Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (27 page)

Up
until this point, I also used to smoke on stage —which seems like some weird
surreal dream now. If I’m honest, my set was a bit shit, but better than I’d
expected. I’d thought I might just break down on stage and sink to my knees
crying, but I got through it — and as soon as I walked off stage made a run for
the door, back to my smoke-free world. There is no doubt I was irritable over a
number of weeks and possibly months, but eventually I realised I could live
with it and settled into a fag-free existence.

That
fag-free existence lasted for five years, although occasionally I would catch a
whiff of someone’s cigarette and be carried back nostalgically to those days
when my powers of self-denial were rubbish. I suppose I just tried to be
pleased that my powers of self-denial had been strengthened.

My
willpower did crack, though, five years on. This was down to a stressful period
in my life consisting of too much work, some family problems and being pissed.
I was at a launch party for Paul O’Grady’s latest book and for once I’d left
the car at home. Normally I use the car to stop myself binge drinking, as
having got away with drinking and driving once I knew I would never do it again.
I don’t normally go to things like this, but I’m very fond of Paul and I needed
a night out.

Having
imbibed enough alcohol to lower the resistance of the Pope, I looked at a
friend’s cigarette and found myself saying, ‘Can I have a puff?’ My mate Alan
Davies gave me the beady eye (he has always tried to stop my smoking excesses)
but, fuelled by enough vodka and tonics to render an entire office Christmas
party unconscious, I turned away and took a drag on my friend Andy’s cigarette.
Blimey, was it lovely And that was the beginning of the end. At the next party
I had a whole one and over the next six months, passed the point of no return
by eventually buying my own packet — a sure sign I was on the road to rack and
ruin.

So,
sadly I am a smoker again, but this time round I seem to have a little more
control than I did and am planning to try and tackle it again. Don’t know
where, don’t know when, but I’m sure I’ll meet the non-smoking me again some
sunny day.

What I like best in life
is reading books, preferably accompanied by a little light scoffing. It is
something that has not been easy to do since I’ve had kids, as finding time to
read when there are eight thousand other things to do is like putting time
aside for darning. That is the main reason why I agree to judge book awards, as
I know it will force me to read and that I will love it. And I do. Books have
been really important to me throughout my life, and the books I love best which
have really stayed with me are the following:

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

by Robert Tressell

This is one of the first
books written at the turn of the last century which is actually about the
working classes.

It is
quite a dense, difficult read and I rejected it as a teenager, because there
just seemed too many long words on the page. It is about a group of builders
doing up a house for a rich bloke in ‘Mugsborough’, a fictional town which is
actually based on Hastings, where I spent a lot of time as a teenager.

The
group of builders all have very different personalities and political views,
and to some extent are caricatures, but the story gives a real insight into the
lives of the poor, as men are laid off, families struggle with feeding their
children and preventable tragedies occur. The idea of socialism rears its head
through one of the characters who is a committed leftie.
The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists
also has a very poignant connection for me in
that my lovely brother-in-law Paul, who died at a relatively young age just
after our daughter Maisie was born, and who taught English Literature at Oxford
Brookes University was an expert on this book. It is one of the must-reads for
anyone who has vaguely left-wing views, and must have been a breath of fresh
air for readers, who at that time had only been treated to the lives of the
middle and upper classes with whom they would have found it very hard to
identify.

I don’t
dismiss all that wonderful literature out of hand, however, as I think novels
like
Pride and Prejudice
are glorious and so is anything by Charles
Dickens, although the many working-class characters in his novels tend not to
be shot through with a political ethos.

I’d
urge you to have a crack at
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
It’s
very sad and depressing in parts, but it gives you an invaluable glimpse into
the lives of working people, before we had unions to protect them. And although
unions these days, having been somewhat decimated by Margaret Thatcher, are
frowned upon because of their excesses, to me they retain an essential role for
the worker who needs to be shielded from the completely profit-orientated
approach of big business.

Blimey,
you’re probably thinking, you sound like a Commie. I am not a Communist but I
feel very strongly that any civilised society should have in place organisations
that look after the lives of so-called ‘small’ people who don’t have any power
or protection.

A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens

And so to Dickens. I find
it very hard to pick out a favourite as I particularly love
Great
Expectations, David Copperfield
and
Barnaby Rudge,
but
A
Christmas Carol
is such an optimistic book, and its images filled my childhood.
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that the main character is Scrooge, a grumpy
mean-spirited misanthrope who treats his employees and everyone else he comes
into contact with like dirt. The story is about his metamorphosis from miser to
cheery philanthropist and general good geezer through his contact with a series
of ghosts who show him his past, present and future. From talking about the
struggling working classes as a group he thinks ‘should die and decrease the
surplus population’, he turns into a beneficent old man keen to help those who
are finding life intolerable.

