Then I lost God. Initially it was a slow breakdown in communication with Him. I stopped asking Him stuff and He didn’t ever say anything anyway so when the feeling of ‘being listened to’ was replaced with a feeling of ‘there’s no one listening’, I accepted that as my reality. I’m not sure God even noticed … When I tried to talk to God (it’s been a while), He seemed very quiet, so I started to ask questions, and with each one unanswered God seemed further away. The route I’d had to Him before seemed unfamiliar and became less and less clear and then He just sort of disappeared, and the map I had that used to tell me where to find Him turned out to be a blank sheet of paper with a question mark on it.
He is supposed to be whatever you need Him to be. God’s plan in God’s time … accept powerlessness and hand it over to your higher power. Let go, Let God. All the clichéd phrases shared in the addicts’ meetings work well. I was told, if you’re struggling with it, let God stand for ‘Good Orderly Direction’. Glib but effective. It’s possible to be an atheist in recovery from addiction and to accept the process and the tools of recovery and even the word ‘God’ without believing in anything supernatural. When I did believe in God, it was a trust in nature that came closest to defining it. I began to see myself as part of a bigger picture and the scale of the natural world seemed inspiring enough to give a sort of reverential splendour to the idea. It’s easy, I think, to feel a connection to something beyond yourself when you’re standing on a deserted beach staring at the vast ocean before you. Less so if a condom washes up or a stag do arrive for skinny-dipping and drinking games. I gave a consciousness to the things that appeared in nature, grand scenes like a big tree, a mountain, the sea or rolling hills. It’s not too hard with a bit of stillness and humility to take the natural and give it a little shove in the direction of the super. Talk to the wind and it’s a cinch to convince yourself that each gust is trying to tell you something in reply: ‘Go inside … get a coat … you should have worn a hat, look at the state of your hair.’
I have made groups of people seeking to recover from addiction represent a power greater than myself. That works quite well. Any two people seeking to achieve together what I am seeking to achieve alone are a power greater than myself, except maybe the Chuckle Brothers. As long as you are wary and keep questioning, then there is something moving and profound about the collective wisdom of individuals working towards a common goal, provided the conditions of assembly are right and there is no talk of raising a militia and invading Wales. If you use any two people as your higher power, I think it’s important they are not the same two people all the time. That would get creepy and odd very quickly. I can picture frightened couples scampering into shop doorways as I trundle after them with a pile of theology books and tear-stained cheeks shouting, ‘Wait, wait, I made you my God, you can’t run into Starbucks and hide! I need you to shepherd me and stuff. Look, I made a list of questions …’
In recovery they say there are only two things you need to know about God. 1. There is one. 2. He’s not you. I can accept the latter, I know I’m not God, because there are six people (four of them famous) who simply wouldn’t ever have existed if I was the almighty. I’ve been told God is everything or God is nothing. I struggle with that one because if God is everything then he’s as big a twat as I am and that’s no good. I want a God who’s obviously better than I am. You couldn’t have a God who can never remember which side the Queen goes on when you’re setting up a chessboard. It’d be ridiculous. So then God is nothing and I’m back at square one (I know the Queen doesn’t go on square one).
Opinions vary hugely about what form God or your higher power might take. It’s supposed to be personal: you believe in whatever version works best for you. Groups of recovering addicts are meticulous in upholding the total separation between what is discussed and suggested about God in meetings and any religious ideology or doctrine. It works. Lives are saved and enriched every day, mine amongst them. In America they have a constitutional separation between church and state and seem to have gone collectively, religiously, insane. It doesn’t work everywhere.
The life I have chosen, in trying to avoid mood-altering processes and chemicals, is a ‘good life’. It’s important I think that, and that I believe it’s one I’ve chosen, or else I’m inclined to derail the whole process and go for a long swim in a bottle of Southern Comfort. It’s a good life, but it feels long. Very long, like a Soderbergh film … Make of that what you will. There are worse things to be and worse places to be them, but I do wish I wasn’t an addict. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of the constant vigilance against relapse. It’s boring and frightening at the same time. Imagine being scared of a thing for so long that even fear becomes dull.
