in it, we worked out that they only stuck us in it, because it had too few kids and our class had too many.  We had to stay in Junior 3 for 2 years anyway, in the end, while our original class joined us.  Pointless.  But at least we got to go on an extra school trip to Devon which only Juniors 3 and 4 went on.  But that's another story....

Phil Knows - A 50th Birthday Tribute to a Best Man

Irony is a wonderful thing, the root of British humour.  No one revels in it more than my friend Phil and he has turned exploiting irony for amusement into an art form.  His love of the absurd is infectious and indefatigable. On too many occasions to count he has brought tears to my eyes, crying with laughter tears, thanks to his swiftly conceived, sardonically delivered nuggets of wry wit.  But few of the funniest people in life are also the nicest, almost as if you sometimes need a slightly nasty side to take the piss.  Phil bucks this trend.  I say 'nicest' but 'nice' is a rubbish word, almost meaningless due its lack of specificity.  But I struggle to describe adequately what I mean by 'nice' without descending into the sort of mawkish sentiment that Phil would rightly scoff at, with a comic turned up lip and frown and a shrug like the ubiquitous Alan Partridge GIF.  So let's get the mushy bit out of the way quickly.  Phil has shown to me over the decades genuine warmth and consideration and a forgiving nature for the times when I was younger and acted like a prick; he is a role model in how he lives his life, sticking to his principles, never succumbing to vanity and showing wonderful devotion to his family; and as a friend he has been loyal, consistent and supportive.  He has always been a measure against which I check myself when I stray towards self-indulgent, egocentric, attention-seeking behaviours, because he is the apotheosis of those sins.  And he is a sage, someone whose opinion everyone values, because it comes from an intelligent, logical and compassionate place; hence the oft-used response of 'Phil Knows' (though, with classic absurdity, he turned this into 'Feel Nose' by always stroking his nose in response to anyone saying that).

He lives in Shrewsbury and isn't one for too much social media contact, so it would have been easy to lose touch over the 30+ years in which I've known him, and indeed we have sometimes gone a long time without much contact.  But now we meet up each year with other university mates in the central location of Birmingham and do what we used to do as students by spending a day drinking beer, moving from pub to pub and making each other laugh out loud with the same sort of nonsense we indulged in back in 1988.  And that is enough to remind me that Phil is the best of men, as he was at my wedding where I chose him alongside my brother and oldest school friend, Dalboy, as my 3 official Best Men.  He's the best of men and the best of friends.  And to return to irony, as the most self-effacing of people I have ever met, he will probably cringe all the way through this tribute and feel slightly embarrassed at (but nonetheless appreciative of) the fact that I have written it to mark his 50th birthday today.

So, brazen sentiment aside, let me now focus on something of the frivolous and the absurd nature of my experience of Phil.  There are enough tales to fill a comic novel, but I will edit myself down to half a dozen or so.

I first met Phil in Mansfield Hall of Residence at the University of Reading in September 1988.  We were brought together by the sort of self-absorbed dickhead that we both thereafter came to view with gentle contempt, a lad who dragged everyone to the pub that first night in a fit of attention-seeking social engineering.  Over the next few weeks, our social group formed, with Phil as the reluctant leader and his room the 'place to be' for our gang of equally self-deprecating misfits.  It was Phil who recognised the bond that held us together - crapness - and it was he who created what became a long running joke, how our lives can be measured against an imaginary 'crap scale'.  He took the joke further by reminding us of a line from Blackadder to describe each situation any of us got into in which things (typically) went wrong: 'At home to Mr Cock-Up'.

So often, Phil reminded us that Mr Cock Up was with us and at no time more so than when a few of us went Inter-Railing around Europe.  One incident in a catalogue of disasters was Phil's ill-timed, horrendously loud fart, which terminated a rare opportunity in which I was being successful in chatting up a girl.  I say 'successful'... we were in Munich and she was German and our friend Geoff translated using the limited amount of O' Level German that he could remember.  At some point while she was explaining how many pets she had, Phil, who was sat next to me on the ground with his knees up and legs parted, let rip with a pavement-shattering 'PPPPHHHHAAAAARRRRRPPPPPPP'.  As if his bottom had decided it had had enough of all this nonsense and was shouting in protest.  The German girl consequently decided it was time to bid us 'Auf Wiedersehen'.

Phil not only holds the record for the most ill-timed fart in my experience, but possibly the smelliest.  He once strolled into my room in hall and silently started at me with a deadpan expression as I chattered to him nonchalantly, until the point at which I wondered why he wasn't answering me.  A grin spread across his face at the same time as his rancid fart spread its way towards my nostrils.  He hadn't come in to talk.  He'd come to leave me that gift.

Phil laughs at himself rather than ever takes himself too seriously, which means that when he laughs at you, you just want to join in.  He reminds me regularly that I have a 'funny shaped head' and after I once told him that the 'fat, smelly. thick kid in our class at school was nicknamed Flump' he replied with, "But you were the fat, smelly, thick kid in your class at school, so you must be Flump" and he has called me Flump regularly ever since.  His lack of malice is that disarming that he can laugh at people's misfortunes if there is something comic about them and no one ever minds.  I once went into a shop with him and there was no one to be seen, so we waited a minute or two before hearing a quiet voice from behind the counter calling, "Help!  Help!"  We looked over to see a old woman lying on the floor.  "Are you ok?" one of us asked.  "I've fallen over," she replied, comically stating the obvious.  We helped her up and checked she was OK, but afterwards we found that the whole thing was making us laugh uncontrollably due to the sheer absurdity of this woman lying on the floor and feeling the need to explain that she was there because she fell over, as opposed to perhaps choosing it as place to sleep or trying to polish the tiles with the back of her dress.

