Portrait of the Idiot as a Young Man

About twenty years ago, I left my life in London and returned to the house where I grew up, in the Lake District.

My big, ludicrously romantic plan was that I was going back ‘to write’. I had a job at Foyles bookshop in central London, which left very little time and energy to get much done—or that was my excuse at least—whilst also surrounding one with books, tempting the young, sensitive, and somewhat deluded to imagine they could write one of their own.

The final straw of many final straws was me leaning on the front desk by the till one day, daydreaming as I often did, and the cheerfully cynical security guard breaking my reverie by saying ‘It’s too late to think about what to do with your life now!’ In hindsight this was a far-fetched attempt at demoralisation: I was only in my mid-20s. But something about his words made me snap, and I decided to quit the job right then and there.

That wasn’t the only cause. I had recently learnt Transcendental Meditation and had suddenly adopted a radical ‘go with the flow’ attitude, very much at odds with my actual personality. Instead of trying to bend the world to my will, I would allow it to guide me. I took this to absurd levels. For example, if I sent a text message that didn’t arrive, I would not attempt to resend it. On a slightly larger scale, my flatshare was coming to an end, so I decided that since I was quitting my job anyway, I may as well not look for another place to live in London. The universe was telling me to leave. None of this, of course, had anything to do with the actual teachings of Transcendental Meditation.

But I went with my new life approach, and ended up sleeping on the floor in the lounge of the flat, having given up my bedroom, but needing a little more time to see out my notice period at work. The girls I shared the flat with would walk into the lounge and talk about how they were going to arrange the room when I was gone, whilst I was lying right there on the floor, on a squalid mattress. I believe this would now be called a ‘microaggression’. Obviously the girls all hated me. And who could blame them? I was self-involved, with an unseemly habit of telling the truth.

I then moved into the house my brother had just left, which was between tenants. This meant I got to live much nearer to work, in Islington, in what was a very nice house, if you didn’t mind the flying ants that guarded the entrance to the bathroom.

Here I was all alone in a four-bedroom, getting an early taste of the solitary living that I always knew was my destiny. Flatshares for me were a harrowing daily nightmare, born purely of necessity. Friends and family would tell me ‘You don’t want to live alone’. But of course I did. More than anything. But they didn’t get it. I was young and misunderstood by a cruel and boorish world.

In this new house I roamed around, dodged ants, and read John Fante’s Bandini Quartet. I slept in a sleeping bag on top of a bed that had no sheets, and continued my twice-daily meditation practice. As I was using this technique for the first time, the effect was very powerful. Especially combined with the stress relief of finally living on my own, and knowing I would soon be done with the low-wage retail grind. During one meditation I felt like I was moving up and down on a giant stair machine. It felt much better than it sounds.

I was listening to Old Crow Medicine Show, who I had just seen live down the road in Islington. The song I related to most was ‘Take ‘em Away’.

Take ‘em away, take ‘em away, Lord
Take away these chains from me
My heart is broken ‘cause my spirit’s not free
Lord, take away these chains from me

It’s about the backbreaking work of sharecropping in 19th century America, but I felt that a retail job in noughties London was essentially the same. I mean, we did late shifts for heaven’s sake.

I could just about walk to work from the house, and there was a magical freedom to this time unlike anything else I’ve experienced. It ended very soon, though, when I was suddenly turfed out and had to move to my aunt’s house, further out in the suburbs of North London. I enjoyed packing up my things to leave, even though I knew I was going somewhere worse. It was then I realised I just liked the idea of leaving places and moving onto something new, whatever that may be. As one of the verses in ‘Take ‘em Away’ went: ‘Some birds’ feathers are too bright to be caged’.

I then lived with my annoying aunt. I had the attic room, which in itself was fine. I had my own bathroom, with no sentry ants, flighted or otherwise, and I spent most of my time reading James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, in a free hardback copy that I got from work. At the time there was massive controversy because Frey had passed the book off as memoir, yet it turned out much of it was fiction. I saw absolutely no issue with this. For one, it was immediately obvious to me that this was a highly stylised and clearly embellished account. And, as the fearsome writing tutor in Todd Solondz’s film, Storytelling, says: ‘Once you start writing, it all becomes fiction’.

James Frey was the only good thing about staying with my aunt, who irritated me at every opportunity. She would eat my toast in the morning, insist I stay up late playing cards when I was the only one who had to get up for work, and many other things that were perhaps meant to be jocular, but were very tiresome. Later everyone in my family stopped talking to her, and all for separate reasons. You could say I was a pioneer in this regard.

