What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness (8 page)

Then I suppose the other thing to acknowledge – and I didn't acknowledge this until after I'd had my breakdown – was that I'd probably been drinking to excess for a long time. I mean my first warning from a GP about my drinking was when I was still at school. Yeah. And it's like, looking back, I can see that it was a really steady part of my life for a long time. And I did have quite a capacity for drink, so a lot of people wouldn't know I was drinking as much as I was. At university I drank way too much but I know loads of students do, particularly these days. And as a journalist, there was very much a drinking culture. Totally the norm, you know, to start the day with a hangover and end it pissed. That was the way for a lot of people. But I can see now it was just absorbing too much of my life.

And then in the run-up to the breakdown, the kind of last few weeks, it was just this combination of things. Overwork, a sense that I was driving the whole thing – the newspaper – on my own. And I
was
to some extent, as we were so understaffed that I was doing half a dozen people's jobs, but I was doing them all badly because I was always constantly looking to the next ‘legitimate' – in quotes – reason to have a drink. And then the other thing that was happening was that I was starting to get really wired – you know, that sense of a kind of excessive stress, which I've known lots of other times in my life. And I think sometimes you can turn that into a creative force, and I certainly convinced myself that I could at the time. And I
was
quite creative – I was having some good ideas – but some were off the wall. So a combination, I'd say, of work, drink, a new environment where I didn't feel comfortable, all of that leading to pressures with Fiona: you know, a lot of late-night rows on the phone because I wasn't home and I was pissed and all that.

The final kind of spiral down was the weekend before the publication of the first issue of the newspaper. So there was all this planning – quite exciting in its own way – and although I was news editor, I was doing a lot of the stories myself. And I thought it would be quite good, because of the political thing, to get something from Labour in the first one. So I persuaded Neil Kinnock – he didn't want to do it – but I persuaded him to let me spend the weekend of the Scottish Labour Party conference in Perth with him. The plan was that I would meet him at the airport, head up to Scotland, just be part of his entourage, and do a big inside colour piece for the first edition. So quite a good editorial product.

The night before – this would have been early March '86 – I had a real mega, you know, on the piss. I was in this pub called the Lord High Admiral, which was opposite our offices on the Vauxhall Bridge Road, and I'd been in and out of there all day, and I'd had a boozy lunch and, you know: well gone. Phoned Fiona about half nine and said: ‘Sorry, I'm still working.' She knew I was in the pub, she could hear the noise. So we ended up having a row and I thought: ‘Fuck it, I'm not going home', so booked into a hotel – that big one near Victoria Station on the corner – and I got in there after the pub shut and I hit the mini bar. The next morning woke up, felt absolutely terrible, slept in my clothes, dirty, urgh.

Then I thought: ‘Shit, I've got to get to the airport.' So I got a cab, got to the airport, and by the time I was at the airport I was starting to feel really sort of . . . wired doesn't really capture it, really sort of edgy. Conscious of the fact that I'm just a bit grubby and pissed, go and buy a toothbrush and a razor and all that. Went to a clothes shop, bought a new – can't remember if I bought a new suit – bought a new shirt and tie. I became obsessed with blue and red – I'll come onto that – bought this blue shirt, red tie. It was all political. Went to the gents, got changed and washed. And I'm just starting to feel edgy, conscious of people looking at me in a slightly different way. And there comes a point where you're not sure whether that's real or whether that's paranoia. But people really
were
looking at me, because it's quite funny to see somebody just taking their shirt off and throwing it in the bin and putting a new shirt on. You know, it's like, to me it was normal because I had to get rid of this smelly, filthy, beer-stained, booze-stained shirt.

Get on the plane, Neil and his people were just a couple of rows up, so I had a chat with Neil. When we get to Edinburgh they all get off and they'd given me the itinerary, but because I was going to be doing something else while I was up there, I'd hired a car. So I got in the car and I headed off to a naval dockyard in Fife that they were visiting in Gordon Brown's constituency, to link up with them there. And I can't remember where it was but I was driving along and I get on this roundabout and I just can't leave the roundabout. I'm in the car and I'm just going round and round, and round and round. And I'm thinking: ‘What the fuck's going on? Where are you going?' And I'm going between rational and irrational. My rational mind is saying: ‘You shouldn't be driving', and my irrational mind is sort of saying, you know: ‘There's some deep meaning going on here.' God knows how many times I went round.

