Jonathan Guinness Yoga

Jonathan Guinness Yoga for Health copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2010-(pictured above with his daughter Daphne)

Anyone who practices yoga will know that the headstand is not an easy posture to learn.  Most people are terrified of it, including me (and I’m a qualified yoga teacher.)  So it is with awe that I discover that the man I am chatting to at tea not only does a headstand every morning of his life, but can do one on this very kitchen table, if it is required.  Although he does worry that he might disturb the chocolate cake.

The man is Jonathan Guinness, 3d Baron Moyne, who recently celebrated his eightieth birthday.  Not for a moment would you think he is eighty.  He is handsome, with the brilliant blue eyes of his late mother Diana Mitford, and is possessed of a slim figure, dressed in casually stylish clothes and quite enviable posture.  I find myself flirting with him, and feeling pleased that he is giving more attention to me than to Jerry Hall, who is seated opposite us.

Being endlessly fascinated by people who can keep not only their health and vitality but also their looks, as they age, I interrogate him about his yoga practice.

Never having been athletic, he took up yoga after he and his late partner Shoe were given a free lesson at the Sivananda Centre in London in 1979.

‘We loved a freebie!’ he laughs.

Since then, apart from one brief period when he had Sciatica, he has practiced religiously, every morning immediately upon waking up, while still in his pyjamas.  I ask him how he found the will power to do the daily practice.

He says he simply made up his mind to do it.

‘ I just thought now is the time!  I was about to turn fifty, and I had got to do something to get fit.  I had already taught myself to stand on my head, from a book.’

There are many different styles of yoga, which can be very confusing for people.  Jonathan has tried most of them, including the Ashtanga style favoured by the likes of Madonna and Sting.

‘ I find that the actual format of the Sivananda session is the best.  Although there is a case for saying that Ayengar is more exact. In the year 2000, Shoe came across John Scott, who was a great Ashtanga teacher, so I had a week with him.  It was wonderful, really strenuous.  I incorporated some of it.  But I slipped back to my Sivananda routine pretty soon.’

It is a routine that he seldom varies.

‘I feel that one has to have a routine that incorporates most of the postures.  My favourite one is probably the Downward Dog.  I tend to pause on the Down Dog!’

We agree that people have days when they don’t feel like doing yoga.

‘ Shoe used to do yoga as well, but there were days she didn’t do it. I don’t expect too much of myself, but I do it every day, never leave it out.  I would feel terrible if I didn’t do it at all!’

He claims not to be very disciplined in general.

‘It just is such a good feeling.  I wake up every morning feeling really quite rough.  Then I do that and I am human again.”

He also incorporates breathing exercises and meditation into the daily routine.

‘The meditation techniques work, they really do.  When I do the Bastrika breathing, I suddenly get the feeling that you see in the pictures of yogis with flames coming up through them!”

There have been many noticeable benefits from the practice.

‘There is no question that it does help the circulation.  And above all it helps the mind,  it makes the mind clearer.

There is the same feeling as you have at sea when the waves stop and it becomes like a lake.  It is wonderful.  It is very good for you, I think. And I think compared to a lot of people I am happy.  I don’t get intense feelings of either happiness or depression, I am on a fairly even keel.  I can still have fun at my age, thank goodness!’

He is not sure if he believes, as the yogis do, in re-incarnation.  But he would like to.

‘Oh, I like life!  I don’t want to lose life forever!  So I would come back if I could.  I hope in reasonable shape!’

Has he always been very healthy?

‘I really mustn’t grumble.  I had appendicitis, which did nearly kill me, that was when I was about ten.  Otherwise I have been okay.

But there is a lot more to medicine and health than whether you live or die.  There is whether you are living well, and can get about easily.’

He watches his diet, but not too strictly.

‘Vegetarianism is not my thing, but I try to eat red meat only twice a week, and a fair amount of fish and quite often I will have the vegetarian option on a menu.  I do drink alcohol, but not terribly much.’

Jonathan keeps his mind busy.  He has written three books and is currently working on two more.  He has survived two wives and his late partner, and has fathered eight children.  He gets great pleasure out of his children he tells me.

‘It is so interesting seeing them grow up!  And to see how different they all are!’

He believes that yoga helps with relationships, as well as with the body.

‘I think that yoga practice helps one not to expect too much.  If you expect too much, you are not going to get it.  And somehow, if you can float off and meditate a bit, or do the postures, you get things into perspective.’

I ask if he would recommend yoga?

‘I would recommend it to anyone.  I would say to people just have a go, even if you think you wont be any good.

People like to be good at things.  But yoga is not competitive.  Don’t think about whether you are any good or not.  Set that competition aside for a bit, and take a rest from it!’

My Adventures with Kurt and Courtney

 

 

 

This is the story of my adventures with Kurt and Courtney.  I learned something very important from this adventure, which was that no matter how justified you feel in holding a grudge against someone, it really feels better to let it go.  I also learned that writing biographies about people without their consent is upsetting for the people concerned.  I apologise wholeheartedly and unreservedly for any hurt I caused to Kurt, Courtney and Frances Bean.

Kurt and Courtney copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2011

 

Kurt Cobain is threatening to have me killed.

 

‘If anything comes out in this book that hurts my wife I’ll f***ing hurt you.  I don’t care if this is a recorded threat.  I’m at the end of my ropes…..I’ve never been more f***ing serious in my life.’

 

Kurt is speaking to my message minder.  When I don’t pick up the phone, he keeps calling back.

 

‘C’mon, pick up the phone,’ he says.  ‘Pick up the phone…..At this point I don’t give a flying f*** if I have this recorded that I’m threatening you. I suppose I could throw out a few thousand dollars to have you snuffed out.  But maybe I’ll try it the legal way first.’

 

The year is 1992, it’s late October and the setting is my rented flat in Seattle, Washington where I have been living while researching a book about Nirvana.  I am alone in the flat, and all night long Kurt and his wife Courtney Love have been calling me.  Because I have not been picking up my phone, they have both been leaving messages.  Courtney’s have been just as intimidating as Kurt’s.

 

‘We will use every dollar we have and every bit of our power to basically f*** you up,’ she tells me.  ‘You are going to pay and pay and pay out of your ass.  By the time we have finished with you, you will wish you had never been born!’

 

After I listen to the entire tape, which is thirty minutes long, I am shaking and feeling physically sick.

 

Every part of me senses that Kurt is not kidding, he really is serious.  A suspicion that will be born out a few years later when he actually kills himself.

 

I am not exactly sure what to do, but I know that I need to do something, so I call the Seattle police and explain to them that I am scared.  They send someone to take a statement, but they also tell me that there is nothing they can do, unless someone actually attacks me.  Verbal threats on an answer-phone don’t qualify for a restraining order.  So I decide to pack my bags and leave Seattle.

 

It wasn’t meant to be this way.  Being asked to write a book about Nirvana had been the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, in my career as a writer, it had been a dream come true.

 

Twenty years ago this week, in September 1991, I had just started out in journalism, and was writing for ‘Lime Lizard’, a London based independent music magazine,  when Britt Collins, my editor played me ‘Nevermind’, Nirvana’s second album, which had just been released.