There is a high degree of accountability in the sober existence. I make mistakes like anyone else. My ego has plenty to say and he and I have been on some hair-raising excursions together with terrible and exciting results. I don’t excuse ‘bad’ behaviour in myself. I accept that I disappoint myself and others up to a point, but I’m not comfortable with being an arsehole. I know a few people who are and beneath the resentment I feel towards them I’m also a little envious. The unabashed arsehole is a thing of some power and an odd nobility. I know when I make bad and unhelpful decisions; I do so awake and conscious of the consequences of my actions. I sometimes think that with the benefit of a ‘day pass’ into a bottle of something delicious I might enjoy a break from my usual sober thought patterns. Maybe with a big enough spliff, these many instances of my being to some degree or other ‘an arsehole’ might be acceptable to me. I could then rely on the often-repeated plea, ‘I was drunk! We all were … Come on, we all do things we regret when we’re off our tits! Sorry, baby, take me back,’ or any other such catch-all basket of an excuse for being a bum. If I want to be loud or obnoxious or leap about like a git, I do it fully aware of my actions. I still do it, but I know I am doing it and I can see myself clearly at almost all times. In fact, I act like I am drunk much more often than you might expect for a spoddy teetotaller in spectacles and a cardigan. I live in a relatively constant state of self-awareness and seek to live a life that I can be honest about with almost anyone. This would be a lot easier if there were a God taking care of the whole thing for me. In the absence of alcohol, I wonder if I might get away with ‘God made me do it’ or even ‘It’s all part of His plan’, but I don’t really think so. He doesn’t have a plan for me, and if He does, it’s about as well thought through as the Iraq War exit strategy, only with fewer roadside bombs and a lot more Stilton.
I don’t know if the hole’s God-shaped. God seemed to fill it a few times along the way and I felt better but I couldn’t sustain it and I can’t seem to shove God back in there anyway because I don’t know where He is. I don’t think the hole is as simple as the space left behind when you stop eating, like a goose who’s volunteered to blow its liver up in the name of good foie gras. I’m sure that being an addict has a bit to do with it, but I’ve done the recovery thing for a long time and I wasn’t always this aware of a spiritual vacuum waiting to suck in a better set of ideas. The hole isn’t food-shaped, alcohol would run through it and drugs seem just as likely to make new holes of their own. There’s a hole in my being, dear Liza, dear Liza. There’s a hole in my being, dear Liza, a hole …
13
I believe that children are the future
IF YOU EVER WANT TO FEEL LIKE A FAILURE, BECOME A parent. I don’t mean that I’m any worse at parenting than most or that my children are particularly challenging or that I don’t enjoy being a dad. I simply mean that every day you fail a little more in your effort to raise your children in the way you thought you would when a black and white ultrasound picture revealed the most beautiful half-formed, hunchbacked, shrivelled, foetal maggot swelling in a sack of amniotic fluid inside your partner’s distended tummy. In that moment you recognize every mistake your own parents made, dismiss them and envision your own phenomenal success. You acknowledge the ups and
downs ahead but imagine balanced, happy, communicative children who don’t need to be nagged, blackmailed or bribed into achieving the basics. A few sleepless, blundering months later you find yourself begging for the fiftieth time for your precious little darling to eat just one bit of carrot. It’s only the size of any one of the many peas now flung across the floor, table, chair, windowsill and ceiling. You then threaten the removal of the telly if they don’t eat up, possibly swear a little, beg again, thump the table, then promise that if they eat up they can have an ice cream and some sweets and more telly and a present. Welcome to the fast-flowing central current of the river of failure, which will carry you, flailing and lurching for the bank, through almost all of your child’s life.
I have two children. Alfie and Emily. They both like me. In fact, with some momentary exceptions they seem to think more of me than anyone else I know. As luck would have it, I adore them too and find them funny, sweet and beautiful beyond measure. It is an amazing thing becoming a dad. It’s been done before, I’m told, but that doesn’t lessen the sheer gobsmacking extraordinariness of it. The moment your first child is born your life is suddenly transformed, it’s filled with light and colour and laughter and joy and inspiration and bafflement and love and adoration and exhaustion and fear and paranoia and regret and embarrassment and wipes. Wipes. The dominant theme of the first four to five years of parenthood is wipes.