University threw up a number of pretentious wankers, people who created affectations to make themselves more interesting, made up their own nicknames on arrival or played guitar in front of others in an effort to be impressive.  Phil managed to play guitar in front of us regularly (and actually quite beautifully) without EVER appearing to be like those attention-seekers.  And that's because he just did it for his own satisfaction and we just happened to be in his room all the time; so why not?  He never said, 'Listen to this!'  But we did listen and it became a feature of our lives at the time.  That and his choices of records to put on - Jethro Tull and early Genesis (unfashionably and with pride) and more contemporary stuff from that time like The Waterboys and The Sundays.  I've seen both Tull and the Waterboys in concert with Phil, both amazing gigs, both all the better for sharing the experience and love of their music with him.

Anyway, that's all just the tip of the iceberg, but a flavour of my good friend, Phil.  Happy half-century mate.  I will raise a pint of bitter to you tonight and look forward to another 50 years of pub-crawls, laughing at all the nonsense the world throws up and the unwelcomed intrusion of the odd ill-timed fart.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 9 - Infants 3, Softies, Alan's funny teeth and Priests )

When we moved to Southgate, I was 6 and changed schools to the very lovely little Our Lady of Lourdes RC primary in Arnos Grove.  For part of my first year there, I actually got picked up and driven in by my Infants 3 teacher, Mrs Green.  But at some point my mum made an arrangement with another school mum called Peggy to take us there by tube.  This required a walk to Oakwood station (nearer than Southgate) and a two stop journey on the Piccadilly line.  Peggy was Irish, with the strongest of accents (think 'filum' instead of 'film') and two sons, each a year younger than me and my brother.  That year seemed a gulf.  Those two boys were pretty bloody wet, smack-arse-faced, like real-life versions of the 'Softies' from 'The Beano' (the swots that Dennis the Menace bullied).  Not that they would have read 'The Beano'.  John - the oldest one - preferred 'TV Comic' which I considered with contempt to be babyish.  Not quite as babyish as the fact that his younger brother slept in a cot at the age of 4 or 5 years old.  That was Thomas.  He had an accent as strong as his mum's, maybe because he didn't talk to anyone else.  When a tube train arrived at the station, he'd shout out where it was bound.  He'd pronounce Cockfosters as Cockfodders and Arnos Grove as Arnot Gove.  That killed me and my brother.  I'm not sure what accent John had, because he never spoke.  Except when he was crying about his mum not buying him TV Comic.  Later in life it dawned on me that together their names made 'John Thomas' as in slang for a willy.  They really were a couple of willies, the poor buggers.

My first memory of arriving at Our Lady of Lourdes was being buddied up with some weird kid called Alan.  Being called Alan was weird enough at the time.  All Alans were bald middle-aged men.  I might be wrong about his name, but sod it, most of these memories could be unreliable, so let's still call him Alan.  He had the straightest teeth you've ever seen.  Like someone had taken an electric grinder to them.  And the third respect in which he was weird was that he refused to ever eat snacks at playtime, saying that his mum told him it would spoil his appetite for lunch.  I soon negotiated my way out of that situation and Alan left the school soon after.  I suspect his mother home-schooled him.  You would if you were the sort of fucked up parent who called your kid Alan and denied him snacks at playtime.

In the equivalent of Infants 3 these days, 7 year old kids are made to do SATs; but this is nothing compared to what we had to do as Catholic kids in the 70s.  First Confession!  Because by 7, you've clearly accumulated enough sins to need to purge your burdened soul of them through verbal exposition to a priest.  Unlike normal confession, which happened in those traditional wooden cubicles, our first one was alone with a priest in the vestry.  Not something you'd write to Jim'll Fix It to ask to do.  There was lots of time spent in class preparing for this moment.  Nothing practical like self-defence, but just some old shit about Jesus and families and how we are born with sin and basically fucked if we don't confess everything bad we do.  We had to fill in a special book as preparation with pictures and writing.  What the book missed out was a list of suggested things to confess.  Because at 7 years old, you just aren't sure what counts.  Did Knock Down Ginger count?  Did laughing at Alan's funny teeth count?  What about finding pleasure in seeing a 6 year old kid throw a wobbler because his mum won't buy him TV Comic?

In the end I went for the same unspecific term that everyone else used - I confessed to having 'bad thoughts'.  (Luckily the priest didn't reply with, 'Well, funny you should say that...' and I got away with 3 Our Fathers and 5 Hail Mary's)

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 8 - Playing out, gingers and dicing with death)

Playing out was cool.  It was much cooler than playing out today.  Generation X, the poor bastards, don't know what they're missing.  Instead of having your playing out controlled by over-protective parents, or just over-zealous parents, or just misguidedly dutiful parents, no one controlled our playing out beyond being told to go out and if you were young (like under 4) you had to stay within shouting distance from home.  That was when your mum shouted your name to say it was time to come home, about 10 hours later, and you'd hear her from anywhere.

