Acceptance and grieving

It's not often I feel compelled to write about things of a deeply personal nature unless such things are wrapped up in the threads of a song, and even then I tend to prefer subject matter to be 'cloaked in the cryptic'. The last 48 hours however have led me to the conclusion that writing about what's going through my mind might well help alleviate some of the grief I am experiencing. As a human being I am flawed in many ways. I have a propensity towards excess, be it through the medium of imbibing, spending or well, anything really. I exhibit behaviour of a compulsive obsessive nature. I hoard and collect things in a bid to feel a sense of completeness that I can never hope to achieve. I am impatient and impulsive. I have an incredibly short fuse and an irrational need to redress the balance when I feel I have been wronged. Just to completely juxtapose that last trait, I am utterly terrified of confrontation, dealing with the fear of what happens if ever I say no to someone or let them down and I would sooner run a mile than have to be anywhere in the vicinity of shouting. Having said that, when enough of my own buttons are pushed I can shout, rant and rage with the best of them. In short, despite taking a 50mg daily dose of Sertraline, I am far from being a calm human being. It is however my utter inability to deal with loss of any sort that has probably crippled me the most throughout my life. My utter denial of the inevitable and the need to 'bury my head in the sand' has stood me in absolutely zero stead for anything resembling a normal balanced life. This last flaw has been ingrained in me since day dot. I am an adopted child and have always known that to be the case. My parents adopted me on account of the fact that they got married late and were too old to have kids of their own. Mum was 51 at the time and dad was 7 years her junior. They met in Ghana in west Africa in the late 1950s where mum was a teacher of English and art and dad was a civil engineer who was stationed there working on the building of a hydroelectric dam. You may know it; it's called the Volta dam. Mum was a highly intelligent, well read, kind, generous and peaceful lady who was the best mum anyone could have ever wished for. She actively encouraged me in everyone single one of my hair brained creative schemes and didn't bat an eyelid when I told her I wanted to be a musician and music producer for a living. Dad was considerably more complicated. He started out as an officer in the RAF aged 18 right at the end of the war. He then went on to become..well loads of different things. At the height of his powers in the mid-70s he was in the highest branches of the tree at Trafalgar House under Nigel Brokes, was director of 67 companies and was chairman of the Cunard shipping line. One might describe him as a driven over achiever. Sadly those achievements came at a cost in the form of a crippling predisposition to the demon alcohol. Growing up, it wasn't unusual for my father to put away two bottles of scotch away per day. Sadly this made for a turbulent childhood with a father who on the one hand I admired and the other hand feared. In some ways it was fortunate that he spent a considerable amount of time away from home on business or holed up in his flat in the Barbican in London where he could drink in peace away from the ever watchful eye of my mother. I don't feel any great need to go into specifics but rather sadly when he died when I was 12 years old it was a terrible sense of inevitability. Ironically at the time of his death it was during an extended period of sobriety whereupon he was simply reaching for the key to his study and suffered a colossal brain haemorrhage. The damage, it would seem, had long since been done. I remember getting called in to see the headmaster at school where he calmly explained that my dad was in hospital and I had to go home immediately. This was the third such time that I had been taken out of school due to my father being in intensive care although the first two times it was of his  own volition in what my cousin later informed me were two botched suicide attempts. This time however, it was different. The truth was that he wasn't in hospital at all, he was already dead, but you don't tell a 12 year old that do you if you're a headmaster? You leave it up to the boy's mother. Anyways there I was sitting in the back of a 1200cc Lada Riva (let’s just pause for a second, you read that correctly, I was in a LADA. My parents were devoutly opposite/apposite, my mum strongly socialist and frugal and my dad staunchly tory and ostentatious) and my mum finally gathered the required hubris to communicate. The long, tall and short of it was that I had been led an understandable merry dance and that my father had in fact died some three days previous but being middle classed and thus emotionally stunted, not one single member of the adopted social enclave quite knew how to address