Redemption Song

I wrote this about Pete and Kev about three years ago, before the new incarnation of Dexy's got together.  But, what with them winning a Q Icon Award, it seemed appropriate to post it now. 

Redemption song

It is 1982. I am at the school disco, a party at the village hall or at Cinderella Rockafellas in Gloucester. I have sat out as Duran Duran have been down to Rio, Spandau Ballet have gone in search of Gold, but then there is that familiar opening three beats on a drum and bass before the fiddle kicks in and everyone, me included, gets to their feet and heads to the dance floor, because Dexy’s Midnight Runners are being played. Me, yes, I always preferred the earlier, harder sound of Geno and Dance Stance, but it is 1982 and everywhere, but everywhere is the sound of ‘Come on Eileen’, its infectious Celtic melody getting under our skins and making us dance!

It is 1992. I am in Dudley, at a party in the summer back garden of a friend. I am being introduced to a man I have never met but somehow feel I already know. He has about him an easy, calming charm that I am drawn to and want to know more about. I offer him a cigarette, he accepts and I ask him how he spends his time. ‘I’m a musician’, he replied. I probed a little further and discovered that he was the bass player in Dexy’s Midnight Runners. I didn’t quite drop to my knees, bowing and chanting ‘I am not worthy’ but I did say ‘wow’ and ask him more. Pete Williams joined the Dexy’s in 1978 and was an integral part of the first incarnation of the band that recorded ‘Searching for the Young Soul Rebels’, one of the great albums of the Twentieth Century. He had played Top of the Pops more times than he could remember and had very, very much enjoyed being a pop star. Then, at the back end of 1981, exhausted and skint, three quarters of the band walked out on Kevin Rowland, the front man of the band because his ego had just gotten too big. Kevin quickly assembled a new line up of more compliant musicians and set about recording a song that the old band had been working on for a few months. It was called ‘Come on Eileen’.

Pete was the single most talented man I ever worked with, and for six short years, was also one of my best friends. He was a brilliant performer and a wonderfully creative partner on a variety of shows that we wrote, produced and toured during the middle of the decade. In the car on the way to gigs, or in the hotel afterward, I would always get him to tell me again about what it was like being a pop star and he would patiently tell me stories I loved to hear. But his tales were always tempered by a certain unspoken, gently burning resentment, especially of Kevin who had engineered the politics of the band so that only he, Kevin Rowland, made any money. ‘Geno’ in particular, although not in the league of ‘Come on Eileen’ had been a massive hit single, the album too sold very well and there were Greatest Hits packages and other compilations that should have seen Pete doing very well out of mechanical, if not publishing, royalties. He never got a penny and spent years living only just above the bread line. There had been talk of lawyers, but he had been advised that success in the courts would cost him as much as he was likely to receive in back payments, such was the Byzantine nature of the tangle that would need to be unravelled. But despite his reservations and an itch at his core, he never openly bitched about Kevin, never really complained about the fact that he had seen no reward for his efforts. Rather he chose to remember the laughs and the drugs and the girls. But his eyes gave him away.

It is 1999. I am living in Brighton. I have recently returned from America and am building a new life on the south coast. There is no room for people from my old life so, on the way back on the ship, I had ripped pages and pages out of my address book and threw them into the Atlantic Ocean. Pete’s was one of them. There was no bad feeling, just an acknowledgement that it was time to move on. And then, somewhat surprisingly, I find as I am in a seaside café having an all day breakfast, that I am sitting at a table next to Kevin Rowland. I am gripped by an overwhelming desire to push his face into his soup, only bringing him up from his tomato choking to ask him just what he has done with my mate’s money. I know the answer of course – he has shoved it up his nose- for it is a well documented fact that Kevin had a serious cocaine problem, but nevertheless I wanted him to know that I knew that he was a thieving little shit. I was furious: all the controlled resentment that Pete had looked after for nearly twenty years was having its expression in me. I didn’t do anything though. I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him very hard in a way that meant ‘I am not staring at you because I know who you are, but because I know what you are.’

It is 2003. I am standing at the front of the crowd at the Warwick Arts Centre. On stage are Dexy’s Midnight Runners and it is the final song of the night and they are singing ‘Come On Eileen’. On the left, Kevin, in a pin striped suit, and there, on the right, amazingly, is Pete. During the introduction to the song, he looks down and sees me. He gives me a lovely, big smile, his eyes light up and he mouths ‘Dave!’ and gives me a thumbs up. The band has been touring for a few months and they are tight and hot and everyone is dancing. Pete is as brilliant as ever (he is actually a much better singer than Kevin) and he is plainly having the time of his life. And then, half way through the song, Kevin starts to busk some lyrics and he sings. ‘It’s twenty one years since I sang this song, but now I’m back again to right all the wrongs.’ When they walk off, they have an arm round each other’s shoulder and they are smiling and I realise that something redemptive and good has happened: the power of forgiveness is so much bigger, so much more joyous and good than that of bitterness and resentment.

The next day, Pete phoned me and as he sat around on a coach waiting to go to Finland for the last leg of the tour, he told me how it came to be that he and Kevin are once again sharing a stage. ‘He phoned me out of the blue’, said Pete. ‘He said that he was very, very sorry and that he would like to try and get the original band back together to record some new stuff and go out on tour. He knew what he had done was wrong. It’s nice to be able to sing ‘Eileen’. I never got the chance first time round.’

