An early start tomorrow – I have a book to write after all.
But before I can finish my list, the thought occurs to me:
Did you lock the door behind you when you came in?
TUESDAY
EPILOGUE
06.58
WAKE UP
It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.
Joseph Addison
I complain because it is easier, I hate because it is easier. As a stand-up comedian I am used to receiving abuse. I can accept blind hatred because by definition it is so irrational. Like a child who says they hate something they haven’t tasted, it is a response, a desire to be noticed more than anything. I hate things and I do so because it is clean and easy and makes me feel better about myself without having to ask why I don’t get my own house in order first.
Had I been a TV executive in the 1980s there might well have been a light-entertainment show entitled Jim Says ‘Fix It Your Fucking Self!’ But that is my past, not my future.
I don’t speak or write much about my happiest moments because for one thing they are very personal to me, but they don’t strike me mostly because my memory of them is somewhat hazy. This is not because they were not important to me or because I was always blind drunk during them (though for some of them I almost certainly was) but simply because I didn’t stop at any point to take mental notes of colour and texture for recounting at a later date. Happiness, like sleep, in order to be fully effective must involve some sort of yielding of conscious thought, in my opinion.
I realise that I have only one memory from my early childhood of even being aware of perfectionism, though I wouldn’t have been able to describe it in anything like such grandiose terms, being as I was only about three or four years old.
The incident took place on an almost black and white afternoon, walking into town with my mum. I don’t know whether the skies were genuinely so dark or whether, over time, all the colours have been bleached by my memory and all that remains are the people and the events. One day they will become blurred too, I suppose, and I won’t remember whether or not this happened in life or in a dream. Lancaster town centre was just about the biggest thing I could imagine and that was a thrilling thought indeed. None of the fear of big cities like London existed then.
Though my memory of the day is black and white, two objects seem as vividly colourful to me now as they were on that particular day: my brand new Thomas the Tank Engine Wellington boots. From the moment I saw them in the bucket outside the shoe shop to the moment my mum relented and parted with what little money she had in those days, or three pounds of it at any rate, I have never wanted anything as much in my entire life. Nor has anything ever lived up to my expectation quite like those wellies in the days since.
‘Do they fit you properly?’ asked my mum as I ran frantically around the shop making choo-choo noises, wearing one Wellington boot and one trainer.
‘Yes, yes, yes! Please buy them, Mummy. Pleeease!’
I could see what she meant by that question – she was looking for excuses to hate my new shoes and not buy them! Luckily I managed to see through that little scheme. These boots were what I wanted and I wasn’t going to let a little thing like whether or not they warped and cut my young feet beyond recognition stand in the way of owning them.
For adults, most things lose their appeal once you own them, almost as if you have lost respect for them for even being attainable. People fall prey to this problem as well as meaningless objects like money, and most of the attraction we feel for those eyes we meet ‘across a crowded bar’ (insert dry retching here) lies in the belief that they might simply be out of your range.
‘Will you go out with me? WHAT? You will! Oh my God, that’s absolutely … Hang on! Why? What’s wrong with you?’
Questions rise to the surface and refuse to be answered by any but the most obvious and disappointing answers. Why do you like me? What’s wrong with you? What’s your ulterior motive? You are attractive, funny, intelligent … and what else? The nicer the person, the greater my distrust for their interest in me. The goals you set for yourself also lose their lustre as you achieve them.
‘Well, if I did it then it can’t be that hard, because I’m only me.’
This is how I sometimes feel about being a comedian – it was what I dreamed of in my teenage years and there are occasionally times when I feel almost embarrassed to have wasted my time dreaming of something that proved to be attainable, that being the opposite of what a dream should be. I sometimes wonder if I have lost respect for comedy because it didn’t call me out. It didn’t expect more than I could offer it. But then there are other times (fortunately more than I’m prepared to admit) when I love what I do and when I realise how very lucky I am to be doing it. There are times when I feel so privileged I could scream in frustration at the fact that I can’t share a little of it with everyone or all of it with someone.
If the experience in the shop was enough to try a parent’s patience, the following half an hour must have been incredibly difficult on my mum, tugging gently at a toddler who could barely walk at the best of times, let alone now, as he insisted on stopping after each tiny step to stare triumphantly down at his feet. Still, despite all my stalling I don’t remember her making me rush. Not then, or ever, in fact. She was happy to enjoy the look of sheer fascination set like stone across my face.
