Star Blog

My wife is getting tired of this blog. Well, not so much the blog but the people that read it and keep yacking to her about it, gurning like toothless old hags cooing over the price of eggs. They don't realsie she never actually reads it, anymore than she reads anything I write. You might think this strange, being married to a writer but having no interest in anything he actually writes. Far from strange, though, it is one of the secrets of our successful marriage. I used to have a partner that wanted to be a writer too and so would read anything and everything I did, discussing it with me and analysing it and so on. Jesus, what a drag that was. Not that I mind people's comments. Or discussing writing. But not when I'm taking a bath or eating a sandwich or wiping my arse with a toothbrush, ya dig?

Anyway, wife not reading my stuff is fine by me, god bless her. Nor does it mean she isn't supportive. She is the most supportive woman I have ever known. A total rock. And anyone that can put up with me for many years at a stretch and still continue to cheer me on is so rare as to be a national treasure, in my eyes.

Anyway, back to the blog. She finds it immensely irritating when people - grinning mental cases mostly - keep on going on at her about this blog. She doesn't read it - except for those rare occasions when something inadvertently makes me laugh and I read it out loud to her - and so is utterly baffled when people start quoting her chunks of it. People as in well-meaning but ill-informed friends, nosey and nothing-better-to-do relatives, strangers at the school gate whose names neither of us know, and other unwelcome types. I tell you, it does me no good knowing who reads this stuff out there in the so-called real world.

Of course, not everyone is such a shock. There are those friends of mine - real and space-beings - who I am actually quite flattered read this stuff, and if you are one of them I'm sure you know who you are, so don't be offended. As for the rest of you, the ones who never stop talking to my wife about it or think it's clever to pull her leg about it, or use it as a way of getting under her skin about whatever plans we are currently struggling to turn into a reality - work, rest, future dreams, the kind of stuff you think you've found out by reading this but don't actually know the half of - do us both a favour and find something better to do with your time. Will ya? Cos wife is already going out of her way to avoid you. You wouldn't want her to stop talking to you completely, would you?

OK, I might have been exaggerating the IT problems. Fortunately, my new best friend Adam - computer whiz, mobile phone guru and all-round coffee-drinking kingpin - was on-hand today to help me out. Which is just as well as the computer was definitely raring up on me. Again. For anyone unlucky enough to find themselves in a similar position in the future, I pass on Adam's words to me, free to those that can afford it, very expensive to those that can't, but definitely worth bearing in mind the next time your own machine starts fighting back, and they are these: get a new one, mate.

Be fair, you can't really argue with that. Straight, to the point, and guaranteed to cure all ills. Until the bill arrives, which is of course another story and a problem beyond the ken even of Adam, who as far as I'm concerned knows everything worth knowing - except that bit about the bill but even the banks seem to be having trouble there at the moment, don't they?

As for the rest of the day. Well, not ever being one to complain, as you know, all I can say is it couldn't have been more perfect and wonderful if a unicorn had trotted up to me and snuggled me with its long curly horn. The children have been quiet and smiling and helpful and in no way a screaming gang of lunatics. My wife has been like her out of Bewitched - the classic TV show, not the moronic film - all smiles and good housekeeping and cute little twinkles of her nose, and in no way moaning or putting pressure on me as I try to work. Which reminds me, work has been bliss too. Oh, I might be just a teensy-weensy bit late with a couple of itty bitty cover stories because of all the fun I've been having with young Adam but, hey, those national magazine editors are so patient and understanding, I'm sure they won't mind waiting till Monday now. Besides, I love working over the weekend. I always say, if only all weeks could only be filled with nothing but work, pain, strife, stress and machinery that won't fucking work right bastard bloody things, then my life would be even more utterly heavenly than it is right now. I can only sit here typing this feeling very, very grateful...

Expect some unplanned radio silence over the next few days. Got a major IT problem. Be back when I can...

Was watching Relocation Relocation on the telly tonight and there was a guy - looked late 30s, though it could have been the 60s beard and lack of haircut - and he was trying to persuade his wife/partner/whatever to buy a flat in Stoke Newington High Street in London. Above a pub. And I thought, Jesus, I'd rather sleep in the park than live somewhere like that. Not just because Stoke Newington was always a major shithole in the days when I used to visit Henry the Horse (as we called him) there - that was over 25 years ago and I'm guessing Thatcher's revolution had the same effect on it that it did the rest of London (hell, even the little no-hope town I live in now has been transformed over the years into a cappacino-guzzling, gym-trimmed suburb of Waitrose) - but because my days of wanting to be "where the action is" as this sad cunt put it were over before they had barely begun. Not that that stopped me wasting my time for years frequenting such dives, and not just in London. But then I had an excuse in that the so-called work I did required me to display a certain ersatz enthusiasm for such endeavours. I'm talking about seeing bands, getting drunk, pissing in alleys and paying for death-trap cabs driven by multi-lingual night travellers who never had change of a tenner or the best route to anywhere. There wasn't even much sex to be had and what there was, was strictly of the delete-from-memory-bank-when-over variety. So what was this twat doing wanting to move into that war zone now, as he said hello to 40? I looked closer and saw. The rugby shirt, the arse-less jeans and dirty white trainers, the aging blonde bird still clinging to his arm, smile like a rictus of pain on her badly drawn face. A sad, childless, clueless cunt with no thought for tomorrow. Just dying to get in there and light a fag, sip his pint of real ale and watch some useless bores wield their useless too loud guitars, while sitting cheering with his mates. The ones he's had since university 10 million years ago. I realised I'd known this guy a long time, most of my life in fact. He's one of the main reasons why I haven't been to Stoke Newington for decades. And why I'm still fighting not to go back now.

His name was Stuart and he was a warrior. A Thin Lizzy man from way back. Hendrix, Tim Buckley, Free... came from good solid stock. A former law student who'd swapped uni for a life of speed and beer and fights and wimmin'. Which may not sound much from this perspective but showed grade-A ambition back in the long hot summer of the mid-70s. Anyway, I loved Stuart, we all did. He was one great motherfucker. Irish, fiercely intelligent, but able to mix it up with IRA, SAS, MDMA, you name it. Played chess and carried a knife. Drank Guinness and stayed thin. Had a chick, Maggie, beautiful and not crazy, who slept in the backroom while Stuart and the boys went at it all night with their permanently dusty mirrors and their little polythene bags and their four-foot hand-rolled wongegroos and Little Feat albums.

Stuart was always full of blood. His own and other people's. Once saw him grab a guy by the face, some cunt mouthing off in the pub, telling things he shouldn't, putting it around in all the wrong ways. Stuart had had enough and shoved his little finger up the guy's nose, hard, then yanked it out as the red flowed like a river and the guy fell like a stone to the beer-stained floor. Stuart picked up his pool cue and went back to the laughter and the smoke, finishing his Guinness in one as we looked on in admiration. If only all men were like Stuart, we thought. Justice bringers. Immortal.

Time passed, things changed, didn't see Stu for a while. Ran into him again and he was a different person. Still thin but much smaller looking. Maggie had gone, he told me, and so had most of the boys that used to hang round his flat in West Ealing, the one he now swore was watched by the police. He seemed jittery, just his big dog left for company, a Doberman-Alsatian cross he'd named Finn after Finn McCool, the mythical Irish giant. It was on the green by Ealing Broadway station and I ran into the Wimpey and bought him a cheese-burger, thought he'd appreciate the gesture. Which he did, but not in the way I expected. Gave it to the dog. He was vegetarian, he said. I should have remembered but I'd been through some changes too and my memory was gone. He looked lost, gone too. I took him back to my mum and dad's, also Irish, where I thought he'd feel better sitting before the fire for a while. Which I think he did, chatting to the old man as though on the same level, which of course he wasn't. None of us were. Then he left, him and the dog, striding off into the cold dark night like they had somewhere to go.

The last I heard was he went back to Ireland, Stuart the warrior, home from the wars, thinner and colder and more alone. I don't know what happened to the dog.

There finally came a point where it seemed I really had made the world go away. Not for long, I realised, but for the time being anyway. New house, small but all mine, many miles from the old life in London, no furniture beside the bed, no cups or saucers, no mirrors or curtains, but mine all mine. I would walk around running my hands over the walls, caressing them, filling my nostrils with the smell of the newly painted stair banisters. No one knew my new phone number yet and those that did only ever got the machine anyway. Instead, I would jump in the car and drive around, looking out at the cows in the fields, unable to take it all in. Hills, trees, fields, farms, places that sold free range eggs laid by actual hens. Places with handwritten cardboard signs outside inviting you to pick your own strawberries. I had never known this corner of heaven before. To think there were people that had actually been born into this, that had never known the backstreets of Acton or Ealing, never climbed the fag-strewn backstairs of a block of council flats looking for a place to hide amongst the indoor smoke and half-empty bottles, the torn-faced junkies and their dead-eyed girlfriends, the TVs showing Countdown or Neighbours or whatever the fuck they showed during the nighttimes of their days.

I looked out at them and wondered where I was supposed to fit into all this, feeling a fraud, no different though to when I'd been in LA, eating Sushi and sipping Sapporo like I knew what the fuck it all meant. The difference was now I really did live here, alone, just me and the dogs and the phone that no-one knew the number of yet.

I pulled into the car park of Tesco's and went inside with my basket on wheels, walking around like a halfwit in pig-shit heaven, marvelling at the aisles of brightly-lit foods. The 'discount' stuff, the cheap beans and cupcakes and toothpaste and thin white bread. I filled the basket and eyed up the wives who knew more than I about what to do. The ones with the too big bums and too big bosoms and often screaming children. I couldn't stop smiling, sometimes secretly, sometimes not. It was an effort not to go up to them and give them a hug. Or at least stick my head on their shoulders. I had just about enough sense left to know that would not be a right move, nor one easily forgotten in this small town of horses and he-men with funny country accents. Now I was the one with the funny accent and I knew I would have to watch that.

Then later, back at my beautiful little empty abode, turning over a cardboard box and placing it arse-face up on the floor for my one plate and penknife cutlery, I would flip on the little TV with its four channels and no remote and still think of myself as having somehow escaped… everything. For now. While at the same time realising it was all a dream, just something I had managed to slip into my tea when no one was looking, that sooner than you wanted it would all change and the real hard stuff would begin. And it scared me, scared the piss right out of me. But I didn't think about that, not outside my belly anyway, just went on eating the cheap beans and cupcakes and drinking the special tea, made especially for me by me and no one else…

I was used to waking up in strange places. We all were, those of us who were young in the 70s. Certainly nothing to get worked up about. Getting wasted was just where it was at. Elegantly wasted, like Keef. I was good at getting wasted but I hadn't perfected the elegance yet. That would takes years of practise and many times on that journey I found myself laying face-down in the gutter; not so much staring up at the stars as pondering the unblinking eye of the abyss that lay just inches below; a crumpled black sack of rubbish left out in the street for the bin men to collect.

