Bit of a Blur (33 page)

As we were leaving he asked if he could have a couple of tickets for the Blur gig at Brixton Academy!

The Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth in St John’s Wood, ‘John and Lizzie’s’ to its guests, often has more paparazzi in attendance outside than patients on the wards within. Among the photographed it’s the most fashionable private hospital to launch your latest progeny. The Portland Hospital is still the hip place to get your ears tested, and I wouldn’t go anywhere else, but for celebrity childbirth it’s got to be John & Lizzie’s. They have very big baths on the birthing unit, almost as big as the ones in the Mercer Hotel. They sell the candlelit New Age homoeopathic, yogaromatherapy delivery package. These things are all popular among famous women.

We started going to visualisation classes. The idea of the ‘Visualisation for Childbirth’ course is to form a clear picture of what the birth is going to be like, so that you know what to expect and you’re not wildly dreading a big painful unknown. It definitely helped take some of Claire’s fears away. We lay on big cushions in a fug of ylang-ylang and sandalwood, imaginizing calm taxi rides to familiar surroundings, soft music playing at the birth centre, a nice big lovely bath, and then a most wonderful natural, extraordinary thing happening. We went into great detail. I often happily dozed off in the sessions. It harked back to childhood bedtimes. There’s a part of the brain that just can’t resist stories, the same part that likes experts. We seem to need them and there’s something about visualisation that’s better than television, or films. It’s like a very intimate, tailor-made radio play and it casts the listener in the lead role. I thought the acupuncture business Claire was having was probably bunk and people who talk about ‘energy’ are, frankly, silly, but there was something fair and simple about this kind of hocus-pocus. Of course it all went out of the window when the contractions kicked in.

I distinctly remember hearing Claire say, ‘I don’t WANT to go in the bath. I want some DRUGS. I want some drugs right NOW. GIVE ME SOME DRUGS!’ She’d been in the ‘birthing pool’ for hours and hours and nothing was budging. More and more people arrived and the lights got brighter. It was definitely all moving away from the calm candlelit herbal scenario we’d been working on. It was four o’clock in the morning when the obstetrician arrived, big, black, smiling and wearing an Arsenal top.

There is a part of everyone that recoils at the thought of seeing their loved one up on the jacks being poked around by a rubber-gloved gooner. Some fathers choose not to be at the birth of their children; it’s quite a trend. Some mothers prefer to have their super best friend as a ‘birthing partner’. I couldn’t have missed it. I was down at the business end gawping and crying. The baby was stuck in the birth canal, and a medieval-looking contraption called a ventouse, a kind of plunger like you’d use for sorting out a blocked sink, was squidged on to the little head somewhere on the other side of Claire. She was huffing and puffing, and the gooner was working up quite a sweat, too, as he pulled and heaved on the end of the plunger in the bright lights. It was hard, physical toil, like a strange tug of war. Some of the people were cheering on Claire’s team. ‘PUSH, CLAIRE, GO ON, GOOD GIRL!’ I was with the doctor. ‘PULL, PULL, NOW! NOW! COME ON THE ARSENAL!’ By the time they’d separated, the baby had a cone-shaped head. He was covered in goo and was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. No one’s ever ready for that feeling.

The new house didn’t look in too bad shape. We thought we’d strip the wallpaper, redecorate, live in it for a while and modernise when the right time came. A lot of plaster seemed to be coming off with the wallpaper, so we took off some of the plaster. The walls were damp. With the walls exposed, you could see that some of the beams were rotten. The beams were rotten because the roof was leaking. So the roof had to come off. By this time it was obvious that the plumbing could do with an immediate overhaul and the electrics needed a good looking at. Old houses are like that. I’d dealt with builders and architects before, in London. Architects are a discrete genus of the species of
Homo sapiens
. To be a successful architect requires a similar mesmeric charm that is the bread and butter of the film director, the television evangelist, the hypnotist and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. They arrive with their little satchels and their propelling pencils. Everything about them says calm; from the crisp white sheets of paper they use to cast their spells, to their supernatural patience. They retreat, taking your dreams with them in that little satchel, and return with goblins, pixies and demigods who turn your house into dust. If all goes well you live happily ever after, but the plot thickens and takes unexpected twists along the way. People who’ve had babies bang on and on about what hard work it is. Having had a baby and builders at the same time, I’d say that builders are harder work, but I wouldn’t bang on and on about it. Other people’s builders are even less interesting than other people’s babies.

