The house was one of those narrow, terraced jobs laid out over four floors and the previous owners had built up into the attic. It wasn’t huge, but because of the height of it, the builders thought it would be a good idea to have a boiler at the very top to heat the upper floors and the water for the bathroom, as well as one in the basement serving the kitchen and living room. Now the upstairs one was buggered, and there was no chance of getting anyone out to fix it for several days. It wasn’t the end of the world – the boiler in the basement was OK – but we still faced a chilly Christmas with no prospect of a bath, which wasn’t exactly the cosy idyll we’d been looking forward to.
My pride as a new homeowner, husband, father and general provider for my little family’s basic needs was at stake, and I wasn’t going to let the small matter of my complete ignorance of plumbing or indeed my general uselessness around anything mechanical stand in my way. I had maybe one spanner in the house, but I was determined I was going to fix that boiler myself.
In the event, I never did get to mend the boiler, because it wasn’t actually broken. It had simply overheated and been locked by its safety mechanism. All you had to do to restart it was press a small button on the side, but for some reason the plumbers had not thought it necessary to show me this handy device, the useless bastards, and there was no mention of it in the glossy pamphlet they’d left.
So, armed with my spanner and the useless pamphlet, and dressed for the job in a slightly dirty white bathrobe, I went up to the attic and set to work. I cleared a path through the boiler housing and, sweating and swearing, tried in vain to make sense of the pipes leading into and out of it. I banged it a few times and twiddled a couple of knobs. Crouching red-faced in front of the stubborn metal box, I didn’t notice that my exertions had woken up the kittens, who had been asleep on a blanket near by, and who, too young to have any fear of a half-naked, red-faced man waving a spanner, were now delightedly eyeing the two dangly kitten toys bobbling and jiggling enticingly under my robe. Or testicles, as you and I would recognize them.
As I wondered whether I should keep on banging or try twiddling something else, they pounced. One missed; the other, however, found his target with brilliant accuracy. I let out a yell and leapt to my feet, walloping my head on the cupboard door-frame and dropping my spanner, which would probably have been more use in loosening the grip of the kitten than in anything it had achieved with the poxy boiler.
My head throbbing and my balls in agony, I backed out of the attic with the kitten still hanging there, its tiny claws embedded in my sagging scrotal sac. If you are a man over thirty-five, or know one intimately, you will be aware that it’s around this age that over three decades of gravity, combined with general wear and tear, begin to have a lengthening effect on the scrotum. This experience, I can assure you, did nothing to help slow down the process, and now that I’m in my late forties my balls are so low I’m often tempted to tuck them into my socks before playing tennis.
While I’m on this delicate subject, I’m reminded of the time I showed my balls to the Spice Girls. This is back when they were huge (the Spice Girls, I mean, obviously). They had been appearing on Comic Relief where, as part of the general jollity, it was agreed that they would give Griff Rhys Jones and me big, crazy kisses if people rang up and pledged enough money to see it. I can’t remember whose idea this was – presumably mine or Griff’s. Anyway, to add to the so-called hilarity, I was wearing a kilt. I forget whether there was an actual Comic Relief point to this or whether I was just going through one of my phases where I thought I looked good in something which could quite clearly only be carried off by a chisel-jawed, twenty-year-old male model with a flawless six-pack. But wearing a kilt I was, and with nothing under it, either. I have no idea why, but after the kissing – I think I got Baby Spice, but if my memory hasn’t focussed properly then please forgive me, girls – as we left the stage and made our way back to the dressing rooms, all feeling a little cheapened by the stunt, I thought I’d lighten the mood by giving the girls a treat.
‘I’m not wearing any pants!’ I shouted in a vaguely harassing manner.
‘Prove it,’ said Scary, I think – if it was one of the others, please forgive me, etc.