Once I did actually come to inside a plastic bin liner. I didn't know it was a plastic bin liner at first, I just awoke to find myself submerged in darkness; sitting scrunched-up on the floor, my head between my knees. I didn't know what the fuck, just that I was there suddenly. Like being transported down to the surface of a new planet.

It wasn't bad, actually. Wherever I was, it felt warm and safe there. I would probably have gone back to sleep if it hadn't been for the strong smell of puke coming from somewhere. I tried searching for it with my eyes and that's when I became aware of the fact that I was wrapped in something; cocooned. Like someone had thrown a blanket over my birdcage. I struggled to free myself…

It must have looked funny when my bewildered face popped out of the top of the bag because everyone in the room started laughing. I just sat there, blinking at them, unable to get my head round it. I knew who these people were; they were my friends. But I had never seen them this way before. They just could not stop ho-hoing and pointing at me. It was infectious. I started laughing too. I couldn't keep it up, though, and stopped.

I felt around inside the bag and realised I was sitting in vomit. It still didn't register yet that it was my vomit. I just wondered why I had been allowed to sit in a bag full of sick? It didn't make sense.

"You went mad in the pub and tried to pick a fight with a guy twice your size," said Jonathan.

"What?"

"If we hadn't been there he'd have fucking killed you. So that was fun, thanks."

I tried to remember but nothing came. "Sorry," I said.

"Then you tried to start a fight with me, you mad bastard! We got your arms behind your back but then you started chucking up everywhere…"

"Which was extremely charming," said Rosemary.

Rosie was Jon's chick. He was a dealer; she was a model. They were the coolest couple I knew. Fuck, I thought, I’ve really blown it now.

"We brought you back to the flat but you were still being sick everywhere so I said we should put you in that bag," said Rosie. "I didn't want you being sick all over the carpet."

Well, no. I could see that. I pushed down the edges of the bag and tried getting to my feet. Rosie and Jon almost jumped off the couch.

"For Christ's sake! You'll get it everywhere!"

I sat back down again. I could see their point. Then it all went quiet again as a good bit came on the telly and everybody went back to watching that.

There was Jon and Rosie and another couple called Viv and Bob that I didn't know so well. I wondered what they were thinking. It was a shame because I quite fancied Viv and I remembered vaguely how she had flirted with me on an earlier occasion. Now she could barely bring herself to look at me.

I sat there forlornly, stuck in my bag, wondering what to do. "What shall I do?" I asked.

Jonathan looked at me. "You stay where you are and we'll figure something out."

Oh well, at least they were being cool about it. I shifted around and made myself more comfortable. I smiled and tried to catch Viv's eye but she wasn't having it…

Listening to the TV, watching the radio, everyone talking of the meltdown, one of the lowest times for me was the winter before I started for Kerrang!, shacked-up with an alcoholic speed-freak in Chiswick whose love I never got, still saved for my older, much more exciting predecessor. She had recently enrolled at St. Martin's as a mature student studying fine art, yeah, right, and I was living on a quid a day, pretending to look for a job, pretending to think about going to college myself, pretending I knew what the fuck I was doing. Because it was her gaff - a one-room shithole where we shared the kitchen and bathroom with the gay couple in the next room - she wouldn't let me have a key, so I would pocket the backdoor kitchen key before leaving with her for the tube station each morning, staggering down the road in the hungover deathly cold not even speaking, her only thinking of college and whatever masterpiece she was currently working on, me hoping her train would come first so I could then walk back to the flat, let myself in by the backdoor and crawl back into bed.

Some mornings it didn't work out like that though and my train came first, so it would be plan B. This meant riding the tube from Chiswick Park to Ealing Broadway. No electronic ticket barriers in those days, often no guards at all, maybe some old black who didn't give a fuck, put 20p in his hand, he was cool. Ealing was only a couple of stops away and I would make for the baker's shop opposite the station. A styrofoam cup of tomato soup and a ham salad roll could be bought for 50p and starving as I always, always was back then I would already be drooling as they handed it over in the white paper bag.

I would save it though for the library, which was a five-minute walk away. Week day mornings there was hardly anyone ever in there and though you weren't supposed to bring food or drink in I would carry my precious bag of goodies in there, not looking left or right, find myself a cold seat in the corner, look for some Henry Miller off the shelf - this was very much my Tropic Of Whatfuckingever phase - and carry it back and start reading as I ate, eking out every mouthful so that it lasted as long as possible, my stomach still groaning loudly for more when I'd finished, licking the crumbs and red stains off my fingers, dreaming of a white Xmas and much, much more.

Did the art-drink-speed-whore ever know what I was up to? Of course not. That would have required putting a name to a face in her mind and I would never tick enough boxes in what passed for her thoughts for that. Instead, when I could no longer get away with hiding in the library I would walk through Lammas Park, smoking cigarettes to keep warm, waiting for it to start to get dark. Sometimes I bumped into Pete, an older loser whose wife had run off with someone much more exciting and left him with twin daughters to clean up after. He was in therapy, he said, when he said anything at all, which wasn't often. He was dull, dull, dull but he let me hang around a bit and sometimes we would go back to his shithole for a cup of tea. But at least it was his. Me, I still had to slope off back to the tube and go back to the room that wasn't mine, make the bed that wasn't mine and wait for the bitch that was never truly mine to come home and tell me all about her day. How she and the guys were going to New York next Spring, to see the whatever museum, or maybe Amsterdam, or Paris, the art world was full of far out destinations full of brilliant crazy kids just like her and all the other amazing guys at college. By then she'd be pissed and speeding and nothing else mattered. She'd pull out the half-bottle of voddy in her bag and I'd fetch a couple of dirty glasses from the kitchen, remembering to put back the key, and we'd sit there playing records listening to how she was going to rule the fucking world, me just toughing it out waiting for the sky to fall which of course it eventually did, ha, yeah.

Been taking a break from this thing. It occurs to me though that it would be a pity not to say something this week of all weeks, what with the first black president of the US being inaugurated (twice) and all, something I don't think anyone on this earth ever expected to see in this lifetime. I was driving back from London and had stopped at Reading services when he began his speech so sat in the car drinking coffee and listening to it live on Radio 4. It struck me that I'd never heard a political speech that had so much resonance before. For once, I knew exactly what the guy was talking about. It was rather thrilling, in a quiet does-anything-good-ever-really-get-done-in-politics-anymore sort of way. Then later, looking at the TV pictures, just trying to take in the size of the crowd in the mall was awe-inspiring, and crowds are not my thing at all, especially big ones. I admit to wincing though when the Obamas went walkabout amongst the crowd, cringing as I waited for the gunshots. You just hope they never come or that when they do some patriotic serviceman in shades will thwart the CIA operatives holding the guns. I also hope it doesn't turn into Blair Part 2, a big hopeful hello followed by a bewilderingly shambolic middle and ending with a bitterly shameful goodbye. More than that I am still finding hard to imagine. Good luck with all that anyway Mr President. All this in the same month we finally got an admission that there is life on Mars. What next? Rod and the Faces to get back together? Oh, you already heard about that...

FORTY & FAT (second drfat intro, from 2003), part 2...

Luck, of one kind or another, is something none of us ever quite runs out of, and surely I had waited long enough for a little bit of the good stuff to come sluicing my way. Now it was here though, I was falling over in it, messed up by it. Being broke has almost nothing going for it except the chance to sit and stare into space occasionally knowing the phone is definitely not going to ring. Now I didn't have time to zip up my fly let alone sit and think. Nothing was simple or easy anymore. Bogged down in contracts, pension plans, mortgages, loans, insurance and the rest of the blithering, idiot-proof paraphernalia that comes with being a responsible, 21st century dad, I had no option but to keep working. Money goes to money, they say, and I believed that, and so I had set the wheels in motion. Now they were spinning out of control. Meanwhile, I kept waiting for someone to knock on the door and tell me it was all an elaborate hoax, a cheap laugh for the gods to enjoy, and that now they had had their fill they were here to take it all back again - new car, new house, the works, maybe even the new wife and babies, too. It was an insane idea but I felt surrounded by insane ideas, and it would not have been the first time I'd thrown it all away just as the going got good. I had a history of turning my back on good fortune. Not because of any cheap principle, but because I was too pig thick to know what to do with it once it started banging on the door. Go away, I always told it, I'm not in. And away it would go, looking for some other sucker to nail to the cross.

Now it was all coming to a head again - figuratively, metaphorically, financially, you name it - and like an expectant mother screaming in the car, all I could do was hang on. My pains weren't coming in bursts but in waves; a constant ebb and flow. Like a tightrope walker poised halfway across the wire, trembling on one leg with a umbrella in his hand, the pressure was now building from without and within. There was the baby that was coming and the baby that was already there. There was the book I was hurrying to finish and the other two books I now worried I'd never finish. Then there was the new house we had just moved into, the new job I was about to start, the radio and TV stuff, and of course the Zeppelin thing - some glossy notes to be included with their glossy new DVD.

It was all very big deal in its own context and what middle-aged fart doesn't want to kid himself he's throwing away all his best hours on something fractionally more exciting than simply paying the bills, chalking up the work days like notches on a prison wall? This forty-something desperado was no different. Now, though, I'd reached overload. I really did want it all to stop. Or rather, not to stop, but to hit the pause button for a moment. Just while I caught my breath, scratched my arse. Just long enough to try and remember why it was I put myself and my family through all this crap in the first place.

But of course there is no pause to such moments, because ultimately that's all they are: moments of exceptional, un-pausing madness; vividly lived holiday romances with a built-in burn-out factor. Making them stop meant taking the plane home early and I was still too eager for the action, too hot for the clinch, to consider anything as drastic as that. Despite the spiralling costs to my personal life, I still hungered for the morsel of prestige it threw my way; the minute recognition that my life might just be worth something more than the shambles it had too often resembled over the years. When the offers came, I took 'em. I was the Michael Caine of rock punditry, never willingly saying no to anything - unless of course it didn't pay. Then I had no interest at all. In that sense I was a true child of the eighties, only really fired up to finish something once I'd gotten the glint of gold. Hence the stalled novel, the lost poems, the never to be requited loves.