Eventually I literally had to force myself off the road and I headed to the dockyard and this is some naval secure base, right, and I'm parking my car in a car park and I'm giving the key to this guy and I'm saying: ‘Look I can't cope with this car, you're going to have to take care of it.' And I said: ‘Can I make a phone call?' Because I didn't have a mobile then. Go in to make a phone call and I phoned the managing editor of
Today
and I said: ‘I've hired a car at Edinburgh airport but I'm leaving it at this naval dockyard and I don't care what happens to it, it's your responsibility.' Put it down.

So off I go and then I get down to near where Gordon and that lot are, but because I've been wasting – losing – time, they've gone. So I thought: ‘I can't drive', so I get a cab and I'm now feeling really kind of, you know, like I say wired doesn't get it. Just really, a sense of almost like a hum inside me that was going ‘whir, edge, edge, edge'. I get to the edge of Perth, so quite a long cab ride, get to Perth, and . . . where did I go? I went to this hotel where I knew they were staying, and now there's going to be this conference, meeting loads of people I know. I've spoken to lots of them since who say there was something really weird going on, they couldn't work it out. I remember I bumped into this guy I knew who was a journalist, but he was also a priest, and I can remember him being really concerned, you know: ‘Are you alright?' and: ‘You don't look well.' And I was: ‘I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine.' And Patricia Hewitt, who was Neil's press secretary then, said twice: ‘Are you okay?' But when that happens you sort of take out of it what you want, so I'm thinking she's saying: ‘Are you getting enough access? Is this working out for you?' So I'm saying: ‘Yeah, I'm fine.'

On the next bit we went to Falkirk and we were in this car and I can vividly remember talking about whether Tony or Gordon would be the next leader of the Labour Party. I vividly remember this discussion. Get to Falkirk, had a drink there in this little Labour club. Back in the cars, got to Hamilton, Neil went off to this dinner he was doing. And I'm just feeling kind of really, totally spaced out, really weird, and asked this guy – it was in the Hamilton council building – asked this guy if I could use the phone. And he took me into this office and I'm trying to phone home, trying to phone Fiona, no reply, trying to phone my parents, no reply, trying to phone all my friends, no reply. What I discovered later was that you had to press 9 for an outside line so I'm just getting an empty switchboard. So that was making me feel more and more panicky.

So I walk down these stairs into this kind of foyer and now anybody who is walking by, I'm reading something into it. People: ‘Are you okay?' Me: ‘What are you after?' So, very paranoid. Then I'm starting to hear kind of noises in my head, a lot of voices, a lot of music, a lot of stuff going on. And I had this bag with me, a sort of black bag that I took everywhere, and I don't know what I was doing, or why I was doing it, but I started to empty it. Then I started to empty my pockets. I was thinking of things I didn't need. I didn't need money – what would I need money for? – I threw away my passport. I think what was going on was that I thought I was being tested in some way, that I was being watched. I was being tested by something or somebody and I had to show I could survive. And the act of survival required me to get rid of worldly goods. And I don't know if I was going to go the whole hog and take my clothes off, I don't know what I was going to do, because these two coppers – these two plain clothes coppers – came up and one of them said: ‘Are you alright?' And I said: ‘No, I don't think I am.' And they said: ‘I think you'd better come with us.'

So I get in the car with them and they took me to the police station and put me in a cell. From what I can remember there was this really funny bit where I get in the cell and I take all my clothes off and I was just sort of writing on the walls. Whenever I see graffiti on walls in prison cells in films now I think: ‘Yeah.' The two coppers that took me in there were perfectly nice, they spoke to the guy on the desk and said: ‘Look, he's not very well, we're worried about him, he says he's this and he says he's that.' I'd said to them, for example, that I was with Neil Kinnock, which I was, but I think they were a bit: ‘Mmmm', so there was a bit of that going on. Later, Patricia Hewitt found out that I had gone missing so she phoned the police station and said: ‘He is who he says he is', so that was very important.