Finally I reached the end of my work notice period, and it was time to go home. My lofty plan was, as I say, to go back and write. I had essentially convinced myself I was Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard. Virtually all of Bernhard’s books are about solitary, obsessive, pessimistic figures (so far I checked all boxes) attempting some artistic feat or other monumental task, and procrastinating until they go virtually insane. For example, Concrete is about a man trying to begin a definitive scholarly work on the composer Mendelssohn, but he can’t start writing it in case his obnoxious sister comes back to the house and interrupts him. Trust me, that is all that happens. Bernhard has stacks of novels like this, and they are all excellent. My favourite is The Loser (feel free to supply your own joke, but keep it to yourself).

Like one of Bernhard’s protagonists (but hopefully a more productive one), my idea was to use the cottage that my parents usually rented out to do my writing. My dad had agreed to this, and on those terms I returned home. When I got back, it turned out my dad had changed his mind and insisted I stay with him and my mum in the house. It was hard to appreciate at the time, but this was, if anything, even more Bernhard-like. How could I possibly get anything done now, with my philistine parents around, when I was supposed to be in the cottage on my own! For Bernhard, that alone would be 200 pages of literary gold.

So I ended up staying in my childhood bedroom, with the chronic damp that stuck the pages of my books together, and a host of equally musty childhood memories. My parents pressured me to get a job, and I found myself working at Waterstone’s in the town where I was born, taking my old school bus to work. Yes: I had left London only to find myself doing a much worse version of the job I had just quit. I can laugh about it now, a mere twenty years later.

Despite my failure to do any writing whatsoever, I still felt I had some kind of latent talent, and this pressed on me from the inside like my arteries were about to burst. I would watch BBC4 documentaries on Bob Dylan and have spasms of almost physical pain that I wasn’t expressing my abilities. Not that I thought I was Dylan, but I knew I could do something.

I formed a plan to return to London. I had lingered at home long enough. Even my old grandad said I was wasting my life. Before I left (or a bit later, I don’t remember) I applied and was accepted onto the Birkbeck Creative Writing MA. One can endlessly scoff at such courses, but it was better than killing yourself. But before the course ever started, I discovered standup comedy.

I was quite good at it immediately, and decided comedy was my true calling. Thus I deferred the writing course, and ended up never taking my place. One year and one day after I first got onstage, I won the notoriously brutal Comedy Store King Gong show. Shortly after that I signed with Comedy Store Management, after receiving several offers of representation based on my performance that night. I had found my talent. Heck, I even had a girlfriend.

More than a decade later I quit comedy, and found a new calling commenting on politics. And I have actually done better at this, at least in terms of worldly success, as measured by money and social media followers. I have also been able to use more of myself, free from the limitations of having to repeat the same tried and tested jokes for drunk people in seedy nightclubs.

Of course, political commentary has its own limits. Sometimes I feel like moving on again, though it would be more complicated this time. Anyone who has engaged in politics in anything but the most conformist way becomes a social pariah. This feeling of being buffeted by the forces of history is unpleasant. No one wants to feel like they have no control over their life. The soul screams out against such impositions. But that is how it is, from the decline of the grammar schools, robbing me of the educational opportunities afforded to my dad’s generation, to the woke hierarchies that were a large part of the reason I left comedy and moved into politics in the first place. We are never really free.

Now I, like so many others, have been sucked up into the great vortex of the Culture War. Or, to use another metaphor from the physical world, I am forced to tackle politics as one is forced to tackle a giant boulder that has just fallen into one’s path. It must be dealt with, but furiously smashing up a rock should not be mistaken for Jungian self-actualisation. Of course, saving the country is important and has a kind of collective grandeur. But there is not that much one individual can do, and it is very different from the personal transcendence made possible through art.

Soon I will leave London and return home again, to that same house where I grew up, and where my parents live still. The noisy concerns of the world will fall away. The lakes don’t care about politics or what’s happening on X. They whisper something far more mysterious and ancient. The wind moves over Rydal Water in a melancholy song that seems like it’s just for me. Me whom these lakes virtually raised as a child, though they speak in a language I’ve forgotten. Me, always restless, never quite at home even in my home. Yet always longing to go back, though in my heart I have never left.

Just like I did twenty years ago, I will seek some kind of answer on where to go next, but I do not expect to find it. The gentle waves will just smile at me, with the quietly amused love of a grandparent watching a child at play. They will let me work it all out for myself.