Anyhow, I remember the date and the time and the place because this was the first year I felt confident enough to break away from the family shindig. Up until about fifteen or sixteen it seems unthinkable that you won’t spend every Christmas, New Year and birthday together as a family. But the siren calls of both the other sex and the arty New Wave band Ultravox playing live at the Marquee in Wardour Street proved to be hard to resist. The gig was, I imagine, great. We were so keen on drinking as much lager as possible from those horrible plastic cups and throwing ourselves around that it was always a bit difficult to remember any of the actual music. But it felt extra exciting to be out on New Year’s Eve, and away from my family. I felt cool, rebellious and very sophisticated. So much so that after throwing up on the pavement outside I challenged my friend Steve Taylor to a competition.
Traffic was gridlocked in Soho, and we decided to see who could run over the roofs of the most stationary vehicles before an angry driver managed to grab you and pull you down. We detoured via Trafalgar Square, but most of the midnight revellers had drifted away and only the litter was left, showing what a great party we had just missed. It was all a bit depressing, so we opted for the last tube train home.
Walking down to the platform, drunk and singing and falling over, we saw two beautiful, perfect young women. Alcohol does that to you, thankfully. I can only assume that in reality they were pretty monstrous, because neither of us was much to look at, so for them to be as obliging as they were must mean they were also on the fringe of desirability and hideously drunk. I don’t think we even spoke. A sort of alcoholic telepathy allowed us to communicate that we both wanted to go home having had a little contact with a real live human, so we lunged for the girls and started to kiss.
So far, so perfect. I know it’s hardly Jane Austen, but we were all consenting and none of us had passed out. The kissing was tentative to start with, and then I decided to throw caution to the wind that always blows down the tube tunnel, and try for a little tongue action. I didn’t really want to, but I knew it was the next step up in kissing after the basic mouth-to-mouth technique, so felt I had to try it. I should have checked first, I now realize, because the obliging young lady on the receiving end was not only drunk but also eating fish and chips. As my tongue snaked in it encountered not another person’s sluggy appendage but instead a mushy pellet of partially chewed cod, generously seasoned with salt and vinegar. Of course it didn’t put me off – I suppose I was so excited to be finally doing what we were doing that nothing could have spoiled the moment. I did think it a bit off when she popped another chip in when we came up for air, but then again she had been eating before we started and you wouldn’t want your takeaway to get cold just because you’d been grabbed by a punk.
Recently, while watching Springwatch with the excellent Bill Oddie, I noticed that the feeding methods of young birds are not dissimilar to my first grapple. The mum flies into the nest with a partially chewed worm or cricket and drops it right into the mouth of one of the waiting babies. I don’t think I actually ate any of my first partner’s supper, but I still find the tangy smell of salt and vinegar on batter to be highly evocative of that night.
The evening ended in a memorable way as well. We got on the train and carried on kissing in that oddly unselfconscious way that kids have of zoning out all the disapproving stares and tuts from the adults in the carriage, fumbling and frolicking in plain view with no shame. She got off before me, in more ways than one, and when I finally got back to Leytonstone I realized that I had left my key at home. It being the big family party night I hoped they would still be up, but the lights were all off. Rather than ring the bell – which was more of a horrible buzzer my dad had rigged up – and wake the whole house and the adjoining ones, I used a small penknife I carried – it was only about two inches long and was intended for craft use only – to knock the window lock open in one of our old crumbly double-sash jobs. Breaking and entering must be a lot harder for people these days, I’m sure – back then you were never really locked out of a house providing you could find a stick or something thin to open a door or window with. Anyway, I opened the window and climbed through, falling to the floor in a most disgraceful and drunken way. At that moment the lights went on and my family all started to shout and cheer. They’d seen me staggering down the road and had turned the lights out to surprise me, not really expecting me to break in rather than use the front door. It was just about the perfect end to the perfect night.
The upside to my almost total failure to get any action is that I also avoided the awkward side-effects that promiscuity offers. Very, very early on in my adult life I got, for the only time, something approaching what might be described as a sexually transmitted disease. Now you might think I’m pussy-footing around this a bit by saying it might have been a sexually transmitted disease, but I honestly have no idea where it came from because at the time – and I’m pretty confident that my memory serves me correctly – I had only slept with one person, and she was lovely and only slightly more experienced than I was. I persuaded myself instead that it had been given to me by some naughty elves – like the ones who used to work for that lazy cobbler and made all those shoes while he was asleep. Clearly they had crept under my covers and introduced some frilly decoration for aesthetic reasons only they understood.
At the tender age of about nineteen – and this would have only been about six months or a year after finally losing my virginity – I noticed (and those of a faint heart might wish to skip ahead a little bit here) a small fibrous growth on the underside of my penis. I am using the medical word for my cock here in the hope that it might make this seem a little more palatable and also might appear as if it is serving some serious purpose, as opposed to the cheap laughs I hope to get out of the situation later on.
