March 2008
In a booth decorated with a framed photo of Sid James in Carry On Camping, I’m having an early dinner with Mam and Dad. We’re in their favourite restaurant, the Toby Carvery, Carlisle, just off Junction 43 on the M6. In the eight years since Clare died, I’ve thought many times how much she’d have enjoyed my various victories in my route to small-time fame and fortune. She’d have loved seeing my face cropping up constantly on TV, sometimes three times per night, on shows with names like Britain’s Favourite Biscuit on Channel 5 and then, hours later, on Newsnight Review on BBC Two discussing Ingmar Bergman. Clare would have rolled her eyes at my ability to sit on a chair with a camera on my face and have opinions on almost any given subject – Space Hoppers, Scottish devolution, the Backstreet Boys – as long as there was a little money involved. She’d have definitely enjoyed seeing me promoting my string of Young Adult novels, which led to me giving readings and small motivational talks in schools all over Britain – although my own former secondary school were peculiarly unkeen to hear my memories. She’d have seen me begin writing a TV column for the Guardian, appearing on Radio 1 doing book reviews and starting to use my lilting regional accent for voiceovers. But best of all, me and her would have been able to drink wine together around the kitchen table in my little house in East London, the one I put a down payment on using the proceeds of all these things. Also, along the way, I’d met a man – a record executive – fallen madly in love, eloped to America and got married. It rankled me quietly that Clare and I had bickered over some boy who felt so important to me at the time yet who had now faded to that level of importance where I wouldn’t care if he bumped into me in the Spar when I was wearing my dressing gown.
It’s 4 p.m. at the Toby Carvery. Now that they’re retired, Mam and Dad like to have their teas out early. Sometimes fish and chips in the Morrisons’ café or a jacket spud in a local garden centre. Lately, though, their hearts have belonged firmly to the Toby.
‘I’ll have a glass of Shiraz,’ Dad says to the waitress. ‘Jacob’s Creek,’ he winks to me. ‘Australian.’
Dad knew very few facts about wine, but he delivered them with great certainty – not unlike your average Islington dinner-party wine buff. As Dad aged (he was now just past seventy), wild silver shoots began to fire from his jet-black hair at tangential angles. Mam nicknamed him ‘Frowsy Freddy’ and spent a lot of her time handing him a comb and nagging him to put on a nicer jersey.
‘He’ll wear the same thing for days,’ she would complain. ‘It’s like he’s determined to look like a tramp.’
My parents had sold the family house, Mam having drastically devalued it with a heady blend of pebble dash, breeze blocks and Artex swirls. They moved to a small retirement flat on the opposite side of Carlisle, cramming the same number of ornaments, mock-Victorian knick-knacks and horse brass into an eighth of the space. Dingley Dell, I call it, preferring to live in a minimalist Scandi-influenced space where the lounge contains one slate-coloured sofa facing a television and some artily arranged books. The only way to keep this minimal space tidy is to shred every piece of household paperwork as it appears and hover vigilantly with a Muji lint roller, removing bobbles and random cat hairs from the citrus-coloured Habitat pouffe as they land.
‘OK,’ I say, recapping on the etiquette. ‘I can go back to the vegetable section as many times as I want?’
‘Yes,’ Mam says.
‘But I can go to the meat section only once?’ I say, glancing over at a man in chef’s whites slicing at a ginormous turkey crown.
It could feasibly be emu. You could imagine Rod Hull chasing Michael Parkinson with it hooked over his arm. Why am I eating here?
I’ve lived in London for about twelve years and have sweet-talked and sharp-elbowed my way into some of the capital’s strangest concept restaurants, but none of them have been quite like Toby’s. The walls are covered with photos of British comedy classics: Mr Bean is playing golf and there’s a young Jim Davidson. Beside the turkey is a honking lump of very well-cooked beef. Not a scrap of blood left in it. Then a large slab of mystery meat that Dad assures me is roast pork.
‘What’s the turkey like?’ I ask.