But you can only keep up the happy-face for so long, no matter how much money is on the table, and by the time wife and I were on our way to the hospital the mask had now fallen away completely. I had felt its edges slowly peeling from my skin for some time now but it had not been until a few nights before, as I sat slumped at my makeshift desk in our new home, trying to stay awake, that I realised it was now coming away in big, unsightly chunks, like bits of an old scab…

THE END (at last)

From here the story picked up pretty much as I ran it last week, so you get the drift. Looking at it again, it still doesn't quite work and I'm still not entirely sure why not, except maybe that you can see the work put into it and that's not how it should be. Not the stuff I like anyway.

I'm glad so many of you seem to have enjoyed the Forty & Fat stuff. A lot of people have mailed in asking why I never published it back in 2003. Well, my agent Robert was never too sure about it and, in retrospect, I agree. In particular, he thought the intro was too dull and so asked for a new one - which I did. And I have to say he was right. The new intro worked a lot better. However, I took so long to finish the bloody thing the publisher we had in mind for a book of such stories had since moved on and a new guy was now doing the job. A new guy that didn't know or care about Led Zeppelin or rock and therefore had no connection to the story. He also thought it dull and peculiar. Of course, this was nearly six years ago and as Robert was saying to me just the other day, "There are no bad ideas, just not always the right time for them." Perhaps the time is more right for something like that now. Though that particular story I would want to rewrite, if I even used it at all. For me it's way too stodgy, too much like someone trying to 'write' something 'interesting' and less about the inconvenient, not right or wrong just the way it is, truth.

In the meantime, by way of an encore, I thought I would give you the 'new' intro I pegged onto it. If you're not interested, just skip. If you are, it's in two parts and part one goes like this...

FORTY & FAT (from 2003), revised second draft intro, Part 1...

By the time I'd gotten her into the car and we were on our way the pains were coming every two minutes. I tried to drive fast but not so fast we bumped around too much. The subtlety was lost on her.

"Fuck's sake!" she screamed. "Hurry! Ooh, Jesus, fuuccckkkk!!"

I put my foot down and moved us over to the fast lane. It was after midnight and the traffic on the A34 wasn't too bad. With luck, we'd be at the hospital in Oxford in twenty minutes. All she had to do was hang on in there. I wondered if some music might help then glanced across at her scrunched-up face and decided not.

"I can feel the head!" she screamed, grasping between her legs.

"What?"

"I can feel the fucking head!"

Jesus Christ. It wasn't meant to happen like this, was it? What karmic law had we broken to make it happen like this? I eased the pedal closer to the floor and watched the dial climb up to ninety. If the cops stopped us, well, what better excuse? We might even get a police escort, I thought idly between screams.

My mobile rang. I looked at it astonished. Who the fuck? But its green face displayed no numbers, just the word 'private'.

"It must be your parents," I said, trying not to sound concerned. They were back at the house looking after our eldest daughter for us. Was something wrong?

I picked up. "Hello?"

"Mick? It's Ross…"

Ross? What was Ross doing calling me in the middle of the night? What was anybody doing calling right now, at this most fraught and fantastic of moments, as we hurtled through the darkness together, my wife and I, in mounting agony?

"I thought you'd be up," he said. "Whatcha doing? Still trying to finish the Zeppelin thing?"

I was struck dumb for a moment as the two worlds collided. Zeppelin thing? What baby's head? All I could think of were the cats' eyes streaming past the windshield.

"Ross," I said, searching for the shortest words, "I'm in the car on the way to the hospital. The baby's coming."

"Oh, shit," he said. "Sorry. Is that what that noise is? I thought it was the telly."

"I'm gonna have to call you back, mate."

"Okay, just quickly then - did you get the Zep thing done yet? You know they're screaming for it."

I should have hung up there and then but that was just Ross; he was a zealot, the original Mr 24/7, working on LA time in London and New York time in LA. There was nothing to forgive, just a lot to forget.

"Ross…"

"I know. You're under pressure right now. But gimme a call tomorrow, okay, after you've had the whassname, the kid. We can discuss it then, okay? It's just that Jimmy was asking about it again today and I just wanted you to know he's on the warpath."

"Ross…"

"Cos you know the words are the only thing they're waiting for now."

"Ross, it's done, okay? I sent it tonight. Now goodbye."

You did? Oh, great! I'll tell Jimmy. How did it turn out in the end? Are you pleased with it?"

"Ross!"

"Yeah, okay. Good news, though. Gimme a call tomorrow anyway. And good luck with the, er, the kid, you know?"

As I hung up I noticed the speedometer was now touching a hundred.

Right on cue, she let go another one. A real goody this time. One that reached right into your skull and squeezed the jelly between its fingers.

"I'm sorry," she sobbed, when the pain subsided again.

"It's okay," I said, "just let it out. We'll be there soon." I hoped so anyway…

If so much of life can be broken down into safe, petty banalities like love and money, or love and no money, or no money and no love, or whatever the shortest straw happens to be that day, there are certain times when the universe appears to break all the rules and begin tilting towards you at a quite frighteningly familiar angle. When you find your space invaded by so much light it leaves you feeling sickened and depressed, even suicidal. First love, perhaps. Or first flush of success. Times when the pendulum appears to have swung so far in your favour you simply become overwhelmed by it; events take on a giddy momentum of their own and life becomes a series of unnatural highs. Punctuated, as an drug guru will tell you, by long, desperate lows - characterised, in my case, by a daisy chain of plum assignments, interspersed with endless days and nights spent stabbing at the keyboard, trying to summon forth the requisite gutter wit to enliven whatever overcooked piece of rock hagiography I happened to be working on. Fighting off the lip-curling tedium of trying to do too many things adequately rather than concentrating on doing one thing really well; and along with it, the nagging suspicion that I had taken a wrong turn somewhere far back down the road.

Some people seem to take their luck for granted, as though always being dealt the winning hand was just the way the game was meant to be played. They take success and swallow it whole, washing it down each morning like a happy pill. God, how I have always envied those people. If only I could have been born one of those. The chosen ones.

Instead, presented with a gift horse I have always found it impossible not to stare intently at its mouth - searching for clues, waiting for the catch. Always wanting to know what the bad news was first. And so it was now, as work and babies and all the etcs clashed and exploded in my mind like noisy fireworks. The brief spray of colours may have looked impressive from afar but up close it was the big, ugly explosions that stayed with you longest. That really shook you up.

Don't get me wrong, you only have to look at the lines that railroad my face, notice the tombstone teeth, the lost hair and the fading, once blue eyes to know that I have experienced enough bad runs not to complain too loudly when an unexpected lucky streak breaks out. But hard times are something you can rail against. You might never win the battle but at least you know what you're fighting for; who the enemy is. The good times, when they finally come, are harder to know what to do with. Work piles up, commitments rise, precious time left alone in which to do sweet nothing is ritually sacrificed before the altar of so-called opportunity. In short, you start to lose control. Days topple over into nights and things that should have been done yesterday are now consigned to an unspecified, but much better, you promise, tomorrow. Things like family and friends. Babies and love. Or just being around to help put up the new curtains. Important things…

FORTY & FAT (from 2003), part 11...

I went back to the book. A couple of weeks before the DVD was supposed to come out, I was told on the quiet that Robert had "gone mad again" and was now refusing to sanction its release "while there's a war on." I had to laugh. Jimmy, apparently, was ready to administer a bit of shock-and-awe of his own. Then that disappeared and the next thing I knew the DVD was actually out there and being praised to the high heavens in all the newspapers and magazines.

By the time my own copy arrived in the mail a few days later, it was already officially the biggest-selling music DVD of all time. I opened the box. The text was spread over two booklets. I pulled them out and had a gander. I couldn't actually bring myself to sit down and read them, but at a glance they looked like any other DVD notes. Nothing special. I checked for my name at the end - there it was. Nothing special at all.

I did watch a bit of the DVD again that night though, as I got stuck into the Crunchies. There's a bit on one of the sidebars where Robert is being interviewed backstage by Bob Harris for an edition of the Old Grey Whistle Test. I remembered seeing it on TV when it was first broadcast in 1975. I was sixteen going on seventeen and although I was planning to go to one of their shows at Earl's Court that year, I remembered how Zeppelin seemed like an old band to me even then. Why, they had been releasing albums since before I'd been old enough to buy them! They were like the Stones - brilliant, but they'd been around so long you half-expected them to end soon. Or just die or something.

Being so young myself, what I hadn't noticed first time around was how breathtakingly beautiful Robert was; a Raphaelite masterpiece done in deep, rich oils; the sun caught in his hair; his face alight with soft expression; the face of a boy-god. But then, watching again from a distance of nearly thirty years, even 'Whispering' Bob looked quite beautiful to me. So vulnerable and earnest and shy… What would the Bomber have been then? Twenty-nine? Thirty? Just a boy himself, still. Odd. Back then he had always looked like the oldest man in the world to me…

It snagged me and so I flipped it over to the concert footage from Earl's Court in 1975. I happened to land on 'Stairway To Heaven'. Oh Christ, I thought. Not that. But while I was searching for the box to see what else was on there it began playing and quite quickly I found myself sitting there listening… again. The years peeled away and there I was watching, wondering, sixteen years old and no idea how any of it worked yet, just that it did, like magic. I had been so excited when they finally came on stage I started having convulsions…

I tried remembering what was going through my mind then, what it was I thought was happening, but the only thing I could come up with was how wise I felt about the music then, and how little the rest mattered. Now… the rest still didn't matter, not really, but it was that area outside the music that I had spent most of my life in. They called it the real world but I wondered how real I would have thought it back then, when I was sixteen and still had to save up for my tickets…

The song built it's way incorrigibly to its gorgeous, over-familiar crescendo, and I eased the blue volume level a notch higher on the screen. Not enough to wake the new baby, just enough to try and reawaken something in me. It seemed strange - even unfair - that this song, this group, should still have such a shuddering effect on me, even at this late stage of the game. Forget cliche. This went beyond cliche. This was something buried so deep in my consciousness it felt like it had existed long before I had.

I didn't know what you called it. Hope? The light hidden under the bushel? Or that other cliche about optimism and experience? It didn't matter. I just knew that without it there was almost nothing else out there worth having.

I took a slurp of cold tea and thought about it. How to reconcile that deep-in-the-night knowledge though with the banal, broad-daylight reality of money squabbles and wife worries; egos and politics? How to stay in touch with the true meaning of Christmas while being taunted for not getting your 'facts' straight?

I was fucked if I knew. I was dismayed to even find myself asking the question again. It paid the bills and kept the ball rolling, I did know that. And that wasn't just dad talking. I mean, at the end of the day, when you get right down to your last Crunchie bar, what else was there? Rocket science?

I was still thinking about it as I finally made my way to bed…

THE END

FORTY & FAT (from 2003) part 10...