 

Britt had been a Nirvana fan for a number of years, and one of the first people to put them on a magazine cover.  ‘They are going to be huge,’ she had assured me.  She was right.  By January 11 the following year, ‘Nevermind’ went to number one in the Billboard 200 charts.  It has since sold over 26 million copies worldwide. (according to the Financial Times)

 

‘We should write a book about them,’ Britt had suggested.  Loving their music, and loving the idea, I immediately agreed.

 

At first, everything seemed to go swimmingly.  The very first agent that we approached was AP Watt, one of the oldest in the UK, and they signed us up straight away.  Britt was friendly with Nirvana’s publicist Anton Brooks, who put us in touch with their manager John Silva.  We had dinner with John, and he liked our idea. Very soon there was a bidding war for our book.  We signed contracts with Hyperion in the US, and Boxtree in Britain and pretty soon we had actual cash in our hands and we were ready to roll.

 

I was given ‘Access All Areas’ passes for Nirvana’s  European tour in June 1992.  It was decided that I should be the one to go on the tour, while Britt went to Seattle to research the ‘grunge’ scene there.  I joined the band in Dublin, and traveled with them to Belfast, Paris and Denmark.

 

I have spent a great deal of my life touring with bands.  My partner Shane Mac Gowan is the lead singer with The Pogues, and because of his job, we have spent a lot of time hanging out with bands, including U2 and the Rolling Stones.  But Nirvana were different, for several reasons.  For one thing, they were extremely relaxed and friendly, much more so than any other band I had met.  Most lead singers (especially Shane) would not allow journalists free access to their dressing-rooms.   But Kurt was always polite and charming to me, he even asked me if I would swap shirts with him one night when he came off stage, but regrettably I did not keep his sweaty t-shirt!  They were also the best live band that I had ever seen, all of which meant that going on tour with them was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. Which made what happened next all the more horrible.

 

One afternoon at Rosskilde in Denmark, I was wandering around the backstage area, when I bumped into Courtney Love.  We had not spoken much, but I had introduced myself earlier in the tour and she had been friendly.  She had previously starred in a film with Shane and The Pogues called ‘Straight to Hell’ and had got on well with some of the band.

 

Because we had decided to include Courtney in our book, I asked her if she would mind doing an interview with me.  She said she would be happy to do one.  But Kurt was not at all happy with this idea.  Later that same day, I was approached by Janet Billig, the band’s American publicist who told me that the band would prefer if I left the tour immediately.  I was devastated.  I actually broke down in tears.  I simply could not understand what I had done wrong.  Kurt, it was explained to me, was not happy that I had asked Courtney for an interview.  That was the reason.  I was not to know at the time that Courtney would appear in the September issue of ‘Vanity Fair’ and that the article would quote her as saying that she had used drugs while pregnant with Frances Bean, the couple’s child.  And that this would lead to a whole heap of trouble.

 

Britt and I explained to Nirvana’s management that we had no choice but to continue with our book, but that as fans of the band we would prefer to maintain a good relationship with them.  At this stage, there was no animosity between us.  It was explained to me that while they understood this, they no longer felt comfortable having a journalist at such close quarters.  And so I traveled to Seattle, to research their background.

 

In Seattle, I stayed with Charles Peterson who was a very old friend of the band, and he took me around and introduced me to all the people who were relevant to the story.  I began interviewing people about the band.

 

Everyone that I spoke to in Seattle said pretty much the same things, and confirmed what I had already discovered.  Which was that Nirvana were a really nice, friendly, genuine bunch of guys.  Apart from that, people didn’t have a lot to say.  What most people wanted to do was talk about Courtney.  And the things that they said about her were not positive.  I have to confess that although I am not proud of it,  I rather enjoyed the bitching because it made for a more interesting story.

 

While I was in Seattle, Britt was basing herself in LA, and while she was there, she interviewed a man called James Moreland, who had been Courtney’s previous husband.  Like a lot of people, he had some negative things to say about Courtney, but they were not serious allegations.  They mainly concerned her treatment of his puppies and her taste in music.  At this point, none of the material that Britt and I had gathered could in any way have threatened Kurt or Courtney.

 

Then overnight, everything changed.  The September issue of ‘Vanity Fair’ appeared, with Courtney on the cover and in an interview with Lyn Hirschberg, she was quoted as saying that she had used Class A drugs, while pregnant.  In the state of California it is a criminal offense to knowingly take drugs while pregnant and if proven, it can result in a child being removed from the parents. There was an immediate backlash against Courtney in the US media, and while she denied the story, Lyn Hirschberg stood by it and claimed to have tapes to prove it.  Intrigued, Britt interviewed Lyn Hirschberg who claimed to have been subjected to verbal abuse and harassment by Courtney, as a result of the interview.

 

Somehow, Courtney discovered that Britt had spoken to Lyn Hirschberg, and there was an immediate backlash against us and our book.  I arrived at a Nirvana show in Seattle later in the month, and was told that I had been barred from all of their gigs.  Charles, the photographer with whom I had been staying withdrew his permission for us to use his photos, which had been an integral part of the book.  Friends of the band who had not hesitated to tell me how much they disliked Courtney now told me that they could no longer speak to me.  Then, on the night of October 22, while I was in bed with the flu, Courtney called me.  I heard the phone ring, but switched it to silent.  In the morning, the answer machine tape was full and there was thirty minutes of messages from both Kurt and Courtney, which is where I began this story.

 

After I left Seattle, I wanted to call Kurt and see if the situation could be sorted out.  I knew that he was furious, but I still liked him and respected him.  Having discussed the matter with our agent, Britt and I were advised not to speak to Kurt and Courtney.  Instead, we made a decision which further inflamed the situation.  We gave the answer machine tape to Entertainment Weekly magazine and they printed the transcript in full, across two pages.  The story was picked up by the LA Times, the New York Times and most of the British and Irish papers.  If this book ever came out, it would already be world famous.

 

At this point we still had not yet begun actually writing the book, and to be honest, if we had not been obligated to our publishers, I would have moved back to London and abandoned the project.  It had never been my intention to write a muck-raking book.  I felt totally out of my depth.   Then things got worse.

 

One night, to cheer ourselves up, Britt and I went to see a band at a club called Raji’s in Hollywood where we lived.  We got chatting to two members of Courtney’s band Hole, and then just as I had taken a seat, I spotted Kurt and Courtney come in.  At first, they did not see me, and I hoped they wouldn’t.  But then I felt a sharp bang on my head, liquid poured down my face and I found myself on the floor, with Courtney grabbing me by the hair.  She proceeded to drag me along the floor, while Kurt stood and watched.  All the while she told me she was going to get me outside.  I screamed for help, and a bouncer managed to rescue me.  After Kurt and Courtney had left, several people came over and suggested that I call the police, and take witness statements.

 

I was not seriously injured, mainly shocked and bruised, but I saw a doctor at Cedars Sinai and I duly reported the incident to the LAPD.  In the morning, I received a call from the police informing me that Courtney had also reported the incident, claiming that I had attacked her.  We both had to go to court the following February, for the preliminary hearing.