It is 2009. I am at the Village Hall Christmas Party. ‘Come on Eileen’ comes on and everyone gets up to dance. Me included. Our friends and neighbours smile as they dance and I look at Helen and I smile as we dance and I remember Pete and Kevin smiling at each other at the end of their redemption song.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBmKYS8fOFo


David Izod December 2009

Does anyone have a contact for the Farrelly brothers?

I ask, because if you do, you might consider sending them the following as a treatment for one of their forthcoming films. I swear every single word is true.

Last Saturday afternoon, I started to feel a bit peaky. I was tired and listless but put this down to having had rather a good lunch with my brother in law and a few glasses of a rather excellent Provencal rosé. And I had spent a hard week decorating the living room, working pretty much non- stop from 7.30 am to 8pm so I forgave myself for dozing, somewhat rudely, on his sofa. I felt no better when I got home however and by the time the poker players arrived at 7.30pm I was starting to realise that this might be a bit more than just tiredness. I was feeling, well, ill.

I knew I wasn’t well when I started to lose money. I don’t lose money at poker. By 8.30pm I was in for £120 and couldn’t seem to find a way to get back into the game, so I sat quietly not really taking much notice of the cards, feeling steadily worse and worse until a little before midnight. At that point, I got up, poured myself a glass of water and suddenly felt as cold as Titus Oates did about an hour after he popped out. I sat down and immediately began a full on rigor: my teeth and jaws clattering like a train over tracks and my body going into spastic shakes. I have to say that this did not unduly bother me for it is my standard reaction to infection. As soon as the bugs bite, my body temperature shoots up and I shake like a bastard until my anterior hypothalamus catches up, works out just what the fuck is going on and re-sets itself.

That said, the blokes round the table took a slightly different view. I looked up from the A/9 off suit I had just been dealt (my best hand for hours) and saw a look of fear and bewilderment in their eyes. They had obviously never seen anything like it and were not at all convinced that this was not the immediate precursor to my death. ‘Are you all right?’ said one.

‘No. Feel like shit. Let’s play cards!’ I replied, and, bless them, they did, even though for the next hour I continued to sit amongst them – or rather move amongst them for my convulsions were so severe at times they thought I was going for a walk – and make a variety of rather terrifying noises. I am pleased to say, by the way, my A/9 held up and I won back £98 of my money.

The next day a couple of texts arrived. They went like this:

‘So glad you didn’t die. Jo wouldn’t have let me play again if you had.’

‘I was all for beating you to death to put you out of your misery, but they talked me out of it.’

It’s poker. You expect it.

By Sunday, it was obvious what the problem was: I had picked up some kind of infection in my lower gastric tract and I was really, really suffering. Fortunately, the Gods of sick had decided not to give me the both ends treatment but throughout Sunday and Monday it was impossible for me to be more than five seconds away from the bog, which was fine by me because to be honest I felt so disgustingly wretched that I only wanted to be in bed anyway. Feeling only a bit better on Tuesday, by which I mean I was now sometimes as much as an hour between my rusty water boarding, I decided that I ought to go to the GP to rule out anything major, so I made an appointment.

Before I go on, there is one contextual detail you need to be aware of: anything of detail less than six feet away from my face becomes progressively more blurry the closer you bring it until anything requiring fine motor skills close up also requires halogen lighting and precision engineered optical assistance. To assist me I have two pairs of glasses, one at work, and one at home so that I should never be without a pair. Needless to say however, that the ones at home are always upstairs when I am downstairs and vice versa.

So, it is Tuesday morning and Helen is going to drive me to the GPs. I trundle downstairs, still stinking from three days of the most profuse sweating, and drop myself into the passenger seat of the Peugeot. As we drive away, Helen says to me: ‘Have you got the sense to be able to listen to an instruction?’

I nodded.

‘I’m going to drop you off after your appointment but go straight on to take Isabelle to Toddler group so I need you to do a really simple thing for me. You know it is Dad’s birthday tomorrow?

I nod.

‘Well I have made him a chocolate and hazelnut swirl cake. I need to ice it later and I am going to use up that chocolate fondant icing I made too much of when I made Isabelle’s cake. There is a freezer bag of it defrosting on the draining board. All I need you to do is decant it into a bowl and put it into the fridge when it’s ready. Is that all right? Can you do that?’

I nodded.

At the GP’s, the nice young lady (all of 16), re-assured me that I just had to ride it out but said that just to be on the safe side she would like to collect a stool sample, for which she passed me a small pot. I examined it to discover it had an aperture about the size of polo mint and contained a small shovel/spoon thing that would have been most useful for any Borrower who wanted to knock up a bit of concrete.

‘Best pop to the kitchen and get a ladle’, I said, ‘It’ll be more use’.

‘Try with that.’ She said.

Returning to Berry Cottage, (Helen having duly driven off to take Isabelle to her Toddler group), I realised that my timing had been impeccable. I had managed to avoid any unpleasantness at the Dr’s but the hour (make that ‘five seconds’ for that was all the notice I was getting) was at hand, so, armed with my Borrower’s trowel, but not with my glasses for they, as usual, were on the wrong floor of the house, I plunged into hell.