This time I got the job done ultra-quick. One sitting. Amazing how fast a slap in the kisser can bring you round. A schoolboy essay? This from the man who made his name singing about goblins and faerie queens? Considering he was also the main reason the notes got written under such duress, he had a fucking nerve criticising them like that. Well, okay. These were their notes, they were paying for them, I would give them exactly what they wanted. Neutered, anodyne, soul-suckingly normal...

I left it a couple of days before sending it. Old freelance trick: never send the stuff in too early. They just assume you've dashed it off. Which you have, of course, but you don't want them knowing that. So I left it a few days then sent it. And that was the last I heard until a few weeks later, when I got an email from Bill's office asking for my invoice. It should have been a good sign - any request for an invoice is always good news, ask any writer - but there was a vibe to the email that was not quite right. Friendly enough, but lacking the little pat on the back that is customary on such occasions. It was the first time I'd heard from them since turning the revised notes in, and I noted with dismay the absence of even a BTW mentioning how much the 'boys' loved them. In my experience, if the boys in the band don't love something, it usually means they hate it.

When I replied to the email, attaching my invoice, I added a little BTW of my own: 'BTW - were the notes OK in the end?' I got an almost instant reply: 'I think so. I think the boys changed a few things though.'

Oh? Well, that was their prerogative. Though I did wonder vaguely why they hadn't come back and asked me to make the changes for them.

The next day there was another email: 'Bill says this is way too much you're asking for. That he was thinking more of something like…' It named a figure - half what I'd asked for. Shit. I replied, this time at length. Yes, the invoice was a little higher than I would have anticipated at the outset, but did they know how time-consuming this whole thing had been? How much fucking around there had been? How many of my precious brain cells I had sacrificed to it? Not to mention coming back to me at the last minute as my wife was about to go into labour demanding the notes be done immediately. And etc and etc…

I suggested a compromise; somewhere halfway between the two valuations. This time the reply was not so instant. When it finally came, a couple of weeks, they agreed. All right, I said. Daylight robbery, they said. I didn't care. I'd given up by then. I had just been about to send an email agreeing to take the half when I got their reply. I am not a breadhead. I don't expect to die rich. But considering how much money the DVD was going to make for them, it seemed a shoddy and unnecessary way to conclude my involvement with it, squabbling over a few quid.

In the end, even Jimmy went a bit off with me. When I later called to ask if it would be okay for me to use some of the quotes that didn't get used in the DVD notes for a piece in Classic Rock he got someone to call me back with the message: "Jimmy says that's fine. Just one thing - get your facts straight this time."

All that pain and worry and sweat and trust, all that glad intention, and where had it got me? Being told - posthumously - to get my facts straight. As pats on the back go, I couldn't have felt more appreciated if I'd woken up with a horse's head in my bed.

FORTY & FAT (from 2003) part 9...

My second daughter was born about four hours later. Not on the floor at home, thank god, but in a cold delivery room at the hospital in Oxford. Just as the nurse had predicted, once she'd decided she was coming she didn't mess around. Suddenly she was just there - whoosh! Straight out of wife's belly and straight into my arms. Another miracle, another angel, what had we done to deserve this? Why were we so lucky?

Then they told us to go home. What? Weren't they supposed to keep new mums and babies in for a couple of days first, just for observation or something? We'd brought the overnight bag and everything…

No, we were to go home. Only mums having their first child were now kept in, they said. It seemed fucked to me but it wasn't a good moment for an argument. Wife hated hospitals anyway. So I called her parents to ask them to drive up with the car-seat for the baby. By the time they arrived an hour later the weird old women that mopped-up the blood and changed the sheets were practically shooing us out the door.

I found wife a wheelchair and pushed her out to the car while she held second-daughter tight in her arms. Nana and Granddad took care of eldest daughter, who was carrying her own baby dolly, bought specially for the occasion some weeks before. We tried to make it as much a special occasion for her, too. We didn't want her feeling left out or second-best suddenly. She and dolly even got to sit with Nana and Granddad in their car as they followed us back. It wasn't quite the home-coming we'd planned, but at least mother and baby were fine. Newborn daughter cried all the way home in the car. Mummy was too tired to cry. Daddy just drove.

If you've ever experienced the strange excitement of bringing a newborn baby home, you'll know what happened to the next couple of weeks. Nappies, gifts, flowers, puke, congratulations' cards, lots of screaming, lots of laughter, lots of relatives and pictures and neighbours and letters and phone calls and big heavy boobs being thrust suddenly into gaping, hungry mouths. Lots of me just peering into the tiny face of my brand new child and wondering…

Never had the book or the DVD notes, or anything else, seemed less important. It was my little family that mattered most. That needed me most. Sure, the money was needed too. But that wasn't all. I realised they needed more than that from me; that they actually had a right to expect more than that from me. From daddy.

The money wasn't a bad place to start though, and as soon as wife was feeling strong enough we went out and did a tour of Mothercare, Toys R Us, the Disney Store, Baby Gap… we took the credit card and bent it in two. A new crib, with new bunny-rabbit sheets and blankets, plus some new pink and white jumpsuits, vests and booties and the obligatory huge white teddy. Some new books and puzzles and a Buzz Lightyear dolly for eldest daughter. And a new double-buggy built like a tank (with double cosy-toes) for both of them. We even found time to buy some loose-fitting, lightweight cotton gear for mummy to wear until she could fit into her proper clothes again. And daddy treated himself to new shoes and some jeans. He even bought a book, cor blimey.

It felt like the right thing to do. The correct response. Not just the buying of stuff, but the doing it together. We treated every day like a holiday and just went out and enjoyed ourselves. Just like a proper family…

Then Bill was on the phone again and our little vacation came to an abrupt end.

"They don’t like it," said Bill, coming straight to the point.

"I see," I said, not seeing that one coming at all. "What is it they don't like exactly? Is it something I can fix?"

"Robert says it's like a schoolboy essay. He says it's too… too…" He struggled to recall the word.

"Cheesy?" I suggested.

"Yeah, something like that. Too fucking cheesy. And too many quotes."

"Too many quotes? But that's exactly what Jimmy wanted, isn't it, originally?"

"I know. Welcome to my nightmare - keeping all the ex-members of Led Zeppelin happy."

"What did Jimmy think of the notes?"

"All Jimmy cares about right now is getting this thing out. If Robert don't like the notes then Jimmy don't like them neither, because it means another delay."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"I want you to see if you can fix them."

"How?"

"I don't know, can't you take what Jimmy says and turn it into what you're saying, so that it doesn't look like Jimmy's the only one who's got anything interesting to say?"

"Paraphrase, you mean? Yeah, I can do that. But you still want some quotes in there, right?"

"I don't know. Do we have to?"

"Come on, Bill. It's exactly what the people want to see. And I've done all the interviews, it would be a shame not to use any of it, don't you think?"

He thought it over. "All right," he said reluctantly. "But keep them brief, okay?"

"Okay, Bill."

"And cut out the purple prose, as Robert calls it. Take out all the wonderfuls and superbs and all that, okay?"

"Gotcha. You want the black-tie version."

"Yeah, that's it. I mean, I can't see what’s wrong with a few superlatives here and there but Robert's got it into his head that it’s too like a schoolboy essay and so this is what I’m telling you. When can you have it back to me?"

"A couple of days?"

"Good lad. Did you have that baby yet?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Fantastic, mate. Congratulations. Boy or girl?"

"Girl. That's two girls now."

"You poor bastard. You think you're in trouble now, wait till they grow up…"

FORTY & FAT (from 2003) part 8...

I reluctantly set aside the book, got a fresh supply of Pro-plus in, and set off like a brain-dead Columbus on the Voyage to Finish the Fucking Zeppelin Notes. I was frantic to get them done before the baby was born. As Bill had thoughtfully pointed out: "It's not like it's you having the baby, is it?" But I knew there was no way I'd be able to get anything more done on this once the baby was here. Not for any money. Not that that would stop them asking. The only way round it was to try and get the damn thing done first. For my wife and the baby. Both babies. I set to work…

It's at times like this - times of utmost crisis - that you really find out what you've got as a writer. With the clock poised at two minutes to midnight, you don't have time to think anymore, you just have to act. The balloon is going down and so you begin by jettisoning everything - starting with all your precious notions of attempting something 'special' or 'different' or whatever conceit it was you originally shilly-shallied with. Suddenly it's time to say fuck all that shit and get down to business. So you copy the quotes, cut-and-paste the names and dates and etc, then scattergun the lot onto one big document on the laptop and start moving the pieces around - as fast as you can. It was a bit like doing one of daughter's Fimbles puzzles, except with about a thousand more pieces to play with. One of those games strictly for ages forty-and-over where if the pieces don't fit you make 'em fucking fit…

Every time I got stuck or found myself taking too long to try and say something fanciful, I substituted the words 'Led Zeppelin' in my mind with 'S Club 7' and immediately found the way forward. My intention was to keep it moving, keep it light; fact-filled and, as far as possible, quote-driven. Jimmy had been keen early on that there shouldn't be "too much waffle, just what the guys themselves have to say about the band and those days." At the time I had wanted to inject a little more artistry into it than that, now I'd changed my mind. Quotes, I had 'em by the bucket load. I'd even now spoken to Robert. It had only been over the phone but that was probably for the best. I didn't have time for a full handholding session and, judging by the way he wound things up after about fifteen minutes, neither did he. As soon as we got to the part of the DVD that showed them at Knebworth in 1979, he didn't want to know.

Whatever. It didn't matter anymore. The baby was coming very soon, I could feel it as sure as if I was carrying it myself, and I would do whatever it took to be there - to be ready - when the time came.

Yet even as I kept my eyes fixed solidly on the road ahead, I was painfully aware of the ridiculous situation I had somehow plunged us all into. Ridiculous and unfair. I looked for the funny side, at odd intervals, usually as I sat slumped in front of the TV, but I was either too whacked to see it or maybe there just wasn't one.

Couldn't I have just said no, told them I was busy with my family and that I would get back to them when I could? I suppose. But then they would probably have turned to some other writer to do it for them and I really didn't want some other writer to do it for them. It wasn't just the days and weeks I had already put into this, it was the years I had spent getting to know Jimmy first, and, to a lesser extent, Robert. Gaining their respect. And I had an ego, too. It was my name I wanted people to see on those DVD notes, not some other Johnny-come-lately's. Balls to that. This was my baby, too, you know.

