A Stretch In Limousin – RSVP

So I moved back into my old room, which was pretty much just as I’d left it, and I set about caring for my dad. He was 73 years old. He was an old man. And he was very, very upset about Neville Jessop, who’d been told he might not ever walk again.

‘It wasn’t your fault, Dad.’

I told him that over and over and over again, and almost every time he nodded and pretended to agree.

After dinner on his first day home out of hospital, I gave him a present. He opened it, smiling, excited. He tore off the loose wrapping paper and held the wooden box in his hands. It was the size and shape of a shoe box, but heavier. He gave it a little shake and looked up at me expectantly. ‘Is it spanners?’ he asked.

I smiled and shook my head.

He located the clasp and opened the box. At first he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Then it dawned on him. He gasped. He looked up at me like a boy on his birthday looking up at his father. ‘Thanks, Son,’ he said.

I went to my bedroom and fetched the new board that accompanied the box of chess pieces and we played chess for a couple of months solid. It was perfect. We got to know each other again and with all of my heart I tried to make up for lost time.

I also introduced him to the internet. He’d never really seen it before. I told him that the internet was basically all of human existence in a tiny little box and I asked him what he wanted to see. He didn’t know. I asked him what he was interested in. He thought for a while. I asked him what he used to like when he was young and eventually he came up with Harold Lloyd. He used to love Harold Lloyd. So we watched Harold Lloyd clips on YouTube.

‘Hmm,’ he said after a while. ‘He’s not as funny as I remember him.’

As for the internet, Dad was impressed, but not particularly overwhelmed, and I was slightly disappointed in his lack of enthusiasm. But I kept a lid on it.

Then I bought some Laurel and Hardy and Marx Brothers DVDs and we watched them together in his room. He would fall asleep a lot, and I would feel sad, but still, it was the closest we’d been since I was a little boy.

When he was finally well enough to get out and about, the first thing Dad wanted to do was visit the Jessop boy. He just wanted to take him something, he said, to say sorry to his face and see how he was doing. I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea but Dad couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t be. ‘I’ve known his family all their lives,’ he kept saying. ‘They’ll be expecting me.’

It was three months after the accident and Neville was still quite depressed. He’d been advised not to get his hopes up about ever walking again. Instead, he was adjusting to life in a wheelchair, but he was bitter. He felt that his life was over. He was fourteen years old. His relationship with his girlfriend had just ended. I wasn’t surprised. I could just hear the arguments:

‘I don’t want your sympathy!’

‘You can’t tell the difference between sympathy and love!’

‘If you don’t want to be here, just go!’

‘If you don’t want me here, just say so! Don’t try and pin this on me!’

There was nothing wrong with my legs but I’d been having those arguments all my life.

When Dad went round to see him, Neville wasn’t nice. Dad took him a Gameboy. Or somesuch. Neville took it from him without thanks and said: ‘Seriously? This is supposed to make up for my legs, is it?’

‘I told him it wouldn’t be forever,’ Dad told me. ‘I told him it was important to keep positive, but….’ His eyes darkened. ‘He just swore at me.’

I was furious. I felt like going round to the Jessops and dragging the little swine out of his chair. But I kept a lid on it. Kids could be cruel, I knew that. And my dad had inadvertently crippled him, so I suppose his anger was understandable.

As Dad was leaving, Neville’s parents thanked him for coming and they said they were sorry. ‘He’s just not ready,’ they said.

By the time Dad got home that day, his skin had turned grey, and from that moment onwards, he seemed to begin to disappear into himself. He wouldn’t play chess anymore. Any headway I was making with the internet fell apart. He just lost all enthusiasm for life. It was painful and frustrating and dreadful.

In the coming weeks, his friends tried hard to bring him back. They’d visit in twos or threes and they’d visit by themselves. His bus driver mates tried to get him down the Terminus pub, where everyone was waiting to welcome him back. His bingo mates tried to get him down the bingo. One day the whole bowls team came round. He told them all he would get round to it when he was feeling better.