There were no puddles to splash in, but I wouldn’t have dared jump into one anyway, for fear that it would make the boots dirty. The boots were perfect and so, while I was wearing them, was I. Adults pollute their world with a spectrum of unnecessary colours like taupe, salmon and azure, but children know of only four or five. These boots were proper, unadulterated blue, no messing around. There was no problem with the colour, or the shape or the shine on their toes, but something was wrong. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t my mum and it certainly wasn’t the boots. It slowly dawned on me that it was simply everything else.
The reason I was stopping after each pace was that each new patch of ground revealed there was something else to hate about the world that existed beyond my magical feet. The pavements I saw in my cartoons and in my head were perfectly smooth strips of Plasticine grey that not only could you ‘eat your dinner off’, but you could safely crawl on your hands and knees sucking up the sapphire-blue puddles that were spaced regularly along their length. This other world, this so-called real world, was nothing like that, now that I saw it for the first time up close, lurking beyond my wellies.
There were cracks in it. Literal cracks on the surface of my world!
There were dirty, brown, decaying leaf skeletons, piles of dog dirt, patches of bubble gum, uneven bumpy bits where holes had been filled with mismatching colours of concrete, there were frothing puddles of human spit and bum bombs from the birds. There were rusty old grids with frenzied patterns and illegible words written across them. The real world suddenly seemed such a horrible place when contrasted with my shiny blue shoes. If they were perfect then why couldn’t everything else be perfect too?
I started to get worried that the pavement was going to ruin my shoes and that if I stood on a crack then the blue colour would seep out of them and down into the bowels of the earth in front of my very eyes and they would turn as grey as the sky and the surface would blister and crack. When I tried to avoid the cracks there were too many, and I noticed that my mother was walking right over them and I got worried that they were going to get her too! I started to cry because I thought it was all going to break and there was nothing I could do to help it. As my mother picked me up and took me into her arms I carried on crying because the sky wasn’t blue and the clouds weren’t chunky white blobs of angel delight and there were too many noises in the street that were hurting my head. Being in her arms made it better though, I remember that.
‘Is it the boots?’ she asked me.
‘Yes, Mummy,�
�� I sobbed. ‘Can you take them off me please?’
I often wonder now, if I see a toddler crying helplessly at the feet of exasperated parents who keep asking for an explanation of what is wrong, if that child is going through what I went through that day. I wonder if they are learning the truth behind the lies they are shown to get them to go to sleep at night, the real world where animals don’t talk but bite, where rain is cold and wet and dirty and where nothing is as colourful as a dream. They can’t put it into words, just as I couldn’t either, but the fear is real enough.
‘What’s wrong, honey? What is it?’
‘It’s everything, Daddy. Why is everything not like you promised it would be? Why?’
Years later, when I asked my mother if she remembered my boots and what happened to them, she explained that we had taken them back to the shop that very afternoon because she had thought they were hurting my feet. She told me she couldn’t believe that I had wanted them so much and yet when they were gone I never once asked about them or wanted another pair. It doesn’t surprise me. Those boots held up a mirror to an imperfect world and the reflection terrified me.
This story aside, I distrust those who have vivid recollections of all the events of their childhoods and significant moments after that because I think either that they are made up (not lies completely but re-imaginings of times and places constructed after the event) or else they cannot have been truly happy memories as some part of the brain was actively planning for a moment in the future when what was going on would need to be recalled, taking evidence almost. I cannot help but cringe looking upon people at a live event, who instead of enjoying the moment and seeing it for what it is, seem hell-bent on filming the whole thing through the crappy camera on the phone they hold high above their heads and point at the stage. Their memory will one day be built solely around the image on the screen and will reflect less and less the truth of what was really happening at the time. Unhappy times seem to work in a different way altogether though, leaving behind mental scars whether you want them or not.
You can see that I can describe at length the face of a man who upset me on a train because I was making a conscious effort to remember him, perhaps so that I could gain revenge if ever I saw him again or perhaps, more generally, because I was trying to work out what was wrong with the situation I was in and how I could rectify it in future and prevent it from happening again. But could I describe in as much detail the face of the last woman I saw who made my heart leap out of my throat? Absolutely not. That moment, and the hundreds of others like them, electrified me so absolutely that I could barely tell you who I was when it happened, let alone where I was when it happened or which way the wind was blowing.
Something happens when you are overcome by positive emotion that forces your brain to surrender to it completely – perhaps this is ‘the moment’ I have argued against so vociferously earlier – and only someone truly cynical at heart would deny this feeling altogether. Almost always these emotions are triggered by other people. Is it possible to be so happy and feel such abandonment of sense alone? I don’t think so, perhaps if only because being alone immediately demands an increased alertness on health and safety grounds.
