Leaving school at sixteen, my mum trained as a hairdresser. It’s something I find hard to believe because she cut our hair when we were children, and was forever snipping our ears with the scissors. She stopped hairdressing when she married my dad and became a full-time mum.
But when the family finally return to Bradford, and my two younger brothers finally start secondary school, she gets a job at the Occupational Therapy Unit of the Bradford Royal Infirmary. She has no training, she’s there as a general helper. Our house fills with ornaments covered in plaster of Paris with seashells stuck into it: lamps, trays, fruit bowls.
The patients mostly have mental health problems, but Mum refers to them as ‘the nutters’. She takes them in the department minibus on a day trip to Scarborough and complains of losing one of the ‘nutters’ on the beach. She buys a painting from a rather gifted ‘nutter’ but takes it back and asks him to paint over one of the clouds because she thinks it looks like the devil.
It’s hard to tell who’s really nuts.
Isn’t it?
In 1976, aged nineteen, I find myself in a room in the psychology department at Manchester University. Electrodes have been attached to my head and chest which run to a complicated-looking machine with lots of dials. We’re in the darkly gothic building in the middle of the campus and I feel like I’m in a 1950s B movie.
Caroline’s room-mate, the psychology student, is now my girlfriend, and she’s using her friends as guinea pigs. She and her dad, both keen canoeists, are planning to kayak around the top of Baffin Island in the Arctic Circle. She has read that the local Inuit have the ability to slow their heart rate at will in order to conserve energy, and is testing to see if this is possible.
A lot of her chums have been roped in, and some can do it and some can’t. I’m the last guinea pig of the day, but the readings from my brain go a bit berserk. She fiddles with the dials but . . . it’s the end of the day, and she says she’ll sort it later, and I can join the second bunch of subjects the next day.
I turn up again, and this time I’m in the middle of the queue. The people before me give regular readings, but my brain feed goes weird again. She can’t understand it. As a test she wires up the next person and it works perfectly well again. So it appears it’s me that is the problem. She’s only been studying for a year, so can’t explain it, and I am put down as a ‘statistical outlier’ . . .
But that’s not when I realize that I am ‘nuts’.
She and I get married. We are both nineteen. Nineteen! This is very odd, even for the seventies. No one else at uni is getting married. Eyebrows are raised. The night before the ceremony I look in the mirror and see that even my own eyebrows are raised. In the car, with my best man Dave at the wheel, I get the jitters, and at a T-junction we discuss whether to turn left towards the registry office, or right towards . . . I dunno . . . Mansfield?
I don’t know her reasoning for getting married rather than just ‘shacking up’ like everyone else, and I only know mine in hindsight: I want someone to prove that they love me. I want to love and be loved. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced love. Of any kind. I don’t know what it is.
Dave says that running away now or afterwards is basically the same thing, the only difference being a piece of paper, he says that divorce is easy, and more importantly that he’s hungry, and that there’s free food, so we turn left and the deed is done.
Dave’s right. It doesn’t last long. Eighteen months later she throws her wedding ring under the wheels of the passing traffic as we argue on the kerbside. I’m the instigator, but I can’t think straight, and in my confusion and unhappiness I become jealous of the ring being crushed into the tarmac.
Later that night I slacken the brake cables on my motorbike so that they’re basically useless, and go for a ride. At a crossroads in the wasteland between Whalley Range and the university I can see traffic going to and fro across the main road and I approach at speed and cannot stop. The other drivers swerve, skid about, blow their horns . . . and miraculously avoid me. I spin out at the other side and gradually slow to a halt a few hundred yards further on.
I’m not entirely well. I see the uni doctor and I don’t understand what’s happening to me. He puts me on tranquillizers, and I sit in a catatonic state in our flat staring at the slugs climbing up the wall – it’s a terrible flat, the paraffin heaters chuck out so much moisture that it’s basically become a wetland reserve. I’m expecting a pair of great-crested grebes to take up residence sometime soon.
The doctor speaks to my tutor and I’m offered a bye for the finals – I don’t have to sit my exams.
But that’s not when I realize that I am ‘nuts’ either.
No one mentions the phrase ‘mental health’. I’m imagining it’s some kind of virus? No one talks about anything – No one about anything. My parents grew up in the trauma of the Second World War; my Uncle Douglas’s face sags on one side, a kind of palsy brought on by watching his friends die under a tank as it slowly sank into soft ground with them sleeping underneath. But nobody talks. And that attitude still persists in the seventies. I don’t know I’ve got a mental health issue.
I don’t like the tranquillizers. I don’t like not being able to think, even if the thoughts are somewhat gloomy. I stop taking them, I start going back to lectures; like Uncle Douglas I pretend nothing has happened. I sit my finals, get a 2.1, thank you very much, and head up with the rest of the gang to do the Edinburgh Fringe again. The force of repression has always been strong with me. And I’m quite good at drinking. And biting my shield. And letting things get worse.
The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band are the soundtrack to my life, and the intro to ‘Sport (the Odd Boy)’ goes ‘Let’s go back to your childhood . . . childhood . . . childhood . . .’ into an infinite echo.
And of course childhood is everything. As Aristotle said; ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.’
On my seventh birthday I go to kiss my dad goodnight, as usual, but he stops me, and says now that I am seven we should stop hugging and kissing like girls and shake hands. We shake hands and I go to bed. This is hardly emotional torture, and it seems novel and interesting at the time, but years later it’s a moment that replays in my head like a dream sequence in a Fellini film.