‘Bit dry,’ says Mam. ‘But there’s gravy over there. As much as you want.’
I’ve had it drilled into me by now by London’s polite society that the word ‘gravy’ is frowned upon. The word is jus. And it should be used sparingly. It should not be applied with a ladle in proportions one could paddle in.
As a French photographer on a glossy mag shoot once said to me, ‘Why would you make zomething to make the meat less dry? Why not you English just make the meat less dry when you cook? Why are you admitting defeat before you begin cooking?’
I stare at the gravy station with its communal ladles and slightly sticky jugs.
‘George, look at her face, look at it!’ laughs Mam. ‘It’s four quid for the carvery! Four! You can’t turn your nose up at that price. Oh, she’s too posh for this now. Too posh!’
Dad shakes his head and heads off to collect his plate.
The longer I lived in London, the further the gap grew between my tastes and theirs. And the more bewildered they were by my life choices. They were politely bewildered by my choice to get married in Vegas, wearing a forty-quid Laura Ashley tea frock, using witnesses we found on the day. I thought it was highly romantic. Like Demi and Bruce, like Don Johnson and Melanie Griffiths! They were bewildered by my and my husband’s choice to set up home in East London – no place to bring up kids – and then refuse to fit carpets.
‘Can you not afford carpet just now?’ Mam said.
‘The floorboards are polished,’ I told them. ‘Look, I’ve had them restored.’
‘Nice bit of shag pile would make the place feel like a home,’ Dad said.
‘I don’t want carpets,’ I huffed.
‘Oh, it’s posh, George, leave her,’ Mam said.
By 2008 I was rather high on the coup of being a presenter on lofty high-brow arts programme The Culture Show on BBC Two: my most Paula Yates moment to date. I was given my own make-up artist called Kevin, who was a miracle worker, and before the series began I’d been whisked off for champagne at the Groucho by a BBC controller in order to be told effusively what a fantastic gift I was to modern television. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Obviously, Mam was standing for none of this, especially down Toby’s.
‘The vegetables look like they’ve just been tipped out of a freezer bag into a tray by someone on day release,’ I say.
‘It’s four quid for as much as you can eat,’ she says. ‘You can’t knock it, can you? Anyway, they freeze veg when it’s fresh.’
I could never convince my family when I talked about eating out that paying four pounds for a small side dish of pommes boulangère was worth it because these potatoes were not only from a local smallholding, they’d also been scrubbed, scraped, sliced thinly by trained, salaried chefs, ladled with excellent-quality beef stock, organic full-cream milk and home-pressed olive oil and placed carefully in an oven for fifty minutes. This was why they were four quid.
‘Four quid for a bowl of potatoes, on top of your main dish?’ Mam would laugh. ‘That is ridiculous.’
By now I was moving in circles with people who believed that the true goal of eating should be to taste great food, rather than simply be full.
And obviously I agreed. Or at least I made the right sounds. But deep down I knew this wasn’t the case.
Not always, anyway.
Eating really is not that clear cut.
Sometimes it is lovely to eat and eat and eat, letting things that are perhaps only just semi-nice slide down your throat, until you end up incredibly full and even a little sore. The dirty truth about eating is that sometimes nothing is lovelier than starting a packet of Jaffa Cakes when you’re feeling a little blue, eating two, maybe three, then finishing the entire packet. Sometimes my favourite dinner of all, when I’d had a shit day and my husband was out, was a bowl of McCain oven chips with a jug of Bisto powdered gravy and mint sauce. I kept this kind of thing quiet now that I was the sort of person who might share a backstage yurt at Hay-on-Wye with Alan Yentob.
David, my younger brother, found my ideas of grandeur deeply entertaining. He kept them in check with great glee. On this particular ‘flying visit’ up north – one of the two short trips I’d deigned to grant my family that year – I’d swaggered off the train from Euston in a silver, slightly fluffy Max Mara belted coat worth £800, only to find he’d forgotten to pick me up.
