Why Do I Say These Things? Read online

  Over the next couple of days I drifted in and out of consciousness, often half aware that someone was looking at me or, on one occasion, poking me in the side to see if I would make a noise. It was the weirdest sensation. The harder I tried to wake myself up, the more thought I put into even lifting my head from the pillow, the more impossible it seemed, and the effort would then send me back into a deep sleep. I remember occasionally having enough energy and presence of mind to drag myself to the toilet, where I would sit for a while, passing water and toxic air with fabulous urgency but never really feeling any better. On one occasion I even fell asleep on the toilet, and only woke when I fell off and hit my head. That’s about as pitiful a position as you can be in – waking up on a toilet floor with your pants down, dribbling and trying to stay awake long enough to either get back to bed or back on the loo, knowing that you only have yourself to blame.

  Eventually the Rohypnol wore off, as did the diarrhoea. I had an upset stomach for about another week though, so it didn’t give up without a struggle, and although many of the odd promises I made to myself during my trip to Mexico were soon forgotten, I have kept one. I have never again eaten lamb that has been wrapped in banana leaves and buried for three days underground. Never even been tempted.

  My greatest achievement

  Here’s a dull question for you. What makes a man a success? When called to account for your life, what will you look back on and say was your greatest achievement? Unless you’re Nelson Mandela or Gandhi or Mother Teresa, or even someone not so universally easy to approve of, like Harold Wilson or Joseph Stalin, chances are you won’t have made a global impact, so the answer will probably have something to do with your kids or your community. You might even have saved a few lives, which is terrific and more than I’ve ever done, but if so it’s likely to be because you’re a fireman or a lifeguard or a doctor, so although it’s still a fabulous achievement it’s sort of predictable. No, a better question, one which throws up a few more interesting responses, is what do you remember most fondly? It’s worth giving this some thought, otherwise on your deathbed you might start ruminating on all the time-wasting afternoons you spent playing Solitaire on your laptop, or filling in sudokus, convinced that you were doing yourself a whole lot of good in staving off senile dementia, but knowing deep down you just wanted that incredibly brief moment of triumph when you fill the last box with the right number. So for your own sake, start drawing up a mental list of all the really cool, memorable moments so that you will at least be able to check out with a smile on your face, instead of lying there cursing the fact that you wasted hundreds of hours reading Jackie Collins and probably entire days searching for your glasses or keys.

  I have mine ready, and they might surprise you. I have, of course, enjoyed many successes as an adult, both in my personal and professional life. I’ve won awards, met the Queen, had dinner with David Bowie. All lovely experiences, but not as exciting as you might hope. And to be honest with you, most of my professional accomplishments have pretty much occurred by accident. I worked in TV for about six or seven years before I started presenting programmes, and right from the start I was lucky enough to have my name in the title of the show. A little later, I remember my mum getting quite excited when she saw a dodgy BBC sitcom in which a young male character of about thirty complained to his partner that he didn’t feel as if he’d achieved anything in his life, commenting bitterly that Jonathan Ross had been a household name by the time he was thirty. It’s a weird feeling, hearing your name used as a yardstick for precocious success when you don’t really feel you’ve done that much to deserve it, so I didn’t really get that excited by it, or at least not as excited as by other things I’ve done – the more straightforward, simple-minded pleasures of my youth. Maybe being of an impressionable age has more to do with it than the actual value of the modest feats I achieved, but whenever I think about what has made me happiest or proudest in my life, the first thing that comes to mind has nothing to do with fame, or even family. No, it is the moment I discovered I could do a forward roll.

  I was about six or seven and on my way to school in Leytonstone. I was actually born in Camden Town, in north London, but when I was about two my parents moved out to Leytonstone, where they could afford a bit more space for their expanding family. East London wasn’t seen as particularly nice, or fashionable. Then, as now, there were little pockets in the east and south-east of the city that were quite charming and pleasant, and others that were a bit dodgy, and Leytonstone, I guess, came somewhere between the two. It was nice enough and I have very good memories of growing up there.

  Initially, we had the bottom floor of a house, and eventually my parents managed to buy the top floor from whoever lived above us. Just as well because by then our family had swollen from being the two grown-ups and three boys to include three more small, runny-nosed children dressed in hand-me-downs. If we’d all stayed on the one floor it would have been like the family in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , but after we took over the whole house we had enough room for my sister – the only girl – to have her own room. I still shared with my four brothers, but we had just about enough space to grow up still liking each other. The house was near to a patch of open ground known as Wanstead Flats, which wasn’t what you’d call attractive, bordered as it was on our side by two enormous ugly tower blocks with equally ugly names – John Walsh Tower and Fred Wigg House. Once you crossed over the Flats you could get to a much larger spread of natural parkland and, beyond that, Epping Forest, so it was a kind of stepping stone out of the concrete jungle towards greener pastures. And we were literally just around the corner from my first school.

