Out of Time

The drugs changed. No more poppers and speed, no more weed and mushrooms and Feminax. Ecstasy, of course, cocaine, ketamine, and then, heroin. Weird stuff like PCP, which gave you flashbacks of little green men explaining the meaning of life. People started falling through the cracks, disappearing. Some were sectioned. Some died. Some went away and never came back. I wrote a piece about heroin and smoked it, though I hated downers, only liked the stuff that took you up and out. I got a cab home, was sick outside our gate and slept for fifteen hours. People got cross with me about the feature. Someone phoned me up and shouted at me about revealing he used heroin, even though I didn’t mention him at all, even though I hadn’t known he was on it.

I got shouted at quite a bit because of my articles. In one, I got methadone and methadrine mixed up, and a lead singer bawled me out backstage at a Rollercoaster event. In another, I put in a quote from one singer wanting another singer to die of AIDS and it caused huge problems. You just didn’t know what would blow up, really. I still thought I was only writing for people like me. People who were relaxed about drugs, who got the joke, who knew that the important bit was the music and the characters around it, and the highs and spin-outs and stupid stuff that came with it all.

The mainstream changed to accommodate us. It really did feel like we’d won. A Labour government got in, for the first time since the 70s. Bars started opening until 2 a.m., and some, all night. Working-class people were celebrated, allowed to be exceptional. Extraordinary ordinary people had become our heroes, and, after they moved aside, Big Brother started and reality TV became the way to make everyday amazingness into stars.

The other day, I came across a piece I’d written for The Face in 1996. It was called ‘Where Were You When the 90s Happened?’. It made me laugh when I saw it. It’s so hard to assess an era or a state of mind when you’re in the middle of it. It redefines itself from a distance, over the years.

The important thing about the 90s was that I was in my twenties, I suppose. We were good at being young. Our belief in change was the same belief that all young people have, but we were lucky. Our generation had the circumstances, the impetus, the gold-plated opportunity to be able to push our beliefs out into the world. Many of our ideas are still around.

At the end of the 90s, I’d moved flat ten times, got through four cars, two serious love affairs and a few not-so-serious. I’d gone away a lot, for work (Las Vegas, LA, New York) and for me, because I’d needed to open up my head. I’d been to Cuba, to Mexico, to Iceland, to the Scottish islands, to Australia, to Nova Scotia, all around Europe. I’d done a bit of telly presenting (I never saw the shows because I was always out), I’d interviewed a lot of musicians, I’d written umpteen features on going out and staying up, on trainers and driving. I’d danced all night, then carried on to the next night, over and over. I’d written a book, about suburbia. In the summer of 1999, on a tour designed to take books into nightclubs, prove that the chemical generation liked to read, I’d met S, who I’m now married to.

So much change, so much energy. I know it was me, but it feels like it wasn’t. And, God, it sounds exhausting.

4. Carry On

We left the 90s behind and continued in much the same way as before. (When are you meant to stop? Is there a signal? How do you know?) On New Year’s Eve 1999, we met up at a friend’s flat and then rushed to the South Bank to goggle at the fireworks, high on the crowd – excitable, international, cuddly – as well as the exploding sky.

Afterwards, in the early hours of the new millennium, a group of us bunched across a packed bridge, straggled through closed-to-traffic tunnels to get to a club. We were blitzed, so it took us quite a while; anyone watching might have been reminded of Monty Python’s 100-yard race for people with no sense of direction. One or two of us freaked out on the way – everyone held hands and ran until it was better, like 5-year-olds in the park. And then we were there.

I don’t know how long we lasted, but long enough for the evening to splinter, to turn into individual adventures that you recounted later when you bumped into each other at the horse-trough washbasins, when you fell on your friends as though you’d been parted for years, rather than hours. Were we playing hide and seek at one point? Did we kick our legs out from behind pillars, like stupid pole-dancing ponies? As the sun rose, S and I went to an after-party in a bar off Leather Lane. It had a spiral staircase and a minor film star was there. We slumped on squishy sofas, teased the film star, made each other laugh.

