Big Beacon, page 6
I jot down a short blurb, explaining that the lighthouse renovation will be ‘funded by the community, built for the community, and feel like it belongs to the community’. The ‘feel like’ is an important caveat because, of course, legally it will be owned entirely by me, a point I underline at the bottom in a much smaller font.
I illustrate the page with a painting of celebrated lighthouse heroine Grace Darling and add a few hundred words culled from Google on her stunning legacy. Not that she has anything to do with this lighthouse. Hers is in Scotland. Nor is she any more heroic than any other lighthouse keeper. After all, she only saved nine lives, whereas the average for male lighthouse keepers is likely to be in double figures. I don’t know, I just feel that in the current climate her inherent ‘womanness’ will help broaden the reach of the appeal.
To entice donors further, a branded T-shirt, tote bag and mug will be sent to each of them. Designed by me with the help of a millennial employee in Prontaprint who kept taking the mouse and doing it for me rather than just explaining how to do it then letting me learn for myself, the merchandise features a picture of yours truly in the foreground, with the lighthouse behind. And by choosing a photo where I am extending my hand, I have created the illusion that I am holding the lighthouse in my palm, a visual effect taught to me by a holidaying South Korean child at the world-famous tilting Tower of Pisa.36
It isn’t just the money. No, I enjoy the thought of being a piece of something bigger, part of a wider team of history buffs and kindly philanthropists – leading the way while a thousand back-seat drivers chip in with their twopenn’orth at every opportunity. Yep, cannot wait.
By the end of 2021, when the crowdfunding deadline arrives, I have raised a healthy amount. Is it a shame that the incidental costs (T-shirts, mugs and totes; the price of couriering the merchandise to donors – mainly in Norfolk but one guy is in Malaysia – plus the fee for the Prontaprint professional design service that I had mistaken for Duwaine just showing me how to use the computer) came to £6,000? A little, but once I’ve topped up the pot with a small bridging loan signed off by the team at Bradford & Bingley, I have the money I need.37
Six days later, I sit in my conservatory, pen in hand, poised to sign the mortgage contract. As my housekeeper buzzes around taking the official photos under the direction of my assistant – ‘chin up slightly’, ‘very nice’, ‘bit more teeth’, ‘not that much teeth’, ‘tuck in the tummy’, ‘perfect’ – I bring down the pen and sign.
The lighthouse is mine.
I am now quite simply – and it’s not a name I will use again because it sounds quite childish – the big beacon boy.
As excited as I am about my new life by the sea, cutting the umbilical cord that tethers me to Norfolk isn’t going to be easy. She is thick and she is fleshy, and I am going to need some very big scissors. But just as I will miss Norfolk, so Norfolk will miss me too. Not to toot my own bugle,38 but I’ve been one of the biggest dogs in the county for the best part of thirty years. And when someone like that is no longer there, it leaves a hole. I am a well-known face around Norwich, adding a dash of cheer to people’s days. I’ll shake hands with a greengrocer, I’ll say hello to a butcher, I’ll shake hands with a corner-shop owner. I’ll chat to (female) beggars, offer feedback to buskers, and be the very visible face of campaigns against any council plans – e.g. the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre – that are a clear backward step for the community. I don’t always have time for shelf stackers, but a nod in their direction as I grab a fresh pack of All-Bran? You better believe it.
However, exiting the county will also pose some fairly hefty administrative challenges, so I sit down with my assistant, and over tea and toast and toffees we begin to map things out. I’m not exactly awash with cash now, and so she suggests, wrongly, that I should put the oasthouse on Airbnb.
‘Absolutely no way,’ is my reply. ‘No way will I ever do that. Complete strangers milling about in my house?’
‘Yes, but you’ll be living in Kent. And the income will—’
‘Ain’t happening. Some inner-city family I’ve never met clattering round my house, scratching themselves in my bed? Cutting their toenails perched on the edge of the bath? Sitting in underpants on my sofa without even having the good grace to put down a dog towel? Absolutely not. Not now, not ever.’
