What I really wanted back then were some plastic trousers. For a couple of months punk was all about plastic trousers and any self-respecting devotee needed a pair, ideally black plastic drainpipes. But black plastic drainpipes cost about twenty-five or thirty quid, and there was no way I could afford that.
One day Steven, who was equally desperate for plastic trousers, equally stupid and equally strapped for cash, told me he’d seen some quite cool-looking angling dungarees for sale up the road. Just as I had been addicted to comics and still loved them but kept quiet because it undermined my punk credentials, so Steven had been a keen angler, and I suspected he still secretly went fishing at the weekend while I catalogued my X-Men. So off we went to check them out in the local angling store, and they weren’t cool at all. For a start they were a dull, dirty blue colour. Presumably this was to confuse the fish, if you were wearing them while standing in a stream. The plastic they were made of wasn’t nice plastic either, not at all like proper latex. It was thick, not especially shiny stuff. And they were baggy.
‘We can’t wear them,’ I said. ‘They’re the wrong colour, the wrong shape and they’ve got a bib on them.’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an idea. We could put big white shirts on over the top, instead of underneath, so you can’t see they’re dungarees.’
I liked his thinking. Then I suggested we could use my dad’s staple gun to staple them down the insides of the legs till they looked like drainpipes. It seemed a brilliant plan and, seeing as these dungarees were only £1.99 a pair, definitely worth a try. So we bought them and stapled the legs, and put them on with shirts on top to go out for the evening. Our legs looked like a couple of giant powder-blue sausages, and the shirts over the top gave the outfit a slight maternity vibe – but, delighted with our reckless brilliance, off we went into town, to the Marquee, to see an as-yet-unsigned band called Generation X.
It wasn’t long before a basic design flaw in our faux plastic drainpipes became apparent. If you wanted to have a widdle, you had to take the whole lot off – remove your shirt, undo the straps of the dungarees, wrestle the stapled trouser legs down to your knees – and then put it all back on again.
The real trouble started when I realized that the toilet cubicle in the Marquee, as a result of being stuffed with beer containers, loo paper and other foreign bodies, had completely flooded. That meant having to pee at the urinal right by the door. Or it would have been right by the door if there had been a door, but the door had been smashed off and nicked. So having a pee would involve going through this performance in full view not only of everyone else who happened to wander in to take a leak, but also in front of the audience on the other side of the doorway. I decided this would be too shameful, and resolved to ignore my full bladder all evening. I wish I had that sort of control today, as I must have drunk seven or eight pints of lager before heading home.
Not surprisingly, once the night air hit me, the situation got rather desperate. I couldn’t find an open toilet anywhere, so I just had to keep holding it in. Eight pints! I have no idea how I did it, but I managed. All the way home on the Central Line, and then a good half-mile jog from the station. I didn’t want to stop and pee in an alleyway because I knew that occasionally they arrested people for that, and my anti-establishment stance was really just a front – I was still a bit scared of policemen.
When at last I reached my front door, hopping from one foot to the other, I discovered I’d forgotten my key. I rang the bell as loudly and insistently as I could. Everyone was asleep. I rang again, and again, and then because I really couldn’t hold it a second longer I ripped off my shirt and dragged the dungarees down around my ankles. I couldn’t wee in the street, so I flipped the lid off one of our dustbins and let it flow. Ah, the relief. I must have stood there peeing in the bin for about twelve minutes in total, and that was the sight that greeted my dad, woken from his slumber, when he finally unlatched the door. He looked out blearily, shook his head in a mixture of resignation and disgust, and left me to get on with it. I knew then, without any doubt, that I was a proper punk.
Daddy really doesn’t know best
I first became a dad over seventeen years ago. First one tiny, scrunchy-faced, crying, scrabbling, needy little Rosslet, then three busy years later another, this time with a bit of jaundice thrown in for good measure, so he looked like a creased yellow muppet. Three years after that, out popped one more, back to the regulation shrimp-pink this time, and so far that’s our lot.
It’s a surprising experience. Not the birth particularly, though that’s tiring and emotional and wonderful and, if you go to the hospitals we did, bloody expensive. And it can be just as expensive for pets.
Recently we paid the vet to give my daughter’s chihuahua a Caesarean – giving birth can be pretty risky for such tiny creatures – and that cost us over two thousand quid for four puppies, which were lovely, but why it’s as expensive as coming home with a small human I don’t know. Perhaps because the work is more fiddly – although if doctors started charging on the basis of the size of the bits involved then the whole system would go tits up. Men would be forever boasting about the size of their bill, even offering to be charged more, while women would probably give the whole topic a wide berth. But money aside, the surprises of fatherhood are many.
When we had our first, I remember the sheer horror and panic I felt when the nurses told me that we could all go home. We’d spent a couple of nights in the hospital with this little baby that we’d made, and every half an hour or so these lovely, kind, knowledgeable ladies would come in and make sure everything was OK and then go out again.