 

I was represented by Axl Rose’s lawyer Albert Dworkin who played the answer phone tape to the judge.  Courtney admitted that it was her voice on the tape but claimed to have intended no malice.  Kurt did not appear in court.  The case was adjourned, and after a month it was dropped.  I was told by my lawyer that the judge had not thought it serious enough for a criminal prosecution.  I could not possibly afford a civil suit, so I gave up on it.

 

Britt and I went back to London, where we discovered that our UK publishers had decided not to go ahead with publishing the book, after having been threatened with law suits by Nirvana’s lawyers.  Our US publishers also decided not to go ahead with the book.  A fax had been circulated from Nirvana’s management to the media warning people not to have anything to do with me or Britt, as we were ‘groupies who had offered bribes and sexual favours to interviewees in exchange for information.’  Which was definitely not true!

 

We managed to find an Irish publisher who was not intimidated, but he was found dead, before he could publish the book.  At that point we gave up and turned our attention to other projects.

 

On 8 April, 1994 Kurt killed himself at his home in Seattle.  Britt and I were horrified.  In spite of the way he behaved towards us, I had always felt sorry for him.  I had felt that he was a sweet, gentle and sensitive soul, under enormous stresses and strains.  And when he had threatened me, I believed that he had genuinely been terrified for his wife and child.

 

Later, Courtney was arrested several times on different charges of assault.  (See attached notes)

 

Over the years that followed, I only saw Courtney Love once, at a Vintage Couture show at the Victoria And Albert museum.  She did not speak to me, but she gave me a look which suggested that she had not forgiven me.  The other day, I noticed that she was in the front row at Ali Hewson’s fashion show in New York. I felt angry, but I was not sure why.  And then, this morning, for the first time in at least fifteen years, I listened to the tape.  And I felt all of the fear and anger and resentment coming back.  I had to stop the tape half way through, I couldn’t bear to listen to it. But revisiting the incident made me question myself.  Because it was not just anger that I felt, it was also guilt.  What might I have felt, what might I have done, had I been in the situation that Kurt and Courtney were in?

 

Recently, Shane and I were sent a manuscript of a new Pogues biography.  It was deeply unflattering, about both of us.  After reading it, I was upset and angry for several days.  Just the very thought that someone is scrutinizing your life and writing about you can be hurtful.  I wondered what it must have been like for Kurt and Courtney, knowing that Britt and I could have been writing something that would affect their child, as well as them?  Would I have been angry enough in their position to threaten the writers?  Quite possibly!

 

For the rest of the day, after I listened to the tape I felt depressed.  My heart hurt.  And then, all of a sudden,  I realized why.  For nearly twenty years, I have been feeling angry, feeling hurt, feeling victimized, as a result of this experience.  What might it be like, I asked myself, if I were to just let go of it?  What might it be like if I were to forgive Kurt and Courtney completely, and to accept that they were doing the best they could, given the situation they were in?  All of a sudden, the pain in my chest began to dissipate.  I  began to feel lighter.  I began to feel peaceful.  And I began to feel love for both Kurt and Courtney.  Feeling love was lovely.  Forgiveness is a much nicer feeling than resentment.  I am only sorry it took such a long time for me to realize it.

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Sammy and Antonia Leslie

This is a piece I did for The Guardian Family section about Sammy and Antonia Leslie and their extraordinary parents

Antonia and Samantha Leslie for Guardian Family Section copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2009

When Antonia Leslie was a little girl, she was well aware that her father had mistresses.

It wasn’t that Agnes, Antonia’s mother liked the idea of a man having mistresses.  Indeed, she was a passionate woman who complained angrily and often about the situation.  It was just that she had grown up with the belief that all intelligent and interesting men would inevitably want more than one woman.  Agnes’s own mother had been a young governess in Berlin, who had fallen for her boss, a leading theatrical impresario.  After his wife died, he married the governess, but continued to have a string of young mistresses and this had been accepted as his right.

Agnes Bernelle had been born in Berlin, but being Jewish had escaped to London during the war, to avoid Nazi persecution. If you look at the Leslie family album, you can see that Agnes resembled the young Ava Gardner when she met Desmond Leslie at a cocktail party in London.  Desmond, in the family photos, also appears to have been an extra-ordinarily handsome man.  Indeed, as I look at the pictures with Antonia I am aware that we are both drooling.  It is strange, Antonia admits, to fancy your father, but it is understandable.  Desmond came from an aristocratic Irish family and was an RAF Spitfire pilot.

Agnes was working in counter-intelligence, broadcasting a fake radio show to the Nazis, when they met.  By all accounts they made a glamorous and exciting couple who both attracted plenty of attention from other men and women.    Even their wedding was exceptional, partly because Desmond was a first cousin of Winston Churchill, and Churchill can be seen waving to the enormous, cheering crowds from the balcony of a London hotel, after the ceremony.  The Leslie children, when they saw the film footage of the event were convinced that all the VE Day celebrations were in honour of their parents.

After the war, Agnes became an actress.  She also sang, performing her first Brechtian cabaret in the Establishment club.  When Bernard Levin criticised her, Desmond famously got on ‘That Was The Week That Was’ and punched him, live on television.

Desmond might have been madly in love with his wife. But Agnes never expected fidelity.  From the start, her husband would disappear for days on end with other women.  Sometimes he would even do this while the couple were on holidays,  leaving her in the hotel.

‘Once, when he did that,’ Antonia says ‘Mum had to stay in the hotel for a month, because she couldn’t afford to pay the bill.’

But this kind of situation, which might have been hopeless for another woman, was turned into the stuff of drama by Agnes.

‘In Monte Carlo, when Desmond abandoned her, she met King Farouk of Egypt’ Antonia tells me.  ‘She was wearing a diamond brooch, but most of the diamonds had fallen out.  King Farouk said to her ‘You have no diamonds in your brooch.’  She said ‘If every lover I have in my life were to give me one diamond, by the end of my life it would be full.’

And so, according to Agnes, King Farouk took the brooch, and arrived back later with it full of diamonds.

Agnes had plenty of admirers.

‘I know, because she would tell me about them.  She was very friendly with Claus Von Bulow, and I suspect she had an affair with him!”

Her mother may have had other relationships, her ‘good friends,’ she used to call them, but she was not happy in her ‘open marriage.’  And things came to a head when Desmond met and fell in love with a woman called Helen.

‘Desmond was on holidays with his long term mistress Sally when he met Helen,’ Antonia says.

‘Helen just walked into the room and fell madly in love with him instantly.  She asked her friends who he was and she was told to back off, because he already had a two thousand volt wife and a very exotic mistress!’

But that was a challenge for Helen.  And pretty soon she was not only Desmond’s lover, but also Agnes’s friend.  Antonia is convinced that Agnes never suspected what was happening.

‘She truly did not believe that Helen was his type,’ she claims.

In 1964 Desmond inherited Castle Leslie, the family seat in Ireland, and wanted to go and live there.  Agnes had just started a career as an actress, and was reluctant to leave London immediately.  He suggested that he take their mutual friend Helen, for company, until she was ready, and Agnes agreed.  Six months later, when she decided to bring the three children and move to Ireland, Desmond simply moved Helen to a flat in Dublin and carried on his relationship with her. Helen got pregnant, and had two children by Desmond, first Samantha and then Camilla.