We took photos of ourselves on our digital camera when we got home, thinking we were beautiful, but we looked sweaty and mad. Not that it mattered. We dragged the duvets to the sofa and watched nature films all day.

A few days later, I turned 33. And gradually, gradually, things began to change. Friends were finding partners, leaving house-shares, settling into new places with each other. Or they were leaving the country, resettling in a different way. We were still going out: just up the road, to Basement Jaxx’s Rooty in the George IV, or miles away, to Glastonbury, or Ibiza. We got excited about bands. The Strokes: I remember seeing them at Heaven, gorgeous cartoons, rock-star Muppets. The Libertines, not so much. UK garage gradually warped into what would become grime, which I really liked, but I danced to it in my kitchen or at festivals, not at clubs.

The money I got from writing the book on suburbia meant that I could put a deposit on a flat, so I did, and moved in with two flatmates. We tiptoed around the new place, marvelling at how grown-up it seemed: the previous owners were a family, and everything was painted and maintained. The rented flat we were leaving was not so pretty. There, the walls were beige anaglypta, fingerprinted, smudged. The kitchen was orange with grease. In the bathroom, part of the ceiling had collapsed and was held up by the shower rail. When you went to the toilet in there, you had to wear a cycle helmet, in case the whole thing came down completely (health and safety). The new flat had Victorian fireplaces, sash windows, stripped wooden doors with china handles, and it seemed astonishing, solid and artily bohemian, an entry point to a proper life.

And so it proved. After a few months in our new palace, one friend moved out; then S moved in; then, a year or so later, the other friend left. Now there’s no more moving: we still live in the same flat, S and I and our kids.

There were weddings, on and off over the decade. There were kids, too, to join the children a few people already had. A range of ages of parents and offspring, but a sudden rush of births after I was 36. We left everything to the final deadline, squeezed in adulthood as late as we could.

Time was doing what it does, ticking on, disappearing, bit by bit by bit. Opportunities were opening up as others were shutting down. There are people who are good at knowing when to move on, the best time to leave, the new thing to follow, where to go and when. They seem born with excellent timing. They’d somehow bought two-bedroom flats while they were in their early twenties. They were busy setting up companies, or were selling the ones they’d already established (when? how?). They were ‘moving into digital’.

But there are those of us who make decisions too quickly, or too slowly, or who don’t even realize there are decisions to be made. We continue with what we’re doing because it’s what we do, or because we like it, or we’re loyal to something that perhaps is long gone. Or we sack it all on a whim, move from job to job, changing but not progressing, trying out new versions of the same thing.

I’d been working for the Observer since the mid-90s, as a regular writer, but I was still a freelancer. This suited me, though I wasn’t always good at it. I said yes to jobs I was awful at, turned down opportunities that seem life-changing now. And when I got a new job, I couldn’t work out, always, how I was meant to behave, what I was supposed to be doing. I needed an editor, a producer; a mentor, maybe. I wasn’t concentrating. I landed another book deal, for a biography, but I couldn’t deliver. I wrote dramas that didn’t work out. I helped with online start-ups, I mentored teenagers who wanted to be journalists. I wrote columns and my columns were okay. But other columnists came along and they were sharper, funnier or more surreal: they were better.

S and I had met in 1999, and we gave each other an excuse to carry on going out, to continue with what we‘d been doing separately (we’d been going to the same places, sometimes even the same parties, we’d discovered) but now with each other. We extended our work trips and went to Thailand, to China and New Zealand. We found the cheapest flights we could to Trieste, Amsterdam, Cornwall, the Pyrenees.

I’m not so good at remembering what happened when we went away, what we saw. S tells me tales of our trips and it’s as though I never went. I remember the feelings, though.

‘God, do you remember how much we used to argue?’ I say to S. ‘How could we be arsed?’