After I’d spent twenty minutes fuming outside the station, David appeared in his Audi with twelve pounds of King Edward potatoes in the front seat and his daughter Lola howling in a car seat in the back. Dave had met a nice Scouse girl called Tam, got married and had a little girl. He had grown up so much – in some ways.
‘All right, face-ache! ’Ere, I like your coat. You’re like one of the Wombles,’ he said.
‘Cheers,’ I said.
‘Gerrin, you’ll have to stick the spuds on your knee,’ he said.
As we drove through Carlisle to Mam and Dad’s flat, I talked laboriously at him about a new, erudite BBC Two show called Screenwipe I’d been filming for a Guardian colleague called Charlie Brooker. It was getting terrific hype in all the places that mattered.
‘Tell you what show you’d be good on,’ Dave butted in.
‘Go on.’
‘Have you seen Hole in the Wall?’ he said. ‘It’s on BBC One. There’s this swimming pool, right, and this moving wall coming towards it. You have to jump through the hole as the wall comes for you.’
‘The one where the players wear tight silver boiler suits?’ I said.
‘That’s it!’
‘I’m not going on Hole in the Wall, David,’ I said.
‘This is the problem with you nowadays,’ he laughs. ‘You’d have loved that wall if it had been down Rhyl Sun Centre. You’re too posh now.’
Was I posh now?
As I sat in the Toby Carvery eating my emu and giant Yorkshire pudding, I began to wonder.
Posh was a word I heard a lot as a kid.
It was usually an accusation.
Mrs Allen at Number 9 was posh because she wouldn’t let her kids play with me and David. They weren’t allowed to eat biscuits in the street or hang about the lamppost like we were. Pgh, posh. Aunt Frieda did posh things; she played bridge and sometimes wore a wax jacket. By these standards, yes, I was posh. I’d changed. I was verging on grand.
Certainly, after years away, I now knew that none of the posh people I’d known up north were really, genuinely wealthy. In London, I’d discovered a whole new class of people living their lives in a way I’d never dreamed of previously. Properly, properly posh.
Until I got to London I’d never known anyone like my friend Luke, who’d been handed a multi-million-pound flat in South Kensington by an elderly relative legally swerving inheritance tax. Or anyone like my friend Cara, whose family had a spare unused family mansion on the Isle of Wight because they preferred to do Christmas in their second home – a farmhouse in the Cotswolds. I’d never met anyone like my beauty-editor friend Pascal, who threw her mother a birthday garden party in a Juan-les-Pins meadow in Antibes, featuring a live New Orleans jazz band and local dignitaries and CEOs of fashion houses as guests. This is posh. Posh is having so much money subliminally available, floating about in the ether via forthcoming inheritances, that you couldn’t understand being working class if you tried. I was certainly not that. I could never be that: that sort of wealth is handed down.
Still, I definitely had more money. That was an irrefutable truth. Royalty cheques from my books were coming in from America and all over Europe. And I loved the way they felt in my bank account, sitting there like a comfort blanket. I’d been told many times during my life that money doesn’t make you happy, but in recent years I’d started to wonder if this was not a huge hoax created by the ruling class to stop povvos like me asking for it. Because although money didn’t make people happier, it certainly made everything easier. Everything. I was happy to never root through the reduced stickers in Iceland when the cash machine would only give me a five-quid note. I was happy when I used a private doctor working out of Soho rather than waiting nine working days for an NHS appointment to beg for a course of antibiotics. I was happy when I got in cabs and never had to run the last terrifying half-mile from the night bus to home. Every cheque that appeared in my account made me happy. And sometimes I liked to spend them on stupid things like coats that made me look like Madame Cholet from The Wombles.
Maybe all this meant I was now middle class?
No.
Never.
Nobody with silver fillings like mine and no maths GCSE is middle class.
‘Go on, have a pudding, they’re good,’ says my mam.
‘Have a pudding, presh, go on,’ my dad says. ‘I’m having the chocolate fudge cake.’