Antonia knew that she had two older brothers, Sean and Mark.   But she did not know that she also had these two little sisters.

One day, when Antonia was about four year’s old, Agnes decided to see a fortune-teller.  She had discovered the affair, and she had decided that she wanted Desmond to make up his mind and choose between herself and Helen, who he was openly visiting at her flat in Dublin. It was one thing to have a mistress, but quite another to have a separate family.

She took Antonia with her, and told her to wait in the corner of the room, while the fortune-teller decided if Desmond would choose her or Helen.

As Agnes spoke of her situation, she happened to mention that her husband’s mistress had two daughters.

‘Oh yes, two little girls.  I can see them now,’ said the fortune-teller, gazing into her crystal ball.

‘Where?  Where are they?  Let me see them!”  Antonia rushed over to the crystal ball to get a glimpse of her little sisters.  And was hugely disappointed not to see anything at all, except her own reflection looking back.

‘It was the first time that I had heard that I had two sisters,’ she says.  ‘I was really excited and curious.  But now, looking back, I think how inappropriate!  To have your four year old find out like that!’

Upon the advice of the fortune-teller, Agnes attempted an ultimatum.  She took the children and moved back to London.  It seemed to work.   Desmond announced that he had made up his mind.  He wanted Agnes, and he would stop seeing Helen.  So she came back.  But she told him ‘If I come back, I am never leaving again.  So make your mind up, it’s Helen or me.’

A few weeks after her return, Desmond said he had changed his mind and he wanted her to leave, after all.

‘Never!’ Agnes told him.  ‘You can leave.  I am never leaving this castle, this is my home.’

A difficult situation ensued.  Desmond attempted to force Agnes out.  He hired the castle out for a month, as a corporate let.

‘We had to live in a little flat on the top floor and go up and down the back stairs to school, pretending we didn’t exist,’ Antonia remembers.  ‘But that didn’t work.  So Dad sent us on a holiday and when we came back he had changed all the locks and had been to Mexico and gotten a divorce, and married Helen totally illegally.’

When they returned from the holiday and got out of the car,  Agnes tried unsuccessfully to open the front door.

‘ Mark, my brother was there and Sean.  Mark was sixteen and Sean was about twenty, and they all tried the key.  Then they knocked on the door.  An American cousin of Dad’s came to the door and said ‘You don’t live here anymore, Agnes.  Desmond has given the place to me.’  Desmond himself did not appear.

As a small child, Antonia’s reaction to this situation was not one of anger, it was one of shame.

‘I felt that I had been thrown away.  I felt ashamed of myself.  My father didn’t want me.  I just remember the shame and the feel of the gravel under my feet, as I scrunched my toes.’

There followed six months of moving around, staying with different friends and relatives, including Desmond’s sister.

‘I really have very little memory of that time,’ Antonia says.  ‘Because of that, I know it was a very painful time.  There are six months that I can’t remember, except for the shame.’

Instead of returning to London, Agnes got a council house in the village of Glaslough, next to the castle.

‘I think she wanted to be near him to piss him off and make him feel bad,’ Antonia says.  ‘I used to hear his car driving through the village, it had a unique sound, and when I heard it, I would hide because I was so horrified that I was still there.  I felt that I had no right to be there and that if he saw me, it would be even more shameful.’

Agnes, being an actress was dramatic about her feelings.

‘She cried all over the place, and I minded her, so I never showed my own feelings.  I didn’t want to burden her with my pain, when she was dealing with her own.’

In spite of the situation, Antonia remembers having had a real yearning to meet her sisters.

‘At a distance one day, I saw the girls.  I saw Sammy walking along with my dolls pram.  And I thought ‘Oh, that used to be my dolls pram!”

She claims that there were no feelings of anger or resentment, however.

‘ I never felt that I had been replaced by these girls, in my mind I had been replaced by Helen.’

A friend of Antonia’s was also friendly with Samantha, who was by now four, and was attending the village school.

‘ Carina took me to the village school for a day, and I was so excited because I knew that Sammy went to the village school. And as promised, she walked through the door, and Carina called her to sit beside us and whispered in her ear ‘That’s your sister’.  Sam took it so calmly, even though no-one had told her!  We waited for the break and then we ran straight into the yard and I said ‘I’m Antonia Leslie’ and she said ‘I’m Sammy Leslie!”  And we grabbed each other’s hands and we wouldn’t let go.’

After school, Antonia took Samantha home with her.

‘ I didn’t want to let go of her.  So I arrived back at the cottage and said to my mum ‘Look!  I have Sammy my sister!’  And we played all afternoon.’

Agnes hadn’t spoken to Desmond or Helen since the break-up.  But a call came from Desmond, saying that Sammy was missing.  The conversation was frosty, but civil.

The next day Antonia was allowed to go to the castle to play with her sisters.  She was shown her own bedroom, which was now Sammy’s bedroom, and her own toys.

‘She had no idea that I had ever lived there, and I never said a word,’ Antonia says, when I ask why she didn’t protest.  ‘I didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable, or ruin her illusion.  I absolutely fell in love with her.  I don’t know what a psychologist would make of it!  But my brothers were grown up, so I had always been a lonely child.  And I think that little girls always want sisters.  And now I had two!’

Helen warmed to Antonia immediately.

‘I thought Helen was fabulous, and she was lovely to me.  But she would tell people that every time she drove past my mother  her hands would shake so badly she nearly went off the road!”

Agnes did not immediately forgive Helen, and would refer to her only as ‘That woman’.  But Antonia and her father resumed their relationship where they had left off, without ever mentioning his having evicted her from her own home.

‘I was always trying to please him.  I went over the top with love and adoration for him to try to win back his affection.  And he did the same to me.  We over compensated.’

Much later, when Antonia was twenty four, she broached the subject of the rejection.

‘I was drinking an awful lot and having issues with my boy friend at the time and he told me that I needed to have it out with my father, rather than punishing him.  So I grabbed the phone and rang him, and screamed at him, and really let him know how badly he had hurt me.’

Desmond admitted that he had messed up.

‘He told me that he used to drive past the cottage and want to run in and grab me, but he thought it was better to leave me alone.’

His apology was a crucial point in her relationship with her father.

‘That allowed me to move on.  And we had a great relationship after that.’

Agnes moved to Dublin and opened a boutique.  While she was there she met a man called Maurice Craig, and fell in love with him.  There followed a reconciliation with Helen.

‘It happened one day in the street, as Helen was dropping me off.  She just saw Agnes and said ‘Hello Aggie.’  And my mother said ‘Hello Helen.’  And that was it.  She was happy with Maurice, who turned out to be the love of her life, and Dad had bought her a house.  She forgave them both, and eventually they got to the stage where Dad and Helen would come and stay with us in Dublin, and even go on holidays with us.  It was wonderful to see my mum and dad in the same room, speaking normally!”

Antonia says that her relationships with men have definitely been affected by her relationship with her father.

‘I have always fallen in love with charming, fabulous, womanising men!  But I think history repeats itself, because I later found out that Desmond’s mother had left his father for a time, because of his womanising.  And when that happened, Desmond had been abandoned by his nanny, who was left behind. So he was traumatised, because she was the parent figure for him, as a child.  They eventually got the nanny back, but it must have been too late.’