My whole perspective was gone. Looking for the E channel one night I accidentally stumbled upon Sky News. They were talking about the war in Iraq. It was about to start any day now, they said, unless Saddam gave up his weapons of mass destruction. They speculated on the coming assault on Baghdad and it was the first time I'd heard the phrase 'shock and awe'. What the fuck is this, I thought? World War III? Again? I kept flipping until I found what I was looking for. Tonight's story was about the Playboy model who left her violent husband to go and live with film director Peter Bogdanovich, only to be enticed back to the former husband for one last fateful meeting, at which he tied her up and shot her in the head before turning the gun on himself. Sheesh! And I thought my life was a mess…

I finally finished the notes late one Saturday night. I read them, re-read them, spell-checked them and read the bastards again. Then I attached the document to an email and pressed 'send'. Usually, there is a sense of relief or elation at this moment. Right then, however, I felt nothing. I was just too dog-fuck tired to care. Sending that email was like punching a timecard. It meant I could go home at last. Forget about it. For a while, anyway.

It was just gone midnight - an early finish for once - and so I decided not to waste any more time spacing-out in front of the TV and just go the hell to bed.

Bed. Sleep. God, those words sounded good to me right then. Sweet dreams… what a blessed phrase that is.

I crept out of the bathroom as quietly as I could and went downstairs to get some water. Even if daughter was in the bed too I would just snuggle in beside them. I got a clean glass from the cupboard and turned on the tap…

"Michael!"

It was wife. Calling me.

"Michael! Quick!"

Oh god… not now. Please. Not now.

"MICHAEL!"

Oh god! Now…

I put down the glass, turned off the tap and sped out of the kitchen and back up the stairs. She was standing on the landing, doubled-over with pain. It's at such moments you begin to wonder about things like fate. Fate and where the fuck the cordless phone is…

FORTY & FAT (from 2003) part 7...

By the time we'd got the move and then Christmas out of the way, I had lost nearly three weeks on the book and was now desperate to catch up. I was ghosting the autobiography of Don Arden - the Al Capone of rock, as the tabloids once dubbed him. Infamous father of Sharon Osbourne ("Don in a skirt," reckoned her brother David), former manager of Ozzy and Black Sabbath, and before them a string of million-sellers like ELO, Wizzard, Lynsey De Paul, the Small Faces, The Move, The Animals, right back to the bad daddy of them all, Gene Vincent - Don was one of the greatest characters the music business had ever known. A poor but smart, and incredibly tough, Jewish kid from the Manchester slums who rock and rolled his way to the top; hanging people from windows, fixing the charts, and building one of the biggest pop empires of the sixties and seventies. A gun-toting, Mafia-connected, music biz pioneer who, at his height, owned Howard Hughes' former mansion in Hollywood - a zillion-dollar Xanadu paid for in cash - and, at his lowest, stood trial at the Old Bailey on charges, including torture and abduction, that should have seen him jailed for twenty years. But didn't.

Fuck The Sopranos, this was the real thing, baby. And I was deeply committed to making the book as incredible as I felt it ought to be. The old man was seventy-seven now but he still punched his weight, and though I didn't trust him any more than I would a hungry shark, I had a great affection for him. He was a rogue but a great storyteller - chillingly graphic one moment, hilarious the next. ("I took the cigar out of his mouth and drilled it into his forehead… I wanted to give him a third eye.") And despite all the warnings I got from others in the biz who had once crossed his path, I liked the old bastard a lot.

I had almost forgotten about the Zep DVD when someone from Jimmy's camp let slip over the phone one day that it now looked like the whole thing might be iced anyway. Robert was refusing to play ball again and Jimmy was starting to lose it. Once again, I was secretly relieved. It was a bummer because of all the work I'd already put in. But at least it meant I didn't have to worry about it while I rushed to finish the book. The book, the book, the book! That's all I could think about, talk about. Everything in my life now referred back to it. We'd moved house, we were having a baby… okay. But what about the book!

Jimmy wasn't the only one losing it. So I allowed the whole thing to slip away, as I had everything else, until just after six one night, a couple of days after the wasted trip to the hospital, when the phone rang and it was Bill.

"I've got good news and bad news," he said. "The good news is the DVD is now definitely back on. The bad news is we need the notes by yesterday. What do you reckon?"

"Jesus, Bill, I haven't even spoken to Robert yet…"

"Do it without him."

"What?"

"Use old quotes."

I thought about it. It was do-able. But I had interviewed the other two, wouldn't Robert be pissed off if he didn't get his say, too?

Bill exhaled. "Look, Mick, I don't know where Robert's head is at right now, okay? I'll ask him but I can't guarantee anything. Him and Jimmy are sending me round the fucking twist. Can't you just do the notes anyway? Then if we get him on the phone for you in the next couple of days you can just add his stuff in, yeah?"

"Yeah, okay," I said doubtfully. "There's something else, though…" I told him about wife and how we were expecting the baby at any moment.

"Let's just hope it's a good rock'n'roll baby and holds off until you get the notes done, eh?" said Bill, making it sound like he was joking.

"Okay…"

I put the phone down and went to tell wife the news, good and bad. She was lying back in an armchair with daughter asleep on her lap, her swollen feet stretched out on the Tweenies beanbag.

"What's the good news again?" she asked dreamily.

FORTY & FAT (from 2003) part 6...

The main problem was Plant, who had a completely different take on things. Since the death of drummer John Bonham, in 1980 - the event which triggered the end of Zeppelin - the singer's true feelings for his former band had run the emotional gamut: guilt, anger, pride, denial, complex hybrids thereof. The way he saw it, he'd spent the last twenty years trying to unshackle himself from the cliched Zeppelin legend; to prove there was more to him than banshee wails and flower-power lyrics. Rock in the eighties - the kind, rightly or wrongly, seen as the natural successor to that of seventies bands like Zeppelin - meant 'heavy metal' and groups like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. The kind of stuff that made Robert cut his hair short and vow never to perform any Zeppelin songs again.

Eighteen months later he was on stage with them at Live Aid singing 'Stairway To Heaven'; a 'one-off' reunion they would repeat three years later in New York, at the televised anniversary celebrations for their label, Atlantic Records. But then singers as a breed are known for having their cake and smearing it all over themselves. Nevertheless, for the most part, Plant had succeeded, he felt, in establishing a new public persona for himself. No longer the buns-squeezing 'golden god' of old but an infinitely more accessible, more freewheeling solo artist of some repute. Which was true, to a degree. His first solo album had gone to No.2. Each subsequent album, however, had sold a little less than the one before and, ironically, it wasn't until the two Page/Plant albums in the mid-nineties that the singer was finally accepted by the critics as anything more significant than ex-Zeppelin.

Now, having gone through all that and come out the other side still smiling, still dreaming - in public, at least - he found himself being asked to turn back the clock and revisit a time in his mind before all those things had happened; when he was still the strutting young stag in the biggest, scariest rock band in the world. And that presented a problem.

I didn't know Robert as well as I knew Jimmy, but it was already clear from our previous conversations that while he was still fond of discussing the early, empire-building days of Zeppelin, he found it much harder to get into the dark, depressing period that began in 1975 with the car crash that almost crippled him, and culminated five years later with the death of Bonham, "my best mate," who'd choked on his own vomit, having passed-out after consuming a frightening number of vodkas at rehearsals one day. In was during this bleak period that Plant also lost his young son, Karac, who had died suddenly just weeks into the band's first tour since dad had climbed out of his wheelchair. That was in 1977, the same year, he later told me, that he "said goodbye to drugs, and to that whole rock'n'roll lifestyle." So when he said now that he didn't want to go there, who could blame him? I certainly didn't want to be the one to reopen - maybe even rub salt into - old wounds.

On the other hand, it was clear from working with them both that there was still plenty of ego involved, too. As one associate put it to me, "The only time Robert's not the most interesting man in the room is when Jimmy walks in." But there was now politics involved, too, and Robert was the master at that game. Jimmy had always been more than just the guitarist in Zeppelin. It was his band. Robert wasn't even his first choice singer. Ironically, however, with the group now in abeyance, Plant had more say in their affairs than ever before, and he liked to wield that power. Jimmy - who still needed Robert to sign-off on the whole project before it could be released - foresaw trouble. "Stay on his case," he warned me, "or he'll keep messing you around and we'll never get these notes done."

I couldn't see how he could pass up the chance, though, especially as the others had already spoken to me. And at first I thought I was onto a winner. "Of course he wants to speak to you," one of his assistants told me. He was very busy but he would definitely be in touch. And so he was, eventually. The first time, in the form of a phone call late one night asking if I could be in London the next morning to do the interview. I couldn't as I already had something else on. "But any other time you like," I said. "If you could just give me a bit more notice. As I mentioned before, my wife is pregnant and…" I realised they weren't listening. No more than I used to when people used to jabber on at me about their kids. Who the hell wants to hear about it in the music business? It's not what you go there to do, is it?

A second and third appointment were 'pencilled in' then scrubbed again as more important things cropped up for him. Weeks went by; then months. By now it was nearly Christmas and we were getting ready to move house. We hadn't wanted to move a week before Christmas but we hadn't wanted to do a lot of things lately that we now found ourselves doing. With the baby coming in the new year, our options were severely limited, so we just went with it as best we could. It was strange though, like we no longer had a say in anything. Strange and wearying.

By now I had set aside the hundreds of pages of research, interview transcriptions and old cuttings I had accumulated in order to write the DVD notes and got stuck into the book instead, the ghosted memoir of Don Arden, rock monster extraordinaire. I was just hitting my stride when out of the blue I got another phone call telling me that Robert was now ready for his close-up and - cue: drum roll - had decided he would come to me! Hoorah!

"Great," I said, trying not to sound exhausted. "When?" They named the day. It rang a bell. I grabbed my diary. It was the day after we moved house - i.e. our first day in the new house. Fan-fucking-tastic. "So… he wants to come to my place?" I said. I suddenly had a vision of us both sitting there on boxes, chatting about the old days as wife, daughter and dog worked around us.

"No, don't be silly," she said, making me wonder suddenly why that should be such a silly idea. "He wants you to find a restaurant or something, somewhere nice like that where you can do the interview. You live in Oxford, don’t you?"

"Near Oxford."

"Well, that's great then! Oxford's full of cool places. He says to try and find somewhere with a bit of ambience…"

Oh, gawd. The last time I'd eaten in Oxford it had been at Burger King, where the ambience had been it's usual stimulating mix of screaming kids, mobile phones and tired, impatient shoppers. I was a Londoner who had forsaken the dirty city five years before for the good green air of a small countryside town. Apart from the covered market and the shopping centre, I didn't know shit about Oxford. Nevertheless, the next afternoon I dutifully set off in the car to find a place with enough 'ambience' to satisfy Robert. I parked up and trudged around in the rain peering into restaurant windows. The last time we'd met it had been at a Moroccan cafe in London. I searched for something similar now. Eventually I came up with a Caribbean joint that played reggae and served mambo or jambo or whatever you call it, and a Thai place that had a picture on the wall of Kylie eating there.

