Memoirs of a Fruitcake Read online

  Having said that, we were in the middle of giving it a bloody good go.

  TOP

  10

  THINGS DRINKING CAN DESTROY

  10 Your bank account

  9 Your body

  8 Your work

  7 Your friendships

  6 Your marriage

  5 Your outlook

  4 Your kids

  3 Your brain

  2 Your love of life

  1 Everything that means anything to you

  LOOKING BACK AT THE LESSONS I HAVE LEARNT in my professional life, the one thing I will never allow myself to do again is to waste opportunities. When I was in my mid-thirties, I was in such a fantastic position to get things done and yet all I actually did was request another beer or bottle of wine.

  The thing is, I honestly didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was still turning up for work every day to host my radio show as well hosting TFI Friday on Channel 4 every week. The audience figures for both were good and, as far as I could tell, everyone seemed happy.

  When you drink heavily and for long periods over several years, in my case a good five years at least, sure, you know it’s bad for you, physically, mentally and spiritually, but there is no denying the bizarre sense of freedom that also comes with it. Whether or not this freedom is actually real is entirely another matter but that’s how it feels.

  Of course, this only tends to be the case when one’s drinking is going well. Inevitably the more one continues to drink, the more likely it is that the darker and more sinister aspects of drinking will eventually take over and consume you.

  The problem is, at what point does the good drinking turn bad and how can you tell? Well, the answer is of course you can’t. The only way you can avoid the onset of bad drinking after good is to quit whilst you’re ahead. Unfortunately though, the more alcohol you imbibe, the less you are able to ascertain when this might be.

  If you think you’re having a whale of a time at a party and someone suggests you go home before you have to, why would you say yes? But there is an undeniable tipping point, that crucial moment when you know that one more probably means four or five more, and a significantly bigger headache in the morning – but by then it’s too late. ‘No’ and ‘home’ are two words that no longer come easily.

  When you allow drink to take over, your mind and body become increasingly unable to resist and will eventually give up and take cover, leaving you to fend for yourself. This is the moment the alcohol has won; the drinker and the drink have exchanged places, and the drink is now calling the shots.

  This is why alcoholics can’t stop once they have started. This is why, once they get sober, they can never have a drink again. To them, having just one sip of alcohol is like turning on a tap that cannot then be turned off again. It opens the floodgates and says, ‘OK, the rules have now changed. Let’s get shitfaced again.’

  ‘Just a couple and I’ll be fine,’ they try to convince themselves.

  But ‘just a couple’ is not a possibility. Alcoholics are not fitted with the right brakes.

  One is too many and a thousand is never enough.

  What a night of drinking does to our brains, one sip of a drink does to theirs.

  I worried I was becoming an alcoholic for years. I still think about it now, if only for the reason that I couldn’t bear the prospect of never again being able to have an ice-cold beer on a hot day, taste a magnificent glass of red wine with a juicy steak or enjoy a warm brandy with a cigar on Christmas Eve.

  Some say being an alcoholic is not a choice a person can make and that you are either born one or you’re not, others say different. I don’t know for sure, but I confess there have been times when I felt I was definitely on some sort of slippery slope from which there might be no return. At such moments all I remember thinking was, ‘It’s just not worth it. I love my beer and wine far too much never to be able to have them again.’

  Have I drunk too much in the past? Absolutely. Do I wish I hadn’t? Absolutely again.

  But I did and I’m still here. I got away with it and I thank my lucky stars. In the meantime I shall continue to enjoy the odd pint of pre-dinner real ale down the local, as well as the odd bottle of beautiful Bordeaux my agent recommends occasionally.

  I am entirely aware, however, of the need for me to keep a watchful eye on my drinking habits in order to do so and will do my utmost to make sure I never find myself on the wrong side of the tracks again.

  I do also think about giving up drinking completely to see what life might be like in an exclusively sober world, and I am not ruling it out. I talk about it quite a lot with a friend of mine who on two occasions nearly died through his drinking.

  He ended up in the same hospital as George Best and was given the last rites before miraculously coming back to us. He is now in the ‘can never drink again’ category and has the pellets in his stomach to prove it. If he swallows so much as a drop of alcohol, he will become violently ill.

  A high price to pay?

  ‘Not for one second,’ he would be the first to reply.

  ‘The difference between you and me,’ he said, ‘is that my whole life was based around drinking. Having another drink was the first thing I thought about when I came to from whenever it was that I’d passed out last. I didn’t “go” to sleep for fifteen years, I didn’t “go” to bed once, in that whole time. I just fell unconscious whenever I couldn’t drink anymore.’

  He said that even when he had managed to stay sober for a while, all he ever thought about was alcohol. This is what’s called being a ‘dry drunk’, a sure-fire sign you still have a long way to go in overcoming your addiction.

  Scary stuff.

  A fellow reformed alcoholic told him before he stopped, that if he carried on he would lose everything he loved and held dear, and this is exactly what was about to happen. I remember helping him get sober on one of the many occasions he’d gone over the edge. Those were three of the most traumatic days I have ever experienced.