Our conversation today is taking place in Dublin where Antonia lives with her daughter Lola, and works as a journalist.  We are joined by Sammy who lives in Castle Leslie, and has turned it into a highly popular hotel, which hosted Paul Mc Cartney’s wedding to Heather Mills.  Both women have been married, and are now divorced and happily single.  They are also still extremely close.

Sammy remembers having a good relationship with Desmond, as a child, in spite of the fact that he didn’t live with her mother.  Neither did she.

‘We lived in a little flat, Nanny and me and Mummy lived next door.  It was very civilised!  Dad would come and see us.’

Her memories of him are of laughing and playing games and having fun, and she was always aware of him as ‘Dad’.

She tells her mother’s version of how she met Desmond in almost exactly the same way as Antonia tells hers.

‘She was at a cocktail party when she spotted him.  But she was warned that he had a thousand volt mistress and a ten thousand volt wife!’

Sammy believes that she and Camilla were the luckier of the children, having grown up blissfully unaware of any conflict.

‘We moved into the castle, which was wonderful and then I met Antonia at school, which was very exciting.  The great thing about being a kid is that you are very accepting of situations.’

‘Children live in the now,’ Antonia adds.

‘It is only when you get older and start having your own relationships that you realise how difficult it must have been for your parents,’ Sammy says.  ‘But in those days people had no emotional vocabulary.  No ability to separate the hurt and the emotions from what is happening.’

Sammy insists that she always felt absolutely secure in her relationship with her parents.

‘Mum and Dad were there and that was it.’

‘We knew we were loved,’ Antonia interjects.  ‘Except for me, for that one year.  I doubted it for that time.  And that has left scars.  But there were incredibly good times!’

I ask the sisters if they ever resented each other, even for a moment.

‘No.  Never!’

‘I don’t think we have ever had a fight or even shouted at each other.’

‘But we didn’t live together, so our time together was precious’, Antonia says.

They later discovered that Desmond had fathered another sister, Wendy for them, in New York, early in his marriage to Agnes. ‘It is a family joke, is there another one out there!’ Sammy laughs.

‘He was a big shag-a-bout,’ Antonia says.  ‘With a great sex drive, and not ashamed of it.  I remember when I was ten, he told me about a threesome that he had.  I didn’t even know what a threesome was!”

Both sisters laugh uproariously at this idea.

‘He had a healthy appetite!”  Sammy says.

Did Desmond’s relationships affect their view of men?  I ask.

‘I set my standards very high, as to what I would like in a man,’ Sammy says.  ‘I would love a house-trained version of Dad.’

As in monogamous?

‘Monogamous, but witty, charming, sexy, slightly off the wall.’

‘Have you ever met a man that matched that description?’

‘Nah.’  She laughs.

I ask Antonia about her situation.

‘The last thing I want at the moment is a relationship!’ she says.  ‘The thought of having to wake up every day with someone there!  But as I say, I have always fallen in love with very complicated guys with loads of baggage.  It is emotionally very draining for me, and at this point I haven’t got the energy!”

Desmond had been told by a psychic that when he was dying, all of his six children would be with him.

‘There had never been a time when all six of us were in the same room,’ Sammy says.  ‘But when Desmond was dying, the entire family got together to be with him, including Wendy, who just happened to have come over from America on holidays.

‘We all spent his last day with him.  And then we spent a week together, the whole family.  There was an incredible bonding.’

Sammy had a vision of Desmond, just after he died.

‘He was standing at the door of the restaurant where we had all gathered, in his RAF uniform.  Looking gorgeous.’  She begins to cry, as she tells the story.

‘I’ll make you laugh,’ Antonia says.  ‘Do you remember when we had to carry his body up the mountain to the church, wrapped in a bin liner, because we didn’t have a coffin?  And we were cracking up, laughing.  They must have thought we were the most awful girls!’

‘Awful!’ Sammy agrees.

Shane Mac Gowan in Malta

This is a piece I wrote a few years ago, when Shane and I went to Malta on holidays.  We were separated at the time, but got back together some time after this holiday.  Which makes it weird for me to read.

Shane interview copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2004

‘I’d like to f**k Brad Pitt,’ Shane says.

‘Would you?  That’s weird.  I’d like to be Brad Pitt,’  I confess. We are lying on the red sand at Ramla Bay, on the island of Gozo, which is the spot where Ulysses was shipwrecked, on his was home from Troy.  Ulysses was seduced by the nymphette Calypso, who enticed him with the promise of eternal life.  We, on the other hand have been seduced by the beauty of Brad Pitt, with his magnificent muscles.  Both of us.

Shane has just been badly beaten up in a bar in London and he has asked me to come on holidays with him, so that he can recuperate.  I knew that there was an Ayurvedic Spa here on Gozo so I suggested we try it, and he agreed.  If I had suggested Chzekslovakia, he says, he would have had reservations.  No pun intended.

There is a prayer that they give you to say, at Alcoholics Anonymous.  ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.’  Shane and I are standing at the check in desk for Air Malta, at six in the morning, waiting for the rep to show up with our tickets.  I hate airports, I hate waiting, I hate flying and I hate being anywhere at six in the morning.  But most of all, I hate being stared at.  Shane is wearing a filthy suit covered in ash, and a pair of gold-rimmed Elvis-in-Vegas shades and he’s fumbling in the brown paper bag that is serving as his suitcase.  People are staring.

I’m paranoid at the best of times, but just because you’re paranoid….  I know it’s ridiculous to care if people stare, I know they might just be thinking what a lovely songwriter he is, but I can’t help worrying that they are thinking what a mess he looks and as always, I’m worrying that it’s me they are accusing, me that’s responsible.

The staring, whether well intentioned or not is one of the things only God can change, but I am not serene about it.  When the rep arrives, I bite his head off.  He says ‘Don’t worry’, in a breezy manner.  I say ‘I’m not apologising, I’m complaining’ in a most un-breezy manner.  Shane helpfully offers to have him sacked by his friends in high places.

In the duty free, I make Shane buy a carry-on trolley thing instead of the paper bag and I refuse to let him go to the bar.  And I wonder what the hell I’m doing here.  After all, we lived together for fifteen years, I should have the sense by now, to know what I’m letting myself in for.

But something makes me want to do this.  Something very big.  Shane and I ended our relationship as romantic partners, three years ago.  But relationships don’t end, surely, if they ever meant something?  All this week, I have been reading about celebrity couples getting divorced and wives demanding millions in alimony.   Sadie Frost was photographed looking triumphant, alongside an article about how she will claim the house, several  million and a monthly income that Fergie couldn’t have sniffed at.  Divorce can be a profitable business.  But is it ever worth it, if it means the end of friendship?

I suspect that as breaking up is always hard to do,  those couples who insist that the split was amicable are lying. But what makes it hardest is the loss of a best friend, a companion, a life partner.  Someone you can be yourself with and still be loved, someone you can say anything to.  Even that you want to be Brad Pitt.

It’s been nearly three years for me, but I still miss Shane and he still misses me.  We have stayed friends, of course.  And we go out, occasionally.  But the cosy domesticity of staying in, eating pizza and watching telly is what people miss, after a long relationship, not the going out.  You can go out with anyone, but you need to be very comfortable with someone to slob out together at home.