  I started in the infants at about five, and later progressed to the junior school; then it was Norlington, followed by Leyton County High School for Boys, which had a sister school for girls. Much to my delight and amazement, I discovered not so long ago that in the mid-1980s they renamed Leyton County High School for Girls as the Winnie Mandela High, in honour of the great Nelson Mandela’s wife at the time, and then, when she was publicly shamed and convicted of fraud, they changed it back again to Leyton County High.

  Anyway, back to my thrilling feat, and the first time the ability to perform it revealed itself to me. I don’t want to give this too enormous a build-up as of course it matters a lot more to me than to you, and it’s not as juicy as me telling you about the night – or afternoon – when I lost my virginity, or the time I found myself in a gay nightclub in Madrid late at night and very much alone. But the forward roll still figures as a big deal in my memory bank, and I find myself thinking of it and smiling probably once a week, even though it was decades ago and I’ve since learnt to do far more complicated manoeuvres.

  My brothers had already left for school but I was running late for some reason. I was a sweet little boy then – I didn’t start getting ugly until I was about eleven, and as a five-year-old you’d have wanted to scoop me up and cuddle me hard. Little shorts, bare knees, dinky socks, probably brown shoes done up with a buckle, and, I imagine, a little school cap. Yes, we wore caps. At least I think we did – I’m old enough now to find it difficult to distinguish real memories from invented ones. I raced off to catch up with my brothers and as I rounded a corner I tripped on a step or an uneven bit of pavement. As I lost my footing I remember thinking, Oh my God, I might die and never get my own chat show. Actually I don’t remember quite that, but I’m sure I anticipated a grazed knee at the very least. But instead of throwing out my arms, as I fell I somehow managed to tuck my body into a small ball and execute a forward roll off my right shoulder, before springing to my feet again and carrying on running. Without even breaking stride.

  I cannot begin to describe how excited I was. I already harboured great ambitions to be, if not an actual superhero, then special in some unspecified way, and this seemed to me a very necessary and valuable first step in that admirable if fuzzy ambition. But try as I might to replicate this particular stunt, I never managed to pu
ll it off quite as successfully again. Even today I’m sometimes tempted to go out into the garden and give it a shot, and I often throw myself on to the bed in a peculiar way which my wife has learned to ignore, but I know that whatever the result, it would never be the same as that first perfectly timed, gracefully fluid movement. It was an instinctive reaction, cat-like, flawless, perfect. And without the stimulus of the danger and the adrenalin that kicked in, I’ve never been able to match it. Oh, and even better, my cap stayed on. At least I think it did … No way could I do that again.

  One childhood skill I was able to hone and which, once again, I look back on with great pride, was jumping on and off the old London Routemaster buses with the necessary speed and judgement. They had an open platform at the back with no door, just a pole to hold on to, so you could leap on board while the bus was moving, grabbing the pole to haul yourself in.

  They were beautiful, those buses, and I miss them. But is it because they really were as lovely as I remember, or is this just another example of nostalgia clouding your judgement as you get older? Is it the buses I miss, or the past? I wonder if today’s kids will ever feel as nostalgic for the ugly utilitarian boxes that ferry them around. Back then, as well as being prettier, buses seemed to be fewer and further between. I was forever going to the end of my road in the hope of catching the number 262 only to wait half an hour before two or three turned up together or, worse still, to see one pulling away from the bus stop.

  The 262 took me from Leytonstone to where my best friend lived, a Spanish boy called José Roman Martinez Diaz, though he called himself Joe Martin at school. If you were the only Spanish kid at school in east London in the 1960s you’d probably have done the same. I’m still in touch with him from time to time. We bonded over our shared love of comics and because no one else wanted to be seen talking to such obvious losers, a status we inverted and wore like a badge of pride. But if I missed the bus to Joe’s it was a royal pain in the arse. I’d have to either wait half an hour for the next one or set off on the boring thirty-minute walk to his house. Pretty soon I got in the habit of jogging the full length of my road down to the bus stop, so that if I did just miss the bus at least I didn’t beat myself up for having missed one that I could have been on if I hadn’t walked. On those occasions when I arrived, probably breathless, just as the bus was taking off, I’d try to find a little pocket of untapped stamina and run full pelt to catch it and bound aboard. Using the rudimentary physics at my fingertips, I’d anticipate the speed and trajectory of the bus, sometimes from behind, sometimes as I ran alongside it, and launch myself into the air, hoping to hit the open space between the pole and the back end. I missed only once that I recall, bouncing back on to the pavement and having a very sore arse and back to show for it. Usually I managed it, and on one spectacular occasion the bus and I were moving at such a lick that I was forced to do a small, tucked-in forward roll as I landed on the platform, jumping straight back to my feet.

  You must by now have surely guessed that this is right up there in my all-time list of favourite moments, along with that first forward tumble with my cap on. But where did that athleticism go? How did the lithe suppleness of youth disappear so completely that these days, rising from my armchair too swiftly after watching The Antiques Roadshow causes me to let out a small, involuntary half-gasp, half-moan – a real old man’s noise.