  He was in a real mess one day and turned up at my house unable to do anything other than stare at me. I rang his wife who told me there was no point in bringing him home until he had dried out. If I tell you she was in another country in their house at the time and she had no idea he was in England, it might help you understand the gravity of the problem.

  I was shocked by the extent to which he had lost all self-control and ultimately all self-respect. We were in a coffee shop in Chelsea, where he thought nothing of vomiting into his cup in front of everyone, regardless of the fact that most of what came out of his mouth missed, ending up all over him and the table. He also soiled himself on countless occasions and became aggressive with me when I refused that famous request, ‘Come on, let’s go to the pub – one isn’t gonna do any harm.’

  Eventually I put him to bed and slept outside his door for the next two nights. When I delivered him back to his house after one of the more interesting flights I have taken, I guaranteed to his wife that he had not had a drink for seventy-two hours.

  I know she loved him dearly but how she stayed with him through all those years I will never know. He has always been a good man at heart but a bloody nightmare when he was on the sauce.

  I think it was my witnessing such a close friend going through such a needlessly tragic and mindless battle alerted me to the fact that I was playing with fire. If there were any chance I might end up like him I would have to change – although at this point I was still a while away from any real epiphany.

  TOP

  10

  FACTS ABOUT SLEEP

  10 Never try to sleep whilst wanting to pee, it’s only going to get worse

  9 Falling asleep on the sofa is a subconscious but very real manifestation of your fear of your own bedroom

  8 Girls really don’t like it when boys don’t come to bed. They see it as some form of rejection – which it probably is

  7 Girls sleep better than boys

  6 Girls sleep quieter than bo
ys

  5 Girls sleep less smelly than boys

  4 Good sleep is dished out by God to those who deserve it most

  3 Lack of sleep is the most dangerous thing other than drink and drugs a person can do to themselves

  2 A peaceful sleep is only second in importance to a peaceful death

  1 Insomnia is God’s way of telling you to shape up

  GOING TO BED WHEN YOU WANT TO AND NEED TO is a sign of contentment and a soul at peace with itself. Of someone who is wise enough to take the hours necessary to fuel up for the next day in order to live life to the full.

  Sleep is not, however, for the malcontent, who, far from embracing the wonderful gift that is sleep, ends up fearing it instead, running a mile at the mere mention of its name.

  For years I was this man.

  I’ve asked myself, many times, why this was. Maybe I feared going to bed because I knew my sleep would be anything but restful and calm. I have always suffered from the most horrendous nightmares and often wake up more tired than when I went to bed. I am convinced that my hair has turned from ginger to white because I spent a large chunk of the nineties supposedly asleep when it was actually just my body that was unconscious whilst my mind was taking part in a horror movie.

  I have come to the conclusion that this unwelcome nocturnal cranial activity was the result of lots of unfinished business that littered my life. You have to tend the garden now and again otherwise nothing new can grow. My garden was well overdue for a good weeding.

  For a long time I had tried to ignore the fact that I had a daughter whom I had not seen since she was a few months old.

  Back when I was a wet-behind-the-ears 21-year-old in Warrington I got together with a lovely girl called Alison, and not long afterwards she became pregnant. We had a beautiful baby girl called Jade, but in those days I was just not ready to commit to bringing up a child. Immature and selfish, I know, but the truth.

  Alison went back to live with her mum, taking Jade with her whilst I ran away to pursue my dreams of fame and fortune. At the time, I’m ashamed to say, I felt relieved. I didn’t think for a moment how Alison must be feeling, or how it would be for Jade, I just wanted my ‘freedom’. Besides, I convinced myself that Alison would meet someone else who would be a much better dad to Jade. Surely they were best shot of me.

  But this pathetic excuse for the abandonment of my child had eaten deeper into my soul than I ever imagined it could and it would continue to do so until I stopped ignoring it. During the latter period, when I was drinking myself into the ground, the impact of not seeing my daughter for all that time began to creep slowly back into my mind like the first ripples of an autumn tide.

  Having said that, I still didn’t have the courage to try to right the wrongs. Far from it – I had become a leading expert in looking the other way the second anything or anyone worthwhile threatened to come into my life to make it better. All I had to do was look at the evidence.

  Over the years I had acquired some of the best jobs in my industry and yet dropped them like a stone. I had also experienced the love, laughter and tenderness of some amazing women but they too were now part of the wreckage. And yet my answer? To carry on regardless and stay out drinking until I dropped.

  There are several problems with this approach, of course – the numerous health issues, for example, as well as the possibility of being attacked late at night. The most pressing problem to me and my booze-soaked mind, however, was neither of these. All I cared about was the fact that when I eventually had to go home, I could no longer speak and so was unable to get anyone to take me. When I contemplate what a state this must have meant I was in, it makes my blood run cold.

  This recurring dilemma, which I began to face more and more as my life continued to fall off the edge of a cliff, led me to make one of my most illogical decisions to date. I took the insane step of announcing to my beautiful girlfriend Suzi that I could no longer live in the house we shared.

  My warped reasoning was that I had to move somewhere else that was easier to pronounce when I was drunk, thus enabling me to get home.