Two people together on a beach can drink and doze and walk along hand in hand, knowing that should anything go wrong for one, the other would step in and take control. One person alone on the beach must always have one eye on not getting too drunk to find their way back to the hotel, not wandering too far from their possessions or getting sunburnt. In short, a part of the brain is always with the bags and wallets on the shore, even if the spirit is doing its best to float away in the warm, blue waters.
I am not saying that it is impossible to surrender to solitude altogether, only that there is an implied risk. I have read books about many men my age who have lusted after solitude and have gone to great lengths to find it – some moving even further away from society than Swindon, if you can imagine such a place! Everett Ruess (whose letters make up the amazing work A Vagabond for Beauty), Chris McCandless (whose exploits were written about in the book Into the Wild, later made into a Hollywood film) and perhaps the most famous of them all, Jack Kerouac, whose ramblings have come to define a generation, all lived their lives totally on their own terms and independently of their perceived duties in society.
As much as their stories enthral me, and inspire me to strengthen my resolve and accept my fate as someone more comfortable with his own company than in large groups, I must concede that a fairly negative character trait links all three – a selfishness in pursuit of happiness entirely on their own terms. I have never been so determined to be on my own that I have forgotten my obligation as a son, as a brother and as a friend; I believe that those people who have stuck by me through my (at times) seemingly relentless efforts to quell any enjoyment of life deserve if nothing else my loyalty. My first thought on turning the last page of Keruoac’s seminal On the Road was of how worried his mother must have been and how little time he seemed to have made to contact her during his travels.
Both Everett and Chris made the ultimate sacrifice in their searches for happiness, giving up their lives tragically young. Everett disappeared at the age of twenty and as inspired as I am by his love for nature and his determination to live a life outside of the ‘rules and regulations’ of normal practice, it still seems a tragic waste of an erudite and gifted writer and artist.
Humans are like balloons. Most outlive the joy they see and shrivel into obscurity, but some generate furious excitement and then, like Everett, simply drift skywards and are never seen again. To live and die on one’s own terms is a basic human right, but sometimes I think we are all too close to our own feelings to be able to put them into context and perhaps, just sometimes, we are not best placed to decide such things for ourselves.
As for what I can do to change myself? I don’t know, but I am certain that I can. Writing this book has helped me put some issues to bed and I hope that it hasn’t been a mistake writing so plainly the thoughts I have down on paper. If nothing else I suppose I might have amassed an army of people who think like I do, and supposing one of them is an architect, another a farmer, a doctor and so on, it is conceivable that we could construct a town for ourselves where there are only single tables in restaurants and all beds are constructed on top of existing furniture. New members would join all the time, I suspect, meaning that breeding would not be necessary; however, recreational intercourse could continue subject to approval by the town elders. If that town needs a clown then I will, of course, submit my application in writing.
Or perhaps not! I know that no matter how many times I fail, or how isolated I feel, I will never be able to stop looking for someone with whom I can share my life. However much I talk about how heavily the odds are stacked against success in love, like entering the national lottery, people do so because the prize is sufficient to justify the hope. I once saw an elderly couple dancing together in a ballroom in south Wales (don’t ask how I came to be there), their interlocked bodies swaying gently with the music of their shared youth. Hands clasped together on one side, the other caressing her left hip and his shoulder, I could see that coiled round the lady’s hand was a lead, at the bottom of which was a dog turning in a happy unison with its masters. For each of these three, everything they loved was spinning within a metre of their smiling faces and time, weather and the alphabetisation of their book cases were all an utter irrelevance.
If this moment of contented bliss is the prize at the end, then surely any amount of worry and stress incurred during the search is worthwhile? Here’s to many more years on the hunt.
Acknowledgements
This book would not be what it is without the hard work of Natalie Jerome, Martin Noble and the team at HarperCollins.
I would not be the comic I am without the devotion and faith of Danny Julian, Addison Cresswell, Joe Norris and all at Off the Kerb.
Most notably, I wouldn’t have a life worth living or writing ab
out without the love of all my family, especially my mum, Elaine, and my sister, Tamsin, who bear the brunt of my moods.
I also owe huge thanks to all the audiences whose laughter has added fuel to my fire.
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
© Jon Richardson 2011
Guardian Weekend cover and ‘Not Looking for Miss Immaculate with a GSOH …’ article by Jon Richardson © Guardian News + Media Ltd 2010
Jon Richardson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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It's Not Me, It's You Page 19