Our relationship wasn’t smooth. It was difficult in the early years: we were both used to doing what we liked; our backgrounds were different; we found it hard to compromise into partnership. But we were cheap to run, we loved each other. Lucky us. Some of our friends had hooked up with the wrong person. Years of their time had been invested in a partner who suddenly didn’t want to stay around, or who was already attached and never leaving their partner, or who was playing them against someone else. Often, it was women who suffered the fall-out. There were emergency rescues from outside bars, long phone calls at odd hours, evenings spent drinking, bitching, comforting.

Love lives, always hard to make sense of, were becoming even more difficult, weighted down with future pressure. Where were these affairs going, what was the point if they weren’t going to make it? And it wasn’t only love affairs. Friends (and us) were losing jobs; there were pregnancies and non-pregnancies, sudden illnesses, dying parents, sick kids, debt. Adult problems that we weren’t qualified to deal with.

‘I feel like we’ve been sitting at the back of the class, messing about,’ said my friend L. ‘And now we’ve looked up, and everyone else has been knuckling down for ages, without us noticing. They’re going to pass the exams. We’re the only ones left back here.’

There were so many changes, behind the scenes, in front of our faces. And yet it’s easy to think that your thirties are not so different from your twenties. We thought this. You’re just carrying on, refining, tweaking, but essentially remaining the same.

Maybe you look better than you did in your twenties because you’re not slathered in make-up or wearing clown clothes. You’ve grown into your face; you know which haircut suits you. You can understand oblique conversational references (‘She’s grand,’ meaning, ‘I hate her’); you realize when jobs are being offered or are about to be taken away (be wary of any conversation that begins ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard our news?’). You don’t burst into tears quite so much. You speak up when you feel something’s wrong. You have less time for people you can’t get on with and they have less time for you.

The side-tracking is still there, though. The diversions. The wandering around town in the afternoons, the not-answering your phone, the lunches that turn into evenings that turn into weekends. The belief that you’re still an outsider, some sort of rebel manqué, sitting on the edges sniping at The Man. But The Man will only notice you if you’re doing something worth noticing.

What’s strange is that you do no more side-tracking than you did in your twenties, not really. You probably do less. You certainly spend less time drunk. But time is moving faster. It is, it is.

At that particular moment, the internet began to make a difference, to music and to books and to the media. The magazines I worked for started to close, one by one. Select shut down in 2000; The Face in 2004; Smash Hits, 2006. The Mirror launched a magazine in 2002, and I wrote a column for it; it was shuttered two years later. The Observer remained, and its sister paper, the Guardian. Both changed their size from broadsheet to Berliner in 2005. The new-sized printing presses cost £80 million, which was deemed a worthwhile investment, as though printing equipment was like London property.

Though most newspapers were still alive, there was pressure on fees, a blanket ban on contracts. One paper gathered together all its regular freelance writers and photographers to tell them it valued them highly but their rates would be cut in half from then on. A hundred per cent of the work; fifty per cent of the pay.

The internet had already messed up the music business, that no-longer-warbling dead canary in the goldmine. Music was all over the place. The money to be made in it was shifting from albums to gigs; record companies and promoters were haggling over what they thought was their share. At one point, mobile phone ringtones were deemed to be the way to wring profits from songs. In 2001, Apple launched iTunes and the iPod, and the iTunes store in 2003. Albums were unbundled, non-singles rendered worthless.

Still, to us, our ways of working remained the best. They had glamour, they were fun. We understood what to do, what the results meant. (Were our ways the old ways? Hadn’t we only just invented them?) We laughed and bitched, as the earth was shifting beneath our feet.

In September 2008, I did an interview with Grace Jones. We met in a chi-chi bar-restaurant in Notting Hill that had lots of small rooms and sparkly fairy lights. It was a Monday night. Grace was hours late – her manager and I had a lovely meal while we waited – and, after she arrived, insisted on smoking, which made the waiters mad. At the end of the interview, which wasn’t really an interview but an oblique chat in which Grace drank red wine, shouted, ‘I am the ink in the squid,’ and waggled her legs at me so I could feel how skinny her ankles were – anyway, at the end of that, we went to the bar.