But on the third morning they came in and dropped the bombshell, ‘OK, you can go home now.’
Even though I was thirty by then, I still felt like a kid, and there was no way I considered myself anywhere near ready to look after a child. Jane was only twenty, which by today’s standards seems frighteningly young. When my eldest brother was born my dad was eighteen and my mum seventeen, and youthful parenthood was far more commonplace. Nowadays most men seem to leave having a baby until they’re about fifty-four and most women seem to be around forty-two. But we were youngish, and certainly felt too young to be heading home on our own with little Betty all wrapped up, hoping for the best.
We’d bought a new house but hadn’t yet moved in because it still didn’t have a finished roof or central heating, thanks to the builders that my wife’s dad had recommended. Don’t worry, I’ve nearly forgiven him. The couch at our old house had been commandeered by the cats and, delightfully, the cats had contracted fleas, so we brought our baby straight into a flea-infested home. She immediately came out in a rash, prompting the first of dozens of trips to the doctor in her first fortnight. Eventually we decided we’d had enough and, seeing as it was summer, went off on holiday to France, failing to factor in that 101-degree heat isn’t really the best environment for a newborn.
But although we weren’t ready for the experience of parenthood, you gradually relax into it, and three or four months down the line you realize it’s the same for everyone. Blind panic, sheer terror, sleepless nights. And then it dawns on you that maybe you can do it after all. There are a few basic rules, of course, about not breaking the baby, not dropping the baby, not overfeeding the baby, not underfeeding the baby and keeping the baby clean, but beyond that, if you just dollop a little bit of love into whatever you do, you’ll be fine.
In fact, once I’d got the hang of it, I found the whole process far easier than I’d feared. The worst thing – and no, curiously enough, it wasn’t changing nappies – was trying to get the babies dressed. I marvelled at the way small infants seem to be permanently in motion, their hands and feet whirring and kicking and grabbing, their little heads twisting while they gurgle and burble. I always panicked that I wouldn’t be able to get arms in sleeves or T-shirts over heads without causing an ear to fall off or a limb to get twisted in the wrong position and left there, and that my children
would grow up hating me because as a result of my clumsiness they walked with a terrible limp or could never bowl a cricket ball.
Aside from changing nappies and getting the baby dressed, my next big concern – and I’m being very honest with you here, so please don’t judge – was that our sex life might suffer. As you’ve probably worked out by now, a regular dose of legal intercourse is pretty important to me. As soon as our first little babby had popped out, I wanted to know how soon after the birth you are allowed to get back into the saddle.
I would like to make it perfectly clear that when I say ‘saddle’, there’s no actual saddle involved. I’ve no doubt some people enjoy that kind of thing in the bedroom, but I find it hard enough just keeping up with the outfits. I once had a frilly shirt my wife quite liked me to wear. I think it made me look a little like a Mills and Boon hero – either that or Jane just liked it because it disguised my paunch. She never said. Anyway, she was fond of it. But keeping that clean and in the right drawer was enough of a drag. As for these people who have cupboards full of vibrating toys and lubricants and whips, and possibly saddles, I don’t know how they manage. We don’t go in for role-playing at such a dramatic level.
Anyway, the right time turned out to be fairly soon after the birth, but not as soon as some. If my memory serves me correctly, the great J. G. Ballard confesses in his autobiography that he made love to his wife almost immediately after she’d given birth. Well, not only have you got to take your hat off to the man, but the pair of them should be congratulated on their courage. Frankly, that’s way too early. Christ, not even the next day! I mean, you might want to wait until you’d got home, or had a shower at the very least. But I suppose you don’t want to leave it too long and risk getting out of practice.
Jane, I must say, was always very tolerant and obliging. As long as the kids were either asleep or in another room she would let me cop a feel of some description. I remember having a delightfully frenzied love-making session on the stairs. Although the children were safely tucked up in bed, she seemed a little distracted throughout. It didn’t bother me: like most men I’m mainly concerned with how much I’m enjoying it myself, but afterwards, as she stood up and we were rearranging our clothing, I noticed that there were two big Sticklebricks stuck to her buttocks. These spiky relatives of Lego are not nice things to tread on, let alone sit on, but, God bless her – and this is a sign of real devotion to spousal duty – she’d kept schtum about it the whole time I was enjoying myself. It’s a sacrifice that still fills me with admiration.
There are other changes as well, of course. Time to yourself, for a start. What did you do with all that spare time you used to have before a small, violent, hungry stranger came home to live with you? All that available, disposable time, which used to stretch out in front of you like acres of open countryside, just disappears. As do those splendid Saturday mornings spent indulgently nursing a hangover, before a lovely late leisurely lunch and an evening of marginally less extravagant drinking than the one before, knowing you can spend Sunday in bed to recover, the recovery aided by the Sunday papers and a spicy Bloody Mary before lunch/ a stroll/ a nap/ The Antiques Roadshow / dinner/ a little drink/ a cuddle/ bed. How lovely to waste the weekend doing nothing, rather than scratching around on a rainy Sunday with three kids who are developing cabin-fever, trying to work out where to take them all for some ‘family fun’ – a phrase which strikes me as being inherently contradictory, as anyone who has spent a Sunday morning in the soft-play area of one of those indoor adventure playgrounds will join me in testifying. It might be fun for some of the family, but rarely for all.