He’s still affectionate with my elder sister, and I never see him ‘shake hands’ with my two younger brothers. And if it weren’t for the obvious family resemblance in our facial features, I might suspect that I’m a cuckoo in the nest, and that this is causing the antipathy. Nothing I do is ever good enough for him, even when I’m to all intents and purposes ‘quite successful’, and eventually I come to accept that maybe he doesn’t actually like me.
The mind is an odd thing. Abstract notions of liking and loving are still inexplicable except as a series of chemical reactions within the brain. I’m in my late thirties when I realize this, and it’s about the same time that I become an insomniac.
Then, while I’m rehearsing an episode of Bottom at the BBC, I suddenly get savage chest pains. Rehearsals stop and I see a doctor who wires me up in almost the same way I was wired up twenty years before. Turns out I’m not about to have a heart attack, I’m hyperventilating. I learn to breathe into a paper bag when feeling particularly stressed and carry on with my life.
At a dinner party I sit next to another psychologist – I describe a few scant details and ask if I should see someone about it. Her advice is that unless my daily life is being unduly interrupted, unless I can’t get out of bed, can’t get to the shops, I probably needn’t go.
So now I have a professional (albeit casual drunken dinner party) opinion that I am not nuts.
Or am I?
I think suicidal thoughts are normal. I’ve lived with them all my life. I’ve looked at the tube trains rushing into the stations, it just seems so easy. I’ve looked out of windows, over cliffs, I’ve read up on the contents of the medical cabinet. I know how to do it.
In 2007 I’m writing a sitcom with my new friend Nigel Smith called Teenage Kicks. Nigel has had an unusual experience.
In his late thirties his tongue suddenly felt fizzy. He rang a doctor friend who told him to go straight to hospital and twenty-four hours later he was in a coma which lasted several months. His own immune system had attacked him. When he came out of it he found he couldn’t walk properly any more, and he’d lost the ability to swallow and had to feed himself through a tube.
These problems don’t go away. He walks with a stick and still feeds himself through a tube.
When we go for a drink he takes a mouthful of beer to savour the taste then spits it into his tube. We call getting pissed ‘getting tubed’. He’s remarkably cheerful. One day I ask him how he manages it, and with the benefit of the writing room intimacy – in which you can talk about things you might not in regular social environments – I tell him that I’d’ve probably topped myself if I was him. He nods, and says he’s noticed that I am very much a ‘glass half empty’ kind of person. He is very much ‘glass half full’. In fact half a pint is almost a pint as far as he’s concerned. He says that suicidal thoughts are not normal.
This is a shock, and it’s when I start to get an inkling that I might be nuts.
I finally tell Jennifer, my wife since 1985, about my history of suicidal thoughts. It’s not the sort of thing that comes up when you’re dating, and I’ve never found the right moment to tell her that I’m nuts.
There, I’ve said it, perhaps I’ve secretly known all along. Obviously she’s been aware of the insomnia, the hyperventilation, the emotional difficulty with my dad, and my short-trigger temper – but suicide is news. She’s shocked – I am a very good actor – she’s sad, and worried, and sympathetic and tells me that I really need to see someone about it. I agree and . . . prevaricate. I suppose I’m afraid of tranquillizers and catatonia. The condition, not the band.
In 2010 a close friend blows his brains out with a shotgun sitting on a rock on Dartmoor. He works in marketing, he’s in horrendous debt, has unrequited love, and thinks he’s being heroic.
A year later an even closer friend hangs himself. He doesn’t think he’s being heroic, he’s completely lost his place in the world, he just can’t think; he hasn’t slept for weeks, his brain is scrambled, and he wants the pain to stop.
I learn how equally aggressive these acts are towards everyone that is left. They devastate so many people and I resolve never to cause that amount of pain.
Deciding suicide is not an option is a game changer. I finally go to see a nut doctor. He’s refreshingly expensive but doesn’t say much. He’s roughly ten quid a word. He asks questions but doesn’t give any answers. He puts me on antidepressants and I worry they will alter me and take away my creativity. Is being nuts part of the spark? Will the pills take away the berserker inside me? Obviously I want to be altered, I want to feel happier, but I still want to be me. Who am I? Oh God, here come the Bonzos again.
‘OOOh, you done my brain in, right in.’
I read a review in the newspapers for a book called Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations by Jules Evans. I’m intrigued, I buy the book, and . . . it changes my life. Not often you can say that.
It’s based on the philosophy of the Greek slave Epictetus, one of the Stoics, with the fundamental notion that we don’t feel pain because of what’s happened, we feel it because of what we think about what’s happened. It’s not possible to change what’s happened, but it is possible to change how we think about it. This is basically 2,000-year-old Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The book asks me to take my mind to a virtual gymnasium, I have to train it, I have to think carefully, and often, about what I can and cannot control. I cannot control any external events or what people think about me, I can control my own thoughts and actions. I have to practise my first responses to things: my dad, road rage, malfunctioning machines.
I get quite good at it. My wife and children will testify that I become a much easier person to live with. Calmer, more biddable. My temper, in particular, is almost completely erased. It’s very different to the stiff upper lip ‘Stoicism’ of my parents and Uncle Douglas – it’s not about repression, it’s about accepting, and having a different response.
I can’t say I am normal. But then I don’t think anyone is. Certainly all the people I know well have . . . idiosyncrasies.