Grace paid for the meal in cash (the only pop star I’ve ever interviewed who has done so) and ordered Sambuca for us both. She said, ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost,’ and we biffed the drinks. Then she stuck her tongue down my throat: an unexpected move, which made me burst out laughing. Her lips were very soft. Grace stroked my face and grabbed my breast and said, ‘It’s a full moon, I feel horrrrrny’ (to be fair, she had shouted this all evening). She wondered if I wanted to come to her hotel, and when I did not, she didn’t seem that bothered.

She gave me her phone number. ‘File it under Grrrr,’ she said, so I did.

I helped her down the stairs – she was very drunk, did I mention? – and we went out into the wide Notting Hill street, the buildings like glistening celebration cakes, the street empty and quiet. Grace ran down the middle of the road, her arms stretched wide, her black outfit billowing around her, howling at the moon.

I thought: They don’t make pop stars like that any more.

(They don’t. We don’t. Do we still want them?)

As Grace ran and howled, without apology, in London, over in New York Lehman Brothers was collapsing. Suddenly, the world of money imploded and shrank, and everything in its orbit got sucked into its black hole, never to escape.

All the bubbles were bursting. There was an election and the coalition got in. The day before the election, I’d interviewed Gordon Brown, prime minister incumbent, for the Mirror. I’d gone to the seaside, where he’d made a great speech. But he was impatient during our interview, which, for reasons I forget, took place in a static helicopter in the middle of a field. Afterwards, we had our photograph taken together. Then Brown took off in his helicopter, leaving me and the photographer alone. In a field. We had to find a taxi and file on the hoof. I transcribed the interview on a train, bashed it out in Starbucks. But I couldn’t get the Starbucks internet to work on my laptop. My editor started shouting at me down the phone.

I asked a young techy guy if I could hop onto his wi-fi so I could file my copy.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What’s the article about?’

I told him.

‘Who’s Gordon Brown?’ he asked.

I used to tell this story as an anecdote, a tale of the young and stupid, like a joke. I now think the butt of the joke wasn’t the techy guy but me. Old-fashioned me, stranded in a field, rushing to a café, borrowing a dongle, writing about an already-forgotten Labour politician for a left-wing printed newspaper.

Money had changed. It no longer seemed to be real. Instead of it adding and subtracting in a way I understood, it had become a slippery, unsolid commodity. Work, too, was becoming less easy to comprehend, its relationships – between employer and worker, effort and resulting pay – becoming murky and unclear. Also, who owned what was done? Contracts were drawn up that gave employers rights over everything made, whether on the net, across the universe, across time, forever.

We were brought up in a world where jobs for life were rare. But they existed (teachers, council workers), and stability was accepted. Even when Thatcher destroyed the unions, dismantled the mining communities, she herself remained. She didn’t budge. She stayed for years, to be followed by Major, who stayed almost as long. We thought New Labour would do the same, but it collapsed so quickly; disappeared, black-holed.

When I was young, my mum and dad worked hard, and were paid for what they did. The maths of their money worked: when they’d paid the bills and there was money left over, we went on holiday. When there wasn’t, we didn’t. We never went out for meals, but we didn’t care about that. At university, if I went more than two hundred pounds overdrawn, the bank wouldn’t give me any cash. I had to negotiate long and hard to get fifty pounds a week, which I got by turning up at a particular branch on a Monday and writing a cheque.

Those years seem so close. But they are a decade away, more.

Hitting 40 wasn’t momentous. I remember feeling a small twinge of something – fear? Regret? Reflux? – but then I went to see Jarvis Cocker play a solo show and thought, He’s older than me, and he’s still great. It’s not the birthday that matters: it’s whatever is going on at the time of the birthday. And at that time, things were OK.

P was small, but there was only one of him and he wasn’t at school, so we could warp and weave our lives around him pretty easily. He was difficult but, in hindsight, only in the way that babies are. He didn’t do what I thought he would do (I think I thought he would act like a small child); scarily, he didn’t do what the books said. He cried a lot. In the mornings, after breakfast, we would put him on a play mat and after a while he would cry. So we would try everything to make him stop: play him music, pick him up, jig him about, put him in his chair, dance about in front of him, give him a jangly toy, maybe some food. Nothing worked. And then someone said, ‘Put him back to bed for a nap,’ and that worked.

