by Adam Buxton
A few minutes later, finally luxuriating in my Special Bath, I decided I might like to switch from Eno and Budd’s reverb-heavy piano minimalism to the Blade Runner soundtrack and I raised a hand through the bubbles to activate my smartphone. But once I’d wiped away the pine-fresh foam, I was shocked to see that my hand suddenly looked like an old man’s hand: not just wrinkled, but papery and marked here and there with little brown dots and splotches over big knotty veins. ‘Fuck,’ I thought. ‘I’m old.’
I started to imagine that I had lost consciousness as a 30-year-old and woken up to find myself aged 80, then wondered if that might be a good premise for a film. It struck me that it was a nice excuse to email Dad, then in his late eighties, and ask him for his observations about ageing.
My contact with Dad in those days was infrequent, and what messages we did exchange were usually short and to the point, but my email about old age must have caught him at the right moment, because the next morning there was a reply in my inbox entitled ‘Random Thoughts on Old Age’. It was filled with insights, observations and a few relevant aphorisms that he had collected over the years. He often talked of compiling these as an annotated book of quotes called Words of Wisdom, though that was another in a long line of money-making schemes that never quite came together – a bit like my film idea, which also got shelved in favour of less ambitious but more achievable projects.
I forgot about Dad’s email until after he was dead. It popped up again when I was in the process of looking through old bits and pieces in the course of writing this book, and it struck me that it was probably the longest single communication he’d ever sent me, and in an odd way the most heartfelt. I was a decade older than I was when I first read it, and observations that had originally struck me as typically pompous were suddenly as grimly relatable as Michael McIntyre routines. See what you think.
A very common phenomenon, even in middle age, I am sure, is the appalling moment when one realises that a large part of one’s life has suddenly vanished without trace, like a mountain climber suddenly disappearing into a bottomless crevasse. I vividly remember such a moment in my own life (I was probably in my late thirties or early forties) when I actually exclaimed out loud, ‘Where did it all go?’ This is why one must always be on one’s guard against that so tritely but so very aptly described danger of regarding one’s days as if they were a rehearsal for the real thing, instead of being one’s never-to-be-repeated LIFE ITSELF.
Yes, we should carpe the diem and take some time to watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, because life moves pretty fast and if you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you might find you spent most of it watching and rewatching films (and of course bonus features).
‘You’re as young as you feel’ may be thunderingly trite, but it’s also profoundly true. Health is not the prime conditioning factor here. Ill health and old age present their own syndrome, but a man can be perfectly fit in body yet behave as if he were verging on the geriatric.
Disbelief is probably the old person’s most common condition of mind. He hears expressions such as ‘the elderly’, but only with difficulty associates himself with that company. Looking for cheap second-hand books, he explores a charity shop called Help the Aged, but does not for a moment see himself as an object of the requested benevolence. He has a bus pass, and values it, but is not entirely convinced of his entitlement to it (though it is obvious to him that the gent sitting across the way is a fully qualified holder of the same device).
This is why the admonition ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, act your age!’ can be so offensive and such bad advice. The intelligent senior citizen eschews the expression ‘at my age’ to preface a statement not simply because it is exceedingly pompous and boring, but because he knows that to get into the habit of acknowledging his years (or claiming them to gain advantage) is a sure way of accelerating the ageing process.
This reminded me of Joe when he was about 16 telling me about getting told off when he was pissing about on the Tube one day. An older woman told him to ‘grow up’ and Cornballs proudly reported to me that his response was, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ I remember feeling that I might have been on the woman’s side.
One doesn’t ‘feel’ old ‘in oneself’ but is nevertheless all too often disagreeably reminded that the ever-youthful mind inhabits a mechanical contrivance that is not immune from mechanical wear and tear. It’s a wonderful autumn day and one sees oneself taking a picnic lunch on one’s back and walking the 17 miles from Lewes to Eastbourne over the Downs between early breakfast and 6 p.m., as one used frequently to do, then remembers that yesterday it required a considerable effort of will to complete a three-mile course (though much of it steeply uphill) in an hour and three-quarters.
