Big Beacon, page 9
The money was pitiful but I enjoyed the rough and ready nature of the shoot, and the chance to meet people with different backgrounds and perspectives. And while some of the stylistic choices weren’t to my taste – incredibly fast editing, everyone laughing at everything always, and a camera so shaky I congratulated the cameraman on overcoming his Parkinson’s diagnosis and continuing to find work only to be told he was doing it on purpose – my association with the kooky young scamps we interviewed had to be helping my brand, had to be.
But it took its toll. After less than five episodes (it was four), I began to feel like Bill Grundy interviewing the Sex Pistols, by turns appalled at their manner and goading them to behave worse. My friend Jackie is a magistrate at a court in Norwich and slips into a similar role when confronted with any youth offender of colour, insisting they stand up straight or blow their nose or look at me when I’m talking to you, but – and this is not just because she votes Conservative, she was like this anyway – longing for them to betray a fragment of contempt so she can rear up and throw the book at them (Metaphorically! Although she once did it literally because she’d forgotten not to a have a drink at lunchtime).
Throughout all this, I drew enormous comfort from the fact that I was still an attractive proposition for advertisers and sponsors. I was what the brand director of Jacamo described as a ‘sexy offering’ who was able to woo 45- to 65-year-old males from slightly lower income brackets than my own.
I’m not sure about sexy! I mean, I’m not Quasimodo or Chiles, but I’m also no oil painting, certainly not first thing in the morning when a combination of dehydration and gravity has made my eye bags swell and my lips dry up. And while one of the cleaners at the gym bumped into me while she was on her daughter’s hen do and whispered that she’d once watched me towel off and decided she’d love to ride me ‘like a Peloton’, I just took it with a pinch of salt.
‘Don’t touch what you can’t afford!’ I joked.
She put her mouth close to my ear and said, ‘Are you on about you or the Peloton?’
I said, ‘Well, both realistically. I’m a successful media personality, and a Peloton static bike is going to set you back thirteen hundred quid minimum, plus the monthly subscription fee. How are you going to stretch to that on, what, a tenner an hour?’
The point is, I was still able to command endorsements and attract sponsorship. Brand managers could see what commissioners would not, and not just because they were men of my age and bought each other drinks and played badminton together. And where I come from, that means something. It confers status. When I hit the high street with a woman or friends, or even woman friends, of which I have six, these perks act as a buoyancy aid, a shot in the arm that gives me more than a little swagger. I don’t mean I’d swan around with wads of banknotes – that would be crass and, besides, the endorsement deals weren’t structured like that – but I’d flop out a gold card at any branch of Zizzi for a third off food and soft drinks; I could treat my date to a shopping spree at GO Outdoors and say, ‘Fill a basket with hiking socks, I get a staff discount.’ I could get me plus four friends into the communal areas at Champneys, complete with free towels and money off lunch. Clearly that opens doors. You become a guy people wanna be around.
It would not last. Why? Well, you’ll find out in the next chapter. Or rather the one after that, because as I said, they alternate between two different timelines.
* * *
54 I’m pleased to say that my attitude towards the tattooed has softened over the years. While the likes of a spider’s web on a lady’s neck or Alice Cooper’s face on a grown man’s arm still seem idiotic to me, I concede that to see a mermaid on a woman’s upper thigh, particularly with properly rendered mammaries, can be nothing short of a delight.
55 The late actor tragically died after his car collided with another driven by Donald Turnupseed. Odd because ‘Turnupseed, Don’ is what a Scottish person would say Mr Dean’s car then did. Gotta try stand-up one day! I really have.
FRIENDS OF ABBOT’S CLIFF
February 2022
It’s a sunny day on the glorious British coast and I am a man on a mission. I’ve borrowed my assistant’s shopping trolley and am striding gaily56 along the seafront, my mind filled with errands and my mouth filled with song – popular hits of the day, which I embellish with tiddly-om-pom-poms to give them a seaside inflection.
Like its owner, the trolley is groaning. I have piled the wheeled tartan cuboid full of croissants, pastries, fruit, Twixes and Innocent smoothies. Fresh flowers are jammed in the side pocket. I still had a box of This Time mugs and mousemats in my garage so I’ve brought them with me too. A gift for each attendee, to say thank you for your welcome. For today is the day I will meet the public.