Of course, memory has a way of condensing those long stretches of tedium, those hours spent watching a child on a swing or in a pond filled with brightly coloured balls, or sitting in a draughty church hall with a bunch of equally bored parents at a ballet or fencing or judo or drama class. At the time, despite loving the odd moment, I can remember finding the experience less satisfying than I’d always imagined. Several years on, however, I am able to persuade myself that those moments were the pinnacle of my life thus far, and that maybe I should shoot for a fourth kid before I get too old to hoick one into a swing unaided.
On the subject of those indoor play areas, I once went diving into the ball pond myself, to frolic with the kids. This was after an exhausting half-hour spent chasing them through those infernal plastic tubes that criss-cross the ceiling. After getting stuck in one of the tighter corridors and having to enlist the help of a couple of teenagers to simultaneously push and pull me out, while they helpfully remarked that I was fatter than I looked on TV, I decided that the ball pond offered less potential for embarrassment. But diving underneath the grimy balls to hide from my six-year-old son, I felt something squidgy under my hand. Another parent had clearly flouted the no-toddlers-in-the-ball-pond law, despite many signs posted around the area, and a nappy-wearer had parted company with his or her fully loaded undergarment, which was now stuck to my right fist. I chose to assume it belonged to a child because the possibility that I was now attached to a nappy that had been filled and discarded by an incontinent adult is the stuff of nightmares.
That particular place was shut down by the council shortly afterwards; the rumour circulating among the local parents was that several dead rats had been found in the kitchen and one in that very ball pond, so perhaps I got off lightly.
As a parent you do find your freedom curtailed, no two ways about it. Once upon a time we might have decided on a Friday to go away for the weekend, and on Saturday morning wake up in Amsterdam. Fast-forward a year and you’d find us lounging around at home with the baby, and one of us would say, ‘Shall we go out?’
‘OK, let’s do it.’
An hour later, we’d still be indoors, searching for either the nappy bag or the bibs, the nappies, the dummy, the baby, the baby’s gloves … and then, just as we were heading for the door, we’d remember we needed some milk warmed up just in case. And maybe I should get out of my pyjamas if we were really going to hit the park.
Out we’d go, finally, to endure another half-hour of preparation – ‘Have you got the car seat ready? Is it strapped in? Did you remember the wet wipes? Have you got the Disney singalong tape?’ And so on and so on and so on, until they hit about fourteen and only want to stay indoors in their rooms or sneak off without you to drink cider and suck on other teenagers’ necks.
And this was despite the fact that I am married to someone who could quite easily be a five-star general when it comes to planning outings. On the few occasions when it was left to me I would usually leave the house without any of the ‘essentials’, including those bloody nappies, and have to try to make do with something I found on the floor – like a leaf, or a newspaper or a crisp bag. The way things are going with recycling and all, maybe that kind of improvisation is to be encouraged. Actually I wiped my bum on a leaf quite recently, and it didn’t do anywhere near as good a job as double-ply Andrex, which surprised me. I was playing tennis with my friend David Baddiel and had one of those sudden, desperate urges to go that hit maybe once a year or so. There was no time for niceties, so I wandered behind a shrub and unloaded, grabbing a handful of broad, hopefully non-stinging leaves to tidy myself up. They did the trick in a rudimentary way, but rather than feeling fresh and outdoorsy I imagine I smelt like a panda with diarrhoea.
Despite the struggle involved in leaving the house with children in tow, we have always tried to carry on with something of a normal adult life, even taking the kids out to restaurants with us. They are surprisingly well behaved and so it’s never caused too much of a problem. The worst place for trying to eat with kids was San Francisco, where we all stayed once when I was filming. When we wanted to go out for a meal we’d ring round several restaurants to double-check that it was OK to bring the kids (we had two at the time). The phone would invariably be answered by a charming young gay guy, or possibly even a straight guy who had adopted the standard San Fran accent so as not to be
outed as hetero. They would always be bemused as to why we would want to bring children to a lovely expensive restaurant in the first place, and concerned about how we would control them once they were there. Nearly all these conversations went like this:
‘Hello, we’d love it if we could get a table this evening for three or four people.’
‘Why, certainly, sir.’
‘Great. But can I just check with you whether children are welcome?’
‘How old is the child?’
‘We have one who’s three and a one-year-old.’
‘Oh my Gaad. Hold on, please.’
Then there would be a long pause while he tried to calculate the ramifications of this terrible information, and sometimes he could be heard conferring with the rest of the staff.
‘Well, it’s unusual, but it should be OK. How can you be sure they’ll stay quiet?’
Why Do I Say These Things? Page 18