If only
it were so easy to get the bad-tempered old self-servers in our society to read
this and change their lives in the way Scrooge did, but I still hold out some
hope. Programmes like
Secret Millionaire
(although obviously there is a
slightly cynical televisual edge to them), in which some loaded person is sent
off to a grim part of Britain to find out about the lives of poor working, and
unemployed, people also adds to the stock of encouraging a kinder attitude to
what many people would have us think are feckless cheating ruffians.

The Faber Book of
Reportage,
edited by John Carey

This bloody marvellous
book is a series of eye-witness reports of events in history told from various
viewpoints. So there are such diverse pieces as Charles Dickens witnessing a
hanging, reports from soldiers in the First and Second World Wars, and some
heartbreaking accounts of children working in factories in the Victorian era.

The
earliest reports go all the way back to Pompeii and the devastation caused by
the eruption of Vesuvius, and come up as far as the unseating of the
shoe-loving Imelda Marcos and her husband as they are chucked out of power in
the coup in the Philippines.

My
favourite piece is the report of a group of rowdy women in medieval England who
would go to jousts dressed up as men and generally cause trouble by getting
pissed and being lary. Nice to see some medieval ladettes giving it large.

The
pleasure gained from reading this book was increased tenfold when I was on a
Radio 4 programme about favourite books in which three of us swapped books and
then commented on each other’s choice. One of the other guests was Jonathan
Meades, an author and what they call ‘a cultural commentator’, and he had a
right good old sneer at my choice of the book of reportage, rubbishing its
historical validity because each piece was a subjective view. As I tend to
think of ‘cultural commentators’ as rather smug types like critics (who are
they to tell the rest of us what we should and shouldn’t think, anyway?) it
made me feel even more fond of this book.

Moments of Reprieve
by Primo Levi

This again is an
optimistic book which covers one of the most shameful periods in our global
history, the genocide of the Jews by Hitler during the Second World War. You
may find it difficult to imagine that anything positive could come out of this
truly harrowing and agonising time. The book is set in Auschwitz and consists of
a series of essays by Primo Levi, who himself had been a prisoner in that
concentration camp. It details significant moments when a ray of hope shone
into his life of struggle and degradation due to small acts of kindness from
the other people there, whether it was another prisoner saving tiny bits of
food for him, or a normally brutalised guard committing an uncharacteristic act
of compassion. I found this book a fascinating read in its attempt to glean
some small comfort from the all but destroyed altruism of certain individuals.

Primo
Levi suffered terrible ‘survivor’s’ guilt in later life, and ended up killing
himself, many years after the war. However, this book and the others that he
wrote on the same subject are a small pool of light in the gloomy theatre of
human brutality.

In the Springtime of
the Year
by Susan Hill

Are you depressed enough
now? Well, don’t be too hopeful that things are going to take an upward turn
just yet, because this book, by one of my favourite authors, Susan Hill, is not
exactly full of laughs. It’s set in the English countryside in a place very
similar to where I grew up, and details the life of a woman whose husband is
killed in a tree-felling accident right at the beginning of the novel.

The
rest of this beautifully written story takes us through her grief and then
eventual acceptance of her widowhood. It’s the sort of book you can immerse
yourself in, particularly if you love the countryside as I do, since every
page brings some new and exquisite description of the changing face of rural
life throughout the seasons.

As my
mum said to me once, ‘Don’t read
The White Hotel
by D.M. Thomas if
you’re feeling depressed.’ I did, and true to her prediction I felt a whole lot
worse, so this is not a book to read if your life is a bit grim. Save it till
you feel better and then you can wallow in its misery.

One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest
by Ken Kesey

I’m sure this book
contributed towards me wanting to become a psychiatric nurse — not so I could
become like Nurse Ratched the psychopathic nightmare who runs the ward, you
understand! No, I suppose I wanted to be an antidote to her.

One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
details the admission
of one Randle McMurphy to a psychiatric unit in America — a complex man, I
would say, with a personality disorder — who proceeds to lay waste to the
rigidly organised totalitarian regime of the ward created by Nurse Ratched. His
cheeky, unorthodox troublemaking throws the ward into confusion as narrated by
a Native American patient who, wordless and inscrutable, floats on the
periphery of the action and observes the descent of McMurphy into a kind of
hell.

This is
a gripping description of the isolated universe of the psychiatric hospital in
those days when the staff could pretty much do what they liked to control
unacceptable behaviour. It’s also really funny and touching, and is to me the
definitive handbook of how
not
to be a psychiatric nurse. Of course, the
iconic film starring Jack Nicholson, which sees the action from a different perspective
is easily as good as the book — a rare phenomenon in cinema and literature —
and Jack Nicholson will be forever linked with the cheeky McMurphy for me.

1984
by George Orwell

George Orwell has written
so many great books that I find it difficult to choose a favourite. I love
Animal
Farm,
a demolition of the totalitarian state if ever there was one, and
Down
and Out in Paris and London,
with which I have a vague connection in that
the ‘spike’ or doss house in which the narrator stays was in fact in
Camberwell, and was a place to which we would refer rough sleepers from the
Emergency Clinic.