'MICHAEL! DINNER!'

That gave us a playing-out radius of about 2 miles from the house.  And you'd climb out of a tree in some nearby park, missing some of the branches on the way down due to the encroaching darkness of the evening and sprint home.  Yes, 'sprint'.  You youngsters try sprinting after playing out for 10 hours.  I don't mean that sort of sprint you do from your parents car to the McDonald's queue.  I mean, a 2 mile sprint in the twilight towards your house, because you're eager for some spaghetti bolognaise or a tin of chicken in white sauce on toast.

The best games were when you watched a film the night before and spent the next day recreating it with your mates.  Action films, obviously.  Like 'The Dirty Dozen' (which needed improvising when there were only 4 of you playing out); or 'A Bridge Too Far' where the garage roof substituted for a bridge.  Some films were a bit harder to recreate.  'Jaws' lost its essence when translated to the Green outside the house.  'The Omen' was an interesting one to do.  I think the apocalyptic Biblical symbolism and nuances of plot exposition were lost on Philip, our neighbour.  He was a bit thick.

Less imaginative or complex - and therefore more appealing to Philip - was when we played 'Knock Down Ginger', where you'd knock on a stranger's front door and immediately run away, hoping they wouldn't see you.  The generation before us called it 'Knocking Dolly out of Bed', but we were less derogatory in terms of objectifying women as 'Dolly birds' so we picked on 'gingers' instead.  Nowadays, you wouldn't even say 'ginger'.  Nor would you knock on someone's door and run away.  Both of these now cause offence.  But that was always the point.  I suppose a modern version would be called, 'Knock down whatever the occupant chooses to self-identify as.'  Doesn't have the same ring.

Next to our row of houses was a very small, walled wooded area, with a few bushes and trees and an electricity generator.  There was a sign on the fence saying, 'DANGER' which in the 1970s meant, 'PLAY HERE.'  We loved playing in what we called 'The Danger', climbing on top of the generator, trying to open its doors, shoving metal into it in an effort to make it explode.  You'd get these public information films on TV in those days that showed kids the possible consequences of doing shit like that, or playing on railways, or climbing electricity pylons.  Great films, which gave us lots of ideas for what to do.  Public information at its best.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 7 - Everybody needs bad neighbours)

There were 6 tall houses built against each other in our cul-de-sac, Linden Way.  So everyone knew each other.  I say 'knew' in preference to 'like'.  I think the only actual proper friendship between anyone was my mum and Margaret, next door.

At number 92 there lived Alan and Leonie and their daughters (slightly younger than me and my brother) Deborah and Emily.  I thought the whole family was weird.  And I based this judgement on some very conservative and prejudiced thoughts.  For one thing, their living room was painted white.  What the fuck was that about?  This fit with my perception of Alan as some king of hippy.  Not a long-haired hippy, as he was bald as an egg, but a hippy in terms of being a bit wet, a bit of a limp lettuce leaf, a bit corduroy and sandals.  I once had a religious argument with him in which I refuted his beliefs as an Anglican in defence of fair less accommodating and self-righteous Catholicism.  I failed to understand how it could be that he was Church of England and his wife was Jewish.  That made no sense to me.  Other kids might have learnt a lesson from this fact, in a sort of To Kill of Mockingbird way, you know, about not judging people without knowing the facts.  But not me.  That white-washed living room proved I was right about the whole weirdness of that family.  And I'll never forgive Emily for eating our strawberries, which were growing against our adjoining fence.  Her being 2 years old at the time doesn't excuse it.  That's out of control behaviour.

At 96, the other side of us, was Les and Margaret and their 4 boys, Gary, Steven, Jonathan and Philip.  Les was a copper who helped out the scouts jumble sales by collecting stuff for them in his big black van and then helping himself to the best bits.  He had oily slicked back, dyed black hair, like Reg Varney in On the Buses.  Margaret was a nice woman, but scared me after the incident in which she told me off for pooing behind the garages.  The older boys were skinheads.  The younger ones weren't close friends of ours, but convenient acquaintances to do stuff with.  Jonathan was alright, but Philip was feral, spending his whole time with his shirt off (skin peeling from sun burn every summer), climbing trees and snotting and pissing everywhere.  He once ate a worm.

At 98 lived Ken, the doctor.  Nice bloke.  Too clever and too straight-laced for anyone else to be close friends with, but everyone liked him.  Spent all his time in his garden.  If your ball went over and damaged his flowers, he'd merely discuss the issue in a positive manner with you like a soft primary school teacher.  Eventually, he found a similarly simpering wife and she moved in with him.

At 100 was Eddie and Edna.  Eddie was a copper (because like our house and Les's, his was Police-owned).  He was a bit scary and gruff spoken, but tended to chuckle a lot.  We made sure our ball never went into his garden.  I can't remember Edna.  I think like a lot of 1970s wives she stayed home and did stuff, fuck knows what.