I got to know his friends quite well around this time. None of them had ever seen him like that. They said they’d never seen him so… sad.

Eventually Marlene lost her patience. ‘But there’s nothing wrong with you, Tom!’ That’s my dad. Tom. Tom Tandy. ‘You’re just wallowing now,’ she said. ‘Please,’ she said.

Sometimes I used to eavesdrop through the cheap plaster walls. Sometimes I’d stand outside the bedroom door. One time I heard her calling him darling.

She said, ‘Tom. My darling, darling man, where have you gone?’

My dad, as far as I could hear, said nothing.

On a miserable Saturday afternoon in November 2007, Dad was on the road back to Digby when something terrifically bad happened. A freak accident. No one blamed him. Not really. But he blamed himself. He tortured himself.

Maybe a couple of months before the accident, he had started to realise that he wasn’t as sharp as he used to be. He’d been forgetting people’s names. He’d been forgetting the words to songs. He knew his mind was getting sloppy and starting to wander, and that was the time – he knew – to stop, before something went wrong.

I got this from Marlene, one of Dad’s closest friends. He always had lots of friends and when he wasn’t at work, he’d be with them at the pub, bingo, library or bowling green. He never spent any time at home.

So he decided to keep going, for another six months. That would take him to 45 years. ‘He was scared though,’ said Marlene. ‘He was scared of having nothing to do with his life.’ Marlene made me want to cry. Whenever she wasn’t smiling, she had the most tragic expression I’d ever seen. ‘But at the same time,’ she continued, ‘he was terrified of doing something stupid and killing someone.’

He’d been driving an empty bus from Bloxholm to Digby. In a field to the left of the main road, four kids had been tormenting a horse. They had fireworks. They tossed a lit banger at the horse’s feet and it bolted. It made for the closed gate which led onto the main road and leapt over it, only just managing to stay upright as its trembling legs adjusted to the harder surface. At least I imagine its legs were trembling. I heard that it left an almighty trail of manure.

So the first thing Dad knew, there was a horse charging towards him with its eyes bulging and flashing like black psychotic lychees. Without thinking – that lack of thought the source of the blame that would later come and more or less destroy him – Dad braked and swerved. In avoiding the horse, he lost control of the bus, careering into the dry stone wall at the end of the same field where four teenage boys looked on – one can only hope – in horror.

After hitting the wall, the bus flipped onto its side and skidded fifty metres down the road to a halt. Dad messed his face up on one of the windows and was knocked unconscious. One of his thighs was cracked too, but otherwise he was OK.

To compound the good fortune – because it could have been a bloodbath – as well as no passengers, there were no pedestrians in the path of the incident, and no other moving vehicles were involved. It was a commuter road between two small towns on a Saturday afternoon. There was just one horse, one bus, seven parked cars… and one cyclist.

Neville Jessop had been riding back to Digby on the pavement. Dad hadn’t seen him. All he saw was the horse.

The horse was unhurt.

Neville was not so lucky.

…

When I got the telephone call from the hospital, everything I was or had ever been instantly disappeared and was replaced with something else more or less entirely. That probably sounds ridiculous. I don’t know.

My first thought was that Dad was dead and with that thought came an instantaneous onslaught of guilt. Then when I found out that he was merely injured, I gulped at the air like a drowning man dragged onto a raft.

This sounds bad, I know, but the fact is, news of my father’s accident came at just the right time for me. I’d been looking for a way out. Twenty years in London had seen me aim for a career in local politics, miss quite outrageously and end up a partner at a digital agency in King’s Cross, where I earned a lot of money but was far from happy. Also, a week before the phone call, I’d ended another in a sad conga-line of long-term but ever-doomed relationships. After three years, I broke it off. I have no idea why. Barbara had no idea why. ‘You took my dreams from me,’ she said. I said I was sorry.