When you leave your lover, you have to think about the bad things.  You have to think about your differences, what drove you apart.  You can’t afford to reminisce, romantically.  Traditionally, couples avoid each other after they break up, even if only one person wanted the thing to end.  There is a belief that you have to get rid of one relationship in order to make room for the next one.  As if there is only room for one love at a time.  But shutting out the bad means shutting out a whole relationship, the good as well as the bad.  Throwing out the proverbial baby.  And having come to realise this, I was determined to spend some time with Shane, in order that we might salvage not just occasional companionship, but also the love that I know we once had.  However difficult that might be, and however much I might wish to draw a line under the bad times.

My editor suggested that I take this opportunity to interview Shane.  I wondered if it was a good idea.  After all, we broke up straight after my book ‘A Drink With Shane’ was published.  And if it is a strange thing to interview your lover it is an even stranger thing to interview your ex-lover. But I knew that other people have trouble with accepting the things they cannot change.  And other people miss the person they were once in love with.  And apart from all that, I knew that an interview with Shane would be entertaining.  So I agreed.

There followed a grim flight and a misunderstanding at the airport in Malta, when Shane went through passport control without me, and I  waited for half an hour outside the gents loo.  And our taxi driver refused to stop so that I could get a drink of water, insisting that it was only a forty five minute taxi ride.  I was parched and fuming, when we eventually arrived at the Kempinski, which according to the reviews is a very nice hotel.

We had actually been advised by our travel agent to rent a farmhouse, with a pool, for the sake of privacy.  But I needed one night of luxury and an Ayurvedic massage, to chill me out after the journey. At the hotel, a nice Indian girl dripped warm oil all over my head until I calmed down, and Shane headed for the bar, not bothered about seeing his room, first.  I knew it was a good hotel because the next morning, when he was still asleep in the bar, they were utterly charming about it.  So we decided f**k the farmhouse, we’ll just stay here.

In the course of the next few days, we compromised.  I persuaded Shane to have a bath, and buy new clothes.  He asked me what improvements I was going to make to myself.  I didn’t know.  The Dalai Lama would have been gracious and accepted him the way he was, but I’m not the Dalai Lama.

Shane has always been deeply spiritual, and as we speak, he is adorned with enough crucifixes, miraculous medals and other talismans to ward off even the most pernicious of evil spirits.  If he hadn’t been a singer, he may well have become a Catholic priest.  And he would have been extremely good at it.  This year, it turns out, he has been asked to write a song for when the Dalai Lama comes to Scotland to see Glasgow Celtic. And having had a few days to read all the guide books and sit around doing nothing, he was in the mood to be interviewed, so we brought out the tape recorder and he talked about it.

‘I don’t know if I will sing for him,’ he said.  ‘But there will be a Tibetan orchestra coming over, and proper people who can go OHHHHMMMMM.  It’s quite wild for me.’

‘Why is the Dalai Lama going to Scotland?  I asked, bemused.

‘What does the Celtic football team have to do with the Dalai Lama?’

‘We are Catholics and we are warriors and we have an oppressive force driving us out of our own country,’ Shane responded, heading off on a bit of a tangent, as he sometimes does.  ‘That’s what he’s got in common with the Irish, the fact that he comes from a wonderful, beautiful Garden of Eden which his place was until imperialism struck.’

‘Yes,’ I said.  ‘But what has he got to do with football?’

‘He’s got nothing to do with football, but that’s what people do, they go to football matches.  The matches between Rangers and Celtic are where the politics are acted out and the Dalai Lama can explain to these eejits that there is one God governing all men.  And he is a manifestation of that God, because he is a reincarnation of Buddha.  Buddha said we will all be reincarnated, but he didn’t make any rules about it.’

Shane is looking forward to meeting the great man, naturally.

‘Of course I’m enthralled. I really miss having a spiritual life, but I don’t really get it together on my own.’

 

And when he’s finished writing the Dalai Lama song, he’s been asked to do a Rock School on television.  Teaching children to play music is, he says, a dream come true and he reminds me that he taught a teenage drug addict to play guitar, when he was in the loony bin, at the age of eighteen.

Apart from that, he says, he has romantic ideas about trying to start a herd of wild horses, on his farm in Tipperary.

‘And I would like to get a camper van and travel.  Anywhere.’

‘But you have been around the world several times,’ I point out.

‘Yes, but I was touring most of the time.  And I haven’t even seen all of Ireland.  But I don’t feel at home in Ireland anymore, I don’t feel at home anywhere.  I think I was born to travel.  Some people are born to travel.  And wherever you are, is a little bit of Ireland, like Rupert Brooke said about England, just before he was killed.  He said ‘If I am to lie, a rotting corpse in a Flanders field, it will mean that there is always a spot that is always England.’

At this point, Shane starts to cry.  I suggest we postpone the interview, being less comfortable with people crying than he is.  But he insists that he’s just getting warmed up.

‘Rupert Brooke would have turned out to be as brilliant as Kavanagh, had he lived,’ he says.  ‘He had that ultra romantic view of the land.’

Shane has always been a romantic, and we get onto Kavanagh, for quite some time.  He shows me pictures of the dark haired girl that inspired ‘Raglan Road’, from a biography of the poet.  Along with this book, he has a stack of others, practically a suitcase full, including biographies of Gerry Adams, Che Guevara and Robert Emmet.  He’s also obsessed with Hemingway, at the moment.

‘Hemingway blew his brains out on his sixtieth birthday, after getting his last blow job,’ he informs me.

Why?

‘Because he didn’t want to get any older.  If you feel you’ve come to that point, it could be a good idea, but I have no intention of coming to that point at sixty.  But then again, I haven’t fought as many lions or f**ked as many Arabs as Hemingway did and I wasn’t a medic in the first world war.  I think he thought there weren’t any more kicks to be had, he had done it all.  So on his sixtieth birthday, drunk, he blew his brains out with his family downstairs.’

‘Did they not mind?’ I ask, concerned.

‘Of course they minded!  But if he had left it twenty years later, he would have been hooked up to horrific devices, in a hospital and it would have been worse.’

For Shane there is no danger of taking the Hemingway route, at this stage.

‘ Jesus, I’ve only just got going,’ he says, indignantly, when I ask him about the possibility.  ‘I’ve got the whole world to cover.’

‘Which bits?’

‘Well, strangely enough, all the bits Joey likes, I hate,’ he says.  Joey is his manager, Joey Cashman.  ‘But then, he’s a Cancer and I’m a Capricorn, so we get on, but we have massive differences of opinion about everything.  Joey is a pessimist, I’m an optimist.  Joey is cynical, I’m not.  Joey is lonely and I am too.  Joey is a funny guy and so am I.  So it’s bad and good.  Ha ha ha ha ha……’

He and Joey are seldom seen apart.  Joey shared a flat with us in London, for a while.  Will you stay together until you are old men?  I ask.

‘No, I’ve got to get him a woman.  Women love him, but he can’t handle monogamy.  He won’t commit.  I had a lot of trouble with it, myself, but now I see the beauty and the sense in it.’

‘A lot of men won’t commit,’ I say.

