Star Blog

The trouble with being cocooned inside the cottage writing the Great Zeppelin book is that there's not much to say when you step outside and try and, say, write a blog. What's to talk about? The fact that my bodyclock is getting back to where it was during the first 40 years of my life before I became a dad - that is to say, ever later nights, ever shorter days? The only difference is I don't feel as comfortable with that as I used to. I'm older, more tired, less interested in the secrets of the night, and the TV at the cottage only has the ITV and BBC channels on it, I can't work out how the DVD player works, there's no video, and so there's bugger all to watch in the wee small hours. Bugger all except Crap, which I find myself sitting there staring at instead.

I don't even read like I used to. I started Atomised, it seemed very good, then I noticed I kept drifting off after half a page. So I turned to JG Ballard. Anything with the word 'Cocaine' in the title can't be all bad, right? And it's not. It's very (very) well written. And I just can't bring myself to keep going with it. I'm just not that interested in reading 'very well written' books anymore.

Maybe I should try The Road. Maureen Rice recommended it to me but it sounds so disturbing I worry it might do me in completely. Years ago, when I believed in such things, I used to maintain that everyone should read at least one Dostoyevsky or Hubert Selby Jr. book a year just to freak themselves out and clear out all the shit inside their head. Now I'm lucky if I can manage a few pages in the Guardian's G2 section. I even struggle with the Culture section in the Sunday Times. What is happening to me and is it catching?

A flying start. Girls to school, then wife to hospital for chest X-Ray, which meant daddy at home looking after boy. Then Stormin' Norman the plumber called. Norman is a Deep Purple and Uriah Heep fan who "never liked Zeppelin cos of all the drugs." And because "I never liked all that heavy music." So now you know Heep and Purple fans. They didn't take drugs and they weren't "heavy." Stormin' was here to fix the downstairs toilet. He couldn't do it. So he's coming back tomorrow. He could drink tea and talk to me about Queen though - his other non-drug taking, non-heavy favourite group.

Wife finally came home and I snuck off to my office... to pay my tax bill (fucking hell!), to open the package from America containing the really quite impressive-looking hardback copy of the Axl book (FUCKING HELL!), to answer several weird and far too long emails (fuck off!!!), and to get my shit together ready to decamp back to the cottage (Oh fuck...). Which is where I'm off to now. Every time I get a little break I see myself running back in there and polishing off the next chapter in no time at all. Then I get there and realise this might just take me a teensy bit longer to do than that. Or possibly just a teensy bit longer than teensy. Or possibly just a...

Back to so-called normality and it's been rather... nice. In its own way. Wife and I took the kids out in the afternoon for a walk to the lake to feed the ducks which actually went well. Cold but really sunny out there, but you warm up after chasing the boy around for an hour trying to stop him diving in. Then came home and I cooked a big bird for dinner. All the trimmings. (I do like my trimmings.) I even got to read about half a page of the Sunday Times.

Then the evening came and while the girls slept the boy decided to put on one of his all-night specials, singing, dancing, banging his sodding drums, telling a joke or two, climbing and falling all over what's left of the furniture. It was like inviting a drunk madman into your home. He finally blacked-out about 10.00pm by which time I was ready to do the same.

Got myself a proper routine for the first time since becoming a dad all those lifetimes ago. As follows...

Wake up from some hideous dream about 9.00am, struggle into shithouse and then shower while spilling tea all over my dressing gown. Emerge from water therapy and eat sustaining bowl of bran flakes taken with more spilled tea while watching This Morning (no Sky Sport News or indeed any other fucking thing on the cottage TV).

Throw on 'outside' clothes and jump in car for 'fresh air' break drive to the paper shop. Get back in time for hunger to kick in properly (bran flakes not capable of filling a hole in my back tooth as my weird old dad used to say). Eat soup and/or sandwich while reading paper. Burp loudly.

By now it is almost 1.00pm and I am ready to rock. Sort of. Armed with strong (I mean STRONG) coffee I go into the 'utility room' where my desk and laptop and other crap are set up. Sit there yawning and stretching and bitching and moaning and occasionally tapping out a few useless words till about... 3.00pm when I can stand it no longer and go and make myself a long (looooooooong) glass of juice. Back to living hell till about 6.00 or 7.00pm, depending on my stomach. At which point I reach for the red wine. This usually keeps me going for another hour or so until I feel satisfied enough with my 'output' to say sod it.