What happened next was recorded by seismologists. Indeed, there were some that thought that that thing under Yellow Stone Park that has been threatening to go pop for forty thousand years had finally blown, that a generation of Pacific North Western Americans had been wiped out and the planet was in for a period of serious climactic change. I actually heard my neighbour in her garden say, ‘What on earth was that?’

I simply cannot begin to describe the volume, the pressure nor the stench, and given that I had had my hand ‘round the back’ (having realised that the trowel really was of no use whatsoever) in the hope of directing something into the absurdly small pot, the direct hit on my hand and the splash back on my undercarriage meant that I was, frankly, in a mess. I looked at the tiny hand basin in the down stairs loo and realised that it was of no use to me whatsoever, so I shuffled out of the downstairs loo like a half blind penguin, trousers and pants round my ankles ,my arse, my hand, the pot and most of my clothes covered in shit. I shuffled into the kitchen and thought,

‘I’ll use the sink. It’s nice and big and I can sit in it. I just need lots of clear space to work. Now what’s that on the draining board?’


David Izod

Fat

There are many things about modern life that I am afraid I don’t understand. My lack of comprehension is not borne of stupidity, old age or any other such state: rather I don’t understand some things because they are simply beyond understanding. For example, I don’t understand why people enjoy Formula One, I don’t understand why people like horses (except to eat, which is an experience I have never had but which I would like to try) and I don’t understand why there is a massive multi billion pound industry surrounding human beings wanting to lose weight. The reason I fail to understand the last of these is because there is a very, very simple equation that is within the grasp of even the most stupid of stupid people: if your calorific output is greater than your calorific intake, you will lose weight. If the reverse is true, you will put weight on.

Now it is true that there are fine tunings that can take place within this: some foods are more likely to be stored as fat, it is better to eat bigger meals earlier in the day etc, but the simple truth remains that when the Allies liberated the Nazi Camps at the end of the Second World War, the people they found that were left alive were thin to the point of emaciation. This was because they had had very little to eat for three or four years and had been working very, very hard throughout the same period. Strangely, there were no fat people who had trouble with their glands.

I say that I fail to understand, but in truth, that is not the case. I do understand why there is a diet industry, I just despair of the fact that there is. I understand that what people want is for someone to make it possible for them to continue to eat doughnuts and have a size 10 figure. I understand that people want to eat and eat and then take a pill and have all that food just simply disappear. And, of course, we are moving towards a situation where that is likely to be possible. This is being driven by the Americans of course who can’t countenance the possibility of their consumers actually consuming less, so what the boffins are doing is synthesising a drug that will make it possible to be fat and still very, very healthy. Years of research demonstrate that over-weight people are more fertile because mother nature understands that there is food for all and allows for a population explosion and the fact that the fatties are inherently unhealthy doesn’t matter because the genes have done their job in making sure that there is another generation of carriers to take their place. The same research shows that people who are just slightly under-weight are likely to be much less fertile (not enough food to go round so mother nature does not allow for more mouths to feed) but are likely to be super-healthy: all available nutrition goes not into fat storage, but into keeping all vital organs in the peak of condition to ensure the survival of the gene carrier until such time as there is plenty of food again. Inevitably, what the American scientists have decide to do is not to educate a nation into eating less, but rather to synthesise a drug from the hormones released from slightly underweight people. This drug will be available in pill form and will fool the brains of fat people into thinking healthy thoughts.

All that, so a nation of fatties can carry on eating doughnuts.

I mention this now, because I have lost a stone and a half and I am proud of myself. I have lost a stone and a half since Christmas through a simple process of removing 3500 calories a week from my diet, which means that I lose one pound of excess stored fat per week. This will continue until my reduced body weight requires fewer calories to fuel itself and I will reach an equilibrium, hopefully somewhere around fifteen stones. This will mean my total weight loss will be a smidge over two stone and I will have done something that I have never managed to achieve before without massive emotional trauma (divorce is a great way to lose weight).

I don’t wish to sound sanctimonious and I am not saying it is easy - I had to stop drinking alcohol on three days a week for heaven’s sake! – but the fact is, that like giving up smoking – losing weight is an undertaking that is entirely within the grasp of absolutely everyone.

Thank you

Those of you who know, will know that in the same manner that I have a tendency to run to fat and a tendency to drink too much, I also have a tendency to indulge in sentimentality.

Christmas is a desperately sentimental time. You only have to listen to the radio or watch the television to be reminded of how the season can render someone else’s shitty experience so much shittier: to be homeless at Christmas is somehow – in the mind of the comfortably housed person at least – somehow worse than being homeless on any other day of the year. For a near or dear one to die in the Christmas Season somehow compounds the pain. I don’t know exactly what it is that heightens our senses in such a way at this time of year, and to be honest, that is not what I want to explore.

Rather, I would like to acknowledge, in this most sentimental of seasons and yet in the most unsentimental way I can, my almost unbearable and acute happiness. I am presently re-reading the diaries and if I learn nothing else from trawling back across the past thirty years, I learn that where I am now is where I have wanted to be for a long, long time.

I am not sure if it is traditional for ones forties to be the decade where it all comes right, but in my case it is certainly true. In my twenties, as much as I loved Alison and as much as we tried to have children, the fact is that I was not up to it emotionally or physically. I was too wracked by self-doubt and professional and emotional insecurity. I am sorry for that.