the fact, which I suppose in hindsight is fair enough. My sister was prescribed vast amounts of tranquilisers and I was left bewildered staring at a late teenage girl bordering on hysteria mourning the death of someone I barely knew.On the day of my father’s funeral I was numbingly contented to race around on a go cart, somehow emotionally incapacitated to the point of refusing to attend...THUS THE SOLIPSISM BEGAN. Fast forward many years of teenage angst and frittered learning and we find ourselves in the early 90s. I got married amidst a whirlwind romance in 1994 to a pretty Finnish girl and in the timeless ageless conduit of predictability we conceived a hellava cool kid who has now grown up to be my 18 year old son Sasha. My mum had (despite her advancing years) embraced this actuality and in the face of my mid 20s selfishness and general self-importance had become the greatest grandmother to Sasha that anyone could have hoped to imagine. The sad fact of the decade is that I STILL deeply replied upon my lovely mum for absolutely everything and I probably couldn’t have tied my shoelaces without her help. Fast forward to 1999 and my mum got stricken down with an illness that rendered her utterly tired and visually on the cusp of yellow. Rather ironically, said disease was cirrhosis of the liver which, given that she never drunk a drop of alcohol, still rings sarcastically in my ears. As usual, with such an affliction, positivity is the order of the day and denial is the best remedy. Sadly, I STILL couldn’t face up to the numbing inevitability of the conflict and one day at 7.30am I received a phone call from Croydon General and all due force and Godspeed was deployed upon the M23. I arrived at the place of rest completely ambivalent to what was about to address me and when finally a duty nurse asked me “have you been told what has happened?” at the edge of my mums hospital bed, I was sort of left to join the dots. There she lay, mouth half open, sister at bedside in tears, mother already dead. Needless to say there had been a 1000 opportunities to visit but all had been rescinded in favour of the best medicine, namely denial. Fast forward to 2015 and my greatest musical Ally and friend lay in a bed in Guys hospital, ardently battling the multiple cancers he had suddenly been diagnosed with in late 2014. Nick Southall was a HELL of a human being. I first met him many years ago when he was managing an uber cool indie band called Patchwork Grace. We spoke about the notion of me producing said band and taking them to planet mainstream and almost immediately bonded over a love of mid 80s rock and early 90s dry wit. After this initial meeting, Nick and I flourished as friends and indeed partners in crime and frequently knocked the Crobar in London into a state of almost sophistication Nick was unstoppable in his belief in people. He was forever playlisting me a stream of demos in a cloud of enthusiasm that I never failed to get caught up in. Working in the tenuous land of PR, he always managed to find positivity in every project he got involved in. Christ, I found myself rewriting the words to the 12 days of Christmas so that they heaped praise upon a simple kitchen towel that Nick was at the front end of marketing. Such was my belief in him that in 2012/13 I tasked him with the unenviable chore of managing the band in which I sometimes play, It Bites. It was his belief in me and his guidance throughout the post release chaos of Map Of The Past that saw us play listed on dads favourite FM, Radio 2, with Dermot O’Leary singing the praises of our attempt at a ‘single’ in the form of Cartoon Graveyard. Lastly, we both shared a love of vintage cars and both owned knackered old 80s Porsches. I sold my 924s to my friend Ben from the band Lower Than Atlantis with a plan in mind to buy a 944 with the proceeds. Nick decided he needed to sell his black 944 as he had recently climbed a notch further up the ladder of responsibility by adopting two young girls with his lovely wife. Being adopted myself, I had spent many hours extolling the virtues of what a great life I had experienced by being plucked from obscurity by my wonderful mum and what a great great job I thought Nick would make of being a dad. Needless to say, in this day and age, adopting a child is even harder to do than when it was back when I was put up for grabs and social services really really make prospective parents jump through hoops (rightly and wrongly) to achieve this end. Needless to say Nick and his wife jumped through every hoop and over every hurdle thrown at them and ultimately became the doting parents I always knew they would be. Sadly being the impulsive twat that I am, I agreed to buy his black 944 without give the matter NEARLY enough thought and subsequently reneged on this agreement when I realised that it was in fact a RED 944 that was my heart’s desire. Nick sighed and forgave me in an instant knowing full well how much like