At 102 were the rich couple.  Mr and Mrs Adams.  We assumed they were rich, because they replaced their front door for a flash wooden one with a brass knocker and because they just looked snottily at the rest of us all the time.  (You could forgive them doing that to Philip, they must have thought he was a savage.)  They had a high fence on the far side of their garden and trees that afforded them some privacy, so our ball never went in there and you couldn't see what they were up to.  Sipping champagne and eating caviar we assumed.  Mum once drove the car straight into their high wooden fence, knocking it over.  She was learning to drive.  She switched from manual to automatic after that.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 6 - Those 3 toilets again)

Our house in Linden Way had 3 toilets.  One on each floor.  And they each took on a different role and thus developed a different environment from the others.

The ground floor toilet was mainly used by me and my brother, as it was the most accessible if we were outside playing.  That meant that we were usually in a rush.  You know how kids are.  You don't want to stop playing, so you hold it in until your bladder has expanded to the size of a space hopper or until your turtle head has nearly eaten an hole in your pants before you run panicking to the loo.  The rushed approach to the use of this utility meant that the walls were often splattered, a bit like when you shake a bottle of Coke before opening it.  You lose the first mouthful in the post-cap-removal explosion.

The kitchen was also downstairs, so you'd expect my mum to use this loo, but I have no memory of her doing so.  This might be because she successfully hid from us the fact that she ever used any toilet ever or perhaps she wisely went upstairs to the middle floor loo to avoid the carnage her sons often left in the downstairs one.

The middle floor toilet neighboured the living room and also had the bath tub that we chose to use.  Given that mum bathed us in the early years in the house (I'd like to say weeks, given that I was 6 years old when we moved in), her mere presence helped keep this room in a more hygienic condition.  As trips to this toilet tended to be whilst watching TV in the next room, they were unrushed and civilised.  I say 'civilised' but all my memories of either of us brothers skidding our pants so badly that we'd take them off and hide them behind the sink are from the middle floor toilet.

Finally, there was a top floor toilet.  It had a bath, but this was never used.  Probably because this toilet smelt somewhat pissy.  Like both other toilets, this one had no external wall and no window and so it relied on an extractor fan to clear any steam.  (From the bath, that is, not from a wee.... although, sometimes, well, you know).  It was flanked by both our bedroom and my parents' bedroom, so it was the toilet that was used during the night.  The extractor fan was too noisy for any of us to put the light on, so we slashed in the dark.  The floor was carpeted, so inevitably the first 10 seconds of a Jimmy was silent as you'd desperately adjust your aim until you'd hear the reassuring  splash of spray on still water.  I'm sure that on more than one occasion, mindful of the futility of hitting the target first time, I opted for the easier and wider receptacle of the bath tub.  Perhaps another reason for never using it for its proper function.

(I know I've written about this before, but didn't check back, because I was in a rush to finish and go for a poo.)

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 5 - Moving to the suburbs, The Green and Philip's bodily fluids)

We moved from Chalk Farm to Southgate when I was 6 and it was like a different world.  There was green everywhere, instead of grey.  There was an area of grass right outside our house, about half the size of a football pitch, which we called 'The Green'.  And it was ours.  When I say 'ours' I mean the few kids who lived in a house facing The Green.  That would include kids from the 6 newly built 3 storey houses in a cul-de-sac called Linden Way - me and my brother from number 94, Deborah and Emily from 92 and Jonathan and Philip from 96.  (The latter two had older brothers, but both were teenagers and less interested in our patch of grass than they were in other grass, I perhaps erroneously and judgementally conjecture).  And then, from the semi detached houses on the other side of The Green, there was just Sergio, a spoilt and annoying kid of Italian descent who we sometimes played with and sometimes told to fuck off.  The third side of this triangular oasis had flats, full of old people I suspect as no one came out.  There were lots of old people around that area.  Poor bastards.  We must have annoyed them by climbing over their fences, ringing their doorbells and running away and being generally noisy during the long hours we'd be playing out in the area.  Kids who didn't live right next to The Green rarely used it, not out of fear, more apathy, but when they did, we didn't like it.  Kids get territorial, like dogs.  We didn't piss on The Green to mark our territory though.  We only pissed on it when we were bored and thought no one could see.

The great thing about The Green was that it was big enough to play football on, jumpers for goalposts OBVIOUSLY; and when the ball went into the road, which it always did, because there was nothing fencing us in, we would just continue playing in the road.  Few cars drove past, it was a quiet, leafy suburban set of streets, away from the nearest main road which linked Southgate and Oakwood tube stations.  And in the summer, The Green attracted bees, butterflies and wasps, which we'd catch in fishing nets.  We'd let the butterflies go, and the bees usually; but the wasps we'd keep in jam jars and then find garden spiders to put in with them in order to see who would win a gladiatorial contest.  The spiders usually did.

There weren't any trees bigger than saplings on The Green, but there were two small, conspicuous round bushes, which you could sit in, push each other onto or piss against.  Usually it was just Philip from next door who did that.  His hobby was pissing or snotting everywhere in the local area.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 4 - Seamus' snot-drop, vomit-inducing milk and Janet and John's Special Needs)

I went to nursery in Gospel Oak and all I can say about that was that it had a big sandpit.  And after that I started at The Rosary Roman Catholic primary school in Belsize Park.  My teacher was called Mrs Morgan.  For some reason, years later when me and my brother were in the bath together (obviously not a LOT of years later) we had a running joke in which one of us would put a wet flannel on our head and say, "I'm Mrs Morgan".  I have absolutely NO idea why.  My memory of my first teacher was that she didn't walk around with a wet flannel on her head.  In fact, the only time she might ever find her head soaked would be if she went too near Seamus when he shook HIS head.  Seamus had a permanent snot-drop hanging off his nostril.  I say permanent, but I suspect it dropped (or flew) off at times, but then it was soon replaced by another snot-drop.  His head was like a leaking bucket of glue.