My therapist suggested that I might have issues with desertion. I said, ‘Do you think? What do I pay you? £75 an hour? Do you think that’s enough? I don’t think that’s enough. That’s nowhere near enough.’ I went on like that for a while. I can be quite annoying. But I was mostly joking.

In truth I think everyone should be in therapy. When I was in my twenties – for reasons that my therapy is yet to properly uncover – I convinced myself that I wanted to become Prime Minister. If I had become Prime Minister, that’s something I would have insisted on: free therapy for all. It would have spelled the end of my political career of course. They would have thought I was mad.

Barbara thought I was mad. And when I quit my job and moved back home, everyone at the agency – although they pretended they thought I was making the right decision – they thought I was mad too.

But it made sense to me. And I wasn’t just running away. I was also running home.

What convinced me it was right, however – what really hammered it home – was the timing. It was just before Dad’s birthday. It was the perfect time to start afresh.

At that point I hadn’t actually been in the same room as him for more than five years, and to see him after so long, all frail and shaken in a large hospital bed, it was quite a shock. Marlene said I should have seen him just a few days ago. She said he’d aged at least ten years since the accident. Still, even there on that hospital ward, with his right leg in traction and his face all puffed-up, scratched and heart-breaking, he was definitely pleased to see me. And for my own part, I was overjoyed to be home.

‘Hello, Dad,’ I said.

‘Hello, Son,’ he replied. ‘Thanks for coming.’

This is a story about a very friendly bus driver with a voice like Ken Dodd and a son that refused to love him for no other reason than that he (the son) was a short-sighted, self-centred, good-for-nothing swine.

It was a week before Christmas when my mother left home. I was ten years’ old. My dad was 43. I don’t know why she left. All I knew was, it wasn’t my fault, therefore it had to be his. So that was that. I turned my back on him.

Before that, I was a nice kid. I got on brilliantly with my dad. We used to play chess every day. We used to go outside and kick a ball around the park. I used to love to kick a ball around the park, it was the best thing, literally the best thing in my life. But when my mother left home, I took it out on my dad. I broke bad.

Not criminal or delinquent but loveless and moody. And no more games. I clammed up and withdrew. I cut myself off like a sabotaged parachute, and watched my dad hurtle to the cold earth, all alone. I was grieving, of course. I was in shock. I should really have been in therapy, but that was still decades away. Instead I became a selfish, inconsiderate, awful adolescent, who, as the years crept by like an endless deathless plague of wet afternoons, grew into a surly, spiky, ungrateful young man. Eventually Dad stopped even trying to make me like him again. He just used to look at me, with that sad, resigned smile. I’d roll my eyes and walk away.

Then, a couple of weeks after my sixteenth birthday, I left my dad in his little house in Digby and I moved south on a guilt trip that would last for 20 years.

On the morning of my departure, Dad came into my bedroom. He said, ‘Hello, Son.’ I flinched. I’d never liked him calling me that. Not since my mother left. ‘Can we have a little talk? Before you go.’ I sighed. He sat on my bed and asked me to do the same. Begrudgingly, I did so. ‘I just want to tell you that I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘What?’ I remember how my face snarled up at him like a lit match every time he spoke.

‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make you happy, Son,’ he said.

I set my jaw against him and watched his big face colour. He had dark heavy eyes that, when they weren’t avoiding mine, sparkled. This was the same face with which he’d greeted the people of Digby every morning before work, every evening after work, all day, every day for 40-odd years, but under the shadow of my gaze, it was transformed. I sucked all the joy out of it.

On the bus, everybody loved him. They really did. ‘He’s the only bus driver who makes you actually happy to be on a bus.’ I heard that a lot. It annoyed me. He never made me happy to be on a bus. He made my skin crawl. He never shut up.

