Beep! Beep! I am getting ready to go out to the David Gilmour gig at the Brighton Centre, an invitation-only event which I have been looking forward to all week. David Gilmour once ate the last piece of hardened brie while looking despairingly into my fridge at the end of my 50th or 51st birthday party.
“This place reminds me of how we lived before we made any money,” he said. Still, water under the bridge and all that, so it was very nice to be invited.
But I have to take a call. It is from my friend N—, whom I have written about before. I have to take her call because she is often in dicey situations, and by that I do not mean hiding round the corner until the bailiffs go away. I mean serious stuff. Anyway, things have got especially bad for her and she asks if she can stay in the Hove-l. She needs to go off-grid.
Now, since I settled into the Hove-l, no one apart from her has ever visited. Although my eldest child went in for a pee one time and was so impressed by the squalor that they made a video.
“Delete it,” I said.
N— gets a pass to access all areas because she has seen things far worse than a messy flat, but trouble pursues her like a cloud of hornets, and the blast area surrounding her is extensive. And this time the hornets were particularly vicious. So I said, “Yes, you can stay but please not tonight.” I didn’t know when the gig was ending and, besides, I needed 24 hours to brace myself.
Before the gig, I met Mat, who used to edit a music magazine, and he asked me how my week had been. I explained the situation.
“Well,” he said after a pause, “I wasn’t expecting that.” I asked him how his week had been and he attempted to calm me down with a soothing story about how his new television had a crack in the screen or something. I was miles away, in a world where gangsters and feds chased each other around the shittier coastal towns of Britain, and I got caught up in the crossfire. I like interesting people, but sometimes they can be a little too interesting.
She arrived the next day, unaccompanied, thank God, by serious maniacs or Plod, and it felt auspicious that as we were retiring early – she’d been on a four-day bender that would have made Keith Moon whistle in admiration – she said: “This is the first man’s bed I’ve ever looked forward to sleeping in.” I hasten to add that one of the main reasons we are friends is that I have never, even while deep in my cups, attempted to have my way with her. Of course, the thought had crossed my mind: she is extremely good-looking, and, well, used to be in what I shall loosely call the adult entertainment industry. But I am firm and pure, like Sir Gawain. Or is it Sir Galahad? Which is just as well, because logistics meant we would have to share a bed. What she needed was to have a pair of arms around her, not sex. She’s had plenty of that already. (I, however, am approaching my three-and-a-half-year anniversary of the last time, and have resigned myself to never having any more.)
It turned out better than I had expected, although there were quite a few hairy moments. I ended up getting drawn into some of her Trouble and, believe me, this is not the kind of Trouble you want to get mixed up in, especially if you are a nice, middle-class boy and the worst Trouble you’ve ever been in has been apologising insincerely to a police officer for doing 35mph in a 30mph zone.
As it happens, she is still here, six days in, lying next to me in bed and getting annoyed by AN Wilson saying something mean about the Pope in last week’s edition of the New Statesman. We had a blistering row last night, and by “row” I mean “me being shouted at”, because experience has taught me that the best way to behave when being shouted at by a woman is to suck it up and say sorry. I must say, this one was something special. I’ve been shouted at by the best, and N— leaves them as a spot in the rear-view mirror. I found myself in actual fear. But she made some very good points during her tirade, which lasted at least a couple of hours, although it might have only felt like that.
In the end, our only real disagreement is about Elon Musk. She fancies him.
“Imagine your brain in his body,” she said. “I’d [redacted for the sake of delicacy].”
But the main thing is that she tidied – without my asking her to – the Hove-l. You have no idea how big a job that was. Hercules, if offered a choice between the Augean stables and my gaff, would have gone for the stables like a shot. I had simply given up. As for my chastity, I think I managed a solid eight out of ten on that, and I have to add that I was under severe provocation. So I think I’ve retained her respect. But I shall sigh with bittersweet regret for the rest of my life.
[See also: Chappell Roan’s war on fandom]
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history