My thirties largely passed in a relationship that lasted nine years but which should have lasted only two. No manner of compensation in the form of professional development and loads of good mates could cover up for the fact that I was nought but a shell for seven years. I remember clearly looking in the mirror one day in 2003 and thinking that I could see through myself. I was a man of no substance.

But now I want for nothing. I want for nothing spiritually, professionally, personally, financially, emotionally and physically. In any damn way that you care to mention I have absolutely nothing except wonder and enjoyment and pleasure and security in my life. I live where I want to live. I am in love and in turn, am loved. I have a daughter, a fact that still amazes me given my various diagnoses of infertility and cancer. And I am glad I have her now and not twenty years ago for now I am ready.

I am richer than I ever thought possible. I do a job that I love. I spend every minute of every day, happy.

So. Thank you. I am not religious and thus I have no deity unto which I need to kneel down and pray. Instead, I say to anyone who gives a shit and anyone who cares to listen. Thank you.

Why I eat meat

A couple of weeks ago, on the way home from work, I saw one of the saddest things I have seen for years. Sitting in the middle of the Stratford Road was an old, brown, myxomatosis ravaged rabbit. He didn’t seem to have much of an idea where he was, but when I stopped the car, got out and tried to shoo him to safety, he was having none of it. I didn’t want to pick him up, so I put a shoe under him and sort of half carried, half kicked him to the side of the road. As soon as my foot came out from under him, he turned round and hobbled back to the middle of the carriageway at just the same spot, the spot where he was most likely to be squashed. Now, I am not sufficiently anthropomorphic to suggest that this rabbit was consciously suicidal, but he did seem to have a very acute idea as to what he needed to do to put himself out of his obvious and terrible agonies. When I drove to work the next day, he was nothing but a contoured squish of fur and blood.
A couple of days later, I stopped again on the way home from work, this time just off the Stratford Road. I called in at Jo Brassington’s place to pick up half a pig that had been killed a couple of days before. Jo keeps his pigs in a field that I pass every day on the way to work and for six months I watch them rootle in the mud. I watch them chase each other, lie in the sun and blow steam in the snow. Then, when the time comes, Jo puts them in the back of a trailer, drives them to Cinderford where they are stunned, have their throats cut and are butchered to my order.
Neither of these deaths makes me happy, but I am considerably more at ease with the latter. The pig that I subsequently turned into salami, bacon, sausages, mince, chops and joints had a good life and he knew nothing about his death, with the possible exception of a moment of fear as he reached the abbatoir, but modern improvements suggest that even this is unlikely. The rabbit had probably been suffering greatly for months, if not years, and nobody cared. He was left to find his own pathetic solution to his sorry existence, which was to be squashed on the Stratford Road.
That is why I eat meat. I eat meat so that I can engage with how animals live and die. I hesitate to make any assumptions about vegetarians, but I do think that they often make one fundamental error in their thinking: not eating meat does not mean that animals won’t die. We all die. I am going to. So are you. And the terrible truth is that if animals do not have economic value, they will be left to die slow and painful deaths because nobody will care. Animals that do not have value will get old, get sick and nobody will call the vet. Animals that get old and sick get predated and will get eaten alive by other bigger, stronger animals. I would much rather give animals economic value and engage with how they live and die.
I was a vegetarian for seven years, at a time when it was difficult to buy good meat. Now it isn’t. With just a little time and effort it is easy to source good quality, relatively cheap meat that has been produced from animals that have had happy lives and died well. You do not have to, and I won’t, eat factory meat made from animals that have never seen the sun or been allowed to express their natural behaviour. And don’t be fooled into thinking that this makes meat expensive: it doesn’t. Although I see the pigs I eat in the field in Flyford and I see the lambs I eat in the field in Wyre Piddle and I sometimes see the cows I eat in the field in front of my house I am willing to bet that I spend less on meat that people who buy it from the supermarket.
If people choose not to eat meat, that is their affair and it is really none of my business. Lots of my friends choose not to and I am happy to accommodate them when we eat together. But do not be fooled into thinking that their abstention is doing animals any favours, because it isn’t.

Booze

One of the things I have always loved doing is sitting up in the quiet of the night, on my own, and having a drink. True, I do also love drinking before dinner and during dinner – more of which later - but if I was forced to make a decision and pin down one of the things in my life that makes me most happy, it is the time I spend on my own at the end of the day with a drink.

The house is quiet. Helen is usually pootling about upstairs doing the endless things that women do before getting into bed. Magic the minxie mog will be curled up on the sofa next to me. There is no more work to be done today and I may or may not be smoking a cigar; it doesn’t matter. If it is winter, the fire will be slowly dying in the grate; if it is summer the window will be open and the birds and the cows will be arguing over who can say goodnight the loudest. The telly will be on but I won’t really be watching it because, like Brick in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, I am really just listening to myself and waiting for the click in my head that tells me everything is all right, the day is done and I can go to bed.

