The Eejit

The Eejit Chapter 1: Hard Rain

I'm 55 now. The last 20 years or so seem to merge into one big, long and absolutely not displeasing phase. The last time I felt real change was in my thirties.

The worst thing for me about your thirties is that you begin to notice a pattern about your life that didn't seem possible in your twenties. You don't so much gain a rounded outlook on life, carefully honed on the back of your many different experiences, as much as you do a sort of single, well-thumbed formula for your own existence. I had always believed, until a few years ago, that if you did loads of different things in your life you might end up, albeit at the higher end of the scale, a renaissance man, celebrated and admired all round, or even, at the lower end of the scale, just a decent all rounder, someone to go to for advice. This may indeed be true for some but I certainly don't believe it any more of my own life. Which is a shame, because I love giving advice.

I would like to think that I've done loads of different things in my life. Actually, I have done loads of different things in my life but I always seem to approach them in the same way and that's what I mean about life becoming formulaic as opposed to varied. No matter what I had ended up doing I would have probably been the same person at the end of it. Sure, you learn some lessons, you have to, and you learn to adapt and to vary yourself as much as you need to, but its still you. You the doctor, you the lawyer, you the brickie, you the whatever, its all you. For this reason I've always distrusted people who seem to elevate their careers to the point that they themselves disappear, or maybe it's just that I envy their ability to conceal themselves so well.

I certainly went through loads of phases as a child. My first memory of wanting to be something was that I wanted to be a dinosaur. I wanted to be a Brachiosaurus because it was hugest dinosaur I could think of and its nose was on top of its head rather than in the middle of its face. I thought that was super cool. Then I wanted to be Brian Boru who was the all - conquering High King of Ireland and that sounded cool too and then I decided that I could achieve a hybrid of both ambitions by becoming a rugby player, playing for Ireland. And so started an obsession with the oval ball which has been with me all my life since and which I have inflicted on all those who have come to know me. My son is now the same.

I was sent to away to boarding school (which I still think is a bizarre idea) back in the days when parents thought that the best way to ensure their kids turned out fully rounded and able to deal with life was to send them as far away from them as possible. I could understand the desire to do this if the parents wanted more 'alone time' but the truth is that my parents would have gladly sent the other one of them with us, given half the chance. At school, the phases came thick and fast, although there is good reason for this. Hundreds of boys, stuck together day after day, night after night, in a remote part of Yorkshire, can be quite harsh on each other, out of nothing more malicious than extreme boredom and a desire to survive somewhere other than at the bottom of the pile. The more you change and reinvent yourself the harder it is for anyone to find those aspects of the real you that are either tedious, irritating or vulnerable to attack. It was certainly due to this that the possibility of my ever being a musician reared its deceptively attractive head. If I'm going to be fully analytical about this, with the glorious gift of hindsight, I suppose it was a mixture of the need for survival and a degree of self-doubt that taught me to hide myself behind something that, if confronted and breached, could be me more easily rebuilt than the fragile ego of a young boy.

I also found that playing the giddy goat in lessons (or acting the little bollix as we say at home), bought me badly needed cheap popularity when I needed it most. I paid dearly for this cheap insubordination but you what you have to do.

I was musical, for sure. And I was as talented a boy musician as you can be, if your game plan is to absorb talent by means other than hard work and practice. I had been in a good choir at the Brompton Oratory, in London since the age of 8, and had been taught to play both the piano and the violin. I gave up the violin when I was sent away to school but continued with the piano and was forced by my parents to join the choir there.