Go and make pasta and some sort of sauce which may or may not have meat in it. Drink more wine and flop in front of TV watching Eastenders or Coronation Farm or whatever the hell fucking cottage TV). Stay there till about 11.00pm watching rubbish. Then back to the desk for the nightshift. Fortunately, I love Late Junction on Radio 3 which kicks in now and so I am OK, just about, till about 1.30am when I finally - finally - decide enough is fucking enough and toddle off to bed with one of my new books that I bought at the weekend. Wait for black out to ensue. Then repeat to fade...

And that, children, is how you write a book. Or how I am writing this one anyway. Now if you'll excuse me, This Morning is about to start and today the stylist is doing something on Big Women and you know how much I love a Big Woman...

Locked into a battle with my laptop. I approach it like a wild animal, sleeping in the jungle. Feel like all I have to do is grab it by its tail and wrestle it to the ground, then bite its fucking head off. Half an hour later the bastard has its paws on my chest, so heavy I can hardly breathe. I break away long enough to get to the kettle, boil some water and make yet more tea/coffee/whatever, then tiptoe back into the nook where the laptop is still waiting, wheezing. And jump on it again. I never win, though. The bastard is too big, too heavy, has too many arms and legs and a big long ugly pointy tail wrapped round my throat. But it's him or me and it ain't gonna me. That's what I told Bob the rock'n'roll bank manager anyway...

Had the traditional raggle-taggle Wall family outing to Oxford yesterday. It rained - obviously, everywhere in the UK being under about six feet of flood water currently - but it didn't stop us. Thankfully the boy sensed it was not a good time to pull his usual I-won't-sit-in-the-buggy-and-I-won't-let-you-hold-my-hand-either routine so it wasn't too bad walking around amongst the foreign students and mini-toffs.

We ended up in Borders where eldest girl got a Dr Who book, youngest girl got a secret-keeping-diary or somesuch, and mummy put an order in for a signed John Barrowman autobiography. He's doing a book signing there next week and she's in a flutter about it. Doesn't matter that he's gay, she wants him and that's that. She even bought his CD and forced us to listen to it on the way home in the car. Fuck's sake. Let him have her just make the CD stop now please. Meanwhile, boy got a toy drum. Ever since hammering seven shades of shit out of Tom and Lyn's real-size drumkit over Xmas it's been obvious he's got a talent for such stuff. Sure enough he immediately put on a show. I swear I saw him twirling the sticks at one point to a very impressed looking security guard.

Daddy walked out with two books: Cocaine Nights by JG Ballard and Atomised by Michel Houellebecq. Don't ask me why, I just did. And, no, it had nothing to do with the fact that the former is about drugs (it's not, but you know what I mean) or that the latter has a picture on the cover of a very attractive young woman naked except for her panties. Well, not entirely anyway. The only trouble is I'm afraid to start reading either of them in case I become unduly influenced by the writing (which always happens when a book is good) and it starts showing up in the Zep book. I've learned to my cost in the past not to allow this to happen. Maybe I'll just sit and look at the cover of Atomised while snorting cocaine from the cover of the Ballard. Or possibly not.

Back to the cottage - or vanilla prison as I call it - today though. That Zep book won't get written on its own. The weekend break definitely helped though and I'm almost looking forward to it in a masochistic writer-as-helpless-word-addict sort of way. Almost...

Back home for the weekend. Feels good. Noisy as hell, but good. The kids are making up for lost time and have given me no peace whatsoever since I set foot through the door. "It's not like this when you're not here," said wife. She looks well and rested and happy and youthful. Even my mother-in-law is looking a little better. Seems everyone's enjoying me being away at the cottage as much as I am. That's what happens when you both live and work from home, you forget what's it like to be on your own for longer than a second. Then when it happens it's like going through the tunnel into Toon Town - the whole world goes from black and white into crazy colour. No Jessica Rabbits on the horizon so far though. Which is just as well, of course, darling...

This is all too good. Very unsettling. At least when things are going wrong you know where you stand. Being one of those people who never feels like they deserve happiness, or good luck, or anything else slightly in one's own favour, I don't know what to think. Even talking about it like this probably jinx's the situation. Oh well, you can only enjoy it while it lasts. The great shit giver in the sky will no doubt be cooking something up to send us all insane again soon enough.

Finally, the tide turns. Kids better, wife smiling, me tucked away in my little cottage. Actually getting some writing done. Nothing new so much as polishing what's already there, getting my head reacquainted with the material. Still nervous over the deliberately eye-catching 'style' of what I'm doing but fuck it, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Or lost.