Not that I am drinking to try and forget about my dead and unrequited gay lover you understand. Nor am I pouring bourbon down my throat at the rate of a bottle a day. But, like Brick, I am waiting for that moment of calm to descend, a calm brought about by the gentle haze of alcohol, a calm that tells me I have worked hard, I have done what I needed to do and now I am having - were I to use an expression from the women’s magazines - a bit of ‘me’ time. Some choose sun beds, some choose gyms, some like hot stones and massages, some like to curl up in bed and read with a mug of cocoa. I like to sit on the sofa, on my own, quietly drinking a few glasses of something nice, whether it be wine, scotch or cognac. And when the click comes, I will turn to the cat and say, ‘Well then, Magic. Time for bed’, and I will get up, turn off the light, turn off the television and mooch upstairs to wrap myself up in the warm loveliness of my wife.

I have liked to do this for more years than I care to remember. Throughout my adult life I have always enjoyed the hour at the end of the day and, when circumstance has dictated that I have not been able to indulge myself – through illness or adverse domestic circumstances - I have missed it terribly. I know I love it because every night, throughout my adult life, if I have been able to do it, I have done it.

But now it has to stop. It has to stop because the simple truth is, I drink too much.

I have always drunk too much and it has never really bothered me if only because I have never really worried about how much is too much? Well, more than 28 units a week for a big bloke like me, so the government say, but who takes any notice of them? Health officials are endlessly telling us stuff that the vast majority of the population routinely ignore because if we didn’t, life would be so intolerably regimented and dull. I know a lot of people who can do 28 units a day without worrying about it too much. I am one of them. Not every day, of course, but if you count up the units involved in a not abnormal day of a couple of large gins at 6pm, a bottle of wine during the evening and a couple of scotches at bed time, it clocks in at seventeen units. Have a good drink up at the weekend and you can be looking at a hundred units a week. Don’t get the wrong impression: that isn’t every night or every week, but it gives you some idea of how people like me – people like you – can drink a huge amount of alcohol without being alcoholics, without being drunk, without having hangovers and without having the slightest problem getting up in the morning and going to work.

But now it has to stop because I drink too much. It didn’t matter when I was younger. It didn’t matter when my intake was not quite so high, but the simple truth is that over the years the amount I drink has gone up and the years have taken their toll. Blood tests show my liver function is not what it should be. And my heart keeps going wrong.

About eighteen months ago, I had an atrial flutter. Not life threatening (usually), but something that requires hospitalization and either drug or electro therapy to put right. I had my first one while on holiday in Cornwall and it was terrifying because I didn’t know what it was: the palpitations and shortness of breath and the tightness in the chest obviously led me to believe I was having a coronary. Diagnosis took a couple of hours and treatment was swift and efficient: an IV bag of a drug called flecianide and the correct electrical rhythms of my heart were re-established and I was sent on my way. ‘Why did it happen?’ I asked. ‘Because it does, sometimes’ was the answer. ‘Alcohol is definitely a factor, usually in women, usually binge drinkers, but sometimes it just does.’

But then, at 6.15am last Monday, it happened again. I was standing at the kitchen sink contemplating the fact that it was the day my wife was due to give birth as well as the fact that I had 17 exam scripts to mark before work, when I got a familiar feeling in my chest. Imagine if you will a palpitation that doesn’t go away. I recognised the symptom straight away but hoped that it might put itself back in to rhythm. I coughed hard, which sometimes works. I sat quietly at my desk and tried to ignore it, but the fact was the top chamber of my heart was not able to send the correct signals to the bottom chamber and so, in a state of some confusion, my heart started to beat at about 120 BPM in a wild and erratic fashion. It is the wild and erratic nature of its beat pattern that makes an atrial flutter relatively easy to diagnose: if an ECG shows irregular irregularities, chances are that is what you have got.

So I woke Helen up and asked if she would be so kind as to drive me to hospital. She was, because she is, indeed, kind.

On arrival, because I had effectively self-diagnosed, I was spared the spray of GTN, the emergency dose of aspirin and the sense of panic but also the ‘no one dies on my watch’ determination of your average emergency room registrar that does rather push one to the front of the queue. Last year, when they thought I might be on my last legs, the sense of urgency was extraordinary. I was wheeled past a Cornish woman who appeared to have had her leg crushed by her horse who was plainly in some severe discomfort. But she wasn’t dying, so ahead of her I went, giving her a cheery wave as I did so.

This year, there was a more relaxed atmosphere and after ten minutes or so I was called through to a cubicle where my shirt and shoes came off and I was hooked up to the ECG machine whose wild needle readings confirmed in short order that I was indeed having an atrial flutter so no one was going to be in a terrible hurry to see to me. I have no beef with this. I just knew it was going to be boring.

And so it was. Over the next two hours, someone periodically came in and checked I wasn’t having chest pains, wasn’t feeling different etc, and then, having given me some pills that didn’t work, they and I knew that it would have to be IV drugs, so the A and E doctor put a canula in and took some blood and said I would have to have a chest x-ray. So far, so standard. Then, a somewhat bored looking fourteen year old house officer (or so he seemed to me, but he must have been twenty seven I suppose) came in and did the whole tongue out, say ‘ah’, let’s listen to your chest routine. He was from the medical ward and would make an initial assessment and recommendation as to a drug regime. Almost as an aside, he asked me how much I drink. I told him, honestly.

His eyes widened and a look somewhere between shock and pity, as if he had just been asked to treat George Best or Oliver Reed, came over his face. ‘How much do you drink in the morning?’ he asked.