  ‘This,’ I claimed hopelessly, ‘is why I have been coming home less and less recently.’

  Suzi, I suspect, had by now all but given up on our relationship and was probably glad to see the back of someone who bore no resemblance to the happy-go-lucky, hard-working kid that she had fallen in love with five years before. If she had stayed with me any longer she would have been on the verge of becoming a victim and, as sensitive and caring as Suzi is, one thing she is not is an emotional punch bag for a bloke gone wrong.

  Kensington Park Road was the address I was having drunken issues with.

  When you’re drunk, really drunk that is, words become like twelve-foot-high walls almost impossible to scale. The more you think about them, the more they become a lost cause – even before you’ve attempted to say them out loud. When you do finally have a go, the emphasis in your mind is so much on getting the first word right that the rest of what you want to say fades into oblivion. Your brain and mouth have fallen out with each other, and you have nothing left with which to pick up the pieces.

  At such desperate times as these, my paranoia at the potential of slurring the word K-E-N-S-I-N-G-T-O-N would fill me with such pathetic dread that I would start thinking about it for up to an hour before I even had to contemplate saying the street name out loud.

  When it came to the big moment I would often make several attempts to convince the cab driver that I wanted to go to Keshisham Park Road or somewhere similar. Various cabbies would wait patiently for an improvement in transmission, whilst others would quite rightly sling me out to sober up and see if I could do better next time.

  So the long and the short of it was, I really did up sticks and move – first into a hotel for six weeks and then into an apartment opposite the hotel, both of which were situated at the infinitely less slurrable address of WILTON Crescent.

  There you go, I assured myself, clean and crisp and easy. WILTON. Lovely. What an infinitely less scary name to be confronted with at the end of yet another mindless night of liver-bashing. Yes, yes, yes – WILTON CRESCENT, that will do very nicely, thank you.

  Ah the joy, I remember thinking. No more having to practise KENSHNINGSHTON PRAK TOAD when I could feel the night and/or me coming to another sad and sorry end. Not only was Wilton easier to pronounce, but the geographical location of my new home meant that if I played my cards right, I could make it home without having to speak to anyone at all. This was because my new address fell within the recently designated £1 public-transport zone of central London. I was pretty sure that so long as I handed over my pound confidently and smiled at the bus driver he would presume that I was a £1-zone man – with no conversation required.

  I was keen to test out my new plan and did so the very next night. I was thrilled to discover it worked like a dream. In fact, it worked so well that cabs very quickly became a thing of the past, with buses my preferred choice of transport. This was a position further compounded when I realised that the London omnibus was also the only vehicle legally allowed to travel west up Piccadilly towards Hyde Park, halving the time it took a cab to navigate the various one-way systems to arrive at the same place.

  So, all very well and good for the drunken nutcase; he had successfully figured out the quickest and most efficient way to get home. But of course when he eventually did get home, there was no one actually waiting there for him.

  Not surprisingly, Suzi had opted right out of this madness.

  She remained for a further year or so in the lovely Notting Hill townhouse we had shared before calling time on it herself and picking up an apartment just around the corner. I heard afterwards that although the old place still held many affectionate memories for her, ultimately it made her sad.

  Where there was once so much joy, love and laughter there was now only emptiness.

  I thought I’d done enough by inviting her to ‘relocate’ with me. Not for a moment
did it strike me that my grounds for moving were so far removed from the real world that no one in their right mind would have sanctioned such a ludicrous course of action by being party to it.

  All I thought was that she didn’t understand. No one understood. It was time for another drink.

  TOP

  10

  BAD THINGS THAT CAN HAPPEN WHEN YOU’RE DRUNK

  10 You start to over-tip

  9 You don’t go home

  8 You think you can sing

  7 You share good things with bad people

  6 You covet strange women

  5 Your morals take the night off

  4 Your mind waves bye-bye

  3 You give your phone number and email address to anyone

  2 You black out

  1 You can quite easily kill yourself

  MY WILTON CRESCENT DAYS were the times when I was least myself.

  It was a period in my life when I clearly wasn’t thinking straight. Wilton was an address I moved into on the basis that it would help me sustain abnormal levels of self-abuse. This is not good karma and karma is something I very much believe in. Not in a hippy-shit kind of way but because anything you do, by its very nature, has to have consequences. Every action has an opposite and equal reaction, as the physicists say.

  Wilton Crescent was always going to be a mistake because I’d gone there for all the wrong reasons – and caused hurt in the process – but I wasn’t ready to see that yet. In fact having originally secured a lease on the ground floor/basement flat, I went on to acquire the other two flats that made up the rest of the property, thus taking over the entire house.

  I have vague memories of considering turning the whole building back into one single dwelling, but of course that would have taken some effort and endeavour; two qualities that were no longer available to me.

  The actual reason I took over the other flats was because I had a noisy neighbour upstairs, and another neighbour, on the top two floors, who didn’t like my motorised scooter parked in the hallway. Effectively I paid for these two problems to disappear by buying them out. I ended up owning the building more by accident than design.