He talked to everyone who got on. He knew everybody’s name. He asked them all how they were. He repeated the same embarrassing guff every day. The same jokes at the same stops, the same stupid remarks in the same cheery voice. He was like a bingo caller. He was always so chirpy. Like he didn’t have a care in the world, like nothing bad had ever happened to him, or to anyone else.

He even sang on the bus! In public! He serenaded the old ladies as they shuffled aboard.

His singing made me want to throttle him. Even so, I had to admit, he did have a good voice. He had a beautiful voice. He was a huge fan of Ken Dodd and did a very convincing impersonation. Tears was his favourite. The one that began: ‘Tears for souvenirs are all you left me. Memories of a love you never meant.’ And so on. He used to sing that all the time, but always, always with a smile on his face. It annoyed the hell out of me.

Also, he never had a bad word for anyone. Even the yobs who smoked upstairs and left their marks on the backs of the seats. ‘They’re good lads really,’ he’d say. ‘You’ve just got to try a bit harder with them.’ He’d certainly tried hard with me. But I continued to deny him.

‘I’m alright,’ I told him, shrugging off his concern.

‘I know, Son,’ he said. ‘I’m just – I’m sorry I could never be there for you.’ His voice was soft, with tiny rips in it. His eyes, blinking wet like frightened oysters, stared down at the blanket on my bed. There was a pause. ‘It wasn’t my fault, you know.’

Whoa there. What on earth was he playing at? We never talked about what he was about to talk about. Ever.

‘No, it’s alright,’ I said firmly, adding, ‘I’m going to get going now. I’ll give you a ring when I get sorted. OK?’

‘OK, Son,’ he said. I flinched.

He gave me a hug as I left. I brushed through it like a terrier, stiff and short.

‘Keep in touch, Owen,’ he said.

‘I will,’ I said.

I didn’t.

Instead I spoke to him maybe 40 times in the next 20 years and I popped home once every four or five years to dispense a few terse pleasantries. Usually at Christmas.

Then, three years ago, thanks to the barbaric cruelty of four other careless little boys, I was given the chance to redeem myself.

So I wrote a story a few weeks ago, about a man’s relationship with his father, and I have no idea how I feel about it. It’s rather different to anything I’ve written before. There is no swearing in it for one thing. More importantly, I worry that it’s a) sickeningly sentimental, and b) just dull. Oh, and c) ill-informed and bogus.

Oh my God, what have I done? It reads like an episode of Last of the Summer Wine. Without the jokes.

Anyway, fuck it. It’s done now, and I’m going post it here over the next week. It’s called A Week Before Christmas, and if I post two or three chapters a day, it should come to an end – get this – a week before Christmas.

If nothing else then, there will be that.

First chapter due in an hour or three.

God, it never gets any easier, does it?

Things are going wrong. Not wrong. Awry.

People are not getting back to me.

People who seemed enthusiastic seem to be having second thoughts. Gah!

Oh well.

I’ve spent most of this week trying to finish the novel I’ve been working on, on and off, for the past eight years, because if I can get an advance, boom! I’ll have at least three or four months travel sorted and I’ll be away. I should really have done this six months ago, of course, but meticulous preparation has never really been in my nature.

I was offered a few weeks’ work yesterday, beginning the week before I’m due to go away. It was very nearly almost tempting. I could just take down every reference to this whole silly festivals folly and pretend it had all been a dream. But of course, it isn’t a dream. Not the kind you wake up from at least. It’s the kind you’ve got to have. If you want to have a dream come true.

Later this afternoon I’m going back to London for the weekend. Tomorrow is Boring 2010, which I’m very much looking forward to. Not so much the talks on tie-arranging and milk-tasting – although I’m sure they will be fun – but the meeting of lots of people from off of the Twitter. I’m very much looking forward to that.

What else? Nothing else really. Got to get on.

Have a good weekend.

Keep hope alive.