With that subject dealt with, it’s on to more workaday matters.
First to be tackled is my membership of the David Lloyd Health & Racquets Club. Financially it would make sense to cancel this membership, but socially? No way. You see, whereas London has the Carlton and the Groucho, Norwich has the David Lloyd, and anyone who’s anyone is a member there: the movers, the shakers, the gluten-free bakers.39 Quite simply, the David Lloyd is where things get done. Exchanging business cards in the steam room. Floating a proposal as you and a senior businessmen talc each other down by the lockers. Looking into the whites of a fellow exec’s eyes as you hammer out a deal in the showers.
Calling up manager Richard Juice, I make a bold pitch.40 My request is that he place my membership on hold while I am out of county, to be re-activated upon my return. Juice gives this short shrift. If I don’t want the membership there are plenty who will. I counter: OK, then, will he allow me to put my membership on hold if I continue to pay my monthly membership fee? We have a deal.
A more emotional parting comes with my pub-quiz teamers. Familiar faces at the Boxley Wheatsheaf, Tony Blanch, Clive Lambeth, Phil Tin and I have been pub quizzing under the name Cromwell’s Bitches since 2007. And we’ve been through a lot. The final in ’09 when we narrowly edged out the Periodic Table Dancers to walk away with the coveted Copper Tankard. The final in ’10 when they narrowly won it back again. Phil’s wife’s cancer. The semis in ’16 when a steward’s inquiry saw us disqualified for alleged Google use in the disabled bogs. Like I say, a lot. So saying ta-ta hurts.
As for my hair and beauty team, well, I reach an agreement with the Thai lady who burns off my nasal hair that she will make the trip to Kent every two months, while my hairdressers (I have three on rotation in order to foster a healthy sense of competition) will be contacted if I am unable to find suitable arrangements near the lighthouse.41
Finally, it’s an email to everyone in my contacts, and I must have started it a dozen times. How to get the tone right when there are so many different people to appeal to? Important people like friends and celebrities, and others like tradesmen and a paediatrician I know. In the end I just force myself to begin and say that if I stop before the email is finished I won’t be allowed a treat after my tea. It works better than I could ever have imagined.
Did I know I was going to pen a poem? I can honestly say I didn’t, yet what flows from my brain, nay my heart, is a piece of writing of which I remain immensely proud. The email is reproduced below.
Pals,
Alas it’s time for me to flee
Riding south to Kent and sea
Tears are forming in my ducts
Round fat droplets, fit for ducks
I pray that you keep safe and well
Do not forget my face, my smell
Go raise a glass, sup by the gallon
Ever yours, your good friend Alan.
Then underneath, I write the rubric: ‘The above is an acrostic poem where the first letter of each line spells PARTRIDGE.’
My assistant feels I should delete that explanation, as if pointing out the acronym somehow makes it feel less good. I disagree, arguing successfully that the small chance someone might not notice what I’d done is simply a risk too far, since, without the acronym, the poem could be seen as potentially shit.
And then the day comes, 7 February 2022. The day I am leaving Norfolk.
I had aimed to be on the road by about quarter past eight, that way I could get through town before the school run. I was determined to spend today in good spirits but knew this would be impossible if I had to contend with any lollipop ladies. Their total inability to understand that a driver stopping for them is a convention and not the law never fails to wind me up. The right of way remains at all times with the vehicle on the carriageway; stopping is at the driver’s discretion and if they judge that not stopping is what they wish to do, a lollipop lady has neither the legal recourse to do anything about it, nor the moral right to pull her face.
Fortunately for me, I am bang on schedule, and with both car and snacks packed, I close my front door and head to my vehicle. I flick my head round to take one last look at the oasthouse, my chin resting on my shoulder in a way that’s accidentally coquettish but does prove I would have been quite sexy if I’d been born a lady.
That thought is disturbed by the ringing noise a telephone makes when it rings. I jog backside the house and pick up.
‘Hello, Partridge.’