‘What? Morning? Nothing!’ I said. ‘Ever. I never drink before 6pm. Except at Sunday lunch, of course.’ I was amazed. Mornings? I don’t drink in the mornings! People who shout at themselves and smell of wee drink in the mornings. He was assuming I was an alcoholic.

He went off to speak to his registrar on the phone to get some advice and I heard him say ‘blah blah blah heavy drinker blah blah blah.’ Heavy drinker? Me? I’m not a heavy drinker. I am a classy drinker. A serious drinker, perhaps, but not a heavy drinker. I have a rich cellar, full of good claret and some excellent Rhone Valley wines. I like to talk about wine, read about wine, think about wine and, yes, drink wine. And good sherry. And I like London gin. And XO Cognac. And single malt whiskies. Maybe I drink a little too much perhaps, but heavy drinker? It makes me sound, oh I don’t know, working class I suppose. Somehow uncouth. Whatever, it certainly made me about as comfortable as the niggling canula in my arm.

It got worse. A couple of hours later, I landed up on the Coronary Care Unit, an oasis of calm in the otherwise hectic hospital. Another bag of drugs was put up and another doctor stood in front of me. I answered all his questions. And then he asked me the question too and I told him and his eyes nearly came out on stalks like in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

‘But you’re from Pakistan’ I thought (he had told me; I hadn’t made some appalling assumption), you’re more than likely a Muslim who hasn’t progressed beyond a ginger beer and a packet of crisps while sitting in the back of your mum’s car. He gave himself away by not really knowing how many units a bottle a day is. I did the conversion for him, at which point – again much like in a cartoon – his hair stood on end and his eyebrows left his forehead.

‘Wow’ he said. ‘That’s too much.’

Honestly. He said ‘wow’.

The new bag of drugs was due to go in over 23 hours, but after just three, I got teary and panicky. My wife was due to give birth today and it was supposed to be her in bed and me supporting her, not the other way around and I felt selfish and shitty and started to cry. The nurse took the bull by the horns, sympathised with my dilemma and said that they would proceed to an electrocardioversion. No more drugs, just electricity to get my heart rhythm back to normal. ‘I’ll just need to inform the consultant as he has to oversee the procedure.’

Twenty minutes later the consultant came on to the ward and talked me through what was to happen, likely side effects (‘a major stroke, but don’t worry, it’s rare’), got me to sign the consent form and went away to make the electricity or whatever it is he had to do. Two minutes later, he was back.

‘They tell me you are a drinker. How much do you drink?’

I told him. He didn’t say wow. His hair, eyes and eyebrows stayed firmly in place. Instead, he fixed me with a steely gaze and he spoke to me in the stern voice of one who knows what he is talking about and who wants to get his message across to an idiot who isn’t listening.

‘You drink way, way too much. You have to stop. Now. Your heart cannot cope with it. If you don’t stop, you stand a good chance of dying young. I will get your heart beating correctly but when you leave here you have to stop drinking. Will you stop drinking?’

Blimey. He meant it. It wasn’t exactly blackmail: he would have to shock me anyway even if I said ‘no’, but I could tell; he was being serious. And I believed him. I believed him because to have one atrial flutter is unlucky, two is suspicious. I believed him because I have spent too many days and nights of my life in hospital to want to spend anymore. I believed him because I wanted to go home and look after my wife and be a good father to my unborn child and not die an unnecessary and early death.

‘I’ll stop.’

‘When?’

‘Today.’

And so he put pads on my chest, a drug in my arm and hit me with 200 joules of electricity that felt like a thunderclap going off in my head but it got my heart back to beating like it is supposed to. Ten minutes later, I woke up and the monitor showed a steady 49 beats per minute so they took the line out of my arm and took all the sensors off my chest. I stood up and put my trousers and shoes on and said thank you to Kate and Claire who had been so kind to me. As I walked off the ward, the doctor was standing at the nursing station. ‘Thanks’ I said.

‘No problem.’ He said. ‘Did you mean what you said?’ He asked.

‘About stopping? Of course.’ I replied.

‘Good. Then you can have a glass of wine at the weekend. It will be good for you.’

And I got home and I did not have a drink. Nor did I on Tuesday, nor on Wednesday, nor on Thursday. As I write, it is Friday and it is ten past six. I put a bottle of Domaine Testut 2007 Chablis in the fridge a couple of hours ago.

I am going to have a glass and then put the cork back in and when Helen goes to bed tonight, I shall go with her.

David Izod

I thought my love affair was over, but it's all right now.

In 1980, when I was fifteen, I went to France for the first time. I went to stay with a French family in Annecy on the school exchange and was immediately absorbed by, and into, the French way of life. I marvelled at the fact that everybody had two hours for lunch and everybody went home to eat an extraordinary meal that the matriarch of the family prepared in what appeared to be a matter of moments. I was amazed that there were only three types of car on the road: Peugeot, Renault and Citroen and everybody who smoked either smoked Gitanes or they smoked Gauloises. I loved the fact that every single person, from 10 – 100 years old, drank wine with every single meal and it was perfectly acceptable to add water to make a refreshing lunchtime drink. I loved the sense of national and regional pride and I loved the enormous sense of difference there was about the place.