‘Yes, but Joey isn’t any man, he’s a great man.  He’s an imaginative man.  A man who understands things that most men don’t understand.’

‘Speaking of Joey,’ I say, ‘there has been a bit of trouble lately, with a petition…’  A group of people, including Shane’s parents have signed a petition on the internet to get rid of Joey.

‘We didn’t have any trouble with it,’ he scoffs.  ‘It went up  on the ‘Friends of Shane’ website.  A few of the people who signed it were people I knew, people that I really like.  But it was a gross slander. It’s just family feuding on the internet.  That’s basically what it is. Thank God they’ve got the internet to act it out on, or we would all be lying around riddled with bullets!  Heeeeee hheeeee hhhheeee.’

And despite the fact that the allegations are that serious amounts of money are unaccounted for, that’s as seriously as Shane is prepared to take the situation.

‘Lets move on to your recent incident with the scaffolding,’ I say.  He was attacked in a bar in Belgravia and beated about the face with a piece of scaffolding.

‘When the scumbag from the middle ages, sorry I meant the midlands, attacked me?’ he asks.  ‘Me and a couple of friends were having a drink and we got talking to this Irish guy.  And he bought me a drink.  Later on, I saw him talking to this other bigger guy.  Who followed me into the toilet and hit me with what felt like a knuckle duster.  I couldn’t believe the pain!  I’ve never experienced pain or suffering like that before in my life.’

‘Even though you’ve been beaten up before, many times?’  I ask.

‘Yes. It was really horrible.  I just took the punches and then I slid down the wall.  He kicked me with his foot a few times, but that was like someone applying bandages, compared to the metal.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘He said ‘Are you queer?”

‘That’s all?’

‘Yes.  He looked like Sean Bean, actually.’

On our first date, Shane picked a fight with the bouncer at the 100 Club, so we never actually got inside the club.  He isn’t usually an aggressive person, though.

‘I would stay I was stubborn and single minded, rather than aggressive,’ he says.   ‘But I don’t take shit.’

He asks me to light a cigarette, for him because the wind is strong, where we are sitting, but the taste is revolting.  It reminds me that when we were together, I used to smoke and drink and take drugs.  Now I am fairly clean and serene.  Shane has recently given up heroin, this time for good, he says.  And he appears to mean it.

‘There are two ways that our souls are being attacked, at the moment,’ he says.  ‘Television is one of them.  Heroin is another.  They sell it to school kids, which is really heavy.  Heroin, I got into when I had enough money.  I don’t blame them for wanting to try it.  But I blame the people who should be stopping kids from being introduced to it.  I would say that nobody can handle heroin.’

‘Was it very hard to kick?’

‘Yes, it was incredibly hard.  I was terrified, all the time, of cold turkey.  It is unbelievably horrific. The physical bits are so horrific that they blank out the screaming depression, though.  It’s the loneliest feeling in the world.’

We are interrupted by the waitress, bringing another gin and tonic.  He still orders a lot of drinks, but I notice that he doesn’t drink most of them, he just collects them on the table around him, as if for security.  Shane tips the staff astronomical amounts.  I can’t help worrying.  About ordering all the drinks.  And of course, I criticise his profligacy.  He assures me that he can always make more money.

I feel too old for late nights and hangovers, I just want to be healthy and go to bed early.  Possibly, if I was with someone less hedonistic I wouldn’t be so neurotic, I tell myself.

Later, we both have the Ayurvedic massage where they drip the warm oil on your head.  Shane says it’s like opium, that you could definitely get people off drugs by giving them massages.  I say that’s what Deepak Chopra does.  He knows, he says.  He’s bought a copy of Deepak’s new book as a present for me.

When we get it together to go sightseeing, we find ourselves at Mass, in a local church and Shane takes Communion.  We also visit, at his insistence the church where Our Lady is supposed to have appeared.  And we sit in the cathedral, just looking at the paintings which are every bit as inspired as those in the Sistine Chapel.  Shane’s a pagan as well as a Catholic, he says.

‘That’s what being an Irish Catholic is.  We sing and we fight and we f**k and all of those things are banned.  Our whole civilisation is based on religion.’

I ask him if he’s having a good time.  He is.

‘There’s a feeling of absolute serenity,’ he says.  ‘Total and absolute serenity.  I am like Cesare Borgia, my ego is so massive that I can almost imagine God.  In fact, I see God everywhere.  Did you know about Michelotto, his half Irish servant?’

‘No,’ I say.

‘Michelotto was left in charge of things while Cesare was away and the Pope had him garrotted and strung up.  Cesare found him, just as he was about to die, and asked him who had done it to him.  ‘Twas the holy faaaather, sorrrr’ he said (in an Irish accent).  HEEEE HEEE HEEE.”

‘What’s the similarity between you and Cesare Borgia?’ I ask.  He thinks about it.

‘  Cesare Borgia was a great Italian and I’m a great Irishman,’ he concludes.

‘Indeed,’ I say.  And I wonder if he could be right.

 

 

Michael Jackson Drugs

I recently found this piece that I wrote about Michael Jackson’s death.  Thought I would post it here.

Michael Jackson Drugs copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2009-

I did not sleep last night.  A thunderstorm kept me awake, the loudest I have ever heard.  I cant function without sleep, and all day I have been wandering around in a daze, anxious, irritable and exhausted.  Luckily for me I will be so tired tonight that nothing will wake me up.  But I have suffered from insomnia and I deeply sympathise with anyone who has ever had several sleepless nights in a row and got to the stage that they cant sleep no matter what they do.  Even prescribed sleeping pills stop working if you take them for an extended period.  Eventually you feel that you would kill for a decent nights sleep.  And this, apparently, is what happened to Michael Jackson.  He needed such strong sedatives to knock himself out that he was knocked out for good.  And so he has joined the roll call in the sky of ultra famous, ultra talented people whose lives have been cut short by medication.  Medication to help them sleep combined with more medication to wake them back up again, so that they could get on with the business of being ultra famous and ultra talented.  People like Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe, who had started out as ordinary human beings and turned themselves into gods and goddesses, icons of perfection worshipped by millions.

It is not an easy business just living up to the virtues that are expected of the everyday common or garden human being.  And so one can only imagine what pressure you come under if you set yourself up as an icon.  I often boast that I am lucky enough to be friends with Johnny Depp who is widely regarded as the handsomest man on the planet as well as the most talented actor of his generation.  And the other night at his premiere party, I was extremely jealous of him, because the thousands of adoring fans and the huge kerfuffle that surrounds his every public appearance highlighted for me just how insignificant I am, by comparison, and made me feel entirely inadequate.  But I had one advantage over Johnny which was that I could be as rude and cranky and unhelpful as I liked and nobody would even notice, whereas there was never a moment when he could stop smiling and posing for pictures and signing autographs and answering stupid questions, not even when we were at the private party for those who are supposed to be his friends.  It is a full time job, being adored by millions, because in order to be adored, you have to stay adorable.  Johnny just happens to have the perfect temperament to go with the job.  But unfortunately for the very famous, only a tiny handful of them get to be completely adored, all of the time.  Most of them get hoisted up onto a pedestal only to be unceremoniously dislodged and sent crashing into the depths of despair, the minute they show any signs of being flawed human beings.  And if, like Michael Jackson did, they show themselves to be weird or eccentric and they begin to behave in ways that are socially unacceptable, then they can turn from icons into freaks.  And the adoration turns very easily into ridicule.

