My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Read Online Free PDF Page A

fashion and that his aunt’s legs had been retrospectively added in pencil.
    I think that largely because of growing up just with my mum for the first seven years of my life, and thinking of my dad as sort of heroic, but absent (and maybe even abstract), I found it very difficult to consort with other children. I would often behave flamboyantly—jumping around and hurting myself, or doing disgusting things just to get attention. I did a lovely line in ant-eating, for example. “Wanna see me eat some ants?” I’d ask some nittish prig of a kid. They’d, of course, be well into the scheme—this was well before Xboxes and people were glad of any entertainment. My mum seems to have spent her entire childhood playing with something called a “Button Box,” which alarmingly is not a euphemism but simply a stinking, lousy box of buttons—what a lot of tosh. So in the early ’80s to see live ant-eating was pretty much akin to some of the more ostenta-tious hoopla peddled by that goon David Copperfi eld (magician, not eponymous Dickens hero). But I only did it for the amusement of others—I never, ever ate ants alone. I was a social ant- eater, never an ant- wanker.
    I ain’t never really had much fun. I particularly dislike pre-ordained happy occasions. I don’t mind Christmas so much, because everyone’s involved, as long as they’re Christians or lazy atheists, or Muslim but into tinsel. But I’ve never had a good New Year’s Eve, and I don’t like birthdays, or any other time when you’re meant to be happy. I’m against the prescription of, say, “Ooh, it’s Christmas o’clock. Smile everyone!” For me happiness occurs arbitrarily: a moment of eye contact on a bus, 23

    RUSSELL BRAND
    where all at once you fall in love; or a frozen second in a park where it’s enough that there are trees in the world. I don’t like New Year’s Eve. I don’t think bliss could ever be preceded by a countdown and the chiming of a pompous clock, unless that’s what death’s like. My mum worked hard to make my birthdays jolly but they were always a right stomach-churning drag.
    I’d been kicking around for exactly five years when the occasion were inappropriately marked by an act of festive arson. My mum had made me a big teddy bear cake with a ribbon round its neck. The ribbon caught fire off the candles. All the other children thought it was really exciting that this had happened, but I saw it for what it was—a grim portent for the forthcoming year. While them other twits grinned out merry drips of piss, I thought, “Well, if this happened in a Ted Hughes poem, the protagonist wouldn’t see six.”
    Then my dad burst in all silly string and cheap charisma.
    He’d always turn up on birthdays—in archetypal bad-parent fashion—with things you shouldn’t give kids; stuff you could set fire to. “Wa-hey! I’ve bought you this big thing. It’s a gun.”
    “Thanks Dad . . . Bye.” My mum would be all upset, there’d be silly string on the settee, excited children and their wee everywhere and my father gone, just a little cloud of smoke left behind in the place where he’d been.
    The cake was horribly maimed. It was during the Falklands War and images of Simon Weston were abundant, so this lent the fire-ravaged teddy another potent layer. “Would you like a piece of Belgrano gateau, young man?”* People could still eat it, but the damage had been done.
    * Simon Weston was a hero of the Falklands conflict with Argentina. He incurred terrible facial burns, and when he valiantly bore this he became a celebrity. Triumph over adversity and bravery were the watchwords. Obviously schoolchildren, utterly lacking in empathy, used his name as an insult, the bastards.
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    Umbilical Noose
    It was also in relatively early childhood that the first stirrings of the wild man junkie persona, which would later occupy my life for a decade or more, can retrospectively be divined. It was at this lad Ben Nicholson’s birthday