What the hell, it's too late to pussy out now. Just gotta keep going, avoid looking down (too often) and hope the piggy bank doesn't completely run out before I finish what I'm doing. Got to admit, too, living alone, working, it takes me back to good times. Lonely but good. I mean, you wouldn't want to live like this for long, which is why we don't stay 25 for ever, cos we're just not meant to, but for a writer sometimes it's the only way to be. To get the sodding job done. I've even started getting a few hours sleep here and there. Just a shame about the recurring nightmares...

Everything slowly getting back to so-called normal. But only just. I don't know if I'm ill or simply mega-tired. Our boy has never been so sick, some hideous ear infection compounded by flu, which has meant he has been awake most nights every night since early this week. Which has meant wife and I have also been awake round-the-clock all week. The only respite was going to London on Wednesday, where I passed a few hours with Robert, my agent, at Grouchos. Then Chris Squire from Yes walked in with his wife Scotty and it turned into a very jolly time. He gave me a copy of his latest CD, Xmas songs and things by - oh yes - Chris Squire's Swiss Choir.

Meanwhile... I'm off again on my travels today, checking into my latest hidey-hole to write. Not a hotel this time but a small cottage on a farm not far from where I live. Just an owl and the moon for company. (And the family that own the farm.) I should have been in there yesterday but things being what they are I'm only getting round to it now, Sunday afternoon.

One bit of positive news, the Jean Michel Jarre piece ran in the Mail On Sunday today. Four pages, good pix, cool layout, cheque in the post. Not sure if it's what the record company had in mind but I like the look of it.

This cottage thing means the blog will be a bit more intermittent than usual but then that will probably be good for all of us. Till then, feel better...

No blog for days cos there has been no brain to write it. Everyone sick, everyone ill, atomic bugs everywhere. Feel like we're living on the edge of hell. No, not the edge, the fucking centre. And no, I'm not exaggerating cheers.

One of those days where things seemed to go as planned. Lots of things - sorting out my latest god help us VAT payment, sorting out rental on a place to work for the next six months while I try and finish the Zep book, amongst other things (can't take it anymore at home, not during the so-called working week anyway), sorting out meetings, calls, emails, all manner of things. Even got some time in on the running machine and a shave, always a good sign.

And yet... I'm sitting here now deep into evening and my head feels like it isn't being held down by normal gravity anymore. I'm all freaked out because time is slip-slip-slipping away and I haven't got enough done on the Zep book. What I have got is going good, I think, but it ain't going fast enough and I'm starting to experience new realms of panic that I've frankly never experienced before. Not just mental agony but physical stuff. An inability to speak, except in angry, irritated outbursts. An inability to concentrate on anything outside this room I'm in now, including most painfully (mainly for them) my wife and children.

Of course, I've been here in other ways countless times before and it's amazing how often (almost always) the book I'm working on is so late I can feel the guns pressing at my temples and yet when I finally deliver it the publisher still finds all sorts of annoying ways to take their own sweet time getting round to putting the damn thing out.

I think what's bothering me is that I know deep down in my rotting aging bones that this time it's different, Lord help me. That this time it's not just a dream and that I really do have to deliver - or else. Shit, shit, shit...

Spent the afternoon back working on Zep. It's been a few weeks, one way or another, so I had to begin by reading back what I've already done. Inevitably, that meant rewriting and sprucing up, as it always does whenever a writer reads back something he's written. In an ideal world, I'd never hand anything in until I'd reached the stage where I was able to read it back a few times without changing anything. And often, that is exactly what happens. It's hard though when you're still struggling in the foothills of a book the length (and please God depth) of this one. If you're not careful you can get bogged down in the detail when what you really need to do is crack on - then come back later and tart around with it.

The other danger of reading stuff back too quickly is that doubts creep in. I knew I was in trouble when I was really enjoying the first few pages. There's no way this will carry on, surely, I thought. Sure enough, about eight pages later I couldn't see the wood for the trees - only the holes in the sky. I tried plugging them but like I say you don't want to get too bogged down so left a few black stars staring down at me. Scary, this part, like trying to hold onto mercury. What you've got might be good but when you're doing a book you never know if it's good enough, or long enough, or detailed enough, or this or that. Because it's a book, not a 3000 word magazine article, it can go almost anywhere, particularly at the early stages. Like standing in the Sahara and wondering which way to go, knowing that if you get it wrong you'll quickly be lost, wandering for weeks on end just the taste of sand and camel shit in your mouth.