‘What the hell are you playing at?’
I recognise the voice instantly. It’s my former This Time producer Howard Newman. ‘Hello, Howard.’
‘You bought our fucking lighthouse.’
Oh dear. Howard seems angry and, as you can imagine, that makes me very, very sad. ‘Sorry – your lighthouse?’
‘It was going to be a running feature of the show for the next year. A historic renovation in honour of the Princess Royal, community involvement, Jennie doing the whole Challenge Anneka thing,42 then we donate it to the RNLI.’
‘What, and you think – let me get this straight because I’m real confused right now – you think I’ve gazumped you and bought the lighthouse … out of spite? Oh, Howard, that’s hurtful.’
‘You’re a child.’
‘Thank you. I use Oil of Olay to keep my skin plump. Will there be anything else, Howard?’
‘You’ll regret this.’
Click. He’s hung up. To this day, I feel awful about all this. A dreadful misunderstanding seems to have scuttled the centrepiece of my former employers’s 2022 editorial output. I am so sad I go and have a Mars bar.
‘I think that’s a bloody eagle!’
It was forty minutes later and I was on the A140 noticing something in the corner of my eye – not literally the corner of my eye, that was just a benign growth that appeared the previous Christmas after I’d tried to rinse some grit from my eye using vinegar, but somewhere in my peripheral vision. A dark splodge against the slate-grey Norfolk sky. Shutting my left eye because the Sarson’s tumour made it quite hard to focus, the splodge suddenly revealed itself. It was a bird. But not a basic bird – neither a basic boring bird like a sparrow nor a basic rudely-named bird like a tit or thrush – no, this appeared to be nothing short of an eagle.
I had just passed the village of Scole, the last conurbation before exiting Norfolk, and was suddenly overwhelmed by a strong sense that, far from just flying around looking for something to do, this majestic feathered creature had been with me the whole way, guiding me safely to the county border like an avine police outrider.
I lowered my window. ‘Farewell, dear friend! Prithee well!’
I considered what to say to it next and quite liked the phrase ‘winged guardian’, but couldn’t think of how to put it in a sentence. Also, I don’t like the Guardian. I closed the window again.43
Yet the message wasn’t lost on me. Just as birds emigrate – I think eagles go to Spain – so I was emigrating, to Kent.
* * *
34 Her concern was that I had a tendency to become unhealthily obsessed by things at times of crisis in my life. For example the following relationship, which I am only prepared to discuss here in a footnote. For several weeks in late 2013, I had been romantically entangled with a recently-retired female judoka. Lady A – as she will be referred to in order to conceal her identity – was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted. Between the sheets, feedback was frequent and unambiguous. ‘Do it faster.’ ‘Bounce me slower.’ ‘You’re making that noise again, Alan.’ She didn’t muck about when it came to physicality, either, the early exchanges of lovemaking typically characterised by an abundance of shoving and grabbing. (In general she would shove and I would grab, though mainly to stop myself falling off the bed.)
Sexy talk was no less forthright. As she entered a state of elevated arousal, Lady A would begin to refer to me using terms that wouldn’t so much make a vicar blush as make him just sit there not saying anything for quite a long time, before standing up and saying he has to go now.
The key was not to take it personally. If there were occasions when I felt myself becoming upset, I’d simply say I needed the loo, and (if permission was granted) a few minutes alone reciting positive affirmations would generally right me, before I’d request permission to re-enter and head back to the coalface. For some, having to take this kind of time out would be a real passion killer. Fortunately for me, however, that has never been an issue. For whatever reason, I am one of those men who is relatively quick to stiffen.
With completion achieved (hers, not mine – I tended not to), all mention of me being a worthless subhuman piece of shit who couldn’t even keep his family together, or whatever, would instantly cease as she picked up her phone and went back to looking at judo news. Ultimately, though, our flame, which had burned so brightly, was to be snuffed out by Christmas as Lady A left me for a short bald man who used to serve in the SAS. They were just a better fit.