I called Robert's office on the mobile and they told me to go for the Kylie. I booked a table, then drove home, picking up a MacDonald's on the way. A chicken MacNugget Happy Meal for daughter and a couple of large quarter-pounder-with-cheese meals for me and wife. I got back and we all sat there on the couch eating together. It felt good. Never mind the ambience, taste the width…

I told wife about Oxford but she didn't seem to be listening. "Are you listening?" I asked irritably. I was looking for praise, or at least some sort of consensual agreement that I was handling things extremely well, all things considered.

"Um," she said, licking her fingers. "Why does it have to be Tuesday, though? It's the first day in the new house. How am I going to cope on my own?"

"I know." She was right but what could I do? "It'll only be for a few hours."

"You mean you'll be gone all day."

"Can't your mum and dad come over?"

"Probably, but it's not the same. I wanted us to decide together where things should go, not on my own."

"Not on mummy's own, daddy!" chimed in daughter.

"Of course not, darling," I said, taking the annoyance out of my voice. I took a breath. "Look, it has to be Tuesday because that's the day he's come up with and I've been waiting to do this bloody thing for about three months now. If I say no it'll probably be another three months before he gets back to me again."

"You've been waiting to do it this long… it can't wait even one more day?"

"I don't know, I haven't asked. I just want to get it done and then that's it, it's done and we don't have to worry about it anymore, yeah? Half the time I get the feeling he doesn't want to do the bloody thing anyway."

She looked at me. "You don't think he really wants to do it?"

"I reckon. Either that or he can't make up his mind. Otherwise there wouldn't be all this arsing around."

"Yet you're making him do it - on our first day in the new house?"

That was about the size of it. She hauled herself off the couch and walked unsteadily to the kitchen, saying something I couldn't quite catch but didn't need to. When the office called again a few days later to say that Robert wouldn't be able to make it after all, but that he'd be in touch again after Christmas, I acted disappointed but the relief was immense. I breathed out for what felt like the first time in days.

I ran downstairs to tell wife. She was in the garden, staring at the grass. "That's good," she said, vaguely. She had reached that last, dreamy stage of pregnancy where she was no longer fully in-tune with what the rest of us were up to. Only that we were moving and that she was having a baby and that I wasn't around much to help because of… a book… a DVD? Something. Being married to me, there was always something…

FORTY & FAT (from 2003) part 5...

Fortunately, Jimmy had always been so open towards me I had never had to go back and re-examine the music again the way I had with Harley and others. They weren't all quite as warped and self-deluded as that poor prick but they were all definitely members of the same tribe. With Jimmy, however, the relationship was slightly better balanced. Not much, but enough to make that crucial difference. Jimmy really did use to watch my show - and laugh. Well, it was a funny show. But he also recognised a fan when he saw one, no matter how well disguised, and I think that's ultimately what he responded to in me, the fact that he knew I was on his side long before we ever met. That he could trust me. Whatever the reason, we had always found it easy to work together. And anyhow, the DVD was Jimmy's baby, and he was proud of it - and in a hurry to get it out. He talked and talked about it.

The problem lay with the other two surviving members of the band - Robert Plant and John Paul Jones. Although neither of them had had any direct involvement in the making of the DVD, I still needed to interview them for the notes, to help retell the Zeppelin story.

In the case of Jones, this should have been easy enough to sort out. Having been pointedly excluded from the squillion-dollar Page/Plant reunion in the mid-nineties, my guess was he'd be pleased to find himself back in the spotlight at all, albeit at a certain remove. Jones, however, had decided he didn't like the idea of being interviewed by me. In fact, he didn't like the idea of me writing the notes at all. Why? I had no idea. Then Bill, Jimmy and Robert's manager, phoned me one day with the answer.

"You've been a naughty boy," he said. "You’ve upset Jonesy’s wife."

Jonesy's wife? I had never met Jonesy's wife.

"Ah," said Bill. "So you didn’t know?"

"Know what, for Christ's sake?"

He laughed. I liked Bill. He was an old East End 'face' from the seventies who'd made the big score, not just with Jimmy and Robert but with The Who, and nothing phased him. His nickname for Robert was 'Manic', as in "Don't panic, Manic!" Bill never panicked about anything. He just gave orders.

"Did you have words with Jonesy's PR a while back?" he asked.

Words? I cast my mind back… oh. Some months before I had found myself reading the riot act to Jones' PR, an ineffectual amateur, I remembered thinking, certainly nobody I'd ever heard of (and after twenty-five years I’d heard of most of them). She had been trying to persuade me to let Jones have copy approval on an interview with him I was arranging in my then capacity as editor of Classic Rock. 'Copy approval' means letting the subject of a story read it before it runs, so that if there's anything in there they don't like they can change it or simply have it removed. Or put another way, the journalistic equivalent of being asked to suck Satan's cock.

It had been a long day and I get impatient with feeble-minded PRs at the best of times, so I spelled it out for her. "We don't give copy approval to Jimmy Page or Robert Plant, why would we give it to John Paul Jones?"

That was the line that really hurt, according to Bill. Well, good. Let 'em wake up and smell the horse shit.

"Well, look," said Bill, "I know what you're saying. Trouble is, that was Mrs Jonesy you were talking to. And she went and told him exactly what you said."

"What? Oh, Christ… sorry. How was I to know? Why didn't she tell me she was his bloody wife? I would have played the whole hand different."

"I know. It's his own fault. But look, don't worry, okay? I'll tell him straight: if you don't wanna talk to Mick, fine, it'll just be Jimmy and Robert then."

"Great, thanks Bill. And tell him... I'm sorry."

Sure enough, a few days later I got a call from Jones' office suggesting a date. Bill had obviously spoken. Bad scene about the wife, I had to admit. What a trick to play, though, getting your missus to handle the press. Was he really so unworldly? Or was I just too harsh; too cynical? I couldn’t make up my mind.

When, after several cancellations (twice his fault; once mine), we finally met, at a hotel in London, I had expected him to maintain a certain distance, maybe even be a bit frosty. But he seemed fine. Trim and surprisingly youthful-looking for a man now in his fifties, and not nearly as boring to talk to as I'd feared. We ordered tea and biscuits and he rattled away for a good hour. No stopping him, once he got going. A man with nothing to hide. Except maybe his wounded pride. I felt for him. As the George Harrison of the group - the Talented Quiet One - he had never enjoyed the same mythical status in the public mind as the other three. Even the corny story of the band signing a Faustian pact with the devil in exchange for Earthly success cast him as the One Who Would Not Sign. What a bummer that must be. Being in the flashest band in the world - and being thought of as the 'normal' one.

He wore it well, though. Yes, he said, "it would have been nice to have seen more of myself in the DVD. But then that wasn't really my job - being seen."

Well, no. I looked at him. Big brain, heavy talent, absolutely no charisma at all. He could have been a senior lecturer at a smart provincial university. One of those groovy profs that still have pictures of themselves with long hair on their study walls. The ones that used to smoke dope and that all the chick students flirt with. All he lacked were the leather patches on the elbows.

We finished off the tea and biscuits and shook hands.

"I enjoyed that," he said.

"Good," I said. "Me too."

"I didn’t think I was going to."

"I know."

He looked at me, as if checking for something, then turned and walked away. I watched him merge easily with the crowd as he sauntered off down the busy London street.

Off to his next lecture…

FORTY & FAT (from 2003) part 4...

Back then I had wanted the Zeppelin thing to be a masterpiece; now I just wanted it to be over. It had seemed like a good enough plan. I would watch the DVD - a seriously far out piece of work built around four cornerstone Zep concerts from the seventies - with Jimmy Page, who had spent a year putting the whole thing together. Then I would interview him about it. Which I did. So far, so cool. But then Jimmy's never been a problem. I've known him for over fifteen years now and, I don't know why, but he's just always been good to me. I guess it goes back to the days when I was presenting a weekly rock show on Sky and Jimmy was "a fan". His words. He laughed when he said them, but not as much as I did. When I was fifteen, I walked around most days believing I was in Led Zeppelin. Sometimes I was the singer, sometimes the guitarist. Sometimes I was both. And I was good. The best in the biz. Everybody said so…

I was nearly thirty when I met Jimmy for the first time and by then I was just about reconciled to the fact that I was never going to be in the band. But that didn't make me any less jittery about meeting a genuine boyhood idol. One life left in a nine-life business, I was surprised to learn that tucked away in some dark crevice of my hobbled soul, impossible to winkle out it seemed, there still lurked the faintly beating heart of… a fan. God help me. Re-playing some of the old Zep albums, in lieu of that first meeting, I sat entranced, reminded again of days that seemed further away to me then than they do even now… sitting cross-legged in the aisle of the local Odeon when we went to see The Song Remains The Same, not because all the seats were taken but because we were Zep-heads and we always sat cross-legged on the floor… smoking my first joint and coughing my guts up all over the juddering crescendo to 'Whole Lotta Love'… borrowing Zep 'IV' from a hippy mate at school and never giving it back…

It wasn't often I allowed myself such indulgences. Who had the time to sit around listening to old albums anymore? Besides, I had been in the business long enough by then to know that the people that made that special music were rarely special themselves. Often, it was true, the devil really did have the best tunes. Did it matter, though? On one level, not all. Look at Lennon: the screwed-up, self-loathing, smack addict who wrote 'Imagine', the most transcendent message-song of our time; a 'Jerusalem' for the new age.

On the other hand, I have never been able to think of my old Cockney Rebel albums in the same way again since working with their singer, Steve Harley, some years ago. For my sins, I was back working in PR at the time, and when the Harley account landed on my desk I actually thought: wow, Steve Harley, I wonder if he still does 'Judy Teen'? What I should have said was: wow, Steve Harley, I wonder if he's a bitter old fart that still thinks it's 1975? Twenty years since his heyday, Harley, I discovered, was another Miss Haversham. You get 'em everywhere in the biz: has-beens and once-upon-a-times who still insist they’re in with a shout; nobodies still clinging to the fact that they were once, briefly, somebodies. It's not everyday, though, that you end up working with one you actually used to put pictures of on your bedroom wall, and so I thought I'd give it a crack. Big mistake.

He had a new album out, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get anybody interested in it. Then I sat down and actually listened to it and understood why: gruel-thin melodies and Harley's flat, wheezing vocals, like an old woman with a chesty cough. It also contained the world's worst ever version of 'What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted'; solid gold in anybody else's hands, here transformed into something so staggeringly unattractive you half-wondered if it was some sort of deliberate post-modern 'joke'.