Dad was always a keen ‘hiker’ and continued with his walks on the Sussex Downs until he moved in with us. Occasionally he’d bump into someone who would recognise him from his BaaadDad days and it always made him happy. There was one particular meeting Dad described to me by saying: ‘I was out walking the other day and I met a fellow on a mountain bike. He stopped and said [does weird cockney accent], “’Ere, I know you! You’re BaaadDad, in’t ya?” I said, “Yes! That’s right,” and we had a very nice chat. But how strange that one should be recognised all the way out there on the Sussex Downs, don’t you think?’ I said I didn’t think it was that strange. The Adam and Joe Show was a ratings juggernaut.
Years after Dad’s death I discovered, through a series of minor coincidences, the identity of the cockney mountain biker. It was the Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry. According to Grayson, who it turns out used to watch The Adam and Joe Show, he had spotted my dad on the Downs twice and they chatted both times.
There are many ADVANTAGES to old age, provided that one has learnt one’s lessons. PATIENCE is one of the most precious of these, though one of the hardest to acquire.
‘He that can have patience can have what he will.’
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
‘Never think that God’s delays are God’s denials. Hold on; hold fast; hold out. Patience is genius.’
GEORGES-LOUIS LECLERC, COMTE DE BUFFON
To these I would add:
‘Have another slice of chill cake.’
A. BUCKLES
FORTITUDE. It is quite comforting to know that one is capable of surviving the injuries inflicted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without falling about, and that one is capable of doing so much more than may at first seem probable.
The key phrase here is ‘without falling about’. Though Dad would never have referred to anyone as a ‘snowflake’, disparagingly or otherwise, he was never comfortable with people sharing every hang-up and anxiety and felt that to do so was to ‘fall about’. If something was really wrong, a person should ask for help, but as for feeling scared, sad and hopeless now and then, well, what did you expect?
As Dad was so fond of reminding us, ‘Life’s a vale of tears,’ but if you keep plodding on it’ll generally brighten up.
I’m on board with some of that philosophy, but being able to talk about how you really feel now and then is useful, too. As long as the falling about is kept to an absolute minimum, of course.
INDIFFERENCE tends to come with old age. Not mindless indifference (which would preclude COMPASSION and consideration for others), but the NOT CARING about a whole host of things that used to concern one. (At the most trivial, for example: I used to be quite irritated by people I didn’t know addressing me by my first name. I still think it’s very bad form, but I don’t care any more. I don’t care where the knives and forks go or if a red glass is used for white burgundy; it doesn’t affect the TASTE of the wine.
On the other hand, I don’t care very much if people jump the queue as long as I’m not especially anxious to get back quickly from the supermarket or racing to the catch the train. And I don’t care what people in general think about my writing; only about the opinions of those whom I happen
especially to respect. The list is long and everyone will have their own.
I look forward to achieving a similar state of relaxed indifference, especially after all the time I’ve wasted worrying about negative opinions from disgruntled and even perfectly well-gruntled strangers on social media. But there’ll be climate change in hell before someone uses a red glass for white burgundy without me fully losing my shit.
When I was reading back Dad’s email I had just spent several weeks not only sorting through boxes filled with his old letters and photographs, but rereading my old diaries and notebooks to check memories and chronologies for this book. It was a process that started out fun but left me feeling shredded, the way I wished some of my diaries and notebooks had been. Then, when I read Dad’s email, it was as if he was sat with me and sympathising – not something he had done since I was about seven and upset after some children teased me for being short and having small eyes.
Literally and metaphorically, one goes into the attic, looking for reminders, and is overwhelmed by the accumulation of things, most of which have been completely or in Freudian analysis probably PURPOSEFULLY forgotten. It is dangerous stuff and can result in severe emotional distress. The mistakes one made; the wrongs endured or inflicted on others; the hopes shattered; the irreplaceable losses suffered; the projects of high promise unfulfilled ......! It is a bit like turning over a compost heap where discarded material has not yet had time to achieve a useful metamorphosis.