So then I stopped being treated as a criminal and we were waiting for a doctor. The doctor came, I chatted to him, I was totally paranoid by then. And this thing I say about everything being political, every time he said: ‘Are you alright?' I thought I was being asked if I was right wing, so I said: ‘No, why are you asking?' And he said: ‘Well, you don't look well.' And I'm like: ‘I'm alright, I'm not
all right
.' And then I can remember . . . you know those ‘sharps only' boxes you see in hospitals? There was one of those in the room where I was being interviewed and I was absolutely obsessed about this: ‘Why is that there and what's that?' Words on walls and things, they were speaking to me. So if it said, like: ‘Warning', then it was: ‘What's that about? What am I being warned?' So that went on for I don't know how long.

The bit that I find really weird in the middle of this: they found a friend of mine who lived not far away, he was up in Scotland, so they told him that if he came and picked me up, as long as he took me to hospital, I could go. So he came down and I can't remember how we got to the hospital, whether he drove me or the police drove me, I can't remember, I think the cops might have done. And the weirdest thing on the way was that the driver got lost leaving Hamilton, and it's now the middle of the night, so he pulls up to ask these people on the pavement and it's the two coppers. And I'm thinking, you know: ‘Was that real or was it in my head?' I don't know, but I remember it as real. And when we get on the road I'm seeing all these road signs; road signs were telling me things. If we see a lorry with a phone number on it, it's telling me to work something out from the numbers and all that stuff.

Anyway, I don't know how they fixed it up, but this is really funny – I was the only one on the staff who'd refused private medical insurance and they'd booked me into this private hospital in Paisley. So we get to the hospital and I see all these BUPA signs and I'm saying: ‘What the fuck is this? I'm not going to a private hospital.' And they're saying: ‘Oh, it's not really a private hospital, they put all these signs up to make you feel better.' So we get into the hospital, find a nurse, and I can't remember much that night, I think they sedated me. It was a nice place but I was not in good shape, I can't even remember how long I was there. I think it was two or three days in when I saw this guy Ernest Bennie, a psychiatrist from Paisley, and he was the one who sort of made me realise that drink was part of the problem. He asked me to go through how much I had been drinking in recent days and as I talked it through I was thinking: ‘Bloody hell'. When I'd been drinking it hadn't really crossed my mind. And when people told me I'd been drinking too much I thought: ‘Well, what do you know?' Classic stuff.

So I was sedated, I was quite paranoid for quite a while. It was on the Saturday, I was watching
Grandstand
and Desmond Lynam was presenting it and I was convinced that all these football scores he was giving me were coded messages and if I cracked the code they'd let me out. So I'm going: ‘East Fife 3 – anagrams?' And I'm crossing things out and joining up the words, and I'm pressing the button and calling the nurse to tell her. And then a friend of mine who knew I was in hospital phoned up and we were yakking away and he said:

‘What you doing tonight?'

And I said: ‘Dunno, I'm not allowed out. Read, watch telly, sleep, you know.'

And I said: ‘What you doing?'

And he said: ‘Watching Taggart.'

And I said: ‘What's Taggart?'

And he said: ‘You know, that thing about the Scottish detective with the granite smile.'

And, of course, I thought he was telling me the code wasn't Des Lynam it was Taggart, and if I could do a smile like Taggart they'd let me out. So I watched Taggart and I'm trying to do his mouth, you know?

And this red/blue thing is interesting, because it's so much about politics. There was this thing on the side of my bed, a colour-coded thing – a panic button – and I can't remember the details but it was sort of graded from left to right, from blue to red, and I thought: ‘What's going on here?' And the first day they let me out to go for a walk I went to this park and some of the barriers – you know the stakes in the ground? – some were red and some were blue. And I was with Fiona and I said: ‘I can't do it, I can't do it.' I had to get back into the hospital. So that whole political thing was very deep.