So I bent over and flicked up the kilt at the back, expecting an admiring chorus and maybe even to be chased by a bunch of sexually aroused Spices and forced to hide in kindly old Stephen Fry’s dressing room or take shelter behind Lenny Henry’s magnificent frame. But no. Instead they let out a collective groan of disgust, and Scary – this time I’m positive it was Scary – exclaimed, ‘My God, they’re droopy!’ We then stood around for a short while not really knowing what to say. I blame those kittens.
There’s always Rambo
So far, I’ve been pretty lucky with the whole inevitable getting-old thing. Still all my own hair, more or less all my own teeth, and aside from a minor injury involving a Frisbee that means I will always see small floating black objects in my right eye, no major accidents to bitch about. My hair hasn’t even started to grey yet, aside from a rogue patch on the lower left quadrant of my chin when I grow my summer beard. My left, your right, in case you ever want to verify. I haven’t checked my pubes recently so I can’t comment on them, but I think they’re hanging on in there as well. Certainly they’re not falling out, and there’s no grey. Do people go bald down there? I suppose if they did they’d keep quiet about it. Maybe there’s a special room at the men’s hair-transplant clinic where you can go and have some plugs inserted downstairs as well.
I am also lucky – thrilled, in fact – to have got this far in life without ever injuring another human being too badly, either emotionally or physically. I did manage to get both my younger brothers knocked over once, and they both had to go to hospital, but they got to come home afterwards, and what’s a broken collarbone among brothers?
Mum made me promise that if I was out alone with the younger boys, without an older person to keep an eye on us, I was never to try to cross the high street with them. But surely she knew it was an impossible promise to keep? After all, the fish-and-chip shop was on the other side of the high street, and if you timed it right and went to the chippie after the lunchtime rush they’d normally be happy to give polite young boys a free bag of ‘crackling’ – our name for the little bits of batter and tiny, overcooked pieces of potato that gathered at the bottom of the big silver trough they scooped the chips out of. They were especially prone to giving these freebies out to young boys who happened to have even younger, cuter boys in tow, and so, despite my promise, I fairly regularly forced the younger brothers to make the journey.
Nothing ever went wrong when we took the zebra crossing, but that was a good hundred feet away from the chip shop, and on that particular day I suppose I just couldn’t be bothered, so we waited for a gap in the traffic and ran over together. No problems getting there. But once we’d got our bags of crackling I tried a new road-crossing method, one that did away with all that tiresome looking-both-ways-for-oncoming-traffic stuff. I steered us towards a reasonable-sized gap between parked cars and told the boys we’d run over on a count of three. With a mouth full of crackling, and not bothering to check if anyone was driving towards us, I counted, and then shouted ‘NOW!’ Trusting and fearless, they both ran out into the path of an oncoming Ford Anglia. (I don’t actually know what the car was, but I’ve plumped for the Anglia because there were a lot of them about and I thought it might help to set the historical picture. It seems about right, too, because they weren’t seriously injured, and anything much bigger or more solid would surely have finished at least one of them off.)
Much of the next twenty-four hours is a blur. I dimly recall being asked what happened, and I lied, of course. They ran out before I could stop them, I said, and after a while I almost began to believe it myself. They came back from the hospital that afternoon, one with minor cuts and bruises, the other with a cast that covered his arm and much of his shoulder. If they remembered what had happen
ed they never said, but even if they had and I’d been asked to explain myself, I couldn’t have done so. I thought about it a little and was never able to understand why I’d been so relaxed about their safety and the Green Cross Code – a lesson that had been drilled into me and my generation by countless road safety commercials, starring everyone from Alvin Stardust to the cast of Dad’s Army to that rather poor home-grown superhero the Green Cross Man.
Maybe I did it to get back at him. He was rubbish – a dozy-looking bloke with a West Country accent. I knew there weren’t any real superheroes out there, but I also knew that if there was one he wouldn’t have talked like he’d just finished a cream tea and was off to geld a lamb. ‘I warnt be thar when you crozz the road,’ he used to say, and he hadn’t lied.