With mounting alarm, I checked the cuttings file, searching for old 'friends' in the press that had written about him favourably before, and discovered he hadn't done any major press interviews for over ten years. Jesus, I thought, what have I taken on? From a PR perspective, his career looked like an old abandoned churchyard, smothered in weeds and dog shit. Now neglect had turned to desperation. He was so needy he used to phone or fax me constantly. "Just to check on the situation." The situation was: forget it, nobody cares anymore. But of course I couldn't tell him that and so he started to blame me. I just wasn't trying hard enough.

To prove the point, he phoned me at home one Sunday morning to tell me he was on Channel Four Racing. "Something I got for myself," he added like a sulky schoolgirl. I was still in bed but I switched on the TV and there he was, smothered in Burberry, the stereotypical horse racing nutter. He waffled on about the gee-gees for a while then they cut to an old clip of him doing 'Make Me Smile' from about fifty years ago. It made me feel queasy and vaguely depressed…

"If I can get stuff like that, why can’t you?" he admonished me the next day on the phone. It was a fair question. The answer was in the answer, of course, but he was too up his own arse to see it. A rock'n'roll Victor Meldrew who needed putting out of his misery.

I plodded on. Not a tickle. Then Steve came up with another great idea, even better than the one about the horse racing. He urged me to write a letter on his behalf to the late John Diamond, whose remarkable weekly column chronicling his - ultimately unsuccessful - treatment for lung cancer was then running in the Daily Telegraph. On the basis that Harley had a "special empathy" for what Diamond was going through, having been in and out of hospital himself as a child with polio, he felt that Diamond might find it interesting to meet with him, perhaps. To compare notes, he said. "I feel like I already know him, you see, like we've already bonded through our shared experiences, our shared pain…"

I could barely believe what I was hearing. I sat there silently, huddled in a cringe, as he continued to elaborate. "Are you jotting this down?" he asked tetchily. Oh, yeah. But if I could just ask a question. What did he hope to get from all this? I winced as I waited for the inevitable reply. I just wanted to hear him come out and say it, the shameless fuck.

"Well, he might mention me in the column or interview me," he said. The phone suddenly felt very sticky in my hand. And maybe give a plug to the new album, too, eh? "Well, you never know," he said excitedly. That was when I knew for sure I was dealing with the devil, or at least one of his less sensitive mates. I told him I'd write the letter and copy him in on it, which I did. But I never sent it, obviously. Gimme a break. Not even on a bad day. Do I need to add that 'Make Me Smile' doesn’t anymore?

FORTY & FAT (from 2003), part three...

As often happened, it was the sound of daughter's laughter that woke me. She was always laughing or crying or just chundering away. For someone still only a couple of feet tall hers was the largest presence in the house; constantly wanting to watch her Thomas The Tank Engine video again, or read a book, do a puzzle, play shops or dollies or something else; an endless repertoire of songs and chatter, dances and smiles, mischief and miracles. The health visitor told wife she'd never seen such a precocious toddler; that she was more like a four-year-old. Wife smiled and nodded her head wearily.

They were coming down the stairs and daughter was screeching with laughter as mummy carried her over her shoulder in a fireman's lift. Then she must have seen me because she stopped and I heard her say: "Look, mummy. Daddy on the couch… dead!"

"Again," said mummy.

I opened my eyes. The TV was still on.

"Hello, darlings," I croaked. "Any chance…"

"… of a cup of tea?" said wife. "Are you sure you've got the time? Shouldn't you be working?"

Below the belt, I thought, but I couldn't blame her. Even I had become sick of the sound of myself trying to justify our increasingly disordered existence. She was a good kid, pure gold inside and out, and she did her best to understand. It wasn't like she hadn't been there before with me. But this was the first book I'd tried to write since we'd married and started a family and she was finding it hard going. We both were. In the past, when I had reached the stage I was at now with the book - where every hour god gave was devoted to getting the job done - I had simply been able to filter out all other 'distractions'. Pulled up the drawbridge and told the world to leave a message after the beep. But there's no way you can filter out a pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter. No way I could just retreat to my dimly lit room and put up the Do Not Disturb sign, as had been my habit before. Indeed, I had never considered writing a book and living what passes for a normal life as compatible in any way. Until now, it had never needed to be.

Beyond that, of course, wife had her own pressures to bear. While I was locked away in the torture chamber each day she was having to assume full-time responsibility for everything else. Hard enough at any time with a too-clever-for-her-own-good infant in tow. But when you're about to give birth to the next one and you've just moved into a strange new house which you desperately want to turn into a home, except your husband says he can't help right now because he has a Very Important Job to finish… well, I still can't imagine how that feels, and I've really tried. Guilt keeps me trying even now.

She did make us some tea, though. We sat there sipping it as daughter coaxed me into helping her put a Bob The Builder puzzle together on the floor. Spud was her favourite. I rather liked Wendy. Bob was a lucky man.

"What are your plans for today?" wife asked idly.

I looked up at her with pain in my eyes, still too zonked to come up with a smart one-liner.

She sat back and laughed. "Sorry! What I mean is, are you doing the book today - or that other thing?"

Ah, yes. That other thing. Like the word 'but' it seems there is always at least one 'other thing' to worry about. In my case, right now that meant Led Zeppelin. Or rather, the notes I had been commissioned to write for the new DVD they were about to release. It was something that should have been done and dusted long before I'd become entangled in the book. But Zeppelin being Zeppelin, things hadn't panned out that way and now it was threatening to become the monkey that finally broke my back.

In my star-mangled corner of the rock magazine universe, they don't come any bigger than Led Zeppelin. Like the Beatles to Mojo, for the Classic Rock crowd there was Zeppelin - and then there was everybody else. Being asked to write the notes for their new DVD - the first official release of any 'new' Zep material for over twenty years - was like being given the keys to the executive shithouse in any other business. Like the band itself, it meant I was now officially the man. The old credibility-by-association shtick. Well, all right, I'd have some of that. In the same way as when I was a dishwasher I always wanted to be thought of by the rest of the kitchen as the best dishwasher. My motivation: sheer boredom. There was simply no better way to kill it, short of killing yourself. Now it seems I had found a way to do both.

Forty & Fat (from 2003) part two...

Since then we had been on permanent red alert, every twinge monitored like a ticking bomb. I prayed to god that whatever happened next I wouldn't have to deliver any babies this night and tiptoed down the stairs, where the dog was waiting for me. I opened the backdoor into the garden and let her out. She went and did her widdle and I went to the kitchen and made myself a sandwich and a pot of tea. Then I grabbed a four-pack of Crunchie bars from the cupboard and carried it all into the lounge.

This was now a close-of-play ritual for me. The pressure of working round-the-clock trying to finish the book while all this other stuff was going on had sent my body-clock into a time zone entirely separate from the rest of the world. One of the side-effects of that was an inability to consume anything more challenging throughout the day than soup and bread and endless cups of tea - and this late night snack that I always finished off with. Based on this simple, minimum exercise, maximum stress diet, I had actually lost a stone over the past three months. Ever since I'd stopped going to the office in London every day, in fact, and began staying at home to write the wretched book.

I collapsed on the couch and turned on the TV. Thank god for satellite TV. Most people dragged out the old cliché about there being two hundred channels and nothing on any of them but that was bullshit. There was always something to get stuck into on satellite TV. Films, documentaries, sports, music, news, shopping, cartoons, wildlife, art, even half-a-dozen excellent porn channels. And if that still didn't work, from about four in the morning you could watch back-to-back episodes of Magic Roundabout for hours on end. I mean, come on!

It helped too, I supposed, if you tended to spend your 'social' hours sitting on your own at some godforsaken time of the night. I shivered as I bit into my sandwich and began flipping through the channels. It was raining outside and I sat there for a moment listening to it lash against the windows. There was a time when I didn't even own a TV and I became absolutely brilliant at backgammon instead. Backgammon and getting drunk. The only reason I bought one in the end was because I was actually appearing on it by then and my curiosity simply got the better of me.

There was another, much longer time after that when I owned a TV but rarely watched it. I was a radio man by then. Still was but now I only heard it in the car. Once I'd have it on around the house all day, even when I was writing. Especially when I was writing. Sitting there alone in the same old room, doing the same old thing, hour after hour, you soon exhaust your own record collection. The radio erased the need to think about what 'background' I might have on, beyond a general desire to hear some classical maybe, or some jazz, or rap, or in the evening the Peel show, perhaps - anything but rock. The only real rocking I did nowadays was on the page.

Since getting married, though, and having a baby, having the radio on at home had become a thing of the past. Apart from the satellite TV - which had almost as many radio stations on it as TV channels - I didn't even own a radio anymore. As far as I could tell, unless it came as part of her Walkman or her car, my wife had never owned one. But then she came from the next generation down from me; as long as she had her MTV, her mobile and her portable CD, she was cool.

I flipped it to 250 - the E Channel. I loved their kiss-and-tell documentaries on US celebrities I'd never heard of. Like the girl who starred in Three Of A Kind - the American version of Man About The House - but got fired for demanding too much money. Or the dark-haired guy from CHiPs who got all the fan mail and the chicks and was hated by the blonde-haired guy. Or - my favourite - the beautiful blonde twins who became Playboy cover stars but had an eating disorder which sent them loopy. Tonight's story was about the English guy who became famous in America in the sixties as the Galloping Gourmet, one of the first celebrity TV chefs. Turns out, it was his rich cream-and-butter cooking that nearly killed his wife, so now he had a white beard and cooks only healthy meals. I could relate.

Here's the first part of a story I wrote for my agent, Robert, about six years ago. He rejected it and I can see why, but I still kind of like it because it takes me back. Any resemblance to true life was of course entirely intentional. I'll post the rest of it... later. It's called FORTY AND FAT, and it starts like this...

I looked at the clock on the laptop. It said: 3.04. "Fuck it," I said out loud. The screen just sat there blinking at me. I didn’t care. At that hour, you've gone past the middle of the night, you're now into the middle of nowhere. I saved the stuff on the floppy and turned the damn thing off. It took a few moments to die then - one last blink - and it was gone. I breathed out. Silence. Momentary peace. Then that was gone too as I struggled to my feet and looked about me.

