Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (22 page)

My
brothers are both happily ensconced in their domestic lives. My brother Bill
lives down in Sussex and has four children in their twenties and a five year
old, which I think is pretty hard work.

Every
year, round about the time of Bill’s birthday he brings about fifteen friends
to a Palace match and we have a nice nosh-up and sit in the directors’ box to
watch the game.

I have
been a Palace supporter since the seventies, when I trained as a nurse near the
ground and we used to go in a big group and watch every home game. I loved
standing on the terraces and listening to the banter in the crowd. The language
was absolutely appalling on occasions but not just for the sake of it; there
were genuine comedians in the crowd. There was never an air of threat and it
was just a good laugh.

I very
rarely heard any racism on the terraces, which cheered me up because that is
one thing I cannot abide or understand.

I have
to say I was very disappointed once in the early eighties when I went for a
curry in a local Indian restaurant to discover a handful of Palace players
behaving in a racist way towards the waiter. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and
went up to the table and called them a bunch of wankers. Hardly, ‘I have a
dream,’ but I just wanted to make a point. I then beat a hasty retreat as I
suspected they wouldn’t punch my lights out, but the lights of the male friends
I was with.

Palace
has had a chequered history of management over the years. He may not be
everyone’s cup of tea, but I always had a sneaking admiration for Terry
Venables, who I’ve met on a number of occasions and who seemed like good fun.
I’ve got to know the staff at the club pretty well and it’s good to see the
same faces when I go to a match. Much piss-taking goes on.

I don’t
often go to away games. I once went to QPR and it was well scary. There was a
surging, rather pissed, large crowd and at one point I got carried along by
them with my feet off the ground and couldn’t do a bloody thing about it. It
put me off going to away games and made me realise how easy it was for
tragedies like Heysel to happen … terrifying.

Palace
to me is a very lovable team. They’re not particularly glamorous, and their
brief sojourns in the Premier League have always had a skin-of-their-teeth,
temporary feel to them. These days, I go when I can and enjoy it immensely and
have happy memories of many games. Weirdly, I have never seen Palace lose a
match that I was at, only win or draw. I’d like to keep it that way (That’s not
to say that they don’t lose — they lose all the time; I just don’t go that
often!)

Having
said that Palace aren’t a particularly successful, glamorous team, I used to
think the England team were the bee’s knees and now I just feel depressed when
I think about them. I was so looking forward to the 2010 World Cup and fell for
all the bullshit of the football pundits who said that we were in with a
chance. The dire first game against the USA I put down to first-night nerves
and let it pass. But then when the next two games proved to be of a similar
standard, I wondered what was going on.

I tried
to blame the manager for a bit but in the end it came down to the players, who
seemed to have no skill and, more importantly no enthusiasm. Our great hero
Wayne Rooney seemed like someone else, i.e. me, trying to play football. Then
the game against Germany happened and the last tiny drop of optimism dribbled
out of me. Maybe we just have to accept we ain’t as world class as we think we
are, lower our sights and accept that qualifying is enough.

However,
I did enjoy the French team’s meltdown as I’m sure did the entire Irish nation,
who were kept out of qualifying for the World Cup by Thierry Henry’s
gobsmacking bit of cheating.

Matt,
my other brother, who lives in Germany works in computers and is married with
one son. He has had a rough couple of years. It all started when he and another
man tried to lift a guy in an electric wheelchair onto a bus that did not have
a raise-able platform. As Matt strained, he felt a huge crack in his spine and
fell to the ground in pain — at which point the kindly bus driver just drove
off.

Matt
had broken his back. The one piece of luck was that the break was outwards, and
therefore thank God he wasn’t paralysed. However, he pretty much had to lie on
his back for six months and was driven completely bonkers by this, as you would
be.

Some
two weeks after he was finally up and about, he took his dog for a walk in the
woods and a rather lary big dog went for it. So he picked his dog up and the
lary dog attacked
him
instead. He began to fall to the ground and could
not put his hand out to break his fall because he was holding the dog. Result:
broken collar bone.

Remaining
faithful to the rule of three, he subsequently slipped over in the bath and
broke his wrist when he hit the edge of the bath. Thankfully Matt was not had
any accidents since, but I suppose he is the epitome of accident-prone.

I met Bernie, who is now
my husband, in the middle of the nineties, through a mutual friend at the
Edinburgh Festival. He is a psychiatric nurse, and so from the kick-off we had
plenty in common and had many long discussions about our work that no one else
would have understood or been interested in. At the time, Bernie was working as
a Community Psychiatric Nurse, which meant he went out of the hospital where he
was based to visit people at home. This was the way that psychiatric services
had been proceeding since the mid-eighties, the result of a move to gradually
empty the big Victorian redbrick psychiatric hospitals in which those with
mental-health problems had been separated from the rest of us.

I’m sure
I have said somewhere else that, although I think the ethos behind this
admirable idea was sound, the fact remains that, especially in big towns and
cities, there isn’t much of a community to speak of, thus many people have
become isolated in their own homes with little support from their neighbours.
Big cities are full of people who are slightly wary of one another and not
quite as friendly as those in smaller communities, and most of us continue to
remain suspicious of those who have had mental-health problems.