a kid in a sweet shop I can be. That was what Nick was like. I’m sure if the boot had been on the other foot, I would have been a sanctimonious arse for a week, but Nick didn’t have that negative affliction. He was understanding, forgiving and kind. I visited Nick in hospital prior to Christmas with a copy of my solo album and a copy of the Xmas Viz annual (both still kids at heart) and I advised him strongly to listen to the maudlin album first then cheer himself up with the puerile inanity of Viz. Things looked positive at the time, he was about to start a course of Chemo the following day and the prognosis and success rate looked favourable. Sadly after Christmas I started receiving text updates from a mutual friend that the cancer showed no sign of waning at all. The denial part of my mind started kicking in. Surely some miracle would occur? Surely this couldn’t happen to Nick, he was tough as old boots and would have been cast as the plucky comic relief in a war film. The plucky comic relief never dies does he?!?! Then I went on tour with Arena for seven weeks, head buried firmly in the sand. We kept texting and he remained positive as ever. I heard he was starting a new course of Chemo that surely kick the bloody curse into touch. That was a good sign surely? Back off tour I texted him straight away trying to arrange a hospital visit. He suggested a day and I agreed. Sadly some seemingly important and yet utterly utterly inconsequential hurdle got in the way and I postponed, denial still firmly lodged in my head, there was always more time. I texted back suggesting Thursday of last week (the 7^{th May}). Nick replied suggesting I come on the Saturday prior to that (the 2^{nd May}) or the Monday, but that the Tuesday and Wednesday were out, he also stated that this was the hardest thing he had ever had to do and he was really looking forward to hearing about my exploits. He didn’t even mention the Thursday. I replied saying that the Thursday was a possibility and was that okay? He never replied. I STILL couldn’t concede that my friend’s life was drawing to a close. I have subsequently reread those text messages a thousand times and have come to realise what was staring my in the face all along, namely that Nick KNEW he wasn’t going to last much past the weekend. Sadly, I’m either too stupid, naive or indeed utterly unprepared to accept the crippling reality of any emotional situation to read what is staring me in the face and shouting to be heard. My phone rang on the 6^th of May at exactly 7.40pm. Nick Southall’s name showed up on the handset. I answered with a cheery “hello mate, how are you doing?”. “Sorry John, this isn’t Nick, it’s his wife. I just wanted to let Nick’s immediate friends know that he passed away this evening at 6.20pm”. I just sat there in stunned silence for a moment. It was like I had been hit by a train. I couldn’t possibly quantify what I was hearing. Nick wasn’t SUPPOSED to die, this wasn’t how the script was SUPPOSED to read. All this time I hadn’t allowed myself to remotely entertain the possibility that any of this was happening, EXACTLY the same as I had done when my mother got ill. “I am sooo sooo sooo sorry” I replied after a brief pause . She had watched her husband’s life slip away one hour and twenty minutes previously and here she was putting on her bravest face and calmly calling Nick’s closest friends to pass on the terrible news. How she managed to do that I will never know. She had a lot more people to contact so we promptly ended the call and I sat there in silence. Then I got up from where I was sat and started walking as fast as I could possibly go trying desperately to hold back the tears because that’s what I was eternally conditioned to do growing up. Then I got angry, irrationally so, and started shouting at myself and calling myself every name under the sun. I tried calling our mutual friend Samantha but her phone was off as she was in a state of shock and didn’t want to speak to anyone as I later found out. I must have walked the entire length of the Oxford road in Reading swearing and muttering to myself like some complete lunatic before finally collapsing on a bench and crying my eyes out. Enough is sometimes enough. I would just like you to know that the very first thing I saw when reaching the Oxford road was a black Porsche 944 with red trim bucket seats, exactly the same car that Nick had cherished and almost lost to yours truly last year. I am not superstitious in any way, but if ever there was a sign of some sort, this was it.

In conclusion, I would just like to say that I hope I have finally learned that sometimes it IS too late to say the things you need to say and if you knowingly have a chance to face up to the fear of loss of a loved one then PLEASE don’t be like me and spend your life in denial and regret and grab that chance. Nick, I’m sorry mate and I miss you terribly and I love you to bits. Until we meet again, Rest In Peace.