Since moving in six weeks before, we'd hardly unpacked a thing. Just the essentials. As ever my 'office' was the smallest bedroom, the box room - quite literally, in this case. I was surrounded by boxes and boxes of crap. And then more crap. And more boxes. Even my makeshift desk was now an unopened box of crap, on which sat my laptop, another box of crap. Getting from the desk to the door was like trying to cross a minefield. I sized-up my best escape route: crawling under the couch (propped up on its side against the wall) then trying to squeeze past the big stack of boxes in the corner marked 'Heavy' without toppling them; or down the other side, struggling between the empty shelves of the bookcase, then feet-first over the filing cabinet behind it, landing on the small river of CDs, magazines, newspapers and old MacDonalds' containers that smothered the floor beyond.

I chose the couch. Crawling comes easy at the end of another long night spent huddled over the machine like a mad scientist at his microscope. It was just getting past those big bastard boxes at the end. The removals guys had been very efficient and stacked them so tight a thin person would have had difficulty circumnavigating them. I was no longer a thin person and each shuffling, sideways step I took threatened to bring the whole caboodle down on my head with an almighty crash. Which would wake wife, then maybe daughter, and then the whole madhouse really would come tumbling down around me.

By the time I got to the door I'd built up a sweat. Nothing unusual there. Not for a member of the forty and fat brigade with too much stress and not enough hair left to pull out. These days, I built up a sweat just climbing off the couch. I walked stooping through the darkness to the bathroom. I felt crushed and short of breath, ill and freaked out. Fuck this, I thought, this is killing me. I really did feel deep down inside as though I were dying. Or that a part of me - the good part - was already far gone. Gone but not forgotten; not quite.

It was pitiful. How had I allowed things to get this way? When did it happen? I was no longer young, that was true. But when did I become so fucking old? I turned the light on in the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The same, maybe worse. I felt for the lump between my breastbone and, yep, there it was. Wife said it was my imagination. "It's probably your ulcer again." But no, the ulcer was what caused the intermittent back and stomach pain; the piles were what gave me most grief in the mornings; and the dizzy spells and RSI were self-inflicted. The lump was something else. I knew.

There wasn't much I could do about it now, though, except add it to the list of Things To Do Once I Get My Life Back. I wondered about that. Right then, that idea seemed further away to me than Christmas to an impatient child. My fingers were so numb from the hours spent stabbing at the keyboard I could barely hold the toothbrush steady in my hand. Man, I was tired. Tired and fucked and ill and weak. An idiot that needed to be kept indoors, away from decent people…

I finished up, threw some water on my face and towelled off. Then I turned off the light and crept back down the hall to the bedroom to check on wife and daughter. Daughter's cot was empty and they were both asleep in the double bed together. That meant I was on the couch again. At least I’d have the telly...

The dog, a big German Shepherd called Annie, was lying at the foot of the bed. She lifted her big head and looked at me inquisitively as I entered, as if trying to place me. "Do you want a widdle-widdle?" I whispered. Her ears pricked up and she got to her feet, shook noisily, and padded past me out the door. I stood there like a statue, holding its breath. But neither of them stirred, thank god, and so I leaned over and gently tucked them in, my angels, and gave them both a little kiss on their foreheads. I could smell their hair, was almost overcome by it and felt like weeping, but I couldn't allow myself to go there. I didn't want to disturb them. I did enough of that when they were awake.

Wife was lying on her back, snoring. Her belly was so big now it looked like she had someone lying on top of her under the duvet. Then I thought about it and realised she did. She had started to 'show' a few nights before and we'd said, okay, this is it! I rang the hospital and told them we were on our way while she rang her mother to come over and look after daughter. We knew it would be any day now and so we were prepared. We had all the bags packed and arrangements made, right down to setting aside enough quid coins to feed the meter in the hospital car park.

What we weren't prepared for was being told, after we'd been there several hours, that it was a false alarm. We sat there shell-shocked as the nurse explained that it was "just one of those things." But that now she had given wife a thorough examination and "massaged the cervix" - a phrase guaranteed to make any man wither - the baby would probably arrive within the next forty-eight hours. As it was also wife's second baby, she added cheerily, "I expect it will come really quickly once it starts." The nurse looked at me and smiled. "You probably wont even have time to get here. Youll probably end up delivering it at home on the floor!"

I smiled back. "Great," I said. Because of course that's exactly what I wanted to hear right then. Not only was I trying to finish a book, sort out the new house, deal with my job, do something about the lump, the ulcer, the everything, I could now add to that list the possibility of delivering a baby. At home. On the floor. Any minute now. I mean, how astoundingly fucking great is that? Wife cried all the way home in the car. We both did...

First day officially 'back at work'. Not unlike all these recent days so-called 'on holiday', except with more work. What I mean is...

Wife's back has gone again which means she can't really walk or move well, which means I have to move better for both of us, which means I got up, made breakfast for us all, walked the dog in the snow, dropped off stuff at the charity shop, dumped cardboard at the recycling dump place, then came back and made lunch for us all, then phoned the bank to get them to pay my latest VAT bill, during the course of which I discovered that money I'd asked my bank manager to put away in a 'reserve' account for me to also pay my tax bill this month hadn't been put away at all, that he'd just not done it, which means I don't have enough to pay the Inland Revenue tossers (and they are tossers), cheers Bob the bank manager. Anyway...

I then set about sorting out my office, which I have allowed to go to absolute hell these past few weeks. This took two plastic sacks, a lot of irritation, one fallen plant pot, one spilled glass of apple juice, a lot more irritation followed by the sudden recollection that my inlaws were coming round this afternoon. Because of various family sicknesses (our children's, my mother-in-law's, others I am still too sick to remember) we didn't see them at all over Xmas so we all had a lot of present giving and receiving to get through still. Which was great until the kids started fighting over them (again). Then...

I went to the chip shop to buy them all supper. None for me, though, because a) I don't like that chip shop (nice people, crap chips) and b) I hadn't finished sorting out my office yet and I had to get ready for a 7.00pm phone interview with the great but maddeningly elusive Robb Flynn from Machine Head. So...

I did all that, the inlaws finished their chips and left, wife took enough painkillers to summon the strength to keep the squiddlies quiet long enough for me to phone Robb. Hoorah, he answered the phone and for the next 75 minutes he talked up a storm for a forthcoming Metal Hammer piece I am doing. But...

The day hadn't ended yet. No. I still hadn't eaten and the kids still hadn't been sent packing to bed, and the phone hadn't stopped ringing yet either. Somehow, in between making myself some pasta, wife roped me into driving a bunch of the kids and their friends to the cinema tomrrow afternoon as part of one of their friends' birthday party. Thanks wife with bad back. I then tried to watch some TV. But there was nothing on worth watching except for 10 minutes of a two-year-old episode of Mock The Week. And wife wouldn't shut up anyway so that was that. Now...

I'm going to bed. So far then, 2009 has been just great. And so different from 2008, doncha think?

Should old acquaintence be forgot...

The ones I think about most are probably Jo and Bareen. He was a sax player who never "made" it made it and she was a doctor - just about. I think she was into her 30s before she finally, finally qualified. He was the best friend you could ever have. Generous with his time, his money, even his woman. She was gentle and kind too, though how she ever became a doctor between the booze and the smack and the god knows what else god only knows. They saved my ass when it wasn't worth saving - at all. I, sickened in the way of pampered young men with no children to distract them, abandoned them when I could bear it no longer. They were not at fault. It was just me. Of course there were reasons but ultimately it was just me.

Then there was Mick and Tim. London Welsh boys, one an ace songwriter, the other a top-drawer musician. Both too interested in the beer and the drugs and the rugby on the telly to ever do anything about it. I picture them now still sitting in the pub, drinking and smoking, blaming it all on people like me, who were too afraid to just sit and watch the telly, who were too afraid not to try and do something with whatever little something they had. I always thought of them as somehow better then me. I don't anymore, though I do think of them both often still.

And Pete Lewis... no way to describe him. A bluebeard artist, a walking cliche in many ways with his dizzying talk, his sometimes terrifying actions, and his endless breathsuckingly beautiful women. I never met a rock star that could compare with Pete when it came to acts of heroic creativity, real-life bohemian rhapsody and sheer blood on the tracks stardom. Yet he will probably die a no-one, at least as far as the art world is concerned. I miss him the most, the same way you miss your looks and your youth, knowing there is no way back now, nor even really wanting there to be.

Lots of others, of course... Dan the Man, who still stays in touch via this blog, bless his smoking drumsticks... Josie, the most beautiful woman in the world, bar none, unseen for 20 years, heading for the white room even then... Big Joe, whose death before Xmas I heard about via email... Alison, whose madness always terrified me... Arnie, whose big arm was stronger than mine and yours... Pete Jennings, a genius whose world now I can't even imagine... more and more, all so dear to my burning heart over the years, somehow left behind when I opted for this life away from London, away from them, with a woman who has never read my books nor cares for my "music" but who has helped us build a marriage with three headbanging kids, all more brilliant and dazzling than any stars. I miss all those friends though I notice I don't do much about it.

Had a good Christmas then just as I thought I'd really got the hang of it, I fell and injured myself and everything else seemed to slide off the tray at the same time. Recovering now, though, just about, as I sit here surrounded by ghosts, hoping to get a glance at the newspaper before bed. If I can just stay awake long enough...

Well... what I wanted to do was offer some explanation as to my state of mind over these past few days, why the blog has not been up to much. But when it comes right down to it, I really can't be arsed. I'm wondering in fact if I ought to be bothering with this blog right now. I feel a lot has gone out of it this past year. Was a time I really didn't care what I wrote, which made it almost worth reading. Lately, though, I feel like I've been writing with a big mirror opposite me on the wall. I'm sure that's not how it's supposed to be. Feel like a break would be good. Maybe a permanent one. Nothing less edifying than watching an old man flogging a dead horse. We'll see, I suppose.

Been teaching my eldest daughter how to play rockin' guitar. That is, what and where the E, A, G and D chords are, where to put your fingers and so on. Not easy for an eight year old but then she picks things up quicker than most anybody else I've met so she's getting there fast. Faster than her old man ever did, for sure. Mind you, I didn't even try until I was 25 and barely alive. Anyway, for a sweet headfucking moment, this is right up there. Like you could never believe you would live so long and yet somehow you did, despite yourself.

Earlier we went for a walk under the bridge by the river in Abingdon, me, wife, kids, dog. Just as the light was fading. Bitterly cold but funny how it always warms you up so that by the time you've struggled back to the car you're on another level entirely. It was dark then, which was nice, seeing the river lights from the boats and houses along the bank. We live in a groovy part of the world, if you like that sort of thing. Now I've got to go and cook dinner. I don't really have to, I just like to. Not that that stops me moaning about it - a lot. I do get to drink red wine while I'm doing it though so, you know. Anyway, the so-called holidays will officially be over soon so we have to make the most of it. Try to anyway.