I have hired a village hall and flyered the local area to invite residents (and only residents, please: bring a recent utility or council tax bill, plus ID) to a meeting, where I’ll be delighted to present my ideas to regenerate the lighthouse and the local area. My project manager thinks this an excellent idea: local buy-in could prove invaluable, since alienated locals can be obstructive when it comes to public planning consultation, often refusing to grant access for construction vehicles and complaining about nuisances such as noise and rubble and visible bumcracks. Plus, I want to immerse myself in the community and, heck, maybe even make a few friends. So a meet ’n’ greet is fine by me.
I’ll be honest, I am excited. I’ve always felt real kinship with people of the sea.
As a child I holidayed at the coast quite often. I remember those days as a parade of cheery, if ruddy, faces. Chip-shop ladies, thick of arm and rosy of cheek, would twizzle up bags containing fish suppers. Campsite proprietors would welcome old and young alike as long as you kept the noise down after 10 p.m. and weren’t ethnic. In smoky pubs, trawlermen and smugglers would swap tales of barracuda and HM Customs and Excise.
For me, coastal villages have a special romantic glow to them, with their own mystical traditions and ways. One thinks of how these communities are brought to life on screen: The Wicker Man, Get Carter, Poldark or Rick Stein’s cooking shows from Padstow where seven, eight, nine times a year, villagers glug cider, dress in terrifying wooden masks and bang tambourines as they eat vinegary food and sing shanties of the sea. Even a show like Broadchurch had its own seaside charm, which the paedophile/child-murder bit could do little to dent.
Yes, I have fond memories of the seaside. I want to be as one with them, live among them. I’ve left behind the financial muscle of London and Norwich, with their win-at-all-costs mindsets that had propelled these twin cities to the top of the global league tables, certainly in the spheres of insurance services and mustard.
Now, I’m depressing the clutch, dropping things down to third or second and taking life at a more leisurely pace. With the exception of oil-rich Aberdeen or fish-rich Peterhead or gay-rich Brighton, coastal idylls live life with the gentle ebb and flow of the sea. This is fine by me. I’ve lived life in the fast lane, I have drawn long and deep on the teat of fame. Now I’ll be giving a bit back, devoting my remaining years to a life that has meaning.
So yes, I intend to be part of the town. I’m not just buying the property willy-nilly. I’ve come here to add real value. Listen to me! I’m making it sound like I’m assuming a white-saviour role, like a prospector convincing yokels he can turn their town around if only they’ll sign their land over to him. Sure, there is that slightly patronising element of an outsider having to provide care the locals have been unable to, like home help coming round to wipe an old person’s arse and unload the dishwasher. But I’m not going to come in shouting the odds, asking, ‘Why haven’t you maintained X?’ or, ‘Don’t you know how to look after Y?’ I’m sure they have their reasons. I just wanna introduce myself, say, ‘Hi, I’m Alan. I’m going to be living with you, we’re neighbours now,’ and slowly but surely earn their trust, respect and fondness. And if renovating their lighthouse teaches them to have pride in their town, great.
And so to business. I get to the hall early in the morning, giving myself a day to spruce the venue to my liking. Although the room I’ve hired was advertised as ‘cleaned’, I spend the day making it spick and, where possible, span. Maybe the seaside version of clean is a bit different to ours, I reason. They do seem weirdly fine with carbuncles and algae clinging to the hull of every boat in the harbour, whereas I would simply chip them off and scrub the green bits away (or pay a chap to do it for me).
But no matter. I enjoy doing a spot of cleaning. A scarf is tied around my head to keep my hair out of my face and yellow marigolds (large) mitten my hands. Adorably, I’ll blow strands of hair from my face as I survey my handiwork, something I’ve seen Anthea Turner do when she enters spring-clean mode as a way to get dinner-party guests to leave. Within hours, I really do have the place looking fantastic.