Bernie
and I immediately clicked. He is a good laugh, which is obviously very
important to me, and our attitudes to most other important things are pretty
similar. Back in London we began to see each other on a regular basis and a
year or so down the line he asked me to marry him.

I
agreed (obviously), and we got married in Ludlow in 1997 in a small church with
a handful of friends. We deliberately kept it quiet, because I did not want to
face the prospect of even one uninvited photographer being present. My friends
joined in the conspiracy with their usual enthusiasm. In fact, good old Waggly
who was staying at a local hotel and was hyper-aware of not giving the game
away when asked by the cab driver where she was going, initially said, ‘I’m not
telling you.’ After he told her that would make things slightly difficult for
him, she capitulated and gave him the address of the church.

My
friend Griffo went to the flower shop to get the flowers for the church, and
when the shop assistant politely enquired who was getting married, she panicked
and said, ‘I am.’ There then followed a rush of congratulations and questions
about where it was. Of course she couldn’t remember the name of the bloody
church and backed out of the place clutching her flowers trying not to look
like she was completely mad.

We
actually used her tiny little Italian car as the wedding car. True to form, the
lovely Griffo hadn’t cleared it out, and as I got in I crunched on a carpet of
empty crisp packets and chocolate wrappers. The service was conducted by a
friend of my mum’s, a woman priest, and it was her first-ever wedding, so the
local vicar stood in the background making sure she didn’t cock it up.

My dad
also came up with the comedy goods when, outside the church he asked me, ‘Who’s
that bloke coming up the path now?’

‘Only
my husband-to-be, Dad,’ I replied. (Yes, he had met Bernie on numerous
occasions.) It was a lovely cheery service. The organist, who also doubled as
the local TV aerial fixer and was famous for scaling roofs in his bare feet,
turned up in the nick of time from a job with a pair of jeans and trainers very
visible under his surplice.

Although
we were relatively few, when it came to the hymns luckily we had my lovely
Grandma Maisie and my Aunt Paddy who between them could up the volume to eleven
and even managed to drown out the obligatory crying toddler in the background.

For the
first year or so we lived up in Shropshire in a small cottage in the middle of
nowhere, but not far from the many relatives I had up there. However, it proved
pretty difficult to conduct my work-life from there because of the travel
aspect. It meant every piece of TV or radio I did would inevitably be in
London, and therefore I was up and down like a yoyo, doing a huge amount of
driving. Touring was different, because in theory, as you are going all over
the country, you can start from anywhere you like so that was do-able.

I had
always wanted to have children, although it was not a completely easy ride
initially I had thought there might be some problems because of my age, so when
I discovered I was pregnant I was delighted. We arranged a couple of weeks’
hence to go and have an early scan at a local hospital and I was looking
forward to seeing the little picture on the screen.

We
arrived, were shown into a room and the doctor began scanning. His facial
expression turned from benign to worried-looking fairly quickly and he informed
me that he was very sorry but, as he put it, ‘There’s nothing there.’ This is
called a blighted ovum.

I was absolutely
astonished and shocked as I had not factored this possibility into my vision of
the future at all. We went home feeling stunned, even though the doctor had
tried to put a positive spin on it by saying something like, ‘Well, at least we
know you can get pregnant.’

He was
absolutely right, it didn’t take long before I did get pregnant again and I was
so relieved. Things went fine until about the eleventh week, when one night
while I was at home, I started to feel a bit unwell and crampy I won’t go into
the gory details but it all went wrong again, and although not physically
unbearable I felt really helpless and wondered if my two chances had passed. We
both felt grim.

And
then one day a few weeks later as I was driving off to a gig, I listened to a
radio phone-in about pregnancy and miscarriage, and a guy phoned in to say his
wife had had ten miscarriages in a row and still managed to give birth to three
children. I felt more hopeful again.

So when
I got pregnant a third time I tried to be positive. Things went along well,
although I was told that because of my age I had a one in twenty-seven chance
of giving birth to a baby with Down’s syndrome. However, tests are increasingly
sophisticated and with each trip for a scan my odds improved tenfold. We
decided that given that our nearest hospital was a forty-five-minute drive away
and I was what they flatteringly call an ‘elderly prima gravida’ (i.e. a
first-time mother over the age of thirty-five), that we would move back to
London, so we could be more like a five-minute drive away from our local
services.

We
found a house in South London and moved back. I had quite a nice time being
pregnant, never felt sick let alone threw up, although I was more tired than I
have ever been for the first few months. Obviously, there were some concerns
medically because I was in my forties, but everything went as smoothly as it
could.

I also
had a tour arranged which coincided with the seventh and eighth month of my
pregnancy, which I was a bit worried about, plus we lost our tour manager John
just before it began. So Bernie came on tour with me and it all went fine until
the last gig. We arrived at a theatre which had the weirdest stage I had ever
seen. It had a fairly steep sloping wooden floor covering the whole stage
which they had made for their Christmas show, and my performance area was a
small cut-out piece about three feet square. I was expected to somehow edge my
way across this incline and jump into the little box to perform and repeat the
process on the way back. Up until this point I had kept the pregnancy secret
and didn’t want that to change, although I was a bit anxious I would lose my
footing and roll onto the front row who were incredibly close to the stage,
injuring me and them.