Putting things to the back of (or out of) the mind is an indispensable aid to a salubrious existence and to disinter such things can be a noxious exercise. The odours of the past can be less than fragrant (the dead rat as well as the faded rose petals or the pressed gardenia).
The attic can be a Pandora’s box, among the most pernicious of all its contents being that of REGRET. Only a stout philosophy can save a man from this particular evil. Here are two aphorisms taken from Words of Wisdom: ‘Your past is always going to be the way it was. Stop trying to change it.’ And, ‘A prudent man will think what fate has conceded to him more important than what it has denied.’
At the same time, the old ought to remember that the last item in Pandora’s box was HOPE.
CHAPTER 19
1988
During my first week of training at the pizza restaurant, they put me on pot wash in the sweltering kitchen and I felt very sorry for myself. ‘It’s like Down and Out in Paris and London,’ I complained to Cornballs. It was a relief when I was allowed out onto the floor with servers and customers, and I made it my mission to master the highly skilled art of the busboy.
At the beginning of each shift I was assigned a section of the restaurant where it was my responsibility to clear, clean and re-lay the tables. That meant piling dirty plates, glasses and cutlery into big plastic ‘bus trays’, taking those bus trays to the kitchen to be washed, then restocking the ‘bus stations’ in the centre of the restaurant floor with clean plates, glasses and cutlery in order to get tables ready for new diners as fast as possible.
The more efficient the busboy, the more tables a server could turn over and the more tips they would earn. At the end of the shift, if the server thought their busboy had done a good job, they gave them a split of the tips. But if you were slow, lazy or the server just didn’t like you, you got ‘stiffed’. On good nights I enjoyed the challenge of working as fast as I could, sometimes competing with other busboys to set up tables in just a few seconds. On bad nights I got non-stop shit from servers and kitchen boys and the only comfort was a 10-minute cigarette break that I took while listening to my Walkman by the huge stinky cylindrical bins out the back. Poor, poor Buckles.
At the end of the night I was damp from the giant dishwasher, grimy from carrying teetering towers of pizza pans and my thighs were chaffing from having marched about at high speed for six hours, but I usually had some good tips in my pocket (in addition to the minimum wage for the shift) and I’d shuffle to the bus stop in Regent’s Street, put on my headphones, listen to some Brian Eno and try not to fall asleep on the night bus back to Clapham.
It felt good to be making money. The first time I got £20 out of the cashpoint with my new debit card (nicknamed ‘Jimmy Plastic’), it was one of the crowning thrills of my adolescence.
* * *
RAMBLE
I’d recently been introduced to the Cockney rhyming slang phrase ‘Jimmy Riddle’ meaning ‘piddle’ or urinate. I found it so amusing I decided it would be fun to stick ‘Jimmy’ in front of other words and phrases, despite there being no rhyming element. So there was Jimmy Plastic, Jimmy Fag Break, Jimmy Night Bus, etc. For some reason it never Jimmy Caught On, and by the Nineties I’d Jimmy Dropped It.
* * *
In autumn 1988 Dad’s financial difficulties went critical when the new management at the Telegraph invited him to take compulsory retirement. By December he was borrowing money from me to keep up his mortgage payments, and when Mum found out she and Dad had another of their increasingly bitter rows. Mum didn’t think an upper-middle-class father should be borrowing money from his son, but after a childhood of non-stop holidays, gadgets and Star Wars toys, not to mention the expensive schools, I thought it was fair enough.
Meanwhile, my further education was on hold. Warwick University had offered me a place to study English and American literature, but not until the following year. That suited me fine. After a few months of working at the restaurant I was enjoying the camaraderie and the drama. Who was sleeping with who? Who was on the fiddle? Who was clearly on drugs during their shifts? Yes, perhaps the job was less enjoyable if you weren’t 18 and living with your parents, but for me it was like putting on plays back at school, except with a more diverse cast, and you got paid.