Seamus is the only kid in my class at The Rosary that I can recall, but the faces in an old photo that my mum has mostly look familiar.  For some reason, in that photo, everyone is sitting on the floor listening to the teacher telling a story, everyone in their own clothes.  And behind them, sitting on a chair and in full uniform is me.  Arms folded.  Standing out a mile.  I don't remember being bullied, but I certainly looked like I should have been.

School milk was still available (although Thatcher had 'snatched' it away in 1971, for some reason we still had it in 1974, so maybe the church paid for it).  But it wasn't stored in a fridge, so by the time we got to drink it, late in the day, it was warm and full of cream.  Cream in milk makes me want to throw my guts up and from that point onwards I refused to drink milk (except in milk shakes) until I reached adulthood and discovered semi-skimmed.  I was quite a fussy eater too and Mrs Morgan's assistant used to swap her 'grown up's' chocolate sponge cake and custard dessert at lunch time for my vomit-inducing (and vomit-looking) bowl of rice pudding.

My favourite reading material at this time was the 'Topsy and Tim' series of books.  Topsy and Tim were a cooler version of 'Janet and John'.  They were 70s kids.  Janet and John talked to each other like they were pensioners living in the 1930s.  Or as if they had severe learning difficulties.  Outside of school, I'd get books from Primrose Hill library, like 'Meg and Mog' and 'The Mr Men.'  Years after moving away from the area, I found a 'Meg and Mog' book which had a Primrose Hill library label in it and I worried for ages that I'd get into trouble.  I walked past that library just a few years back on the way to a restaurant with staff from Haverstock School and even then I felt a bit anxious, like I'm still on their 'Wanted' list with a fine that has since increased to something like my annual salary.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 3 - London rooftops, Getting kissed 40x and the Spastic Box)

Bridge House was 6 storeys high and you could access the roof.  The view from there was amazing. You looked down onto the top the Roundhouse, across Camden Lock market towards Camden Town, the West End, the Post Office Tower.  Early 70s rules on Health and Safety decreed that a waist high metal bar around the perimeter of the roof was sufficient prevention against a young child falling to his death.  So my parents let me go up there on my own.  Or at least, didn't stop me from doing so.

At ground level there were scary concrete sheds for residents.  It was unusual for anyone to have a car.  Dad had a bicycle which he kept in our concrete shed, but I wouldn't go in there due to the infestation of killer spiders.  I say 'killer'.  They were daddy-long-legs spiders and tended to remain static.  But I was sure that if I'd gone in there, they'd jump on my back like in that final Jon Pertwee storyline in Doctor Who.

Next to Bridge House was a pub.  And my parents must have known the managers, because I was allowed to go round there and play with their daughter outside of opening hours.  It was an intriguing and exciting play space for kids, full of scruffy luxury with its dark red interior, strange sofas and beer-soaked carpet emitting an enticing odour.  The daughter was slightly older than me and far more forthright.  She once pinned me to the carpet in order to kiss me, then proceeded to count each kiss.  She got up to 40.  So it wasn't just my first kiss with a girl, it was my first 40 kisses.

We didn't have to walk far to the shops, just across the road and next to the tube station.  The sweet shop obviously held the biggest attraction for me, especially the bubble-gum machine outside.  You needed the wrist strength of a weightlifter to turn that bloody knob on the bubble-gum machine.  There was also one of those large charity boxes chained up outside the shop, a figure of a boy in callipers, a sign encouraging you to give to 'spastics'.  Spastic was such a 70s word, but got banned later, because of its association with people who had disabilities; but we tended to use it just for people who were a bit crap at something.  The sweet shop was run by Monty, one of those friendly chaps who enjoyed talking to kids.  Nice bloke, but come the 1980s he probably had to stop being friendly to kids as people started to get paranoid about that sort of thing being a bit noncey.  Most of the time it wasn't.

There was a grocery shop where there had been a dairy on the corner next to the tube, where Chalk Farm Road split into Haverstock Hill and Adelaide Road.  We were in there quite a lot.  Sometimes I was in the barbers over the other side of the road.  And on a rare occasion, Marine Ices.  I couldn't get over Marine Ices.  A restaurant just for serving ice-cream.  I've never known the like of it.  It was still going 40 years later when I was working in Haverstock School, but it moved location during that time.  The barbers was still there too, but under different management, a right moany bastard.  As for Monty, well, he'd also gone by then.  Hopefully into happy retirement and not paedo-jail.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 2 - Doctor Who, a Golliwog, Stuart Hall)

My cuddly toy collection reflected the one in 'Play School'.  Almost.  I had a Big Ted, a Little Ted and a Golliwog.  My bedroom in Flat 29, Bridge House was downstairs.  Upstairs was a long rectangular lounge, the caramel brown settee in the middle, dividing it in half, creating an area for a dining room table.  That also meant that it was easy to hide behind the sofa during Doctor Who.  Everyone talks about hiding behind the sofa during Doctor Who, but I imagine most people had theirs pushed against a wall, so really I was one of the few who lived up to that urban myth.  And Doctor Who was really fucking scary.  The earliest I can remember was one story with dinosaurs, when Jon Pertwee was in the role and also his final episodes before regenerating into Tom Baker, in which spiders jumped on people's backs.  Pretty scary.  Then I can remember everything about Tom Baker, from his first storyline with the giant Robot onwards.  I became obsessed and played it constantly, going into a wardrobe and pretending it was my TARDIS, collecting the cards that came free with Weetabix at that time.  And I had my earliest crush, on Sarah Jane Smith.

