Star Blog

Seem to have spent an awfully long time on the phone today. Unusual in that I go for days sometimes without anyone phoning me anymore, everything being done via email these days. But then I can also go days without going out the door at all, contact with the outside world being exactly: zero. Pardon me, but I actually don't mind this. Except for moments like last night when I went to make sure the front door was double-locked before I went to bed only to discover it hadn't been unlocked from the previous night. Or maybe the night before that.

So anyway, today the world came a-calling. What they found when they got here I've given up worrying about (much). I just want to go away on holiay now. Please God. If that's, like, all right with you. What?

Maybe later then...

A better day, though I don't know how I managed it. Hardly slept at all last night. Came downstairs in the end and sat watching telly while eating Bran flakes. Oh yes, I still know how to bust the joint up when the mood takes me. Got working but by 2.00pm just ran out of steam. Very nearly went and lay down on the couch (a beautiful option not open to me usually when wife and kids are here) but jumped on the treadmill instead, lying to myself that I would only use it to walk for a bit, sweep the cobwebs out of my blow-hole. Found myself jogging all the same. I use the term loosely, though. More like shuffling and huffing and puffing. Weirdly addictive though. If my poor old legs didn't ache so damn much I'd find a way of doing this every day, or most of them. As it is if I manage four times a week I feel like I deserve a special Olympic medal. The silver perhaps for Most Game Old Git Who Should Know Better. Not that I ever lose any weight. I mean, I don't even believe I can anymore, fuck everyone else's bright ideas.

Showered and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. Felt sooooo good. Had to force myself to rise though. Still not ready to go back to work I made a very early dinner - steak and salad - and sat there eating it while watching a re-run of Enterprise on TV. By the time that was done with it was nearly 5.00pm and I thought, well, you know, I suppose I better get back to...

Then the phone rang. It was some radio station in America ringing for their phone interview about the Axl book. I'd completely forgotten. Live, too. Strange. Did it while making a coffee. Surprised actually I can still remember enough stuff about that book to sound like I know what I'm talking about. Seems my auto-pilot gets better with each passing year. One of the few blessings of getting older (and older). I used to stress about shit like that. Now I know none of it matters.

Somehow, all this conspired to get me back at the laptop with renewed energy, to the point that five hours later I'm knocking it on the head feeling I've actually done something today. Like I say, a better day. They come around sometimes. The trick is to hang on (and fucking on).

Like the old days round here at the moment. Well, nearly. The good bits of the old days, put it like that. Well, sort of. The good bits of the old days if the 'good bits' mean working your arse off round the clock trying to get something finished while wonnering how on earth you're going to pay all the bills this month as you've just been told the paymaster at your publishers has gone on holiday and almost certainly not 'signed off' (evil phrase) on your 'delivery advance' (beautiful, elusive feeling) before he went away (bastard!).

Try again... with wife and kids out of the way I've been free to find my own rhythm again, meaning I have actually started sleeping past 6.00am each day. But then I have also started working further and further each night past midnight. I enjoy this. Not the work, just the finding my own schedule. Three small kids mean not having anything that's your own, let alone a body-clock, you just do what you have to do whenever they decide they need you to do it. Suddenly, I am me again. Admittedly, a 'me' that works, eats, sleeps and not much else, but still meeeee.

It can't be that good though or I wouldn't be in such a hurry to finish and get my arse down to Dorset to join the monsters again. Found a card my eldest daughter had left me on my desk before they went: it was an oblong colour abstract on black card with a big '50' up top and below that the words I LOVE YOU OLD MAN. I took it as a compliment.

Wife and kids all left yesterday for the cottage in Dorset, leaving me here to finish The Thing. Good in one way, obviously, no distractions - well, no obvious ones anyway, though there will always be distractions when you're Tired and Had Enough, as I have (for several weeks now, in fact) - bad in another as this was supposed to be our special holiday planned a year ago. Four weeks away from It All. Later squeezed down to three when it became obvious I wouldn't be able to make four. Now stripped down to two, if I'm lucky and get The Thing finished by this Friday.

Very weird being here at home all alone. Not like being on my own in the other cottage - the work place I was in for the first half of this year. That was a small gaff just up the road. A million miles away metaphorically, 10 minutes drive actually. And I was there to work, which is what I did. Now they are the ones who have gone away to a cottage, except it isn't just to work and the drive is about three hours. Too long to stop and say hi. To far away not to feel their absence. Yet here I am surrounded by all their things, their pictures on every wall and shelf. Very bittersweet. Makes me realise how much this place really belongs to them and me - to us. And that there really is only us and no them or me. Even apart.