One thing I do know, and it rather surprised me, is that I didn’t feel particularly bothered, and I certainly didn’t cry. I don’t think this was because I was a boy and boys weren’t allowed to cry. Along with how to bake conkers and check all hedges and bushes on the walk home from school for hidden stashes of pornography, this was one of the few things I had learnt about being a boy that I knew was adhered to by all other boys. Crying, like skipping and rounders, was for girls. And although I really liked rounders, and liked the look of skipping, I had managed to avoid letting anyone know they appealed, and had been equally successful in not crying, ever. Even the one time I got punched in the face at school, on purpose, by a boy who later became one of my good friends, I held it in. But it makes you wonder, once you get old enough to be comfortable about admitting to liking rounders, where they go to, those tears.
If I’ve learnt one thing about the universe it’s that nothing just disappears – it finds a way of sneaking out via a back route, and although I kept them tamped down for ages, those tears were just waiting for the decade when they could get out.
It was a simple commercial that first made me realize this. One of those mini-films that seem to cram more into their thirty seconds on air than some feature films do in their two-hour-plus running times. And while I’m touching on that touchy subject, why are films so bloody long these days? It used to be that cinemas screened two films, so they had to be no longer than ninety wonderfully economical minutes each. Then they did away with the double feature and film-makers started to relish the extra space, which is fine when you’re telling a story as complex as The Godfather or Lawrence of Arabia . But did the last Batman film really need to be nearly three hours long, and so bloody dreary with it? No. So stop it with the too-long films.
Anyway, I was watching TV in America with my wife and the kids, and the adverts came on. This particular commercial started with a nice blonde girl arriving for her first day at her new college. She pushes into her room and sees a little Goth girl sitting there, curtains drawn. The blonde Barbie one opens the curtains and introduces herself and puts the framed picture of her very straight boyfriend next to the Goth’s pic of her boyfriend, a Marilyn Manson wannabe. The girls look set to hate each other, giving proper eyes and ting as the kids might say, until they sit down and open up the same laptop. By the end of the commercial the Goth has draped her python around the valley girl’s neck and you know they are going to be best friends, for ever and ever. Or until one of them buys a different computer.
Just another commercial, a straightforward piece of salesmanship designed to persuade mums and dads to buy their little girls a computer that will win them friends, or at the very least not antagonize the scary-looking person they may wind up sharing a room with. Nothing even remotely intended to tug on the heartstrings, right? But for some reason this particular ad reduced my wife and me to tears when we first saw it on TV while on holiday in Florida. Big, fat, salty, silly, embarrassing tears. We held hands and laughed, but we were actually, properly, crying. Over a stupid ad about a stupid girl and her stupid computer (a Dell laptop with Intel inside by the way). Of course our kids thought this was hilarious, and started watching us for other emotional outbursts, which seem to happen increasingly often and for increasingly inappropriate reasons.
Is it just us or does everyone get a lot soppier as they get older? Do you cry more? Do you find yourself moved, at times, to excessive displays of emotion over the most pathetic little things? I’ve noticed it more and more. Some films you expect to get emotional in – ET, for example, and I cried like a pinched baby during Toy Story 1 and 2. But I think a grown man might expect to feel reasonably safe when settling down to watch the Sex and the City film. I welled up repeatedly – not just when Big proposes to Carrie and when he gets the rooms knocked through to make a really huge lovely wardrobe for her. Those scenes are guaranteed, designed even, to moisten the eyes. But when Carrie gave her assistant the handbag she’d always wanted I wept a fresh flood of tears, and it hit me that I had to do something about this phenomenon. It’s embarrassing. I even cry while watching films that I only partially engage with, and don’t necessarily enjoy that much. The moment I start thinking about how much my kids, or even other people’s kids, would enjoy a moment of silly sentiment in, for example, Horton Hears a Who! then out come the tissues. It’s got so bad that I now make sure I have a small, man-bag-size packet of tissues with me at screenings and near by when watching TV, just in case.