Of course, none of the above has changed even to this day.  Except the Golliwog,  I don't have a Golliwog anymore.  And the teddies.  I grew out of teddies after the head fell off Little Ted when I was seven.  But everything about Doctor Who.... that's the same.

I can't picture much more about the inside of number 29, Bridge House.  We had a gold fish, which Dad must have won from the Bank Holiday Fair on Hampstead Heath.  I fed it once and most of the tub of fish food fell into the bowl.  The poor fucker ate himself to death.

We once had an evening visiting our neighbours, whose flat I can't picture now nor then, as it was thick with cigarette smoke that evening.  But we played the board game version of 'It's a Knockout'.  I loved that TV show.  Who would have thought Stuart Hall was a nonce?  You could have knocked me down with a large foam hammer into the water.

There was another neighbour a floor or two below, a boy about my age, called Rodney.  My mum reckons he was a spiteful little bastard, but I don't remember that.  I just remember his huge jar of sherbert lollipops.  Mum warned me not to eat too many as they would give me diarrhoea.  Once, I ate too many and had diarrhoea.  I was round Rodney's flat at the time and created carnage in his toilet.  More carnage than I could cope with, so I shouted to him to go and get my mum, quick.  Mum came with Aunty Sharon, which made the whole thing even more embarrassing.  I stayed away from sherbert lollies for a good while after that.  Weeks probably.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 1 - Self indulgence, burnt cushions and a horrific knee injury)

In a futile attempt to avoid the vanity and self-importance associated with an autobiography, and fully aware that for years I have been posting many absurd childhood memories on this blog, I've decided to fill some time during this period of COVID-19-avoiding self-isolation by amusing myself (and possibly about 3 or 4 others) with some kind of self-indulgent chronological (and probably unreliable) narrative of (other) stupid things I remember about growing up.

Part 1 then.  Begin at the beginning.  My earliest memory?  Just an image of our front room in Flask Walk, Hampstead, when I was about 2 years old.  I can picture the caramel-brown settee we had there.  I'm told that I took a cushion from the settee and put it next to the electric fire, causing the vinyl on its underside to melt and burn.  I don't recall doing that.  But I remember the burnt cushion, as we kept the settee for several years afterwards.  Me and my brother would joke that someone had just sat on it and farted really badly, that's why it was all burnt and melted.  As you know, most of our humour revolved around farts, poo, bums and lavatories.

My next memory was moving into Bridge House in Chalk Farm (I was 3) and my Dad and Grandad struggling to get that brown settee upstairs to flat number 29.  They tried the lift, but I don't think it would fit.  I was scared of lifts in those days.  Justifiably, as they did often break down.  You'd have to wait to be rescued and you'd climb out of the opening where the bottom of the lift overlapped a bit with the external door, and you'd look underneath to see the lift shaft plummeting down into the dark and you'd believe it went all the way to Hell (thanks to a Catholic upbringing, but more of that later).

Around this time, possibly even slightly before, I have another memory of being told that my brother had just been born and we were to go to the hospital to see him.  I was hugely excited.  But unfortunately I was also at the top of a slide.  So instead of sliding down (which would have been too slow, as those slides sometimes were, you know, when there'd be too much friction and you'd stall and have to drag yourself down by pulling the sides) I unwisely decided to run down it.  I fell knee first onto the concrete at the bottom, cutting myself, but in my mind this cut was magnified into a huge flap of skin peeling off to expose a few square inches of flesh.  It was only the promise of an ice-cream that prevented me from continuing to wail as if in the throes of dying of crucifixion; but I suspect that in reality I had a graze on my knee.

For the next 3 years we lived in Bridge House, moving to flat 2 at some point and there is a whole load of stupid things I remember about that time; so I'll keep that for parts 2 onwards in order to keep this bite-sized enough not to bore you to oblivion...

Recovering from a bastard bloody heart attack

In my head, I've felt like an old man since I was 16 in 1986, when pop music went all shit and I threw myself into the 60s and 70s, avoided dance clubs, holidays in Ibiza and fashion.  And I maintained my old man outlook on life as I moved from young adulthood into middle age, intolerant of anything fast, fatuous or fun (in the youthful sense, that is).  And no doubt, you all might have noticed this.  But in one important respect, I had NEVER felt like an old man.  And that was physically.

Despite avoiding gyms like the plague and viewing jogging as a modern version of Dark Age monks' penitential self-flagellation, I maintained a reasonable level of fitness and healthiness that is underserving of my lack of effort in that regard.  Which is why, on my first post-heart attack long walk - from hospital ward to car park - I was appalled to discover that physically I had become, albeit temporarily, I'm assured, a slow and feeble OLD MAN.