So... back to work then...

Have been working all day on the edits of the Zep book. This is where a highly skilled and intelligent editor goes through the whole thing, every last hiccup and fart, and tells you where you've gone wrong. Well, not just that but those are the parts you inevitably get stuck on for the rest of your life. In the best of worlds, this is an invaluable process, as it forces you to seriously question every aspect of what you've done and what you originally tried to do. A Very Good Thing. It also forces you to answer some fairly inane questions sometimes, like whether Terry Reid really was in the frame to become the singer before Robert Plant. Do bears wank in the woods? Well, do they? Are you sure? How sure? Lawyer sure?

I have been exceptionally lucky in that my editor Ian is a top man - official - but that doesn't make the job any easier. Especially when you're going in with an attitude half-formed by decades of working with crap editors and half-formed by your own un-erasable underdog view of things, born of years of being kicked in the goolies for reasons you have often been too thick to figure out, or worse, have known exactly why.

So anyway... a long day. Phones off, door closed, wife and kids banned from house, not even any music on, just me and it and the meaning of everything and nothing if only I can find a better way to put it, cheers. But good, now it's almost over. I'm still only halfway through but it's a long book and there's a lot of stuff to do and think about and try and not get in a huff over. Inwardly, I'm thrilled someone so professional is doing his stuff. Outwardly, I'm sweating like a rubber plant in a greenhouse in July (in Cairo on a particularly hot day). And more to look forward to tomorrow. Great joy indeed...

Wife - a true missionary - has spent the past week or so trying to find ways of keeping out of the house as much as possible during daylight hours in order to give me a fighting chance to do the impossible and actually finish this latest project in the three weeks I've insanely agreed to. That is to say, she has done everything she can to try and keep the little spiders known as my kids away from me. She has been reasonably successful. The end result though is that while I have been churning out pages like so much bog roll the house has rapidly gone to hell as there is literally no one to keep it shipshape.

Normally we try and split these things between us. Apart from working down the word-mine all day and night, I do the washing - being good at throwing crap into a machine and pushing buttons, even quite good and folding it into a neat heap when it's done and loading up the machine with more crap. I also do most of the cooking. (Well, it's either that or starve or live entirely on Chinese and Indian takeaways.) And of course I also help out with the children far more than any so-called normal dad that ever lived (or so it seems to me). She... does the rest. And the rest is A LOT. I might moan here very occasionally about my own 'lot' but I wouldn't swap with wife. Hey, baby, I might look stoopid...

Lately though, all these arrangements have gone right out the window along with what's left of anything else I used to hold dear between my ears (and legs) and the house has turned into a bombsite in Beirut. That is, until today. "If you can handle it while you're working," she said, "I'm gonna try and straighten the place up today."

"Fuck it," I said, "After eight months of Led Zeppelin up my arse I can handle anything."

Wrong. Very, very wrong. What she meant was, can I handle the screams, tears, shouts, enormous inexplicable and so sudden they make you jump out of your wrinkled on skin BANGS! that also entail whenever wife is otherwise enagaged therefore leaving the ankle-biters to kill each other. Answer: no, Lord, I can't. Please make it - them - go away just a little while longer until I do what I have to. What's that you say, Lord? No?

Cheers for that then...

A true sign of age... Was sitting watching the golf on TV this afternoon - the Open - while eating a sandwich and drinking orange juice (the non-drug addicts' mid-afternoon high) and wondering how long I could allow myself to stay right where I was and not be stuck in front of the computer going bash-bash-bash. Found myself curiously drawn in. In fact, after half an hour or so of watching Greg Norman fuck it up and The Irishman (can't spell his weird Gaelic name) romping into an all too elegant lead, wishing I was maybe twenty years older, the kids had all left home and wife was somewhere else in the house doing whatever wives in their fifties (which she will be in 20 years time) do while their septugenarian husbands (assuming the old goats are still alive, just) sit and watch the jolly old golf. Even WEIRDER... found myself wishing I was out there on the golf course with them, hitting a few nine irons and chipping from "the sand" as I noticed the whiskey-voiced commentators call the bunkers.

Couldn't understand what all the fuss was about Greg Norman coming so close to winning. Apparently if he'd kept his three-day lead and done so he would have been the oldest player in golf history to win the Open. "But Christ," I found myself saying out loud to no one in particular (us old gits have a habit of talking out loud to ourselves), "He's only 53!"

Another sure sign of age. Saying things (out loud) like "...only 53..." Fuck it, where's my caddy when I need him...