‘Dad, you’re not meant to be having …’ I begin, but my mother rolls her eyes as if to say, don’t waste your time.
I want to harangue my father over his diabetes and the wisdom of ordering chocolate cake served with ice cream and thick chocolate drizzle, but as ever I know he’d wear us into silence.
Why spoil a nice time with an argument?
What can I change anyway? I don’t live here.
And when I look back now, I realise some of the happiest times I ever had with Mam and Dad were down at Toby’s, drinking Oscar Bay Merlot, eating carvery and laughing.
‘OK …’ I say, scanning the menu. ‘I’ll have the cookie-dough sundae.’
They both smile.
They’re never happier with me than when I am eating.
November 2008
It is Thursday, mid-morning, in my small, very messy home office. A clean desk is a symbol of an empty mind, I tell myself as I sit among the rubble of tattered notepads, spider charts that plan my latest column, press releases, discarded false eyelashes that look like dying spiders and coffee cups. A framed photo of Cleo Rocos on The Kenny Everett Show in stockings and suspenders smiles down at me. I’m supposed to be writing the opening paragraph of a Guardian column. Instead, I have my iPhone clamped between my shoulder and my ear joining a switchboard queue for a hot new restaurant. I’m hiding from a growing reality in my world that I feel I’m the first person to work out.
But restaurants are a wonderful distraction, and everyone is talking about this one. It’s a glitzy new modern Russian brasserie in the heart of Soho named Bob Bob Ricard. It has quirky ‘Press for Champagne’ buttons in each booth to summon the waiting staff with elegant coupes of Pol Roger at a moment’s notice. It serves fancy chicken Kiev for around £18, caviar with blinis and iced vodka shots. It has a huge buzz.
Everyone wants to go.
After living in London for twelve years, I know the unwritten rules of how to squeeze my bottom past the queue in its opening weeks. This involves a type of grubby psychological warfare. It requires name-dropping, plea-bargaining and obsequious grovelling. If it’s done properly, one should feel thoroughly ashamed of oneself afterwards but filthily excited too. You’ve done it. You’re in.
The hottest, most talked-about food in Britain is actually only accessible to about 0.1 per cent of its population. Everyone else has to go to Café Rouge.
Or Toby’s.
As I wait, a yellow Post-it note on the side of my computer says: ‘Call Dad’s GP – make aware about all the stuff.’
I wrote this note to myself as a reminder.
But now it’s reminding me and it feels painful, so I tear it off and place it face-down in order to continue the game at hand.
I’m like a terrier about getting into a good restaurant. I began honing my skills in 1998 at a place called Moro. Very hot. Very buzzy. Moro in Exmouth Market in Islington – New Labour territory – was the coolest place on earth. It served this brand-new thing called Moorish cuisine. Yes, I’m sure the North African Muslims occupying Spain in the eighth century may have quibbled with this, but the only moors most Brits had a working knowledge of at this point were in the Peak District.
Moro was one of those places that everyone was suddenly talking about. I mean everyone: the features desk at The Face, Michael Winner, Jay Kay from Jamiroquai, the researchers on MasterChef 1998 and the folk who high-fived Chris Evans as he walked past to get into the bar on TFI Friday. Everyone. I was already dropping Moro facts casually into conversation. ‘Ummm, yes, they put a drop of orange oil in their flatbread, y’know?’ Getting a table would be difficult. But who knew, if I mastered this, maybe then I’d chance my arm at other trendy places, such as Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy, where I longed to perch on a pill-shaped bar stool and sip a cough-syrup cocktail beside strategically stacked piles of haemorrhoid-cream packets. Or even stray behind the velvet rope at Oliver Peyton’s Atlantic Bar & Grill to eat Caesar salad with Gary from Reef and Natalie Imbruglia.
London was so exciting. No wonder I got lost here for so many years.
‘When, sorry?’ said the voice when Moro’s reservation desk picked up.
‘S … S … Saturday… this … er … weekend, please,’ I stuttered.
‘Caghh,’ was the exact sound the woman made.
