Rob Manuel

Recently been reading Philip Norman’s “John Lennon: The Life” a fantastic autobiography that makes Lennon really come alive, especially in its depictions of his childhood, but the reference that really caught my attention was that John named his 14 month booze bender The Lost Weekend after the 1945 film of the same name.

I like addiction stories so I sought the movie out and I couldn’t help but notice the amount of places that the hero stashes drink, so in the spirit of helping any alcoholics who are still simply leaving their drinks on open display here’s how to hide your booze – a guide according to The Lost Weekend:

Underneath apples, implying you’re just shopping for healthy groceries.

On a rope hung from your apartment window.

Inside the hoover. This made me laugh out loud.

On top of the light fitting.

Or even in a special booze-hole behind the bath.

Coincidentally I was recently chatting with my chum Joel Veitch on a similar theme and he says it’s common for alcoholics to use water bottles filled with vodka so they can swig away in the office. So if you’re an alcoholic who likes to stash booze, like squirrels hiding nuts for winter, then please share your secrets here, I’m all ears.

Mostly the B3ta lot live online – a youtube video here, a flash game there, but occasionally some of them can be arsed to leave their spunk encrusted bedrooms and venture outside for a real world project.

Some such guys are John Hopkins and his friend Richard Glover, who plan to get the web to pay for a yacht so they can sail to the Edinburgh festival. The video caught my attention as it reminded me of a comment Ben Goldacre made about moving to live on a boat, “I’ll become London’s novelty shag.” And it’s got a great title: With Sails & I.

I feature the video clip in the newsletter and forget about it until one morning and I’ve got three excitable emails from Hopkins, the last one most worryingly going, “I’m about to pass out on the Hamble river.” But what really shocked me was that he phoned me at 8 the following morning – I assumed these were drunken ramblings.

Hopkins is affable and excited on the phone – he’s hasn’t got a boat yet but he’s been learning how to sail via donated lessons. “The company wants their name promoted – it’s on the side of the boat.” Ah, something for the video editors to pixel out should this ever reach TV.

He keeps stressing how foolhardy his plans to sail from the South Coast to Scotland are and how little he knows. And how likely he is to die.

The plan is to pull off a comedy fundraiser, “Like Live Aid” he says, to raise the cash needed and he invites me to attend the event.

Not a big one for nights out at the moment – two young children mean I need to be up in the mornings but I’m curious – who is this John Hopkins? My mental image is a 30 something bachelor who’s looking for the big project to make sense of his life, when probably what he really needs is good stiff talking to about family values.

I meet John at the venue – he immediately demands a bear hug which startles me a little, he’s excited and nervous, I recognise the weird flighty energy people get before going on stage, this stuff really is a drug – it’s as addictive as cocaine and makes people just as hyper. I’m bundled down the stairs and introduced to passing people, “This is Rob Manuel from B3ta” Hopkins shouts, “So that’s what you look like!”, another says. Well yes. This is what I look like.

Then a whirl of people I don’t know – an attractive blonde comes to our table, “Hi, I’m Alexa, I’m here to look after you tonight.” Awkward at being schmoozed, it’s fight or flee. What’s this all about, I think to myself. I’m Rob from some stupid website, I’m not a commissioning editor from Channel 4, he’s over there, pointing vaguely in my mind, at home watching TV. But I say nothing other than, “um yes, I can’t really refuse beer.”

“Hey Rob, I know you, I worked at Comedybox, you did a song for us – about wishing your wife was a horse. But I gave up my job to film these guys. How could I say no?”, says the camera operator. Er.. Because you were made redundant at a guess, again I mutter in my head, as who’s going to give up a proper job in the current climate?

Lenny Beige is comparing, he’s like Mike Flower’s Pops with scissor kicks. I like the scissor kicks, they’re exciting. Each time he kicks – boom – excitement. Next time I do a Power-Point presentation I’m definitely going to liven it up with a few scissor kicks.

Then our new boating heroes take the stage to do a few skits – the most amusing bit involves drinking spunk, not so much the semen itself but the apology to the girlfriend’s mother about the sketch. Aha, so he’s not a loveless bachelor then.

Other guests include um, some other guys who sing and dance a bit. My friend Mike comments, “it’s a bit like a school play isn’t it? They’re playing to their friends who already know the jokes.”