Anyway, it didn’t really trouble me until it multiplied, so that what began as one little nodule became two in the space of a week or so, and then, quite wisely, I thought I should have it checked out. So I went to our family doctor, who I believe was a Dr Patel in Leytonstone High Street, a very nice, elderly man, and as you may have guessed, an Indian. And I showed him my penis, which I suspect he’d seen before, but not since I’d grown into a full-blooded young man who was capable of using his penis in the way that men should do. In fact it was the first time, as an adult, that I’d had to take my pants down and get the old man out in front of another old man. So it was a genuine rite of passage. He studied my penis and his verdict was that on the underside, right up near the top bit, under what is called the mushroom, I believe, in doctor circles, I had a genital wart.
Now this was bad news. Nothing had prepared me for the possibility that you could get warts upon your genitals, nor had I ever had a wart on the rest of my body. There may have been a small growth on my finger once that was removed, but I can’t really remember it that clearly so conceivably it happened to someone else, maybe one of my brothers. Anyway, I was alarmed and a little bit ashamed. No, there was nothing to be ashamed of, he reassured me, these things are very common and easily treatable, and he told me how. He gave me a prescription for some wart-removing liquid and then he took the trouble of drawing a rather crude illustration to show me how it should be used. Dr Patel continued by saying this was very powerful stuff and I must apply it only to the wart itself and not to the skin around it – it would kill the wart and it would drop off, but under no circumstances must I paint it anywhere but on the wart. Thank you, I said, and he advised me against sexual contact for the next few days until the wart had disappeared and he sent me on my way, out into a waiting room filled with middle-aged ladies who I swear had overheard most of the conversation, because they looked at me quite differently on my way out than they had on my way in. When they hadn’t looked at me at all, in fact.
Off I went to the chemist’s, taking the trouble of going to one which was quite a bit further away from my house than I would normally go to, for fear that the stigma and shame of the genital wart would l
inger for the rest of my life if it was known about by my local pharmacist. Little did I know that some twenty-eight years later I’d be writing about it in a book.
Now I don’t want to cast aspersions on Dr Patel’s medical skills, but the product he had prescribed was an over-the-counter treatment which I later saw advertised on TV for burning warts off people’s fingers. Possibly my penis at that stage looked a bit like a finger, but as I’m sure you’re aware it is made of a more sensitive material and serves a very different function to a finger. At least mine does. Anyway, I took the liquid home, and it was in a very small, plain, uninteresting brown bottle, which looked a little like those bottles of Rescue Remedy that you see bonkers old ladies squirting into their mouths when they’re a little bit panicked, fully aware, I’m sure, that essentially it is brandy in there and that’s how the rescuing is done. When I was home I took out the bottle, which came equipped with a small paintbrush on the inside of the lid, and very gingerly painted the liquid on the small wart. And it was only a small wart. It wasn’t a full-blown ugly thing. You really had to look quite hard to find it, to be frank. So I painted the liquid on the area as described by Dr Patel both verbally and in his marvellous illustration. Nothing seemed to happen.
The next day I did the business of unfolding my equipment and looking closely and intently, only to see that the wart looked exactly the same. So I reapplied the liquid, left it to do its work and, as I was at university in those days, I imagine I went off to read about modern history and enjoy too many pints of lager in the pub. I came home feeling slightly sleepy and examined my equipment again, only to find once again that the said wart was still in place. Now slightly angered by the lack of progress made by the wart liquid and no doubt fuelled with a certain kind of devil-may-care brio that seven or eight pints of lager will give a young student, I decided to go hell for leather and slapped the liquid all over the entire end of my penis. Then I went off to blissful sleep, and woke up the next morning to find that, rather like a magical occurrence in a fairy tale, my cock had swollen up and now resembled a rather angry sausage with a medium-sized peach attached.
While this might have been impressive in many ways it was also hideously painful. I figured out that the liquid kills the surface layer of skin, and so for a robust little wart might need a few days to do its job. But on the normal soft skin down there it had worked like paint stripper, and overnight it had removed the entire surface covering of my beautiful, proud, flute-like cock, which had decided to take protective measures by swelling up bigger than you would have thought possible. As a consequence I was now carrying around what looked like a small length of rhubarb glued to a large, slowly festering tennis ball. I explained this to my girlfriend at the time and after I had managed to calm her down enough to stop her packing her belongings we decided that we would leave it a few days to see how things progressed. And agreed we’d probably never have sex again.
It took about a week or ten days before things really started clearing up down there and it was agony. But there was a plus side. The whole process was rather like a snake shedding its skin – a bit messy and uncomfortable when you’re only halfway there, but when it’s over, well! It was even more beautiful; it was like a brand-new penis. As a matter of fact, I’m surprised that the sort of people who sell Botox to elderly women and suggest that you pump the fat from your arse into your lips to make yourself look a little bit plumper and poutier haven’t started selling genital-wart liquid as a way of rejuvenating your tired undercarriage, because mine was sparkling and brand new, as smooth and rosy as a newborn’s cheek with ne’er a sign of a wart. So Dr Patel’s methods may have been suspicious but the end results were all I could have hoped for. I did ask my publishers if they would like a photograph to accompany this piece, but they have stopped answering my calls.