35 Had no choice, joint investment with assistant.
36 Thanks, Do-yun!
37 I’ve always thought Bradford & Bingley sound like the names of two talking dogs in a shit live-action Disney film. Setting up Bradford as an old-school aristocrat type and Bingley as his loyal but long-suffering butler would fail to resonate with the kids of today. A safer bet for Disney would be to make Bradford a boy dog that used to be a girl dog and Bingley a girl dog that used to be a boy dog. Tapping into the prevailing wokeness of modern culture but handling the subject with sensitivity and care would make a surefire success of any such tranny dog franchise. But what do I know?
38 Until recently I’d have started this sentence with ‘Not to blow my own trumpet’, but I have since been told the phrase is a euphemism for bending double and self-fellating.
39 Elias Parsons, CEO of NorfoBake.
40 As a child Richard Juice had been known as Dick Juice but had to rebrand as Richard when a female colleague took offence.
41 Their names are Giovanni, Gianni and Luca, and they are all third-generation Italian (i.e. English).
42 Ooh, modern reference, Howard.
43 When I later relayed this story to an ornithologist friend of mine (to the extent that you can ever really be friends with an ornithologist) he said it wouldn’t have been an eagle because there are no eagles indigenous to this country. Ultimately, though, he just couldn’t handle the fact that something he’d tried to see all year, I’d just seen from my car window and wasn’t even that arsed.
GOING PLACES (OF MY LIFE)
March 2012
I was providing live commentary at a seniors’ badminton tournament at Cromer leisure centre. The fee wasn’t great, but I needed to swing by anyway to collect my bodywarmer and underpants from the lost-property box.
I wouldn’t say I was the world’s biggest badminton aficionado, but by the time we got to the semi-finals I had largely mastered the terminology: ‘And Clive Kennedy absolutely WALLOPS the cockleshut.’
It was then that I spotted none other than Norwich carpet kingpin Brendan O’Coyle. His chain of CarpetChief stores had been the dominant player in the Norfolk flooring scene for over two decades. Retail or domestic, carpet or laminate, those guys had it covered. Literally. If it was inside and you could walk on it, it was probably CarpetChief.44
But what was he doing here? He wasn’t taking part – the last thing you could describe Coyle as was an athlete. Big gut, large arse and fingers like the sausage rolls that made up the bulk of his diet, he would have made an unlikely badmintine. No, my first thought was that he was here because the rumours that his team was being brought in to carpet the sports hall were true.
And would it have been such a mad idea? Certainly it would have put a stop to the high-pitched noises made by training shoes jamming against the rubber floor (the dreaded ‘sports hall squeak’). Carpet would also cushion the falls that were an almost daily occurrence at a facility whose patrons were overwhelmingly geriatric. (The manager once told me they had 999 on speed dial, which to me seemed slightly pointless, but I didn’t say that because I knew he was being bullied by his wife – for example, making him wear rubber gloves to do the washing up even when he wanted to do it without.)
As it turned out, sport-hall carpetisation was never to come to pass. The wobbly pensioners would have to take their chances. No, Brendan was there because CarpetChief was the tournament’s platinum sponsor, providing a first prize of twenty-five square metres of carpet, laminate or vinyl to the winner in the men’s competition and twenty square metres in the ladies’. It was a mouth-watering prize and one that went some way to explaining the ferocity of competition that afternoon.
Not that I was particularly enthused by the sport unfolding before me. By now, there was an unmistakeable half-arsedness to my delivery, even the bits that required oomph: ‘Shot of the Morning sponsored by CarpetChief goes to Helga Bellamy for what’s described here as a “jumping backhand with shout”. Wish I’d seen that, you can imagine the skirt billowing on the way down like a German parachute … on one of the very missions, I think I’m right in saying, in which her father sadly died.’
I caught sight of myself in the reflection offered by a vending machine, a man in an Umbro tracksuit carrying a hefty microphone and speaker like a man on day release setting up the karaoke in the corner of a pub for a friend. I sighed, deep and long and hard.