The car journey home - with my wife at the wheel, as I'm not allowed to drive just yet - brought with it the stark reality that I had better not gesticulate at other drivers with my routine sarcastic hand-clap or more occasional wanker wave, because, should anyone get out and come looking for a fight, unless they are under 4 stone with the strength of a lettuce, I 'd get a right hiding.  Even that Stu Francis from 'Crackerjack' could beat me up, based on the fact that he could at least 'crush a grape'.  I can't.  But then it occurred to me that I'd probably get a right hiding from a good proportion of fellas on the road anyway and yet this has never stopped me reacting provocatively to selfish, arrogant or aggressive drivers.  Having managed to avoid proper fisticuffs since the one time when I was about 8 (which I won, hence my faultless fight record of 1-0-0), I have acted with complacent impunity both on the road and public transport (where, as it has been documented, I often trip up rude people).  I suspect, that as I'd had a similar attitude towards my health, this will one day catch up with me just as the heart attack did.

My first 'practice walk', on the day after my discharge from hospital, I managed 200 metres up the road, before feeling the need to turn back; and again, this was at such a pace that by the time I passed by the neighbours' plastic recycling bins for a second time, they had started to biodegrade.  Yesterday, my wife kindly dropped me off at the cinema to watch the 1pm matinee of '1917'.  If you ever go to the cinema for a mid-week matinee in school term time, you might notice that it's full of pensioners.  I was the only one in there who hadn't lived through 1917, the year, never mind the film.  And yet, I was still getting overtaken on the stairs.  Anyway, I got a bus most of the way home, but this still left what would normally be a 15 minutes walk, but which ended up taking me 30 minutes.  The embarrassing thing was, it required me to walk past a school after home time.  Embarrassing, because I wasn't walking any faster than someone who would be seen as 'loitering' outside the school.  And because I don't look like an old man who should be strolling that slowly, I assumed that I looked like someone very dodgy, in the 'Not On Normal Courtyard Exercise' sort of way.

The other key feature of my recovery that I feel the need to share with you, is the slight adjustment to my diet.  I was reading the little booklets published by the British Heart Foundation that the hospital gave me, full of advice on changing your lifestyle to avoid a repeat incident.  The problem is, it had case studies.  And the photos of the people in the case studies looked nothing like me.  I read about Paul and his heart attack and how he changed his diet; and I looked at the picture of Paul and I thought, 'Of course Paul had a heart attack, look at the fucking state of him.'  Despite not being like Paul, I have acquiesced to some key changes in my diet - limiting dairy products, cutting down on red meat (especially the bacon, as it was the bacon that done for me) and on chocolate and avoiding saturated fats, animal fats, all that sort of stuff that gives you bum cheeks to inadvertently knock things over with in shops.

You'd think as well that this lifestyle change (and life changing event) would be a topic of conversation when I went to see a GP a couple of days after my discharge, as directed.  You might even think that she'd open the conversation with "How are you feeling?" given that she had my notes in front of her.  You might even think that SHE would lead the conversation with a series of questions to explore how I'm getting on, what I'm doing to look after myself, how it might have affected me mentally, etc.  As it turned out, she did none of these things.  She said, "What brings you here?" (which she knew, she had the notes on her screen) and I replied, "A heart attack" and she joked, "What?  Now?" before we entered an awkward silence while I expected her to ask me something.  I had my list of what to say and thus skipped over the section on how I was feeling to my list of questions, all of which she answered monosyllabically with no follow-up questions of her own.  I asked about the theoretical likelihood of a person being stressed without knowing it and if that could have been a contributing factor to the attack.  Short answer and no follow up to conclude if I had been stressed or what might have caused me to be so.

Maybe I'm being an intolerant old man, but this appointment was late Friday afternoon, the GP was young, she was probably distracted, thinking about getting home and going out that evening.  To a dance club.  For a fast, fatuous and fun night out.

Bastard bloody heart attack

Hubris, if you haven't heard of it before, is an ancient Greek concept in which someone gets a bit over-cocky and pisses the gods off, causing them to send some thunderous shitbolts his way as a form of revenge, knowing that this would shut the bastard up.  For as long as I can remember, I revelled in my ailment dodging, my body's refusal to succumb to human illnesses, the tiny return I got on my NHS contributions and the suggestion that I was in fact some kind of Kryptonian immortal.


Then last week I had a heart attack.


No one saw this coming, but on reflection I might have avoided it by not eating a double round of bacon sandwiches every day for nearly 6 months.  And not pouring a large dollop of tomato sauce and hubris on each round.  And occasionally a slice of Swiss cheese.  Or if I hadn't gone to Edinburgh a few weeks before.  It's no coincidence that this was my first trip to Scotland, where heart attacks are viral and as a foreigner I don't have the immune system to cope with it.  I think I caught heart attack up there.


I'll spare you the details of the attack, as clearly those who witnessed it pretty much shit themselves, while I decided to indulge in some distracting gallows humour.  (Except to say that it was nothing like it is on telly or in films, where someone just clutches their arm and keels over into the tomato plants.  I almost wore out the carpet scratching at it in pain for 15 minutes before the paramedics arrived.)  Instead, I want to inject some typically lavatorial, black comedy into the story of my 2 days recovering in hospital.