Unsteady vibes on the home-front as it looks like I won't be joining the family in Dorset for the first week of our holiday. When we booked it last year the idea was to have four weeks down there, lazing around forgetting about everything, enjoying our just deserts, the Zep book being long since finished, life being good and - um - normal again. Then towards the end of the year we decided that four weeks might be pushing it work-wise and that we would bring one of those weeks forward to Easter, which we did, and had a nice time, even though I did end up bringing the computer with me, the Zep book being nowhere near finished yet at that time.

Now it looks like I'll be sending the family on without me for the first week, and that I'll be lucky to get two weeks down there, maybe even just one. The Zep book is finished - just - but this new thing I'm doing won't be and we're so skint we neeeeeeeeed the bread. Badly. So... my understanding wife who totally 'gets' it may be reaching the far end of what's left of her tether. This doesn't mean I get hell necessarily, just that life becomes hell, or certain aspects of it anyway, all of which is almost certainly my fault. Naturally.

I must admit I am sick of it all too. But this is the gig, man. And wife has known it all the time we've been together, stretching back to when I did the official Iron Maiden biography back in 1997. We weren't married or living together then and there came a point when I just couldn't see anybody for a few weeks, working round the clock as I was on the poxy poxy poxy book. God, that nearly finished her off. She just didn't get it at all, took it all personally. Course, it was different as the years went by and the occasional royalty cheque would come in. Then it was a great idea. Well, it's a similar story now, and she's been there with me plenty of times to know the deal by now. There just has never been such a long period of this stuff before, for either of us, and like I say, that getting older by the minute tether is now stretched mighty thin.

Have to be brief as the computer I use for going online is rebelling and shutting down on me for no reason (none I can make out anyway), leaving me about 15 mins to check and respond to emails. Good in one way cos I have no time for email right now but bad in another because it's one more sodding thing to try and sort out before I die.

Speaking of which... found a whole new way to OD yesterday when I went for lunch with Simon Porter. Ate calamari for starter, swordfish for main course, no desert but had too many coffees. Fine, to a point. But when I got home found wife had decided to treat us to (huge) tuna steaks for dinner. Feeling too guilty for being out enjoying myself to say no, I sat and ate the lot. (My excuse, anyway.) Then couldn't sleep all night cos I felt like I was having a bloated-gut-induced heart-attack, a feeling which has persisted right up to this very second. What a way to go, to Die Of Fish Overindulgence. How very 00s, sort of.

Meanwhile... got the Zep book edits back today but haven't had the nerve to actually cast an eye over them yet. Actually, I lie, I have given them a glance and without going into the actualite, as they say, they don't look quite as bad as I expected. That is to say, they are not reams and reams of pages long (always a bad sign). Maybe if my gut is feeling less consciousness-expanded tomorrow I might allow myself to read them, maybe even respond. Though that may require some form of fish-assisted reward system as motivation. Should I live that long, obviously.

Couple of long-short, good-bad days that have kept me from The Necessary, work-wise, but forced me into Other Necessities everything-else-wise. Kids' stuff, mainly. Saturday was the big dance-off, left with a silver medal for the boy, a silver and gold for youngest girl and a trophy (second year running) for eldest girl. Celebrated with burgers and nuggets and sausages and etc from the local chip shop. Oh, yeah, big time.

Then Sunday was the school annual summer fete. I flaked out of that one on the basis of Work Needing Doing but found myself flaked out instead on the couch staring at the ceiling. Made up for such disgraceful behaviour by making roast chicken for dinner. Anything to keep my Dad of the Year title, obviously.

Then last night was Parents-Teacher meetings (two of them back to back) at the school. Glad I went, want to Do The Right Thing, always, especially as my own parents did not. But Christ I was starting to get antsy about not working by the time we got home. Not cos I'm some workaholic. I'd happily reture to a desert island if I won the lottery (if I did the lottery) and Fuck It All. But this job simply has to be done by August 1 or no beans on the plate for me and right now I can't afford that. Money so tight I even have to go shopping with wife because her cards are both maxed out, the joint account has reached its overdraft limit, and the only card left with anything just about on it is my Only In Emergency Card which we have been living on for weeks now and is almost full. The hope is that the Zep book is Approved Soon so that we can get the delivery money, in time to pay off some of the debts and keep swinging to the next financial crisis. It's at times like this you do envy those wage-slaves you thought you'd left behind when you went solo. But still. At least I'm young and I've got my health.

No, wait...