  Before we leave the buses, I have remembered that while jumping on to a Routemaster was fun, jumping off one was even better. As the saying goes, we had to make our own fun in those days, and buses were more than just a mode of transport, they were also a thrilling source of entertainment. If there was a bunch of you going somewhere together, getting on and off the bus gave you the opportunity to play a game involving great skill and foolish courage. Picturing ourselves as cowboys riding a freight train heading across the old west, we’d all race to catch the bus as it picked up speed and the last person to get on – in other words, the person with the most courage and precision, who waited till the last possible moment – was the winner, or at least, gained the most kudos, since there was no prize as such. Occasionally somebody wouldn’t make it and he’d be left standing in the road, forlorn and out of breath. Occasionally we’d lose him altogether, but there was usually a chance he’d be able to sprint to the next stop before the bus pulled away, especially if there was a queue of people waiting there who took their time to get on. I say ‘him’ because, with the exception of my sister and her friends, who rarely played with us because they were quite a few years younger, we had next to no deliberate contact with girls until way after puberty. Why would we need them when we had buses?

  The most fun to be had was in the getting-off procedure. This time the game would be reversed, and the bravest person was the one who jumped off first. The bus might still have been doing maybe twenty, twenty-five mph, and whichever one of you had the most to prove or most needed the confidence boost that winning gave would try to hit the ground running, invariably too soon to pull it off, and instead go arse over tit.

  The best and most dramatic accident caused by this game occurred on our way to the swimming baths over in Leyton. We were on a number 10 bus – oh, friendly companion to the 262, how I miss you! One boy leapt off very early. Really very, very early indeed, earlier than I had seen anyone try to disembark before. You could see from the second he hit the ground that even though his legs were pumping and his arms were flailing he had absolutely no control over himself, and there was no way he was going to stay upright. With his face red, his legs churning comically fast and his arms shooting up and down and sideways, he looked a bit like a turkey trying to take off. The bus slowed down quite gracefully while he kept running, virtually alongside us now as we cheered him on, until he slammed face-first into a concrete lamp post. He didn’t pass out, which meant we still got to go swimming, but he did lose three, possibly four teeth in the process. They really should bring those buses back.

  I kiss my dogs, even though their breath smells bad

  It’s often been said that I’m far too kind-hearted a person. Mainly by me, I’ll admit, but I pride myself on being super kind to all the little creatures that wriggle and walk and hover and limp – especially the limping ones. Why, just the other day I stopped halfway through a game of tennis to pick up a ladybird I had spotted on the ground and place her safely on a nearby leaf. I’m fond of all living creatures – even the ones I eat, though like most non-vegetarian animal lovers I pretend not to know too much about what is on my plate and how it got there. I circumvent this apparent contradiction quite happily via the assumption that people like Gordon Ramsay would probably be out there killing pigs and sheep and cows anyway, just to prove how manly they are, so I might as well put the end product to some good use. Some delicious good use, with potatoes and salad.

  Of course, I draw the line at eating domesticated animals, but were I to get especially peckish we have plenty to choose from. Over the past twenty years our family has managed to acquire quite an impressive menagerie. We have had approximately seven or eight cats, some of whom are still with us in various stages of domesticity, with one or two being almost completely feral and only hanging around for the food and because they fancy their chances with the fifteen or twenty fish we have in the small pond at the end of the garden.

  It’s hard to grow especially fond of fish, isn’t it? I wonder if we’d spend more time with them if we could breed a fish with fur, and maybe extend the fins so they look a bit cuter, more like little arms and legs. But then they’d look like frogs in fur coats, which in turn I suspect would resemble German businessmen from the 1930s as portrayed in cartoons, and so the fish would be no better off, really.

  We also used to have six ferrets, which make adorable pets. Highly recommended if you like the idea of having a very thin fur ball to tickle. They also play with each other in a very cute way, sort of frolicking and dancing around like animated draught-excluders. We no longer have them because three died and the one girl
escaped, and you need a female with every small group of boys, to keep them in order. So we had to either start again with a new bunch or hand them back to the rescue centre we got them from, which we did. We still have our python, Ken, but Dave the iguana died just before Christmas. As I’ll explain later, Dave was actually a Davina, but I’m pretty certain that our confusion regarding her gender had nothing to do with her death. She was just old. We currently also have seven dogs. Too many for any sane household, but fun in a noisy, smelly way. They have somewhat ousted the cats from the house, though, who now live down the end of the garden in the flat that is currently occupied by my wife’s dad, in a weird little commune. Only cats and old blokes allowed.

  I love our cats, even if the wilder ones only crouch and hiss when I go in to feed them. The cat commune started with Merlin, an incredibly handsome and seemingly very intelligent beast. He was Bengal, a type which I think are cross-bred from some kind of North American wildcat, like a lynx, and a domesticated cat. The offspring are tame enough to keep as pets but still look very strong and rather like mini-leopards.