How Did All This Happen?

by Bishop, John

  • • •

  I split up with Joe in Prague. We had spent just over a month together and had become firm friends, and there was no doubt that we would keep in touch, despite living different lives: I was to return to England to put my bicycle away, get married and rejoin the company I had worked for; Joe was just going to keep riding and see where the road took him.

  But, thankfully, neither of us was going to be a miner.

  We were not to know that, decades later, he would be in France living a sustainable lifestyle with his wife and two kids, and I would be in England with my wife and three kids, and the easiest way to communicate would be via the internet. Of course we weren’t to know: the internet had not been invented.

  In many respects our lives have been polar opposites, and yet I think it is fair to say that I could have easily lived Joe’s life and he could have lived mine. In fact, after watching the Sport Relief challenge I did in 2012, Joe went to Sierra Leone to work for three months on a bicycle project out there. It seems our lives will always cross paths.

  I pushed on alone, riding long days, fixated with hitting my return date in September. Back in the UK, Arthur informed me that the fundraising was going well and that there would be a small reception when I returned to Liverpool. For my part, I just wanted it over. I really enjoyed the ride through Europe, but I was desperate to get home. I had spent nearly nine months riding a bike. Every day I was uncertain of where I was going to end up, and now I just wanted to stop still. So much had happened during that time, and I now felt I had a degree of certainty that I had lacked in the past. It wasn’t as if I had had an epiphany and was now ready to get married and settle down; it was just that I realised who was important and I wanted to be with them. I wanted to be the person I ran away from being nine months earlier.

  After splitting from Joe, I made my way home by crossing the border into Germany, then riding through the Austrian Alps into Switzerland. From there I moved through France, only pausing to spend a few days at Melanie’s mum’s house in the Dordogne where she lived at the time. Within days I knew I would be in Liverpool and it would all be over. I knew I was ready for the end; I was ready to stop moving and to start setting down some roots.

  I rode into the Albert Dock in Liverpool on 12 September 1992 after spending my final night on the road at my nan’s house. I was greeted by a crowd of around 50 people made up of work colleagues, friends, family, Melanie and a man playing the bagpipes (for a reason even Arthur has never been able to explain). It was emotional seeing everyone after so long and, after spending large portions of the previous nine months alone, it was slightly overwhelming to receive handshakes and hugs from so many people in one go.

  There were numerous comments about how much weight I had lost and how much bigger my legs had become; there was even a suggestion that as I was now fitter than I had ever been, I should help our Eddie’s Sunday league team out with a particularly tough game the following week. (I played and looked like a true athlete with my tanned face and legs against the all-white strip. The only problem was cycling does not help you run, so I could hardly move. We got beaten 9–0.)

  There was a reception in a bar at the Albert Dock where I was told the trip had raised £30,000 for the NSPCC. In today’s money, that would hardly cover a Premier League footballer’s hairdresser’s bill, but in 1992 it was a significant sum.

  At a family gathering that evening, I allowed myself a moment to let it all sink in. I had to admit to a level of mild satisfaction: I had learnt some valuable life lessons and, at the same time, raised some money for a brilliant charity. I had also done something many people thought I was mad to attempt.

  It was not the last time I would have that feeling.

  CHAPTER 20

  MARRIAGE, FATHERHOOD AND IDIOT FRIENDS

  After returning home, my future was set out in front of me. I was 25, going back to work at Syntex, I was getting married to Melanie and I was to slip into the old life I had before. It felt like the world was telling me that it was time to grow up: I’d enjoyed my adventure and now it was time to settle down, get married and have kids. Which I duly did.

  The first house we bought was two doors away from where I had lived with my mates as students in Manchester. We bought it for a knock-down price from Melanie’s dad, and that gave us the funds to convert it from the bedsits it had been into a nice Victorian semi, although this involved ripping everything out. I remember taking Melanie to assess the job in progress; as we stood in the cellar looking up, we were able to spy daylight from the absent roof four floors above us.

  I felt we were making great progress, and I enjoyed talking to the builders about manly things that I could pretend I knew about, like ackros, scaffolding and roofing. Melanie was watching a building being ripped apart and left nearly every visit in tears because we looked ever further away from the point of moving in.

  Everyone who has ever refurbished a house will know that builders can sway from being your best friend to being your worst enemy within the time it takes to plaster a wall, and a very small wall at that. As a form of protection, I used some friends I had known from my school days, but it also illustrated how much Melanie and I didn’t really know each other at that point. When I took her to the house one day, I was downstairs shouting up to my mates on the roof, John Hickey and Paul Christie, both lads who, like me, had spent their teenage years in Runcorn surrounded by people who spoke with the same accent. I had played football with John as a teenager and he was the one who had sent me the $AUS20 when I was in robbed in Cairns. He had always been more sensible, even as a teenager, although things didn’t always work out the best for him. When we had all learnt to drive, John took us to the Cherry Tree, the local nightclub, and sensibly decided to leave his car there overnight rather than drive home after a few drinks. When he stepped off the bus the following morning to walk across the road and collect his car, he was knocked over and broke his leg. ‘Don’t Drive But Be Careful Crossing Roads’ is not a government campaign that ever really caught on, but perhaps it needs looking into because we all joked he would have been safer just driving home pissed.