My daughter Emily is the younger of the two; she’s five. She finds my being away for work difficult to understand and the look on her face when I try to explain about where and why I go where I do has a very similar effect to how it might be if she reached in through my chest, tore my heart out from between my ribs and crushed it in her bare hands in front of my eyes. When I toured God Collar I tried to explain to her: ‘Daddy’s going away to tell jokes to strangers, that’s how I get my needs met.’ She was really very sweet and replied, ‘Will you tell me a joke, Daddy?’ So I said, ‘Well, I don’t really do jokes, it’s more sort of concepts and ideas.’ It’s not easy being a parent … I think she understood a bit. She certainly seemed to get the idea that I was nervous about it. She was nervous when she was second angel on the left in her school Nativity play. A good production, slightly obvious scripting; some directorial tightening wouldn’t have gone amiss. To be honest, I thought Mary overdid it somewhat, but she had to carry a lot of slack after Joseph pissed his trousers. Quentin Letts from the Daily Mail gave it five stars but he’s pretty odd and very angry. I suspect he pissed his trousers too when Labour won a third term. Anyway, Emily seemed to understand about my preshow jitters. As I left to start the tour she shouted, ‘Happy Luck, Dad.’ Isn’t that adorable? ‘Happy Luck!’ That simple phrase touches me. It feels like it’s not just emotional, it’s certainly not physical. Her innocent kindness reaches me somewhere altogether deeper. Perhaps in the place that, if I had the language for it, I might describe to you as a soul. I think she took Happy Christmas and Happy Birthday, the best ideas in her five-year-old head, and smashed them together with Good Luck to send me away with the best and most positive message she could find for me. ‘Happy Luck.’ Lovely. Sure, ‘Happy Luck’ sounds a bit like a Chinese brothel, but you can’t have it all, can you?
Emily loves spending time playing games. A lot of children’s board games are unbelievably dull. I think we remember them fondly, but trust me, if you’ve managed to avoid Ludo, Snap and Guess Who, then you’ve missed very little. ‘Is it a girl? Yes. Does she have a hat? Yes. Is it Maude? No. It must be. She’s the only one with a hat …’ It’s not exactly knight to king four, is it? Here’s a tip to minimize self-loathing – never save money by buying a cheap Snakes and Ladders board. Why? Well, because it has the same number of snakes as it does ladders. Technically, the game can last for ever. It’s not a great game, Snakes and Ladders. There’s very little to it. Roll the dice, move up the board and hope you reach a ladder that will whizz you closer to the end of the game. Pray to whatever you believe in you don’t land on a snake, which will slide you back to where it all began. It’s dismal, and because it’s only a board game you can’t even call Claims Direct and sue anyone for giving you the wrong sort of ladder or leaving a load of snakes lying about. So I sit as a dutiful loving father, opposite my wonderful daughter, with her smile and her dress and her hair and her endless patience for Snakes and Ladders, and we move together into hour three of game one. It’s usually at this point that I land on yet another snake. Emily’s delighted, but in truth all I really want to do in that moment is scream, ‘Oh I wish I was dead. When will this interminable bloody game end. Please God have mercy on me and visit a plague on London. I wish I was on an actual ladder being attacked by real bastard snakes.’ But in at least two of the books I’ve read, it says you absolutely mustn’t do that. So instead I look across the table at her big excited eyes, and the joy in her little face, and all I can do is slide my plastic tiddlywink down the snake’s slippery bloody spine and say, ‘Ooh, Daddy’s on another snake, sssssssssssss.’ And in that moment a bit of me dies. A bit of me dies because in that moment I’m thinking, ‘I wish I was somewhere else.’ I’m imagining I have somewhere better to be than playing a game with a five-year-old. There is no place better than that, that’s the best place in the world, but I can’t hold myself there because it’s difficult. Difficult and relentlessly tedious.