The least important aspect of this whole festivals thing as far as I’m concerned, is the length of time it takes me to do it. I put it at a year because that gives it a competitive edge. It makes it a challenge, and for publishers and what-have-you, I imagine it seems much more commercially viable. But in reality, and within reason, I don’t really care how long it takes. I’ve got nothing but time really. Time and desire. That’s all I need. Time, desire and this Slanket. That’s all I need.

A few days ago, someone on Twitter made a suggestion. Here it is here:

This got me thinking. I do love boats. I also love trains. I also rather enjoy cars. Paradoxically, I’m really not keen on aeroplanes. They’re an awful lot of hassle, and actually not that much fun once you’re up in the air. Plus of course, aeroplanes are the evil ones that kill all the flowers and tapir cubs and baby voles and whatnot. So I began to think, what if I took my time and chose cheaper, less environmentally disastrous and more enjoyable modes of transport? Then I remembered that sadly, tragically, trains are not always the cheap option these days. But still, my point remains. I don’t like planes. I like trains.

And of course, it is my thing, this festivals thing. Ultimately I can do whatever I like. And if I fail in some way, or indeed many ways, to do what I originally planned to do, then who cares? As long as there are interesting and fun adventures along the way. As long as there’s something worth writing about.

Not that I’m changing anything, at the moment. Just having thoughts. Which I think is good. It’s essential that I’m open and flexible, like a femidom, and not closed and rigid, like a nun.

In other news:

• my self-promotional video has been emailed to me – but it still needs finishing and sending off to interested parties.
• my website is up and running – but I haven’t yet made the time to make it look nice.
• I have a countdown clock – you may have noticed it, up there to the right, counting down. Or maybe you thought, ‘Wow, look at that strange clock. I can’t tell what time it is. It seems to be counting down. I wonder what it is.’ It’s a countdown clock. It’s counting down.
• I have more or less finished a 30,000-word story about a man and his father, and Twitter, at Christmas – which I’m thinking of serialising over the coming weeks, like a kind of a low-rent Dickens – but I’m scared. What a mouse I am.
• I am dedicating this week primarily to the rewrite of the novel – I’m currently 134 pages in and I have to say, thus far, I really like it.

That’s it. Now I must get on. But, having written this, I’ve just been reminded: life is exciting, and whatever happens, thank God I quit that job.

‘God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.’

- JM Barrie

I’m staying in Fleet at the moment. Fleet is in Hampshire. According to Wikipedia, only this year Fleet was voted ‘Best Town in England’. Unfortunately, this is wholly uncorroborated and if I may speak frankly, I question its veracity.

Anyway, I’m staying with my sister and her family here in Fleet, which is – don’t get me wrong – a fine town.

Two days ago I took a large box of family photographs and made it into four small boxes of family photographs for ease of transportation to the loft. Towards the end of the task I discovered, at the very bottom of the large box, a cutting from the Sunderland Echo. Although I hadn’t seen it for over 30 years, I recognised it instantly.

Looking at it again brings back mixed feelings. I distinctly remember the shame I felt both at the time of the photograph being taken, and later when it was published in the local paper. I remember Stanley Lock (who really had no right to ridicule anyone) whooping with laughter and calling me ‘Pug’ because of my admittedly ludicrous, utterly embarrassed facial expression (which time has sadly faded to much of a mush).

What I don’t remember – because it would never have occurred to me at the time – is the hilarity of the headline.

I like to imagine that the sub-editors at the Sunderland Echo were amusing themselves, but looking at the rest of the article, I suspect that level of wit was probably beyond them. ‘Hlep’ indeed.

But dear God, just look at Judith Emmerson. She’s the one handing over the cheque. Judith was like the complete opposite of me in school. I’m pretty sure she moved to our school late, and I remember her sitting next to me, applying lip balm and telling me she had to keep her lips soft, for kissing. She wasn’t flirting of course. She was tormenting me. And just look at her in this photograph, ten years’ old and the camera already loves her. I wonder what became of her.