It wasn’t a laugh, more a splutter of breath that seemed to say, ‘You must be out of your mind.’
‘Nothing all weekend, sorry,’ she said and then the phone went dead.
It was that sort of front-of-house rude that doesn’t feel rude immediately. But then it does and it increases the more you think about it. Then it feels like you’re wetting yourself in public.
‘Well, I bet this doesn’t happen to Michael Winner,’ I blushed.
Then I was more determined to go than before.
Six weeks later, I called Moro again, pep-talked by my starry magazine friends. My elbows were ever so slightly sharper, my tone more demanding and clippily self-important. Somehow I managed to snare a midweek early table and invited the latest love of my life, Cliff, a newly qualified High Court barrister that I’d met in a Firkin pub near to closing time. The only thing we really had in common was that my friend was planning to have sex with his. Our relationship lasted two dates; my memories of Moro have lasted a lifetime.
Good restaurants change how you view eating forever. Moro was the start of me thinking a dressed small plate of cannellini white beans in oil and herbs was an actual reason to leave the house, rather than ‘something you might eat during a siege’. I tasted my first harissa. I ate monkfish in sherry, then yoghurt and pistachio cake. Weirder still, dinner came in no proper order: small plates, big plates, just whenever the chef was ready. Mind-blowing. And not very filling. The barrister paid £80 for two of us and we both left hungry. So metropolitan! Only London people leave dinner unfazed by needing a round of toast afterwards.
But it’s fun to be in there at the start of a new scene. Soon Moro’s sumac-stained footprints were all over British gastropub menus; its recipes ripped off and reproduced on Saturday-morning telly. These trends trickled down.
OK, they never trickled down to the Toby Carvery, Carlisle.
Over the last year, Mam has confessed to me, Toby’s has become almost the only place Dad will go. He no longer wants to book cruises. He’ll go to Blackpool at a push as long as she always books the same hotel, and even then it makes him anxious. And to the local garage for his lottery ticket. It’s as if almost everywhere unnerves him aside from his bedroom and his chair in the lounge. His world has become smaller and his habits more eccentric. He picked a fight with a neighbour for posting a church magazine through his letterbox. He seemed to believe it was something Satanic. He collected twenty pence pieces avidly in little plastic bags, then hid them under the bed. The last time me and him spoke in person, he told quite a detailed a story about a specific medical appointment. He told me about the examination, the prognosis. Afterwards Mam assured me this appointment didn’t happen. We decided, together, after throwing the topic around and coming up with a reasonable excuse, that he must have got mixed up.
My call moves further in the Bob Bob Ricard queue.
I put all these things out of my mind.
Eventually my call is answered. I spring to life and know exactly how to get in. I use my name, which is vaguely recognisable from the telly and newspapers, and a smattering of sparkle about my record-industry husband and they give me a table for four at the time I want on a Saturday night. As ever, when I put the phone down I feel a little grubby and ashamed.
Why would I ever go back to Carlisle now that I’m a priority?
But like all daughters who run off chasing bigger, better things, I could hear a siren calling.
2009
‘He’s been hiding chocolate in me glory hole again,’ Mam fumes down the phone. I place my hand over the receiver. Former children’s TV presenter Andi Peters is having his face powdered in the make-up chair next to me. I explain to Mam again that the term ‘glory hole’ has shifted meaning in recent times. It no longer suggests a place to shove random bric-a-brac. It is Day 86 in the Big Brother 10 house and I’m appearing on a Channel 4 Friday-night spin-off show to interview the twelfth housemate to be evicted. Live television. If you can pull off live TV, it’s one of the sharpest thrills of all.
‘Why do you have to be so filthy?’ Mam says.
‘I’m not being filthy!’ I say. ‘It doesn’t mean cupboard anymore.’