  When I had finished shouting up to John and Paul on the roof, Melanie looked worried.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘If nothing is wrong, what were you arguing about?’

  ‘We weren’t. That’s how we speak.’

  The John that Melanie knew was the Manchester student who had friends from all over the country. Although she had obviously met my family, she had never really spent time in the world I was from because I had left it before I met her.

  At the time it was a funny comment, but it also showed that perhaps we did not know each other as well as we would have hoped. The reality was that losing the baby had left a hole between us, and my asking her to marry me had been an attempt to fill that hole, when perhaps what we had needed to do was just spend time together and get to know each other properly, rather than rush into a life-long commitment.

  The first holiday we ever had together, apart from the trysts of the previous year, was our honeymoon. One tip I would give to anyone in a relationship is to go on holiday before you commit. Priorities change when you go on holiday; it’s surprising how not getting the right sun lounger can ruin your whole day, and from experience deciding to get drunk at lunchtime while your partner sunbathes doesn’t seem to help matters either.

  Our courtship had been on-off, and I guess Melanie, too, would admit there was always a sense of shadow boxing. It was a question of ‘Who would concede?’ or, in the vocabulary of a relationship, ‘Who would compromise?’ Now we were to be married, and things were no longer negotiable.

  • • •

  I had returned home in September 1992; in May 1993 we were married in St Cuthbert’s Catholic Church in Manchester, and in August 1994 our first son, Joseph Michael Cornall Bishop, was born.

  Joe was initially going to be called every
thing except Joseph. We had a list of names we had argued over:

  Melanie: ‘Jude.’

  Me: ‘Girl’s name.’

  Melanie: ‘Gabriel.’

  Me: ‘Hairdresser’s name.’

  Melanie: ‘Josh.’

  Me: ‘We don’t have a pony.’

  Melanie: ‘Thomas.’

  Me: ‘Not naming my son after a train.’

  Me: ‘Zack.’

  Melanie: ‘With your accent? Don’t be stupid!’

  It is such a responsibility to give another human being something that will last for the rest of their lives, but somehow Joseph came completely out of the blue and was no doubt influenced by the fact that, the year before, I met a man named Joe who had impressed me so much.

  When he was born, after a long and exhausting labour (yes, I was exhausted – it’s hard work feeling useless for eight hours), I was overcome with emotion as Melanie re-gathered her composure in the manner that women instantly do after childbirth. In a way, that is Nature’s defining difference between the sexes: women become mothers instantly and start dealing with the new life in their arms, while men take photographs and thank everybody within a five-mile radius. When handed the new version of themselves, if they are anything like me, they become a blubbering wreck as more emotion than any man can take flows through their body and finds its escape in tears, snot and slobber so that they look like that last person on earth who should be holding a baby.

  When asked what we were going to call him, I just looked at Melanie. With tears and snot running down my face, I was in no position to speak, so out of the blue she named him Joseph Michael. As this birth process has been repeated twice since, Melanie has named each one of our three sons, always with a name that was either not in the running or was the least favourite going into the delivery room – and a good job she has done of it, too. I think Joe, Luke and Daniel suit being called Joe, Luke and Daniel, although had we gone for Zack, Jude and Gabe we may have had a boy band in the making.

  The ‘Cornall’ in Joe’s name is Melanie’s surname, and all the boys have it as part of their name. Her dad, Mike, had been an only child, and Melanie was not only a single child, but also a girl. It seemed an insult to her grandfather’s legacy that the Cornall name, which is unusual anyway, would be further diluted by our marriage, so Melanie kept her name when we married and, naturally, it passed on to our children.

  The irony is that her dad subsequently got married to his third wife, Denise, and had two other kids, Hannah and Charlie. So the gesture was unnecessary, and we are left with the legacy of the kids having a double-barrelled name that we keep forgetting when booking plane tickets. Thus we end up in long arguments at airports as to why the names on the tickets don’t match the passports. Bloody Japanese.

  At least we didn’t name him after where he was conceived. Parents who do that must surely plan their travel accordingly. Joe would have been called Gran Canaria – difficult to carry off in any accent.

  In many ways it was appropriate that Joe was conceived in Gran Canaria, because Mel and I had flown there to see her dad Mike depart on a transatlantic voyage aboard his sailing yacht. On board was a crew comprising two of my mates, John and Paul, who had never sailed; an experienced sailor called Paul; and Jim, Melanie’s stepdad. Jim was an excellent sailor and a good friend of Mike’s, although we liked to joke it was an arrangement that Eileen, Melanie’s mum, could have sold to a TV station: How Two Men I Married Went Sailing Together!

  I say it was appropriate, because there would have been a time when I would have sought the adventure myself, instead of staying at home. But I was not long returned from my cycle ride and with the responsibility of a job, a mortgage and a wife I bid them farewell. Nine months later those responsibilities grew even more when Joe was born.