Later in our school careers, Stephen Renney went out with Angela Robson. I had a crush on Angela Robson and I watched with growing bewilderment and burgeoning yearning as Stephen Renney showered her with gifts and then Angela Robson dumped him – cruelly. One day, I thought, one day I will be dumped cruelly by a woman with whom I’m wholly besotted and it will be wonderful.

And I was.

And it wasn’t.

Well, in a way I suppose it was. Just not at the time.

Anyhow, last night I was finally getting round to setting up a new Flickr account when I found an old one, and saw some pictures I hadn’t seen in a long time. They are rather embarrassing, so I thought I would share them with you.

Yes, I am wearing sunglasses, weight-lifter's gloves, a tracksuit top and a tie. Why? Well, I'm not 100% sure but I think I may have been on drugs. I fucking hope so anyway.

This was after a night in a theatre bar where I found a hat. This is me trying on said hat and pulling a face which - until that moment - I had no idea I could pull. I suspect the hat brought out the face. That night, interestingly, I had a one-night stand with a woman who would not take off her top. Life is ceaselessly bewildering.

This is me about to attack a pensive man with a lady's dumbbell and a tiny globe. Obviously.

This is me playing fetch with my mate's kid, whose hand is there in shot. I'm sharing these pictures with you because I love you. I hope you appreciate it.

This is the same night as the terrifying chin-up. Oh come on. Who amongst us can say that we haven't got a bit wrecked, dressed up as our favourite Village Person and posed for weird photographs. I particularly like the glasses atop my hard hat. Nice touch.

Sorry, no. I have no idea.

And finally, my sister’s family includes a cat named Jazz. Jazz is a very affectionate cat with a mighty purr, like a Lotus Elan at the lights. But I think he might be schizophrenic. He keeps communicating with me telepathically, suggesting I do all kinds of unhinged stuff. That’s not normal, is it? Plus he looks at me funny. He has a tooth missing. Here he is about to make my head explode…

Here we are in a Hitchcock movie – I am overacting, he is purrfect…

Here he is doing Elvis…

And that’s your lot. So. Are we having fun yet? Of course we are.

Two days ago I met Matt Carrozo in Muswell Hill. From there we walked to Alexandra Palace and Matt filmed me dicking about in the snow and trying to explain why I want to go around the world visiting festivals next year. This will be for Kickstarter and other places. I haven’t seen an edit of the video yet, but although I have no doubts as to Matt’s talents as a filmmaker, I find it difficult to believe that he’ll manage to make me not look like a cock. And that – frankly – fills me with dread and pre-emptive embarrassment. But I guess I’m going to have to get over that at some stage soon.

Two nights ago, my last night in London for a while, a friend of mine told me he had some bad news. I steeled myself. In a nut, my friend had been telling a friend of his about my festivals project when this friend of his reacted with astonishment. Then my friend’s friend proceeded to tell my friend about his friend (my friend’s friend’s friend) and the fact that he had just returned from a year-long trip around the world during which he had visited festivals – all kinds of different festivals – and now intended to sell his experiences as a book. My friend said, ‘It’s even called “Around the World In However Many Festivals”.’

‘Eighty?’ I suggested.

‘Could be,’ said my friend.

For a moment I was ever so slightly devastated. Then I thought about it a little more and decided that basically – essentially – ultimately – it makes no difference. Despite the similarity of the projects, they are still bound to be enormously different. (Like Back To the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married – very similar ideas, both coincidentally in production at the same time, both in the end, very different.) The fact is, a huge part of my project – for better or for worse, depending on your outlook – will be about me. Similarly, my friend’s friend’s friend’s project will be about him. There may be room for both of us. There may be room for neither of us. Nothing has really changed.

Onwards!

Two afternoons ago, I came across this video of Burning Man made earlier this year. It got me thinking, whatever happens next year, I have to go to Burning Man….

Eh?