Over the years, my love for France grew. I learned to love the heat of the Midi and the grace of Paris. I learned to love the beaches at the edges and the mountains in the middle. I learned to love and understand about the cuisine, about how eating was bound up with family and the seasons and a sense of place, and then, about seven years ago, I fell under the spell of the wines of the Medoc.

I can remember precisely the moment of my bewitching. For years, I had been carting back cheap table wine and for years, my friend Alastair had been taking the mickey out of me and telling me that I really did need to develop a better palate. So one year, I did bring back some half decent bottles of Bordeaux and, one night, in October 2003, sitting in my chair in my old house, I discovered that with each mouthful the wine was getting more and more interesting. The taste was changing and developing according to what I was eating and how long it had been in the glass. This wasn’t just a wine to drink; it was a wine to think about. So I did think about it, and read about it and learn about it and drank an awful lot of it until I was entirely under its spell and had to go and see for myself where it was made.

The Medoc is the region of France that sticks up north of Bordeaux, bounded by the Gironde River on the one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. Here, many of the greatest of the Bordeaux region’s wines are made. The peninsula is about thirty five miles wide at it widest, narrowing to a point fifty miles north of the city. The western two thirds is made up of boggy pine forest that has little agricultural value but plays an excellent host to a range of wildlife, while the eastern third is dominated by a vast sea of vineyards that grow Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc together with tiny quantities of Malbec and Carmenere. There are no major towns and only a few places that could be called anything more than villages. There is no industry of any kind which means that the air is stunningly pure: the Atlantic brings in beautiful fresh breezes that pick up nothing but the scent of pine before wafting around the vines. The coastline is an unbroken line of golden sandy beach protected by dunes that stretches all the way down to the Spanish border.

On my first visit, I was so excited I was like a kid in a sweet shop. As I drove along the ‘routes des vins’, I was amazed to actually see the places that had, until then, only existed on labels or in books. From the village of Arsac in the south to St Cristoly in the north, I drove up and down, with my jaw dropping as the famous names presented themselves: Giscours, Lascombes, Margaux, Latour, and even the smaller chateau that I could afford and happened to be my favourites, places like Tour St Bonnet and Moulin Rouge. I loved pulling up in my car at the latter of these and meeting the man who had been making the wine all his life, taking over as he did from his father and his father before him, stretching back in an unbroken line to the Seventeenth Century. I loved his passion (and his hysterical accent when he tried to speak English) and I loved him letting me taste his wines, including the new wine still in the 225 litre oak barriques that, over the period of a year or so, turn the wine from grape juice into something magical and unique.

Most, if not all, serious wine drinkers fall under the spell of the wines of the Medoc and for most, they remain the benchmark wines. Yes, Burgundy. Yes, the Rhone Valley and we might, at times, even drink some ‘foreign’ wines like a Rioja or a Chianti, but everything is judged by the standard of claret, everything is compared to claret and if it is Christmas or a birthday or some other big day, then it is always claret that will grace the table. So, to actually be there, to be able to get out of the car and wander, at will and liberty, into the vineyards of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, was a wonderful thing. If you then factor in that the beaches are wonderful and empty, the food is cheap, the sun is shining, and Bordeaux is one of the world’s great cities (as recognised by UNESCO), you have a recipe for a truly wonderful holiday destination. So, after my 2004 visit, I returned again in 2007, found I loved it even more and so returned for my third trip this summer.

But this time it just wasn’t the same. I know that familiarity breeds contempt, but that is far too simple an explanation. Yes, it’s true that the first flush of my love affair had definitely passed. I had anticipated that: I knew it would no longer be good enough for Mistress Medoc to simply flutter her chateaux at me and expect my knees to go weak as they once did. But my sense of disquiet was based on something a little more fundamental. There were things about the place that were actively disappointing.

Firstly, the simple fact is that France is no longer a cheap country to visit. The exchange rate doesn’t help of course, and neither did the introduction of the Euro that saw a rise of 20% or so of the price of everything, but the fact is , even leaving these factors to one side, prices have simply gone up. Fuel used to be cheap. Fifteen years ago, I would drive to Andorra to fill up with diesel because it was – and I jest not – cheaper than bottled water. Now, petrol on the motorway is £1.35 a litre. When you factor in motorway tolls, simply getting there is now a serious percentage of the holiday budget. And when you do get there, things are expensive and not always of the quality that you would immediately associate with Continental living. One of the main reasons for this is that the French have been seduced by the supermarket to an even greater extent that we in England have. Just like here, the society has been cheapened by the embracing of so called ‘cheap’ food that has gone a long way to wipe out small independent producers so that even in middle sized towns there is very often no way of accessing the produce that is being grown in the fields less than fifty km away. At home, I know the origin of the meat and vegetables I eat and the vast majority of them come from within fifty miles of my house and they have not – as supermarkets dictate – then gone off to Wigan or wherever the central distribution point is. It is hard, if not impossible to do that in France, which would not be so bad if the quality of the produce in the supermarkets was excellent, but it very often isn’t anymore. I remember, in previous trips, being almost overcome by the smell and flavour of the white peaches of Roussillon: they were unlike anything we could hope to encounter in England. Now they are often unripe and often bland. And they are expensive.