  Having already lost a baby, Joe’s arrival mattered more, if that was at all possible. When your first child is born, it changes your life. I knew there was now someone much more important than me and that everything I did from that day forward would be measured against the barometer of my being a good father or not. It changes your perspective on everything, and though your friends send cards and come to the christening they don’t really know what is going on in your world unless it has happened to them, too.

  I was 26 and married with a son. My dad was 24 when he had his fourth child, and many of his friends were in the same position; it seems to have been the norm for that generation. Some of Melanie’s friends had by this point started a family, but most of my mates had not even reached the stage of co-habitation with a girl, unless she happened to be in the same shared house.

  It was even more apparent that my mates and I were at different junctions in our lives when Sergei came to stay. Joe was less than six months old, and teething. Every parent knows that a teething baby is like having a pneumatic drill in the next-door room, and the only way you can stop the shrill ringing in your head of a baby in pain is to spend nights walking around the room rocking said baby and hoping the dummy eases the agony. The reality is that as a couple you try to share the load, which means one of you stays in bed and attempts to sleep whilst the other deals with the baby. The result is neither of you sleeps.

  At the time, we had a very protective German shepherd called Sheba who felt it was her duty to be in the room with Joe, just in case some sheep needed herding or an intruder needed biting. Although her intentions were admirable, a German shepherd is a big dog. In fact, with all the baby paraphernalia taking up so much space, adding a German shepherd was like adding a man in a dog suit, but a man who couldn’t hold anything and who thought lying on top of the changing mat was helpful.

  It was into this environment that my erstwhile student friend Sergei came to stay the night. He was back in Manchester from London to attend a job interview. We had a spare room, and as it presented a potentially tempting opportunity to go to the pub with an old mate, I readily agreed to him staying. Actually, I will rephrase that to reflect the reality of the situation of a freshly married man with a baby. I had a discussion with/asked permission from Melanie who, to be fair, thought it would do me good to get out too, as long as Sergei knew not to wake the baby when we came home.

  Kissing my family and stroking the dog, I left the house with Sergei for the same pub we had attended every Sunday as students. It felt like getting a surprise day off school, and I admit to being rather giddy with the simple excitement of it.

  The night was good fun, and I enjoyed catching up. But, by 10.30 p.m., I had developed the ‘new dads’ face, the face that says to the rest of the world you have not had a full night’s sleep for months and if you carry on being out of your bed you will burst into tears, fall asleep in the lap of the nearest person or will remain in a semi-catatonic state till less troubled friends escort you out of the building. It’s the face that says, ‘I used to belong here but now there are records in the charts I have never heard of, my clothes feel like they belong to my dad and I want to tell every single person in the room to leave the pub and get to any hedonistic gathering before it’s too late.’ It’s basically the face that says, ‘Look at me! Do you want to be me? Run! It’s too late for me – save yourself!’

  I said to Sergei it was time to go home because I knew that if we went now I could do the last feed and give Melanie a break.

  He looked at me as if I had gone mad. With eyes that sparkled with frequent sleep and lacked any hint of fatigue, he surveyed all that was in front of him and declared that the night was still young and that he fancied a club.

  Saying that to a man in my position was like saying to a marathon runner he had gone the wrong way and would have to do it all again. There was not a chance I was going to a club, so I gave Sergei an ultimatum: come with me and stay in the spare room, or go clubbing and do not return till the following morning.

  He said it was no problem and he would see me the next day. What I should have realised is that ultimatums do not exist in the world of twenty-something single men with
out real responsibilities. In their world, what do they have to lose by not sticking to an ultimatum? In the world of the married man, you lose your dinner, conversation, access to the bathroom, clean clothes, sex and, in extreme cases, the television controls. Ultimatums matter to us: they are a bond, and accepted as such.

  The doorbell rang at three in the morning and the dog started barking, which woke up Melanie and the baby, who had both been asleep for less than thirty minutes from the last bout of teething (please consider what it must be like to be a genetic product of me and have gums that hold teeth like mine – teething is hard for any baby, but for ones whose teeth are emerging and expecting to be in a horse’s head, it must be even harder). I knew that the ultimatum had not worked.

  I opened the door to find Sergei swaying on the doorstep, while eating a kebab.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Eating a kebab – I got you one.’ He pulled something flaccid from his pocket that was wrapped in paper. ‘It’s vegetarian, which means it’s just lettuce and shit. I didn’t get Melanie one. I thought she would be asleep and all that.’

  ‘She was! Dickhead!’

  ‘I was right not to buy her one, then.’

  There are some people with whom reason will work – a drunk friend holding two kebabs in the early hours of the morning is not one of them. Melanie was now walking zombie-like to Joe’s room to deal with his crying, whilst the dog proceeded to growl at Sergei in between being fed bits of kebab. I decided the best course of action was to throw him into the spare room and for the rest of us to try and salvage whatever sleep we could.

  In the morning, after barely any sleep, Melanie decided to take the still-awake-and-still-crying-with-teeth-pain Joe out in his pram – she felt it best to be out of the house and away from any kitchen knives when Sergei woke up.

  After she left, I went into the spare room.