I even plug in a few air-fresheners – I’ve gone with Eucalyptus & Freesia from the Air Wick Active Fresh range, as I find it steeps the room with a certain calmness. Or it certainly does in my house.57
Here at the village hall, I have these plugged in but turned off at the wall – I’m not anticipating they’ll be needed and I would sooner use them only if necessary, since the aroma, and my apologies to the guys at Air Wick, absolutely stinks.58 What else? Ah, yes. I’ve curated a brief soundtrack based on the theme of ‘friends’, which will play as they guzzle smoothies and chew pastry, subconsciously making them warm to me. This will play in the background as people arrive: ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ (Carole King), ‘You’re My Best Friend’ (Queen), ‘That’s What Friends Are For’ (Steve Wonder), ‘I’ll Stand by You’ (The Pretenders) and ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ (with Ringo on vocals, not the Joe Cocker one; I don’t like the Joe Cocker one, the Joe Cocker one sounds too gravelly).
I set about destacking and arranging the chairs. This is to be an inclusive, welcoming space so I arrange them in a way I think will be conducive to cordial conversation. Instead of rows of chairs facing a stage in an adversarial layout, I arrange them in a big circle, a configuration I learnt at a support group I briefly attended when I’d been feeling crummy (More on that later! Maybe!), and which also works well for ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
And now? I am ready. Ready to make new friends.
‘Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!’
I am shouting. Have to. Friends? That’s a laugh. For the gathering has descended into a hostile barrage of questions. Questions that are raining down on the presentation proper, pebble-dashing the smooth putty of my talk.
Suddenly these locals have turned from interested stakeholders to the stake-holders you get in Hammer Horror films, the flaming-torch variety. They are aggressive, forever raising their hands or saying ‘excuse me’ to ask questions like a pack of feral dogs. It’s questions, questions, questions – chillingly couched behind a veneer of friendliness, bubble-wrapped in what I call weaponised politeness. Ben Fogle does it a lot.
I’d started promptly enough, smiling as each person moseyed in. John and Julia Hirst were the first to arrive and Julia squeezed my hand as she shook it, which I thought was seriously classy. Then there was a woman in a cycling helmet, two ladies who had the air of lesbians, a couple of shopkeepers, a few people not worth describing, a couple who’d only recently moved to the area, and, perhaps most mysteriously, a flame-haired (i.e. ginger) woman in her mid-thirties with large eyes and a watchful bearing. She had responded to my smile with a sudden glance away, the skittish shyness of a woodland animal, but I noticed that she looked back – and when I smiled at her a second time, slightly harder than I had before, she smiled too and unfurled her hand into an open palm, as if to say ‘hiya’. That’s when I realised. She was the mysterious woman I’d seen on the cliffs that day. She was real! She was really real!
I composed myself. ‘Grab a seat, Red,’ I drawled. I’ve always wanted to call a ginger woman ‘Red’ and now I had. Who was she, this intriguing, orangey woman?
Attendance had swelled to ten or a dozen, and although we waited for any stragglers, none straggled so we cracked on, cheerfully.
It had started well enough. ‘Welcome to tomorrow,’ I began. ‘This is a vision called One Abbot’s Cliff. “One” because I wanted us to move forward with one shared vision for what this area can be, and “Abbot’s Cliff” because the area is called Abbot’s Cliff.’
I ran them through a PowerPoint of what the work would entail and ended on a picture of the finished lighthouse complete with those ghostly people architects always put in their drawings. A young couple holding hands. A boy with a balloon. A family laughing, beachball tucked under Dad’s arm. A woman jogging with a dog. You can just download these figures and slot them in, but they almost felt like friends to me.
I finished and did a gesture that was meant to suggest ‘voila!’ but came out more as a ‘ta-da’. And then I waited for applause. Instead, a few exaggeratedly thoughtful nods. I found myself adding: ‘Remember, this is your lighthouse – not legally, it’s mine. But it belongs to the town just as much as it belongs to me – again, not legally. So I want to make sure you guys are—’
‘Sorry, I’m just going to stop you there,’ said Julia, who in real life has the appearance of a retired dog trainer more than a retired school teacher.
Oh no you’re not, I think, before realising she has.
‘Couple of anomalies …’
Anomalies? I actually laughed when she said this. But she stood up and unfurled a roll of blown-up photographs. She laid them out on the table, slap bang on top of my drawings.