I don’t want to overstate my response to these instances of selfishness and frustration on my part. This isn’t why I need God. It’s only guilt, it’s nothing more profound than that. But it’s cumulative, and because it’s family, the feelings seem to run deep. Put them all together and add the constant worry that I am failing as a father and hey presto, you have the right emotional Stanley knife to cut yourself a nice little God-shaped hole.
I have the same feelings about my son Alfie. He’s great, he’s eight years old now and I think he’s hilarious. Whatever it is, he’s up for it. It’s a good thing eight-year-old boys don’t go on stag parties. The presence of eight-year-olds would escalate the simple pleasures of tying the stag to a lamppost, leaping in a canal and downing a litre of vodka Red Bull whilst standing on a table to something that many people would consider ‘out of hand’. His enthusiasm and excitement for life show in every part of his being. He jiggles, dances, hops and lurches about with fascinating facial contortions to match and speaks of such wondrous things that I think he must be channelling the spirits of deceased fantasy novelists. Alfie is fun. Watching him realize the power of humour and begin to harness his ability to make people laugh has been one of the greatest joys of seeing him grow. I remember an occasion I was driving us home from somewhere or other. I had a friend with me in the front of the car who was telling us about a documentary he’d seen. My friend was explaining to us about a breed of monkey so small it could cling on to your thumb … From the back of the car a small but confident voice said, ‘What, thumbkeys?’ I was over the moon. Good lad, Alf! Of course, they’re thumbkeys. I couldn’t have been more proud if he’d accidentally discovered a new clean source of renewable energy. We all laughed, and repeated the word ‘thumbkeys’ until we fell back into silence. Alf let it be silent for a while. He rode it out, happy in the knowledge he’d made a zinger. Then out of nowhere, for seemingly no reason at all, he suddenly punched the air and shouted, ‘Who’s with me?’ What a question. ‘Who’s with me?’ Well, we all are now. He’s in the back of the car; he’s not even in charge of where we’re going, but where he leads, so shall we follow. He is the thumbkey king and, yes, we are with him. That’s probably similar to how Jesus ended up with so many fans. He had the courage to ask, ‘Who’s with me?’, and know that simply by asking many would follow because it takes some guts to put that question out there. I love my son, but for the record I’d like to make it very clear that no part of me thinks he represents the second coming of the Lord. He made a funny, then he punched the air. He’s brilliant, but I let Alfie down. All the time. I don’t mean to but I do. I let him down because I’m not eight an
d sometimes I’m selfish and an arsehole.
I cycle him to school most days. It’s a great chance to be father and son together doing something fun. Or if not specifically fun then at least blustery and dangerous, which is an excellent substitute for fun. I have a trailer bike for the boy. That means I have my bike and then a one-wheeled, low-seated, pedal-powered half-bike that attaches to the back of mine. We have three wheels but we still get to be twice as smug as a normal cyclist. It represents very good value. It’s a lovely bit of time to spend with Alfie because it’s just him and me after the chaos of the morning. And it is chaotic. You try for it not to be but it is. Most mornings the run-up to the departure for school is like the final stages of a siege. If you’re diligent as a parent, then you prepare. The night before you get the school shoes ready, unroll the socks, put out the school uniform, help pack and prepare the school bag into which you slip the completed homework from the night before. If you’re really on it you get the breakfast things lined up and ready to go (don’t do this if your kids prefer toast, it doesn’t do well overnight. If you like your toast like that, eat at Garfunkel’s). So the morning is prepared and you retreat to bed, edging out of the room backwards, watching to see that all is still in a state of readiness. Then, during the night, the mummy-and-daddy fairy comes to visit, and takes all the possessions and clothes and bags and flings them randomly around the house. The parent fairy hides one key ingredient – usually a shoe – and then turns the two smiling, warm, huggy, beautiful children you kissed goodnight just a few hours before into a pair of screaming banshees. Your sworn enemies on earth with no concept of time. I’m quite an organized person really. Most mornings I come downstairs and it’s like I’ve invited Amy Winehouse to spend a month living in my house.
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