Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (26 page)

Ruby Wax

I am sure that the first
time I met Ruby, she blanked me although she insists this isn’t true, but we
got over that and discovered we liked each other, although we are totally
different. Ruby has a sharpness of mind that I simply don’t possess and, like
Jenny she could talk the hind legs off any creature you care to mention. But
there is a fondness between us and we like having big long laughing sessions
together.

Hailing
from Notting Hill, Ruby is not best keen on setting foot in Sarf London and
treats it as if she were in the Bronx. She distracted me so much once when we were
driving through South London that I hit the car in front. The driver got out,
ready to remonstrate in a South London fashion i.e. quite cross, but on
spotting both of us thought it was a hidden camera show and beat a hasty
retreat.

Yes, I
know you were expecting me to be holidaying with Elton and David or playing
badminton with Posh and Becks, but I suspect I’m not quite glamorous enough.
Bollocks — I don’t suspect — I know.

The cliché that everybody
has a novel in them is probably not true. I certainly don’t think it was in my
case.

However,
once you achieve a certain level in the business of show, you do tend to get
asked whether you’d like to write a book.

‘Yes,
one with lots of pictures and not much writing in it,’ was always the response
in my head.

Well,
the offer did come my way in the early nineties, and based on a book that had
been published a year or so before, about the hundred greatest men in history,
I decided I would have a bash at my own list.

The
first book was called
A Load of Old Balls,
and although I had some
characters in there that you might expect, like Jesus, I also added a few like
Ronald McDonald. I enjoyed writing it, the structure was simple and it was like
fifty short pieces of stand-up.

This
then led to the second book —
A Load of Old Ball Crunchers
— a list of
fifty great women in history.

I am
not in the slightest bit organised, so my approach to writing these two books
was pretty chaotic and depended on things like how hung-over I was, what was on
telly and whether I felt like it. Some days if I was in the mood I could write
for twelve hours; other days, after an hour and a half I’d have gone stir crazy
and had to go out.

It was
the three novels that I found most difficult. Having had a break from writing
for a few years and got married and had children, when I was approached by
Headline to write a novel I thought it would be a good idea to accept, because
my eldest daughter was still pretty much a baby and it meant I could stay in
wearing my nightie and sit at the laptop composing great prose while rocking
the cradle with one of my feet.

Of
course it’s never how you expect it to be and after a couple of months I found
myself rather resenting the huge amount of work it entailed. A novel is such a
massive undertaking. It’s like doing thirty really long essays, all run
together. And you wonder where you are going to find enough words to put in it.

I
decided to write about areas that I knew.

So my
first book,
Sorting Out Billy,
was set in South-East London where I was
from and involved three friends, one of whom was a budding stand-up comic
(unsurprisingly). One of the three friends had a boyfriend who was violent
towards her and it fell to the other two to try and sort him out. It is a
comedy book and you may question why I thought domestic violence was a suitable
topic for comedy In itself of course it’s not funny, but every base aspect of
human nature has a darkly comic side to it and this was what I was trying to
achieve.

The
next novel was called
It’s Different for Girls
and was set in Hastings,
again an area that I am very familiar with because I spent my teenage years
there. Rather conveniently I set it in the seventies when I was a teenager —
hence demolishing with one swipe of my pen as it were, the need for ploughing
through archives of teenage lives in that decade.

And
finally my third book — which is my favourite —was called
The More You
Ignore Me.
It was set in Herefordshire, where I spend a lot of time, and
involved the two ends of the fan spectrum within one rural family To write it,
I drew on my knowledge and experience of mental illness. It seems that now I
may have exhausted my personal repertoire, so if I ever write another novel I
may well have to spend the first few months doing research.

The
first novel took six months, the second six weeks and the third two years — and
all of them had their attendant problems. It’s unlikely that I will ever give
up my career as a comic to become a fulltime writer. It’s too lonely and
there’s too much opportunity to skive off.

I have
also contributed to other books, including many charity ones. A very popular
way of raising money is to produce a celebrity cookbook, and in many ways I am
the worst person to come to, because I hate cooking and I like eating very
boring food. So I have to rack my brains every time, as I’m sure no one would
be too impressed by a recipe for cheese on toast or spag bol, both of which I’m
very good at. Well, they’re the
only
things I’m good at, to be truthful.

My
favourite contribution of all time was to the
QI Annual 2008.
I was
asked to do a page called ‘Fags of the World’ and was sent a sheet of paper
with about a hundred packets of cigarettes on it and told to provide a by-line
for each one.

This
was tremendous fun to do and enabled me to write captions, say for a packet of
Russian cigarettes, with the words:
‘Perfect after you’ve shagged your best
friend’s husband’

Ending the last chapter
with a cigarette — a Russian one, to boot — leads me neatly into this chapter
on the pleasures and perils of tobacco.

