For the past year now, we have had a lodger. Indeed, we have had several lodgers. Just as one packs up to leave, another seems to come along — as though we had some manner of social insurance policy, doing a like-for-like deal whenever we incur a loss.
The first was a singer-songwriter, who had pleasingly — and, in terms of his predilection for champagne, somewhat necessarily — become a millionaire during the years that we had known him. On breaking up with his girlfriend, he became averse to rattling around his flat on his own, and so he moved into ours for succour and, frankly, pizza, which he could eat in prodigious quantities.
Aside from the pizza, our lifestyles were notably disparate. He was with us for four months, and would regularly come running down the stairs wearing a beautiful black Prada suit, carrying a guitar, to catch a private jet to Milan, while I shouted “Weetabix?” after him. The coat rack contained: one small child’s anorak, one slightly larger child’s anorak, one ravishing cashmere pea-coat from Armani, one cat-hair-covered Marks & Spencer duffel-coat. I once texted him, “Shall I put a limescale dissolving tablet in your en suite?” and he texted back “Yes — I’m at the MTV awards. I think we just won.”
When he checked out — to embark on a year-long world tour, starting in South Africa, “so that we’re tanned by the time we get to Munich” — our current singer-songwriter moved straight in. A broke ginger genius, he would stand in the kitchen doing some routine that was half Eric Morecambe, half Peter Cook, and eating huge amounts of hardboiled eggs and salad cream with a spoon.
Twenty minutes later we would hear him playing a new song up in his room — something about dazzling autumn mist — and boggle at how a man who had spent the past three hours answering all questions with the word “quack” could have secretly stolen Nick Drake’s brain.
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Of course, they have not been lodgers in the strictest sense. They haven’t paid rent — or if they have, it has been with champagne and birthday songs. There has been no rationing of the telephone, no curfew and no contract. But they have occupied a unique position: closer than friends, yet (vitally) more distant than family.
Let’s face it: families — good ones, at any rate — allow you to drop your standards drastically, to the point where you all just lie around on the floor eating mashed potato with your hands, discussing each other’s toilet habits as if it were a competitive sport. But during their months with us, our house guests have forced us into a unique domestic mode, into a daily manner somewhere between “at ease” and “on best behaviour”. To put it briskly, being constantly observed in your our own home, we have discovered, makes you a much better person.
Previously, the average domestic hour — scraping carrots, finding the hairbrush, preventing the small kid from having a tantrum, making the big kid eat fish, vacuuming the sofa — felt like 60 thankless bubbles, all popping in the wind. Like parents everywhere, I felt that every effort went unnoticed and unrewarded. Most days I would approach the task with a potent combination of fatigue, resentment and cheese.
Given an audience, however — an appreciative audience, one that is adult enough to calibrate just how effortful it is to come up with more than three alternative endings for a story based on the characters from The Little Mermaid — and your whole perspective changes. Mindful of your audience, you find yourself becoming more patient. More creative. Far less likely to eat cheese sandwiches resentfully while hiding in a cupboard.
There is a sense of your life becoming, in a very positive way, a performance. Like the nurse selling poppies from a tray in Penny Lane, you feel as if you’re in a play. Previously, if I’d had any sense of my domestic life being a play, I had presumed that it would be something tedious at the Edinburgh Fringe — possibly involving free-jazz, and shouting lesbians — that played to empty houses every night. Now, at the very least, I know that I have sold one ticket.
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Of course, had I ever believed in God, this sense of being constantly observed — even in the front room, when I’m singing my special customised lyrics to the theme tune to the Antiques Roadshow! — wouldn’t be so novel to me. I would have presumed that every second of my life was being judged by an omnipresent being, and ramped up my rendition of Row, Row, Row Your Boat from Day 1 as a result.
As a Godless, modern urbanite, however, it turns out that the nearest thing to God in your life is to have someone in the spare room. For me, the big guy upstairs literally is the big guy upstairs — although he’s really only 6ft 1in.
A case in need of a catchphrase
Obviously there are several bad points about the impending, brutal divorce between Sir Paul and Lady McCartney. It’s always sad to see love between two people die. There will doubtless be trauma and upset to their two-year-old daughter, Bea. There is no live CCTV feed to the house of Stella McCartney — so that we might enjoy her daily 14-hour sessions of rolling around on the floor, hooting with laughter and high-fiving anyone who might walk past.
But, personally, the facet of the impending split that I find the most upsetting is that we have yet to come up with a catchy name for it. Something that encapsulates just how huge and ferocious the event is becoming. Something along the line of “Watergate”, “9/11” or “Bay of Pigs”. In an effort to get the ball rolling, might I suggest “The Macpocalypse”?
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Palace guard
Shock and sorrow has followed the news that the Royal Family has, allegedly, been bugged by a journalist working for the News of the World. Personally, however, I was relieved to learn that the royals might be being bugged. Of course we should be bugging the royals! They invaded our country! They made us their subjects! They rule us! They have done for 400 years! Bugging their mobile phones is, frankly, the least of it. Once we’ve set up the CCTV in Stella McCartney’s house — obviously the top priority — the next port of call should be Buckingham Palace. These are clever people, accustomed to winning, with a lot of soldiers, horses and fortified housing. We should be on top of these guys 24/7.