It's true, that in situations like this, knowing that an ambulance is on the way, you do reflect on your choice of underwear; and I was reassured to remember that I had chosen a recently purchased, nicely-fitted pair that was 2nd from the top of my pile, over an old baggy pair right on top, which was detaching itself from the elastic waistband and beginning to show signs of perishing around the gusset.


Once in theatre, about to be moved from trolley to operating table, fully conscious as it was only an angioplasty, the medical staff - nearly all young women - instructed me to help them get my t-shirt and then trousers off by pulling them down over my bum.  Not a problem.  Then someone said, "Sorry, and your pants, please."  "Not my pants," I moaned, but these were still whipped off and I groped at the theatre gown they'd put over me in order to cover my essentials.  Then they helped shift me onto the table and I asked, "What about my socks?"  I was told I could keep them on.  "No, take them off, I look silly."  You have to keep some dignity.


They had to stick a tube in through a vein from wrist to heart in order to inject some dye to help locate the blocked artery and then pop in two stents to widen it; and they had a choice of going up through my groin or from my wrist.  Once I saw them shave my wrist, I worked out why this was the preferred option: They'd saved themselves 20 minutes and two bottles of shaving foam.


I was wheeled onto a ward to recover and told not to get out of bed for 24 hours.  In order to go to the toilet, I could use a cardboard urine bottle or if necessary (it wasn't, as I'd crimped a few out already over the weekend) a bed pan for anything more solid.  I was told to drink as much water as I could and it would be easy to roll over onto my side in bed to use the urine bottle or they could help me stand up and do it.  I opted for the rolling over.  But this didn't work.  Obviously.  I could have guessed it wouldn't.  After all, when blokes in public urinals have a case of the nervous 'no-go', they don't decide to lie on their side on the toilet floor to try it from that angle.  Therefore after many hours of horizontal futility, I got myself onto my feet to try with the support of gravity.  At first, still nothing, except the anxiety that someone would walk in on me with my gown gaping open at the back and my arse hanging out.  Which they did.  Eventually, come about 2am (12 hours since my last wee, pre-heart attack), the dam burst.


The acoustics at that quiet time of night in an airless hospital ward, with an empty echo chamber of a cardboard urine bottle providing a receptacle, meant that a man pissing like a horse could sound like the Niagra Falls.  Almost a minute into the exercise, you start to wonder how close you are to filling it.  You can't see.  You shake it to try and gauge how full it is, because it's certainly getting heavy; so heavy, you fear dropping it.  You wonder if you'll feel it before it reaches the lip.  But, as luck would have it, I finished just before it reached what would have been labelled the 'fill level' if it had been a Pot Noodle pot.  Then, as you place the container on its flat side on the table next to your bed, the spout sits at a 45 degree angle, so you worry again it will pour out; but I was about 2 mm short of that happening.  The next morning I filled two more within 15 minutes of each other.  A nurse came to take my blood pressure and went to move the trolley where I'd placed them both..."WATCH OUT!!!" I panicked, and just in time, we averted a curtain of warm piss being sent across the bay.


There were 4 bays on my ward.  Opposite me was an old Jamaican man with the deepest bass voice you've ever heard.  He'd clear his throat in the night and it sounded like an earthquake.  Then you'd hear him mutter, "Mercy, Jesus!"


Next to me was a Romanian man, who got told off for giving himself oxygen, because it was there, why not.  He didn't speak English.  They'd ask him a question and he'd reply, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no."


But at an angle from me was the world's more boring, moany old bugger I've ever had the misfortune to lie and listen to for 48 hours.  He must have phoned every one on his contacts list to "update you on how I'm doing" which meant repeating the same sorry-for-himself story of his ailments in a loud, monotone monologue that would have sent each listener diving for an open oven door.  Without noticing the irony, he'd finish each long call with, "But you know me, I suffer in silence."  He was in for a stroke, but my guess is that he also had a charisma by-pass, which had obviously been a success.  You'd feel sorry for him, as I sometimes do for life's dullards, but he was both creepily flirty with the nurses and a bit entitled in terms of his moaning at them for things he wanted done.  Charmless nurk.  And he didn't draw the curtain when pissing into his cardboard pot.


I had a space age bed, which adjusted itself every 5 minutes to stop you getting bed sores.  The mattress would mould itself to your body, by sinking where you lay and rising in the gaps.  So you'd be trying in vain to sleep at night, hear the buzz of the bed kicking into action and feel something work its way up the crack in your arse.  (I assume this was the bed.  It was dark, but I didn't think anyone had wandered over.)


Finally, a word about the food.  My hopes were raised when I first arrived on the ward and was given jacket potato and beans.  The latter are of course "good for the heart" but made me want to fart and with those acoustics, this was not the place.  Some severe muffling was required.  But come the next day, I opted for beef stew for lunch and macaroni cheese for dinner.  Because I love both.  Or rather I love my wife's version of both.  The potential to ruin both dishes is limitless I found.  The beef stew was fat and gristle in tasteless, phlegm-textured gravy with a dumpling as soft as an overbaked biscuit.  The macaroni cheese challenged me to work out if I should eat it or use it for grouting between the bathroom tiles.  The mashed potato it was served with, I hid under my pillow so I could start to tunnel out in the night.


So, there you go, every cloud has a brown lining or at least something dark to laugh about afterwards.  Until the next time (blog, not heart attack), adios!