We were applying hectic solutions to a non-hectic situation, because that was how we’d lived up until then. We were still narcissistic enough to believe that a child was an extension of our personalities (he’ll love staying up late, because we do; he’ll love company for the same reason; he’ll like this music because we played it a lot when I was pregnant; oh, look, he’s a champion burper – it’s a family trait). He lived to our timetable and that timetable remained flexible. Having a child stopped our late nights, mostly; but the major life rhythms, the when and where we were doing what we did, they were still as up and down as we were, as varied as the state of our finances. P seemed to fit in well.

I shared my fortieth birthday do. Two friends and I took over a pub, including the downstairs dance floor. It was a great party. Afterwards, I lay on the pavement outside and stared at the stars, searching out their sparkle between the high rises, looking past the restricted view, out to the enormous sky.

Between 2000 and 2010, I didn’t move house once. I got married, I gave birth to two children. I acquired and held on to a flat, a microwave and a dishwasher, and a mortgage on that flat. How did that happen? Is this the person I am now? God, how dreary.

5. This is a Low

Here we are now. (Entertain us.)

The dramas of life change when you have children. They expand to the vastness of your terrified imagination. They reduce to the size of a raggedy toy cat.

‘Where’s Kitty?’ wails F.

‘What’s she lost?’ whispers S. ‘That grey rat thing?’

‘Cat, not rat,’ I say. ‘Kitty.’

These dramas take up time, and mind-space. They don’t leave much room for your own. This can be a good thing – gone are the hours spent worrying about what you said at a party, mostly because you don’t go to parties – but also frustrating, when your own drama is about trying to work out where you’re at. And how to go on from there.

I am fitting my drama into specified time slots. I have read that this is one of the best ways to approach unmanageable concerns, to contain the things in the day that keep you awake at night. In the mornings, you consider your anxieties, examine them properly for twenty minutes, then you store them and get on with your day. I contemplate my fears. I’m unsure how deep I should go, how dark and twisted, how specific (unemployment, divorce, the loss of The Point). Or should I be grateful for them, tell them I’m happy they’ve come into my life? Hold them in my virtual hand, before rolling them up like socks and putting them away tidily in their drawer – the virtual drama drawer (next to the wardrobe of worries)?

The next hour is spent frantically opening real-life drawers and boxes, untidying rooms, checking pockets, under sofas, trying to find a grey toy cat.

In the British Library, I am researching my drama.

In 1965, Canadian psychoanalyst and psychologist Elliot Jaques coined the now much-used epithet ‘midlife crisis’. Jaques interviewed a group of successful people and realized that many were feeling the effects of reaching a central point in their working lives. They were confused, disappointed. They’d arrived at their central point to find it was not a high spot, but a dip. Maybe even a spiral. He defined this new crisis as what happened when high achievers hit middle age and feel tortured because of ‘unrealized goals, lack of self-determination or physical changes’. It being the 60s, the midlife point was assumed to be between 30 and 35, and the high achievers Jaques surveyed were men.

Though Jaques named it, and nicely, the idea of a critical moment of change at life’s central age had been knocking around for quite a while. Literature loves the idea of a failing, flailing fellow in his middle years, and Carl Jung, through his work in the 1930s, believed that the midlife stage was vital to human development. ‘The very frequent neurotic disturbances of adult years all have one thing in common: they want to carry the psychology of the youthful phase over the threshold of the so-called years of discretion,’ wrote Jung. We want this, he said, even though it can’t happen: ‘We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning: for what was great in the morning will be little at the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.’

Jung believed there should be colleges for 40-year-olds, institutions of learning to help us get through the painful transition to full maturity. I like this idea. The Middle-aged University. A place to study your navel, if you can still locate it, Chunky.