All I want for Christmas is everything
They say that as you get older your memories of recent events grow harder to hold on to or to summon up, while incidents in your childhood and early adulthood return with crystal clarity. Which, when I was young, used to scare the life out of me. I thought the older version of me would hate to be bumming around not knowing what happened yesterday or the day before, whilst wallowing in the crisp memory of what happened thirty or forty or fifty years ago. No wonder old people keep losing their keys and mobile phones – they think they left them in the 1930s.
Of course, back then I hadn’t realized that there is a plus side. With the benefit of time and distance, even mundane events take on a far more interesting hue. A walk down to the shops that I made last week doesn’t bear dwelling on, but if I try to recapture the sights and sounds that accompanied a similar event back in 1985 or 1972 then it’s oddly thrilling. The different cars, the shops that no longer exist, the haircuts, the deformities – all those little details that I took for granted at the time are now delicious treats to be savoured at leisure. So I’ve come to the conclusion that memory adjustment is one of Nature’s brilliant design features because, when I think about it, what happened to me last week is of no real interest to me. I love watching my children growing up, and wandering around with my dogs, taking a nap after lunch and so on, but it’s all pretty mundane, to be honest. My life has settled into a happy routine. What I do one week is broadly similar to what I did the week before, and that’s exactly the way I like it.
As you get older you cling more to routine and regularity and you don’t like surprises quite as much as you used to. Or loud music, reality TV or too much excitement of any sort. You don’t really want to go out and have a wild night that will go on for four or five, six or ten hours longer than it should. You no longer want to wake up in someone else’s bed, or a skip, or spend the whole night ricocheting around town then hang about waiting for a night bus.
A perfect evening for me is to get home quite early, browse the internet and bid for something I don’t really need on eBay, chat with the wife and kids, stroke the dogs, watch a bit of TV and, after dozing off in front of whatever is on, head for bed. Normally at about ten thirty. Then it’s into my PJs, do a wee, brush and floss, do another wee, make sexual advances to the wife – and as you get older, it doesn’t really matter whether they are accepted or not, because, frankly, just the thought that you might get your leg over is very nearly as satisfying as the real thing. And considerably less tiring. Nowadays, just lying next to a nice warm human and a small furry dog is a pleasant enough way to end the day. Then do another wee, and sleep, trying not to wee again until morning.
But the prospect of being able to remember the sixties and seventies clearly is growing ever more exciting to me. I’m not quite old enough for it to have kicked in fully yet, but already some distant events are beginning to shimmer into focus. It’s like suddenly finding a pair of glasses designed for looking into the memory distance. Although the fact that I can still remember the recent past means that I must currently be wearing the equivalent of bifocals. Maybe that’s something opticians could develop: memory glasses that help people to see back to 1965. It would make for an interesting eye test when you went in for a check-up. ‘Can you see the past clearer now … or now? Do things seem happier with this lens … or ten years further back?’
That reminds me of a conversation I had with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer in the early nineties. They were new faces on TV back then, and my company at the time, Channel X, had been lucky enough to get involved with them. Vic Reeves Big Night Out was essentially a show that Vic and Bob had created and performed as a raucous live event in various pubs and clubs in south-east London. We just streamlined it and filmed it for TV. But hanging out with the two of them was not only inspirational, but also tremendous fun. One of their flights of fancy involved thinking up the single as-yet-uninvented new invention that would transform your life for the better. I can’t remember what I came up with, but either Vic or Bob suggested a sort of projector hat that, when worn, could project an image of whatever memory you summoned up. The noblest use of this, we all agre
ed, would be to project images of all the bosoms you had been lucky enough to get a look at, so that your friends might also enjoy admiring one of Nature’s greatest gifts. It would also give the owner of the hat and of the memory a chance to have a longer, more leisurely look themselves. All too often a young man rushes through these moments looking for the greater gratification that lies maybe thirty minutes ahead. But with our patented Projecto-Helmet™ you could linger as longer as you liker. If any millionaire investors are interested, I think I still have Bob’s early sketch detailing the procedure. Come on, Sir Alan, we could make a fortune!
Anyway, it’s nearly Christmas and at this time of year I often find myself thinking back to Christmases gone by. Those that I’ve celebrated with my wife and our children are still clearer for me than the ones when I was a kid. But there are a few that I do remember from when I was young. Or maybe it’s the family stories of those events, retold so many times, that have lodged in my head, rather than precise recollections of what really happened. Holding on to memories on purpose is tricky, isn’t it?
Why Do I Say These Things? Page 11