‘You’ll see here, the lantern room – that would have been accessed by a ladder,’ she said. ‘We actually have the original ladder in storage and we’d be happy to—’
‘You’ll see here,’ I countered, plonking my drawing on top of her photos, ‘it’s now accessed by a tight spiral staircase.’
She seemed not to notice, rescuing her photos, which weren’t even colour, and putting them atop the pile. ‘And again, the lantern room,’ she said. ‘You’ll see that was empty bar the lamp itself, which meant the keeper had space to walk round it and—’
‘You’ll see here,’ I interrupted, which is something I never do, ‘there’s now banquette seating around the circumference. So you can look out with a glass of wine or—’
‘Of course, originally that wouldn’t have been there,’ she smiled.
‘Of course, now it will be,’ I smiled.
‘Yes, but originally—’
‘Originally, I wouldn’t have been there, Julia – I wasn’t born for another ninety years. Originally, you wouldn’t. Originally, the clifftop wouldn’t have had a main road. Originally, the sea wouldn’t have had a nuclear deterrent. Originally, there wouldn’t have been the contraceptive pill, or cars, or contact lenses or iPhones. Am I allowed to bring my iPhone into the lighthouse, Julia? Am I allowed to say OMG in there? Am I allowed to use an electric razor?’
Julia glowered at me. John looked at his shoes.
And that’s when the questions began. ‘When is all this happening?’, ‘Did you say you’re planning to have the lighthouse light on?’, ‘Can you slow down a bit, please?’, ‘Did he say the light’s going to be on?’, ‘How bright is the light going to be?’, ‘Can you say that bit again?’, ‘Do you mind if I ask a quick question?’, ‘Won’t the light keep awake people awake?’, ‘What do you mean by Pathway to Abbot’s Cliff 2.0?’, ‘Will there be any consultation?’, ‘Can you speak up a bit, please?’
I expected some pushback, maybe a modicum of wariness. But this? This is fang-bared hostility.
Far from creating a safe space, the circular set-up of the chairs simply means that whichever way I look my vision is assailed by the face of an angry woman. Left? Angry woman? Right? Angry woman? Straight ahead? Angry woman. The effect reminiscent of a recurring nightmare I suffered after getting into an argument on Mumsnet.
Not all of the attendees are women – I will not be accused of chauvinism – I’m just saying it seems like they are.
What is their problem? Why are they so opposed to my restoring, nay improving, a dilapidated lighthouse? Some are insisting that the rotating light would light up not just the sea but neighbouring homes and countryside, which would upset the sleep of local children and, hilariously, cattle. Others seem to take issue with my half-serious suggestion to monetise the lighthouse and – may God have mercy – turn a small profit by turning the lower floors into a Wetherspoons, or possibly an All Bar One. I was happy to discuss which of these it should be. Others, I decide, are simply jealous. Others still are plain old arseholes.
A man who looks like the late Harry Secombe with a rash has his hand raised.
‘What does it mean when it says Pathway to Abbot’s Cliff 2.0?’ he says.
I can’t help but sigh. I haven’t even arrived at that bullet point; they are jumping ahead. ‘It’s just a normal pathway.’
‘Like a coastal path?’
‘No, more like a strategic vision, that kind of pathway,’ I say. ‘Shall we just stick to the points in the order they’re bulleted? I think we should stick to the points in the order they’re bulleted.’
‘I’m not sure this will even get planning approval,’ says Julia.
‘Already has,’ I say. Cue yet more consternation. What? When? How? They really are playing the greatest hits when it came to question rhetoric.
Deep breath. Time to put this pressure cooker under the cold tap. I smile. ‘I’m pleased to say my attorney here has inspected my application in detail and will be able to put any concerns to bed.’
Instantly I regret this. The person I’ve gestured towards is far from an attorney; she is merely my assistant, whose legal qualifications amount to repeat viewings of Judge John Deed and a hairstyle that resembles a judge’s wig (coils tightly at the back, looks like it could be lifted off). But the smile that plays on her lips tells me this is a role she’s dreamt of – and that concerns me.