Eating out too is not now the virtually guaranteed pleasure that it once was. It, like food shopping, is expensive, quality is unreliable and imagination sadly lacking. The days of each small town having two or three eating places (usually a family run restaurant, a brasserie and maybe somewhere a bit more fancy) that sold good local food at reasonable prices, have gone. Restaurant menus are now routinely 25 Euro a head for distinctly average food: French cooking has lost so much ground over the past ten years or so that the average British pub meal is now often half the price and twice the quality of yet another French offering of ‘steak frites’ with greasy chips and an anonymous piece of meat sourced from somewhere in Holland, or more often these days, Ireland.

Also, the French attitude to food and wine is changing. There is a creeping, insidious Americanisation of attitude that is starting to undermine what used to be a wonderful attitude to the dinner table. The French are turning their backs on their own table wines and are ‘drinking less and drinking better’. They are worrying about making sure they eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day (who the hell came up with that? My generation grew up on less than five portions a week and we seem to be doing ok) and are having to put up with endless messages on every advert telling them to be careful with what they eat instead of just heaving down the fois gras with gay abandon like they used to. President Mitterrand’s last meal was said to be of Ortolan, a tiny bird that is captured alive, force-fed, then drowned in Armagnac before being roasted whole and eaten that way, bones and all, the diner having first draped a linen napkin over his head to hide such an indulgence from God. Now, as shameful as such a meal may be, I can tell you now I am in awe of a country that could come up with such a dish and would certainly want to follow its gastronomic lead rather than go down the path blazed by the nation that brought us the Zinger burger. But it is to America that France continues to look, even if the Americans –as Homer once said – consider them to be nothing more than ‘cheese eating surrender monkeys’.

Can you believe that only 15% of French people aged between 15 and 75 now drink wine every day, with 37% drinking wine only ‘occasionally?’ Now I am prepared to accept that if this means that the lorry drivers are no longer guzzling half a litre with lunch before getting back into their thirty tonne lorries, this is probably a good thing, but that is not really where the reductions are coming from. The French as an entire nation have slowly been lowering their consumption for forty years (it has halved since 1970) and yet the intake of anti-depressants has doubled in the same period. The media and successive governments have done their best to virtually criminalise the daily drinking of wine, despite the fact that the French have always had astonishingly low levels of heart disease despite a somewhat fat rich diet. Part of the decline can be explained by wine no longer being the populist, blue collar ‘everyman’s drink’ but the main reason is that the middle classes have gone into an American style health panic, driven by highly influential anti-alcohol lobbies. The middle classes have been seduced by the ‘it gives you cancer’ argument, wine sales are plummeting and France is becoming the sort of country that only Daily Mail readers would want to live in: a place that embraces blandness because blandness is better than the terror that will be unleashed if we take absolutely any pleasure out of life whatsoever.

And just to make me feel really at home, the traffic was a nightmare. It didn’t use to be, but it is now. Really, a nightmare. On one occasion, I left our accommodation to pick up a pre-ordered pizza (because we couldn’t afford to go out to eat every night) from the place in the local town, about 4km away. It took me half an hour to get back. The traffic was solid, nose to tail, like the M25 on a Friday afternoon. One Sunday we tried to drive to Cap Ferrat for a bit of lunch, but gave up because the queue to get into town was 21 – I repeat, 21 – Km long.

But.

On our last night, we had an excellent picnic supper and then walked out of our apartment, through the garden and straight into the vineyard of Chateau Clarke that was planted right up to the lawn of our chambre d’hote. It was after nine and the sky was a dark blue, flecked with the last bits of pink reflected against a blob or two of cloud. I stood amongst the vines and listened to nothing but the sound of the grapes ripening, the crickets doing their thing and the buzz of a motovelo somewhere in the distance. The air was warm in that evening way that evenings are only ever warm on holiday: fragrant and fresh and clear and still. The street light came on on the telegraph pole on the road up to Listrac adding another layer of light and colour. It was our last night in Moulis en Medoc and the truth was, that despite it all, I didn’t really want to go home. As I looked out, all I could see in three of the four compass points was nothing but vines. Row upon row of vines gently turning from green to black, waiting to be harvested and transformed into great wine, wine that I can still afford even though I have to look harder and dig deeper to find the smaller, better producers. Which is, of course, part of the fun. I walked into the region six years ago with my eyes only on the names I had seen on the price lists of the big importers and in the text books written by American critics, but over the years I have learned that the joy is in keeping your ear to the ground and buying wonderful wine for 6 Euro a bottle made by a man and his wife that will never be sold outside the village limits. They are there. You just have to find them. And they do taste just as good at home.

And we had found one place to go for an excellent lunch: 12 Euro for three courses of well cooked, simple dishes, with wine. So we went for lunch regularly and enjoyed the fact that there was no menu, just a choice of two home cooked dishes at each stage which just goes to show again that you just have to look harder for what was once everywhere. They haven’t completely forgotten how to do it.

And as I stood there and soaked it up I wondered if the problem was just with me and my ageing, jaded eyes but I decided that it didn’t really matter and it didn’t really need thinking about: all I needed to do was stand and listen and watch and enjoy my last moments in a place that is unique on the face of the earth. And I know that everything looks better when viewed through the romantic glasses of a last night on holiday, but it was good enough for me and, much like a successful marriage, despite the niggles and the frustration, I knew that I was still very much in love and I knew that I would be back.

David Izod August 2010