Dad’s fuzzy-headedness is definitely due to his diabetes. Mum, Dave and I have decided this. Mam has been trying, and failing, to keep tabs on his Dairy Milk intake again. This has been going badly. Dad’s determination to eat Fruit & Nut by the square foot involves chutzpah similar to Steve McQueen’s in The Great Escape. On trips to the garage to buy his Daily Mail and lottery ticket he’s buying multiple bars of chocolate and sneaking them into the house up his jumper. He hides them inside a shoebox under a pile of old jumpers in the airing cupboard.
‘What about his pills?’ I ask. ‘Are they under control?’
Dad has taken his Metformin strategically for many years. He uses it like magical fairy dust to counteract a full ASDA family-sized strawberry trifle. He hangs back on the pills when he’s being good, then takes double when he’s binged. We pretend – as it’s easier all round – not to notice him slurring his words a little or not really knowing who I am when I call until I explain. Or when pins and needles began in his feet. Or when he falls asleep mid-conversation. In recent weeks I’ve finally gone behind Dad’s back and called his doctor. But without any consent to discuss his medical problems, they fobbed me off quickly. I would need to get a health-and-welfare Lasting Power of Attorney form signed by him to give me any power to begin interfering properly. This feels like a big reach considering I’ve spent four decades letting him wriggle out of discussing his other children, or even apologising to me for an entire childhood of his fibbing.
The wardrobe mistress appears, delivering my newly ironed dark green dress and the soundman is trying to hang a microphone pack off my bra. We are going live on Channel 4 in forty-five minutes to a couple of million viewers. I don’t have time to think about Carlisle.
‘He left his credit card at the newsagent again today,’ Mam says.
‘Again?’ I say.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s like a fog descends on his brain.’
‘Yes,’ I say. The penny is beginning to drop.
In my dressing room, I chuck back a small glass of Chenin blanc while waiting to go on set, where the audience are being warmed up by a comedian telling the same warm-up jokes I’ve heard a dozen times before, but they’re working. The audience is laughing. My best-friend Matt, a Public Relations boss, is reading me messages from my 20,000 followers on this amazing new ever-so-positive social-media wormhole called Twitter, where feedback from absolute strangers is instant. It’s just an endless stream of people telling me they like me! This new social-media platform means everyone can contact anyone now. I’ve chatted to Simon Le Bon and Curt Smith from Tears for Fears. Everyone is so friendly; it almost seems too good to be true.
Shortly before the show goes live, a window fitter from Brentwood called Marcus Akin who dresses like Wolverine is evicted from the Big Brother house, spilling out of the famous doors, across the walkway, past the screaming crowds and eventually into the adjoining TV studio, where behind a desk Davina McCall, Andi Peters and I interrogate him on his behaviour. I hit most of my VTs and even get some big laughs and applause and then wander victoriously into the green-room booze-up full of TV researchers and evicted Big Brother contestants like Charlie and Karly and Dogface and Rodrigo and bottles of warm Blossom Hill plonk from Borehamwood Tesco Extra. Then into a chauffeured Mercedes-Benz, which whips me home down the M25, where, in our dark, quiet house, my husband has gone to bed. A pile of fan letters sits on the table, including a request to be the patron of a nearby donkey sanctuary and some weird fan art where someone has painted my face in crisp white Tipp-Ex. I give it a sniff. I don’t think it’s Tipp-Ex at all.
My husband does not get up to say hello. He didn’t call to say he watched me. Maybe he’s sick and tired of waiting for me while I hobnob with folk off the telly in green rooms and finding almost everything I need spiritually from appearing on TV in studios with bright lights and shiny floors. In our expensive designer fridge, the shelves are empty. I’ve left a Post-it note on the front, which says, ‘Try Dad’s doctor again.’ A leftover slice of Domino’s pizza sits in a box on the kitchen work surface. Decent wives do not let their husbands go to bed as they’re hanging out in green rooms, I think quietly. Nor do they let their husbands order Domino’s again. I feel guilty and know I should have left some sort of casserole. Food is how you show people you love them. I feel guilty when I admit to myself that such pre-historic ideas hold any scrap of veracity. I wish desperately it was untrue. Twitter says tonight I did great.