Been clearing out my office, filing away the endless boxes and bags of Zeppelin 'stuff'. I still need to hang onto some of it as there are still many things to do before shutting down completely, but getting it onto shelves or 'filed' in the garage is good for the broken-down head. Dreading the editing which begins next week, though. Still, not as much as I was dreading starting the book, or freaking out in the middle of it, those long dark potholes back in the winter at the cottage when I would wake up - literally - screaming some nights.

No time for breathers or any of that stuff either. Got another book to write now. Which sounds so ludicrous but is true. Nothing of the same magnitude as Zep, thank god. More a mad quicky based on journalism, memories, jokes, stuff from the dumb-dumb past. Don't really want to say more here right now as I can't bear to get into the detail. It has to be finished in three weeks. Yes, that sound you hear in the way-off isn't another police siren it's me shrieking with, um, laughter. But what can I do, these bad men, they came to my house, dangled a cheque under my nose, and, forgive me father, but I signed my name in blood - again - dirty rotten junkie writer scum that I am.

On a different note... Off to a gig tonight. It's the big annual dance show at the civic hall and not only are both my girls appearing, but the boy too. A real John Barrowman in the making, despite being built like an ox he loves showtunes, wearing his sisters jewellery and once he insisted - I mean INSISTED - wife took him to school wearing a dress. You think I'm kidding. I wish I was kidding. What a mover he is, though. Makes the eldest girl - a genius at everything else - look like a donkey. Nobody beats youngest girl though. She dances like a fairy princess and already has all the makings of a total mad bitch diva, bless her. Should be quite a night, lucky me...

Well, it's done. The book, I mean, of course. The final couple of chapters got sent off in the early hours of this morning and I sat here at my desk having a small-ish glass of Bush Mills whiskey to... I was going to say celebrate but it didn't feel like a celebration, more a collapse over the finish line. I don't feel happy it's over because it isn't yet. Ian, the editor has to do his thing, as do the lawyers. A process I truly hate, being unable to take criticism of my work on any level. I mean, I take it obviously, because I have to, and sometimes because it actually makes sense, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't shoot dead the ones daring to do the criticising.

Other things have to happen too, formalities, but they all take days and weeks. By the time all the various boxes have finally been ticked I will be too far past it in my mind to celebrate or be happy. There will just come a moment when I'm not working on the damn thing anymore. And then there will be a kind of blank acknowledgement in my mind as I'm walking to the toilet or sitting on the bed staring at my feet. In fact, the only fun you ever get from these things is holding the finished article in your hands, months later, smelling the cover, but still too worried to actually crack it open and read a page or two in case you notice an error, which of course you nearly always do immediately. Or I do.

I do get to sit here though and write the words: it's done. I suspect this will come as almost as much of a relief to the readers of this blog as it does to me. But look at it like this, if you grew sick of reading about me working on the book all this time, imagine how I felt having to keep on about it, through the hotel days, the cottage, the screaming, smiling, lovely, maddening kids and totally understanding, loving, screaming mad without whom wife. Not just here but every time I spoke to anyone. I was chatting on the phone to Status Quo's manager Simon Porter the other day and he reminded me that the last time we saw each other was when the band played in Oxford last November and we went out to dinner, and that I had been talking about how the book was going.

"It seems like a lifetime ago," I said.

"It bloody well is a lifetime ago!" he said. "What's taken so long?"

I'm still asking myself the same thing...

Broke my cafetierre today (no idea how to spell that). Apart from anything else - so that's no cigs, no drugs, and now no coffee, thank you great horned god - this is a very bad omen. Feels like the end isn't so much nigh as actually gotten past me and I still haven't managed to keep up. Tonight must be the night then. The only thing left after this is strong Irish whiskey and considering I couldn't manage to keep control of myself on that even in my big drinking days that really is the last resort at this impossibly stupidly late and awful stage of the not funny anymore game.

Fuck

it

all.

Sitting here early morning, this last day of any old day, rain trickling down my window, torrential sweat pouring down my back, head full of pain, arse full of heart, nose blocked, gizzard garrotted, fingers dull with boredom, hurrying still to send the final bit, it dawns on me it's never really over, is it? Never. Not till it is. And then you don't care anymore anyway. That, hoping for flowers and champagne for the band (as we used to call buying drugs back in the 70s), or at least some marker, some red flag, saying, yup, you dun it, boy, well dun etc, all that happens is the kettle goes on again and your youngest now has chicken pox too and wife comes on her period (thank god) and the world is as flat and as round as it ever was... In the distance, Robert singing his lovely country mulch with Alison, Jimmy grinding his teeth and tapping his fingers, waiting for it all to begin again, and good luck with that, pal.