There are times in all our lives when we need a little help to be perky or positive, or to calm down and deal with stress.  But when you have to deal with the normal ups and downs of life while at the same time maintaining an image in the eyes of the media and the masses, when you have to put on a public persona every time you step outside your house, the stress can be completely intolerable, as was recently proved by Susan Boyle.  And if the consequence of this stress is that famous people often take drugs to help them cope, than it is hardly news and it is hardly surprising.

Cherilyn Lee, one of Michael Jackson’s nurses was quoted as saying that in the days before his death Jackson has been asking for an extremely strong drug called Diprivan, which she had warned him was not safe to take.  It is not yet known whether it was this particular drug that contributed to his death, but whether it was this drug or another drug is not really the point.  The point is that as a very famous person with an image to uphold, Michael Jackson would most certainly have been able to get any drug he wanted.  Because he was rich and famous and people generally indulge rich and famous people more than they do ordinary people.  It is hard for even the very nearest and dearest to resist the anguish of an addict who cries out for the drink or drug that will give them temporary relief from anxiety.  So the likelihood of the members of a famous pop star’s paid entourage of yes men and women being able to deny him what he wanted is slim indeed.  And if he wanted a strong sedative then a strong sedative is probably what he got.

It is sad to think that such a talented man as Michael Jackson will be remembered as another of those tragic icons who have succumbed to the pressures of their own fame, who have ultimately sacrificed themselves for an image.  But what is sadder is that he may be dead, but our appetite for icons is undiminished, and is unlikely to ever be assuaged.  More and more people will rise above the masses to become special and important and will ultimately fail to be anything but human beings.  And in spite of all their pain, the rest of us will more than likely envy them their immortality.

Being a VVVIP

I thought it might be fun to post this, which was written a few years ago, but I think it is still relevant!

The VVVIP Perspective on Festivals copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2009-

 

It was a dark and dastardly night.   The rain was torrential.  A lone figure appeared on the horizon, battling the ferociousness of the elements as he struggled to lift one foot out of the mud and put it down again in different mud.  Despite the inclement weather, the lone reveller was clad only in a pair of see through pink cheesecloth trousers and a colourful, batik t-shirt.  His feet were bare and almost blue.  As he drew level with me, he eyed me with the look of one who is not seeing entirely what is in front of him. There was a pause, while I stared at him.

 

‘Can I help you?’  I asked, helpfully.

 

Eventually he spoke.

 

‘A fried egg sandwich,’ he says.  ‘Please,’ he added, as an apparent afterthought.

 

I duly prepared the sandwich and proffered it in my small, grubby hand.

 

‘Fifty pence’.

 

He fumbled in a hessian pouch and handed over the coin.  Then with an expression of one who has had his mortal soul saved from eternal damnation ,  he bit into the sandwich.  The rich yellow egg yolk spurted out and dribbled down his beard.  I watched in amazement as oblivious, he wandered off  in the direction of the tents, which floated in the next field.

 

I awaken, jolted by the car in which we are travelling, and discover that I am no longer in 1977, working the fried egg sandwich stall at Lisdoonvarna.  I am back in 2009 and once again it is a filthy night, with torrential rain and howling winds and rivers of mud.  But now the wet field is in Punchestown.

 

Outside the limo, hordes of people dressed only in shorts and wellies and plastic poncho things, battle to get to a portaloo.

 

I watch them with that mixture of sympathy and smugness that Bono suggests in the Band Aid song.  Thanking God it’s them, instead of me.

 

In the warm, dry, dressing room with sofas and a telly and proper glasses and ice cubes, Shane immediately inspects the drinks.

 

‘There’s no gin,’ he observes.

 

‘I want my dinner,’ I say.  ‘Where’s my dinner?’

 

A nice young man offers to rectify the situation without delay.  Soon we are comfortable on the sofa, Shane with a gin and tonic, me with a plate of meat and potatoes with gravy and a bottle of Claret.  The door opens and Nick Cave appears, closely followed by the Bad Seeds.  They are immediately concerned that we have been adequately provided for in the way of food and drink.  In spite of the fact that it is their dressing room, not ours, and we have come to visit them, they form an orderly queue to shake our hands and kiss our cheeks.

 

Perhaps it is human nature, perhaps it is just me, but the more I get, the more I expect and demand.  The festival experience is just one more place to make demands and expect them to be met.  If you are among the majority of festival goers or ‘revellers’ as they are described in the papers, you probably expect to experience hardship, deprivation and discomfort, you expect to get wet, to get ripped off, and to have to queue for ages for the loo, only to find that you would rather wet your pants than endure the smell of vomit therein.

 

You may find yourself wondering what it is like for the small minority who get access to the ‘VIP’ area, or the Press tent or God forbid the artist dressing-rooms. And you are right in thinking that it is a lot more like home, the closer you get to the top.

 

The toilet is something that we all have to use at some point, even those of us who have VVIP passes.  And it is the standard of cleanliness of the toilet and ease of access to it that is perhaps the most accurate measure of one’s status at a festival.  If you are the lead singer of the headline act you can arrive by helicopter, only moments before you go on stage and you can leave the site immediately afterwards.  You may not need to use the toilet at all.  But if you are forced to, as most of the performers are, you can have your driver take you right to the door of the artist toilet, (as I saw one famous diva do at the Electric Picnic) and wait outside to drive you the few hundred yards back across the grass to your dressing room.

 

As anyone who regularly flies first class will tell you, the more you do it the more you begin to notice the little things that are not to your liking.  It is much the same with the facilities at festivals.  Sometimes it is the lack of wooden hangers in the dressing room, sometimes it is the fact that it is Bollinger and not Krug in the cooler.  Or perhaps it is simply that you don’t want to be next door to the Arctic Monkeys, you remember how much nicer it was to be neighbours with Bowie.  Whatever it is, there is always some small thing to complain about.

 

The gates to Hell are heavily guarded, as difficult to get past as the security at Glastonbury.  Which is lucky for those who never get in.  But now that I am on the inside, and utterly spoiled I can never go back to being a normal human being with the decent qualities of patience and humility and a sense of camaraderie, those attributes that make a festival fun.

 

But there is hope for everyone, even the damned.  A few years ago I was invited to actually perform at a festival.  It was at the small, insalubrious Flat Lake Festival in Monaghan, and I was billed to appear at eleven o clock on the Sunday morning when sensible people are sleeping soundly.  The stage was in a barn, with hay bales for seats and there was no microphone.  My tiny audience was augmented by a few noisy children, some dogs and a tractor.  The person who announced me got my name wrong. It was humbling in an unpleasant way.  But afterwards, a few people said they liked me.  And somewhere deep inside me a tiny flame flickered into being, and refused to be extinguished even by the fact that I didn’t get paid.  And that tiny flame propels me to go back to Monaghan again this year, possibly even to perform.  Because even though they use the scary, non-flushing eco-loos, and have no dressing rooms, I now realise that there is more to festivals than the toilets.  There is.