Hopkins does a series of thank-yous to people who are helping the project, “…And Rob Manuel from B3ta… Anybody know B3ta?” Tumbleweed and the longest five seconds of my life as nobody knows B3ta. My personal version of hell will have that 5 seconds played over an eternity. Thanks for that.

He also mentions that I’ve got ginger hair and it waves like the blowing wind, even when I’m inside. Glad to have made an impression.

Phill Jupitus on next and he’s a bit of a worry. With his gigantic girth and a pork-pie hat, he does the right thing and acknowledges his size this to preempt the audience,”I’m 47 years old, 22 stone and a hamburger away from a heart attack.”

A startling joke as it’s true. He needs to look after himself better. I like Phill and I don’t want him to die. We met once for working reasons and we talked about our kids, “having children is a great leveller” he said. Yes Phill, and your kids want you alive, so lay off the family pack of Kit-Kats.

Phill hasn’t done stand-up in 7 years and is anxious about it – he needn’t be, he’s great, his powerful delivery is in stark contrast to the other acts. He storms it.

He does a gag about his daughter bringing back her first boyfriend and he threatens to “cut him up if he so much as touches her… He starts crying? Sheesh – six year olds today.”

His material is 12 years old he tells us, his daughter is now a young adult who has sex with her boyfriend under his roof. The roof his comedy paid for. This makes him very angry. The joke here being presumably, that this is not a joke.

His turn finishes in 15 minutes to loud applause which he takes badly. He’s horribly self critical – he complains he doesn’t deserve it as good stand-up should be faster and it’s all about speed, then mutters something about being a “pathetic excuse for a human being” and wanders off the stage. Come now Phill, save the self-hatred for your shrink, your public loves you.

And now for a final sing song – all the comics shuffle back on to the stage and launch into a ramshackle medley that lurches between Blondie’s The Tide Is High and The Specials Message To You Rudy depending on who took the mic.

A special guest joins – it’s Pete Bennett from Big Brother. Another disturbing figure – he’s dressed in a figure hugging Lycra with S.P. emblazoned on the front. Super Pete presumably.

He does a growling ragga thing, like Shaggy toasting over a Culture Club 12″ – “I met them on a beach in BrightON. They wanted a boat that they could get ON”

Pete has an electrical energy about him, a fizzing spark, a short circuit. I worry for him – I reckon you could persuade him to do anything – the 14 year old boy who runs across a railway track because you dare him. I hope he doesn’t mix with people who do.

Wanting a big finale for filming reasons, John Hopkins apologies on stage, “we have to do this bit” and launches into Rod Stewart’s Sailing.

Some girl is plucked from the audience and suddenly she’s singing like Janis Joplin. She’s not bad and presumably is a plant.

Time to sneak off before I’m collared by Hopkins and strong-armed – in the nicest possible way of course – into promotion for his project for the rest of my natural life. However I’m interested to see where their story goes next: will they get a boat? Will the coast guards have to save them? And how many times? And will the end result have a certain story-telling charm? I think the answer to the last bit will certainly be yes.

http://www.withsailsandi.co.uk/

Recently I’ve been re-reading Douglas Adams novels, particularly enjoying his travelogue Last Chance To See, but the odd references to smoking makes me wince. Adams died of a heart attack in 2001, and as the British Heart Foundation points out, “quitting is the biggest step you can take to reduce the risk of having a heart attack.”

Two years ago I stopped smoking. The government told me to – well they banned smoking in public places and I went out to the pub for that one last time with a pint in my hand and…

I got drunk – too drunk, didn’t eat any food so I could have more room for lager and cigarettes, hence a blur of visiting the toilet every 10 minutes to piss and, well nothing. I’d drank so much my memory is blank and all I get next is a feeling of shame.

My wife woke and shouted, “What the hell are you doing?” and I looked down, saw myself pissing on the carpet and mumbled, “ugh!” and took myself to the bathroom.

Maybe this is a sign I should give up drinking, but no, I took it as the cue to give up smoking, and this wasn’t the only reason, some of the anxieties that were floating around my head at the time include:

* Brown teeth. Like most handsome young men, I’m dreadfully vain, and I was nauseated by the sight of my increasingly stained tusks. I was scared to smile and would momentarily grimace where I’d flash my teeth, worry that people would be revolted and then drop the grin and look shifty.