We are
all absolutely certain by now that SMOKING IS A BAD THING. And that’s not just
for you as an individual, but also for the people around you into whose faces
and lungs you may be blowing your smoke. There was a golden era in the forties
and fifties when people were blissfully ignorant of the dangers of smoking and
assumed it to be the most sophisticated and attractive habit in the world. Then
gradually through research, it began to dawn on us that perhaps it wasn’t the
health-giving habit everyone assumed it to be. Smokers metamorphosed from
urbane creatures into scuzzy lepers, who were not only damaging themselves but
their loved ones too.

Of course,
as a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl I didn’t know anything about this when I
started smoking. It was a simple act of teenage rebellion, combined with the
boredom of a very long bus journey to school on which several of us would
produce our tiny little packets of ten Number Six out of our satchels and try
to look like we knew what we were doing as we attempted to direct the stream of
smoke out through the tiny slot of window on the bus that we could actually get
open.

After
Number Six I moved onto Rothmans, whose ad showed the arm of a pilot at the
controls of a plane, thereby implying that you could be something as dashing as
a pilot if you sucked on these babies too.

According
to Mr Sigmund Freud, smoking is an oral pursuit and I won’t bore you with the theories,
but it seems to me that smoking is used by a lot of people to calm their
nerves, firstly by giving them something to do with their hands and secondly by
supplying them with some nicotine to soothe their anxiety.

I have
worked in two professions that worship smoking: nursing and comedy It’s amazing
how many nurses and doctors smoke, given that they more than anyone, should be
well-versed in the potential dangers. But many dedicated smokers play the
lottery game of assuming it will not be them who suffer the long-term effects,
and cling rather pathetically to stories of stalwart elderly people in their
nineties who have smoked eighty a day throughout their lives and can still run
a marathon.

As a
nurse I can’t believe now, when I look back to my days in the Emergency Clinic,
that we were actually allowed to smoke in the nurses’ office, where you could
sit down and have a break or a cry after someone had hit or abused you. The
place was thick with the fug of smoke and must have been really unpleasant for
the non-smokers, but your smokers tend to be a selfish lot so we just carried
on puffing away.

Similarly
in comedy in the good old bad old days, dressing rooms would be stuffed full of
nervous comics waiting to go on, dragging on their fags as if they were full of
oxygen. Audiences smoked too, so everywhere had a blue-tinged mist hanging over
it — and that kind of felt right and matched the atmosphere of tension and
expectation.

As the
smoking ban started to bite, I found myself having an increasingly adolescent
attitude towards the rules and trying to get away with smoking in as many
non-smoking areas as I could. When I toured Australia, we deliberately booked
on an airline that still let you smoke, as the thought of a fourteen-hour and
then a seven-hour flight did my head in anyway let alone being forbidden to
have a fag.

For me,
smoking is a way of tackling social anxiety. These days, I don’t drink so much
or so regularly as I don’t think I could function as a parent if I got pissed
too often — sorry to deliver such a bombshell. Therefore my life has followed a
pattern of drinking absolutely bloody loads in short bursts and behaving quite
badly on a number of occasions, but always having a fairly consistent intake on
the fag front. When my anxiety rises, so does my smoking, and at social events
like parties —or gigs, of course — I do actually find it helps me feel slightly
less wobbly.

During
my twenties and thirties, it didn’t really occur to me to give up, but when I
decided I wanted to have children I got the most almighty lecture from my GP
and decided to stop. I did this by making a cutting-down plan over three weeks,
cutting down from forty a day to three on the final day The last days were
almost worse than having given up, because the gap between cigarettes seemed
to stretch like an eternity of doom ahead of me and I found myself counting
down the hours, minutes and seconds to when I could have another one. I didn’t
use any chemical aids like that chewing gum.

On the
final day I had a last cigarette, attempting desperately to smoke the filter,
and then stopped. It was bloody awful. I tried to cut out things that I
associated with smoking, like talking on the phone to friends for hours on end,
going to pubs, and Mark Lamarr, who had been a good old smoking buddy for
years.

However,
I couldn’t actually cut out Mark Lamarr as I had a gig in Birmingham at the
Glee Club two days into the new fag-free regime. I had decided to aid my giving
up with some special medication known as Murray Mints (‘too good to hurry
mints’) and seemed to be getting through about three bags a day When I arrived
at the Glee and walked into the dressing room it smelled like a war zone to me.
I had been free of smoke for two days and it was a bit of a shock. Also, I was
worried that without the crutch of a cigarette, my act would fall to pieces.
However, I didn’t give in and did my first ever smoke-free gig.