I think I know what started this awkward state of affairs, or at least when the emotional gates began to creak open. It was just after my first child was born. We were in Los Angeles, probably a work-related thing, and I needed to see the newly released Robert Altman movie The Player . Great film, and I enjoyed it all the more for not having heard much about it beforehand. But I wasn’t prepared for the rather nasty, rather real act of violence in the middle. If you haven’t seen it then skip the next sentence. Here’s the spoiler: there’s a fight, a scuffling kind of struggle, and one of the men involved slips and I think hits his head and dies. Now I’ve seen a lot of violence in films, and occasionally will deliberately seek out movies with lots of cool, fun fighting in, like the Bond movies or anything starring the great Jackie Chan. But of course that never seems ‘real’, and you always know when it’s going to kick in, and ultimately no one you care about gets hurt – it’s always the bad people, or nameless thugs. But this scene seemed rather too real, too plausible, too horrible to deal with. I almost got up and left. I couldn’t cope with it. I immediately thought of Jane and Betty waiting at the apartment we were renting and felt I had to rush back there to check they were OK. I didn’t – I stayed and calmed myself down and watched to the end.
It’s pretty natural that the emotional lurch involved in becoming a father would have repercussions, and although I guess the old ‘boy-training’ enabled me to keep things in check a little longer, gradually I welcomed the change. I began to feel genuinely connected to those around me in a way I never had before, and if in return I had to show a bit more emotion to the rest of the world then so be it. But now, sixteen years later, still sniffing and snivelling and sobbing my way through commercials for pasta sauce and welling up when I hear any of the songs from The Wizard of Oz or catching just two minutes of Big when channel-hopping, I’d really like a break.
I’m thinking of starting a group, a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous for the easily moved. We’d sit in a circle in a church hall and, after announcing our age and that we were a big old cry-baby, we’d share stories about stupid things that had triggered us off. To finish we could punch each other in the face and watch the last Rambo movie on DVD and pretend for a couple of hours that we didn’t care about our families, or global warming, or abandoned puppies, like in the good old days. Before we became men.
Cheesy Wotsits and other looks I have worked unsuccessfully
Over the years I’ve acquired a reputation as something of an outlandish dresser, which, against all odds, I’m proud of. I’ve never seen the point in running with the crowd just for the sake of it, and growing up when I did, hitting the latter part of my teens as the punk-rock movement got into its stride, meant my fashion sensibilities were shaped
at a time when outside the mainstream was the only place to be. Up till then, my concept of individual style was more of a negative than a positive one, as I tried to live down my parents’ laudable attempts to foist an assortment of hand-me-downs and catalogue purchases on to my very tall, very thin and very puny frame.
I know you wouldn’t believe it to look at me now, in the full magnificent bloom of middle age, but as a child I was an appalling sight to behold. Trust me, I was monstrous, grotesque, terrifying, like an elongated gargoyle that had leapt down from a parapet to scare the villagers. Strangers would look at me on the streets or the bus and shake their heads, tut-tutting as if this mockery of a young man had been created deliberately to insult them. It hurt at the time, sure, but it has served me in good stead. When I now head out into the world wearing tweed shorts that are clearly not appropriate for a grown man, or a jacket fashioned from plastic with plywood accents, or a tie made of leather and feathers – all actual items I have owned over the years – the reaction from my fellow men and women no longer stings.
There was one incident, however, which occurred at Disney- land in California, that managed to pierce my armour. It must have been around 1989, as I was with my wife but we didn’t have children yet. We had both desperately wanted to visit Disneyland as kids, but foreign travel and expensive holidays abroad were not for the likes of our families. So as adults we seized the chance and headed off together. I had no idea what you were supposed to pack for a theme park, never having been to one before, so I did what I normally do when faced with a new experience – I went for the gaudy, dressing-up option.
Why Do I Say These Things? Page 13