* Children. Nothing looks worse than trailing behind a pushchair with a fag in your gob. So I didn’t do it. Hence would find myself not smoking until the evening, finally light a cigarette and then feel a bit sick.

* Fertility. We wanted a second child and it wasn’t happening, we were due an appointment at the hospital for an investigation and I couldn’t bare the idea of being told it’s my fault. Hence if I stopped first, I couldn’t be blamed. Win. I think.

* Smell. A friend recently stopped smoking to persuade his now wife to marry him. He found a difficult time of it and made many attempts including hypnotism. After not smoking for a few days he said to me, “Rob, I never knew when I smoked, but when you go for a cig, and you think no one notices, they do, you really stink.” I hated him for a least a week after that, but he’d certainly produced a clanging bell that struck with a cracked note every time I sparked up.

So that morning I quietly decided to stop smoking, and it was very easy as I was horrifically hung over and I never feel like smoking when I’m ill anyway.

I’ve always found it easy not to smoke for a day or two, as long as I was lurking around the house and not exposed to any stress. It’s the third day that’s always more tricky when the little voice pipes up in my head going, “oh go on, you’ve been good, have a cig.”

This time it was going to be different – instead of giving in to the urge – I googled it. I decided to read as much about smoking as possible so that I’d be going into this battle armed, or more honestly, it was an excuse to immerse myself in smoking without actually putting a cigarette to my mouth.

Unsurprisingly there’s no shortage of smoking stuff online, there’s database fetish sites where every instance of an actresses lighting up is studiously recorded, there’s 80s musician Joe Jackson essay “The Smoking Issue” where he argues that the health risks of cigs have been grossly exaggerated, a furiously edited wikipedia page that helpfully points out that Nazi doctors were the first to link smoking and cancer and of course a hooky PDF copy of How To Give Up Smoking the Easy Way by Allen Carr.

Allen Carr – I have to type that carefully as it’s irresistible to confuse him with the speccy comedian with the Carry On voice Alan Carr. A confusion the comic must have noticed himself and quipped, “me? I’m not giving up fags.”

Carr’s book is repetitive and attempts to brainwash but I found it contained a few helpful ideas which I’ll paraphrase:

* Smoking is addiction to nicotine. All the stuff about needing stuff to do with your hands is nonsense. Addiction to nicotine. That’s it.

* Chewing nicotine gum is unlikely to help, that’s like trying to cure a smackhead by giving him a heroin patch.

* Smoking is a con that works via anxiety. In smoking a cig you simply top yourself up with nicotine. Every second afterwards your nicotine levels are falling and the only way to cure this feeling? Have another cigarette.

* Hence your body learns to associate the reduction of anxiety with cigarettes, yet the only true anxiety it’s resolving is your body’s need for that next cigarette.

What a con. That was the word that really stopped me in my tracks. I hate the idea of being conned. I’m cleverer than that, I like to think anyway.

So how to stop? Carr talks about an addiction monster that must die and every time it’s asking for a cigarette he’s going, “please feed me” and the only way to kill him is to not feed him. Hence every craving should be seen as a good thing, as this is your addiction monster dying.

The next few days were pretty easy, as Will Self writes, “In fact, nicotine withdrawal is a rather pleasant experience — giggly, slightly trippy, rendering the recovering smoker emotionally volatile, likely to laugh, cry or shout.” My particular version of this involved a lunch at an Italian restaurant which reminded me of the extraordinary sensations produced by eating a packet of Frutella on mushrooms.

Over the next few weeks I notice I’ve got a couple of cues for smoking.

* Phone calls to parents.
* Getting off the tube and waiting for buses.
* The pub

The first two are the easiest to deal with – I tell myself that’s the addiction monster dying and I can move on quickly – the pub is a trickier beast.

It’s not so much I want to smoke but my friends want me to smoke. One person in particular is a keen part-time smoker who relied on me to enable him to have the odd cigarette. He pressures me and is irritated when I refuse.

Two years later and it’s much much easier. I hardly think about cigarettes and I feel generally healthier. Woo hoo. And I get to feel superior to the smokers stuck outside restaurants and pubs.

If only Douglas Adams could have knocked the fags on the head then maybe we’d have a few extra books to read, or at the very least, the best ever person to follow on twitter.