Building wasn’t something I’d ever viewed as a particularly creative process, not like art or music. Art and music happen in your mind and live there. Building, when you’re able to build anything you like, starts in your mind and then you live there. Artists and musicians enjoy a cachet that eludes the builder, but I’m starting to think that building is the most primal and satisfying of all the creative urges. As a steel beam was being craned into place, I turned to the structural engineer and said, ‘I guess it’s sculpture really, isn’t it?’

‘That’s not what we facking call it, mate! Hur, hur, hur.’

It’s easy for your dreams to run away with you, but, when all is said and done, a house is just a house. A home is something else and I gradually realised I had one. Even when it was mainly a building site it was where I wanted to be. We lived in the chaos with an ancient cooker and an open fire, doing nothing at all whenever we could. I didn’t want to go anywhere else. I’d landed.

I bought a digger. There was a huge area of concrete behind the house, about an acre, I think. I’m not sure if anybody actually knows how big an acre is. I’ve never been able to find out for sure. The area it covered was bigger than a football pitch and smaller than a cricket pitch. It was for making silage on. Silage is what cattle eat in the winter, fermented grass. I couldn’t see us needing quite that much silage ever, so I bulldozed the whole lot and a machine as big as a ship came and crunched it all into little pieces. Bulldozing concrete is about the closest feeling you can get to playing the bass in a rock and roll band. They are connected.

Now I was a builder again, like I had been when I failed my ‘A’ levels. When I worked on building sites, I dreamed about being in a band and the band was playing to huge crowds. I always knew it would happen, I just didn’t realise when it did that I’d be onstage dreaming I was on a building site.

There is always someone banging something somewhere on a farm. It’s a kind of heartbeat, and it’s as natural as the sound of a cock crowing.

There was a point when I realised that ‘farm’ is just another word for ‘building site’. A farm is a process, a continuous cycle. There is no conclusion. There were piles of manure, piles of rubble, a mountain of crunched concrete, heaps of wood, all kinds of stuff in mounds. My first inclination was to get rid of the piles and clear the place up, but piles are a farm’s vital organs. Some of the piles grew and some shrunk, but they were all being fed and milked, it seemed. I soon started to collect piles and talk about them and, indeed, to them.

We bought a couple of thousand sheep. Sheep are a good place to start. They are easy to look after and they don’t need any expensive equipment, not like babies.

My granny didn’t believe that we’d called our baby Geronimo. She kept asking what his name really was. I said that sometimes we called him Big Ears, and sometimes we called him Skippy, but his name was definitely Geronimo, and he wore it well. His first word was ‘digger’ which rang nicely with my new sense of purpose.

I saw the advert for the singing group in the doctor’s surgery. While being weighed, Geronimo had scored a direct hit on the health visitor’s slacks with a vigorous spray of baby wee. They really hate that, health visitors. They say, ‘It’s all right, happens all the time’, but it sours the atmosphere. Then he’d had his latest injections and he’d screamed and screamed at the nurse. Until then, I’d thought trumpets were the loudest thing in the world. It’s got something to do with their range. Trumpets play in the same register as shouts and screams. The Red Arrows taking off, or standing onstage at Glastonbury, sandwiched between towers of amplifiers and a hollering multitude, doesn’t give you quite the same impression of loudness as being in the same room as one other person who is playing a trumpet. And trumpets don’t get near to babies on the perceived loudness scale. It’s got nothing to do with decibels. There is something very subjective about the ear’s response to babies screaming.