Before he went off to university, Patrick did a few months as a busboy at the pizza restaurant, too. We spent one of our first shifts together doing Derek and Clive impressions that came down to calling each other a ‘fahking caaant’ in a variety of styles, until an angry manager interrupted a ‘CANCANCANCANCAN!’ volley to remind us there were families around. We didn’t get too many shifts together after that.
Around that time, Patrick and I were also deep in our enthusiasm for Van Morrison and Woody Allen. Van had been on our radar for a couple of years since getting into Moondance, then Astral Weeks, Veedon Fleece, Saint Dominic’s Preview and everything else he’d done in the late Sixties and early Seventies. To me, Van was the sound of walking to warm pubs on cold nights with Patrick and his sister Eliza, who was reliably outrageous and funny. After the pub we’d go back to their house in Wandsworth and watch Blind Date while Eliza and I entertained Patrick with our very hilarious comments about Cilla and the contestants.
Until a few months previously I’d seen only two Woody Allen films and hadn’t thought much of either of them. The first was A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. I watched it on cable late one night on our trip to America in 1982, but it had far less sex than I was hoping for (i.e. none) and far more not-very-funny comedy. The second was in my first year at Westminster when our housemaster took a group of us to see Zelig. I was pleased to be at the cinema on a school night, but I didn’t get the point of Zelig at all. The guy wants to fit in and be liked – and?
Then in November 1987, BBC Two showed a season of Woody Allen comedies that, as well as Manhattan, Sleeper, Take the Money and Run and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), included the first ever UK TV showing of Annie Hall.
The film included the cleverest thing I’d seen (and actually understood) up to that point: the moment in the cinema queue when Woody Allen magically produces the real Marshall McLuhan to humiliate a man pontificating loudly about McLuhan’s work before breaking the fourth wall to say, ‘Boy, if only life were really like this.’ For a self-absorbed young man who didn’t understand women well, finding ingenious jokes like these woven in with observations about the joy and pain of being in love left me feeling I had a new best friend, and I hungrily devou
red the rest of Woody Allen’s films.
I hate him now, though, obviously.
DJ Deep Dish
During opening hours, the restaurant PA would play tapes of Chicago Oldies station Magic 104, so we would work to the sound of DJ Dick Biondi playing Fifties and Sixties pop on a loop.
When I arrived at the restaurant this was fun and I enjoyed discovering tracks like ‘Happy Together’ by The Turtles, ‘Runaway’ by Del Shannon or Frank Sinatra’s version of ‘Chicago’ (the restaurant chain’s unofficial theme, which would play every hour). After a few weeks, however, songs like ‘Concrete and Clay’ by Unit 4 + 2 or ‘Have I the Right’ by The Honeycombs became the same kind of special torture that Bill Murray endures in Groundhog Day as he wakes up each morning to ‘I Got You Babe’ by Sonny & Cher (which Dick Biondi also played a lot). To this day, it only takes a few seconds of Old Blue Eyes singing ‘Chicago’ to bring on a feeling of grimy-pizza-pan-clearing exhaustion.
One of the managers at the restaurant was called Sally. She liked the compilation tapes I’d sometimes play when we were cleaning up at the end of the night. Sally agreed with me that the constantly repeating Oldies tapes were a significant threat to staff sanity, and she said next time I was working a quiet shift (Monday lunchtime was reliably dead) I could bring in one of my compilations to play while we worked. There were a couple of conditions: in line with company policy, the tape needed to have Frank Sinatra shitting on about Chicago every hour and the rest of the music had to be suitable for people to listen to while they ate revolting-looking pizza pies and garlic bread that was actually just stodgy pizza base brushed with buttery slop that looked and smelled like bile with bits of parsley in it.