Right now I sort of feel like I've set off in the right direction generally but have possibly wandered too far from the nearest watering hole to be able to rest easy for the night. Except I'm tired and hungry now so this hill of sand I'm standing in the shadows of will have to do. Oh yes, writing books is great fun, kids. No wonder so many writers turn to drink and/or drugs to help them muddle through. Me, cos I'm not on that road anymore, its endless cups of coffee, pineapple juice and regular trips to the toilet. Oh, and the usual interruptions by my two-year-old son. Ah, the joy, the joy...

We went out last night for dinner at Lyn and Tom's place. They had Lyn's mum and dad down and Tom's mum was there too, plus all the kids. It was really nice. Lyn's mum Eleanor cooked a traditional Scottish cottage pie with heaps of different vegetables and secret recipe gravy. Very, very good. And of course there was wine, brought back from France earlier this year by Tom.

Best of all though was the appearance of a huge selection of cheese and biscuits - followed by a bottle of good Port. I haven't drunk Port for 20 years and Jesus Christ was it good. God cleary knew what he was doing when he put Port and cheese on the Earth. In fact, I'm officially declaring this the new rock'n'roll. Balls to sex and drugs - cheese and Port (and biscuits) is absolutely where it's at, man, and don't even try to talk me out of it.

Paid for it this morning when I woke up though. A hangover is something else I thought I'd given up about 10 years ago. Funny how these things can suddenly come marching back into your life, and so unexpectedly too. Fortunately, I had the perfect cure. A houseful of screaming kids. You oughta try it sometime. Nothing beats feeling sorry for yourself like a faceful of kids all yapping at the same time and calling you unspeakable things like 'Daddy'. There is quite simply No Way Out. So that was me.

Tomorrow, though, it's back to work on the Zep book. I'm looking forward to it and dreading it. Looking forward and dreading, all at once. Another good hangover cure, in case I need one. Sunday? Yeah? And?

We came, we saw, we got ripped off for every penny in our possession, then went home again where Daddy ran with shaking hands to the red wine bottle. Yes, it was High School Musical On Ice. And no, I won't ever be caught doing that again. Jesus, what a money pit. Five tickets cost over £100, add in two programmes at £12 a pop, two Sharpay dolls and a teddy bear at God knows how much (wife paid while I hid my eyes and sang la-la-la out loud), two quite good hot dogs and two absolute shit burgers at another bank-jobbing price, plus a £2 bottle of what tasted like tap water. I mean, fuck it, what does this teach our kids? That mummy and daddy are suckers, that's what.

It was a day out, though, I suppose. And both girls now want to be ice-dancers when they grow up, which is nice. Not. At least the boy had the right idea, he just went ballistic, climbing up on the backs of chairs and kicking people in the head. Which wasn't nice but made daddy secretly smile. Except for when mummy made him take the little bastard outside for the last half-hour before he got us all thrown out.

Best bit was coming home, via the Chinese Takeaway. We had a picnic on the lounge floor while watching the Simpsons on TV. Best entertainment of the day. Apart from the bit when my four-year-old daughter gazed in wide-eyed wonder at 'Gabriella' twirling on the ice, then looked up at me and giggled: "Daddy, I saw Gabriella's knickers!"

Spent the day trying to finish off the update for the paperback edition of the Axl book. This meant listening to the 11-track CD someone sent me earlier this year of Chinese Democracy. Obviously I don't have all the tracks. According to our mutual friend Sebastian Bach there are maybe four CDs worth of songs out there. But it does give you a good idea of what we're talking about. Bottom line: it's like everyone who's ever heard this stuff says, he shoulda put it out AGES ago. Everyone that is, except Axl. It really does make you wodner about his mental and emotional state. What kind of place must his head have been in this past 15 years not to put this out? To think he can somehow do better? And even if he can do better, to not simply consider putting that out on his NEXT album? Poor cunt just doesn't have a fuck, as they used to say in a place I once lived.

Knocked off about 5.00pm, when it was good and dark, thus fooling myself that I'd got some proper work done. Then went to roast a chicken for dinner. Me and wife got into eating early during the Xmas hols and we want to keep it up as it's apparently good for keeping your weight down and I can use all the help in that department I can get. If only I really gave a shit I'm sure it wouldn't be so bad. But then I could say that about a lot of things. You, too, probably.

Tomorrow we're off for the first big gig of the year. Forget Zep and the Spice Girls at the O2, we're talking High School Musical - Parts 1 AND 2 - at the NEC in Birmingham. Not only that, but ON ICE. I mean fucking forget about it, baby! This is where 2008 really kicks off! I'm not even kidding...