We’d suffered a punctured dummy at Tesco a couple of weeks earlier and he’d gone into paroxysms of anguish. I figured that being deprived of his binky for an hour or two would do him good, toughen him up a bit. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be really, really famous, try pushing a screaming baby around a supermarket for a few minutes. You look up and all eyes are on you. People stop what they’re doing and stare at you; they ask you if you’re all right, they nudge and point, they interfere. ‘No, he’s fine, he’s absolutely fine,’ I’d said. But they weren’t buying it. My nonchalance made them more concerned. Some had started to follow us and by the time we’d got to the beans aisle we had to abort the mission.

The surgery was full of screams here and wee there, and I was evacuating as swiftly as possible. I was halfway out of the door when I saw a little card pinned to the wall advertising a singing group for mums and babies. I paused to take down the number, avoiding the collective gaze of the waiting room.

I assumed they meant dads as well as mums. I arrived slightly late at the village hall, but I stood outside suddenly finding the need to pluck up courage. I was never nervous about going onstage or talking to rocket scientists on live television. I wasn’t fazed by Hollywood starlets or foozled by bullying billionaires. But I felt nervous now. Even when I picked up my guitar and sang Joe Strummer a melody I’d written for him it hadn’t been this bad. I was terrified. I was about to tiptoe into the delicate skein of the real world and I hadn’t been there for years.

When I got through the door the mums were singing a song about shaking a parachute, and shaking a parachute. Some babies were crawling around. Some were under the parachute laughing and some were trying to break things and fight each other. It’s invigorating to observe babies en masse.

The unaccompanied sound of mothers gently singing to their little children is the sweetest music I’ve ever heard. I was the only dad there. It was like being back in the French department at college, another matriarchal super-civilisation.

A lot of the well-known nursery rhymes are folk tunes as old as the hills. They’re a part of the human condition, and they lift the spirits like love in the morning. We sang ‘Giddy-up horsey’, did more parachute shaking, then there was one I’d never heard involving lions and rivers. The hits kept coming, though. I think it’s the best band I’ve ever been in.

I became more and more engrossed, messing around in the parish. The more things I did, the more other things suggested themselves. It felt like I was in the right place. My usual response to being told ‘There is a TV crew at the door’ is to panic. The news media only normally hound you because some heinous escapade has come to light or something nasty is brewing. It’s never normally a good sign, even if it does make the cleaner feel glamorous. There were actually two TV crews and a
Sunday Times
journalist in attendance by the time I got to the front door. They were all smiling, though. They took it in turns to explain that our tiny, local rural community had been voted ‘England’s Finest Village’ by
Country Life
magazine.

Not since arriving in Japan for the first time, poor and practically destitute, to be overwhelmed by fanatical fans at the airport, had I felt quite so ridiculous as I did now in this Cotswolds village. Being big in Japan wasn’t something I’d ever bargained for. It was just a huge slice of luck that Japan existed at all and that its people wanted to buy our records and give us presents. I had the same feeling of outrageous good fortune now as it became clear that somehow we’d landed on our feet.

Of course the notion of the best village in the country is just a bit of harmless nonsense. In fact, it made our neighbourhood the scourge of the shire. The surrounding villages, some of which have a nicer duck pond and better preserved stocks, a higher-ranking celebrity resident or less low-cost housing, were unified in their disapproval. But I felt vindicated. When we were in the process of buying the farm, almost everybody I knew had sought a quiet word with me. They all expressed their concerns about my buying a random tumbledown ruin in the middle of nowhere. It had bewildered people and now it suddenly looked like a pretty neat trick.

I don’t know how much sense it would make to live in the country if I wasn’t married. Cities are distracting, erotic places, but love flows uninterrupted in the countryside. I suppose that’s why we moved here, because we wanted to be together. That’s the best thing about living in the country, being in a world of your own with the person you love. I was never happier than when sailing on the random breeze of fortune, but now I was settled. I still wanted to travel, but in order to travel, rather than drift, I need a home. Some people have lots of houses, but you can only really have one home, somewhere that you long to be when you’re not there, somewhere in which you can happily do nothing at all, where all your things are.

I had been nocturnal for many years. Cities only really come alive at night; that’s when all the good stuff happens. The great outdoors flourishes in the sunshine and the pleasures of the countryside are subtle and lasting, rather than short and sweet. All happy endings imply gardens. That’s just the way it is.