Made it Ma, top of the world! The James Cagney
character then blew himself up at the top of a water tower to exit with style
in an apocalyptic explosion. My own idea of making it, Ma, is rather less
spectacular, but equally far-fetched: to receive a phone call from the BBC,
requesting my presence on Desert Island Discs.
Being a compulsive list-maker, I’ve never had any trouble
coming up with Top 10 pieces of music, books, films, paintings, finest football
midfield players or whatever. Tell me about your fifth selection then, Mr.
Sampson. Well, Roy, it’s a classic example of a memorably melodic three-minute
pop song: ‘I Saw The Light’ by Todd Rundgren. (I only quote this
particular choice because I was prompted last week by The Guardian home page to
watch a video on You Tube of a slightly corpulent Todd performing a new version
of his song with a slightly corpulent Daryl Hall and other friends at his
Hawaii home.)
And so I wouldn’t have any difficulty in pinpointing my
Desert Island Day, the best day of my life. As a young kid, it might have been
the day at the end of Primary 7 when I finally beat Albert Jordan to the
coveted First Boy prize. That kind of thing was important to me in those days.
I was quite competitive then.
Albert Jordan was the ground-keeper’s only child. He
lived in a house that looked like it was made of marzipan, about 25 yards from
the school itself. Our first house in Belfast backed onto the playing fields.
We kids dug a hole underneath the railings, so we could slip underneath and
play in the grounds. During the summer holidays, I would slip through the hole
– which his father would keep filling up with stones – to play tennis or
two-man cricket with Albert. My friend was a talented southpaw and I could
never beat him at tennis or bowl him out at cricket.
So it was wonderful to get that First Boy prize after
several years of trying. Somewhere among my memorabilia is a fading
black-and-white photograph from the Belfast Telegraph of me, grinning
like a loon, sandwiched between Anne Kissock and Jane Rutherford, the object of
my young heart’s desire. We were all supposedly pouring over my prize: a
history book written by Winston Churchill. My glory, though, was tempered by
the fact that the journalist (as usual) got a salient detail wrong. The paper
printed that we were pupils from P5. I’m not 9; I’m 11, for God’s sake!
Still, it was a good day. But not the best. I know which
day I should choose. It was the day our daughter was safely
delivered into this world. I’d long muttered darkly that if it were a boy, I’d
leave him as the Spartans used to do on some bare, craggy mountainside – to see
whether he had what it took to survive to manhood. So I was greatly affected by
the sight of what the consultant referred to as a healthy wee gurrell.
In truth, though, I was too agitated fully to revel in
the moment. It wasn’t so much the matter of child’s sex, as the fact that she
was delivered by caesarean section and I was perturbed at my wife’s bedside by
all the antibiotics they were drip-feeding into her (the mother’s) system. At
that point in both our lives, we were a little obsessed by the health of our
immune systems, and so I was concerned that the antibiotics would undo all the
results of following the Fit For Life diet, a book first introduced to
me by James Moody, the great American tenor saxophonist, at a concert on the
Brighton seafront, a day or two after the hurricane of 1987.
So not that particular blessed day. No, pop-pickers, number-one-it’s-Top-of-the-Pops
occurred 23 years ago today, the 5th May. It was the day, not unlike
today in fact – a warm early summer’s day that unravelled under a limpid
un-Sheffield-like blue sky – when I married my wife in Bakewell Registry
Office, Derbyshire.
The weeks before had been pretty stressful, organising
the catering, the party (in the church hall at Tideswell, a delightful village
in the Peak District) and accommodation for family and friends. We’d almost
agreed to call the whole thing off. In the time-honoured fashion, we separated
the evening before the event. While I was enjoying in our terraced house the
company of my best man and his wife, who had flown over from New York, my
estranged wife was holding court in her mother’s temporary lodgings in
Tideswell – and resisting, in fact, her mother’s last-minute attempts to warn
her daughter off tying the knot to a man with few prospects and suspect moral
character. Her father, in his irascible wisdom, had stayed at home as if to
underline the words of a Gerry Rafferty song: Her father didn’t like me,
anyway.
We met up the next morning down by the river in Bakewell,
surrounded by a gaggle of family, friends and local ducks. My peerless bride
arrived in her open-top bottle-green Beetle, which she and her best woman,
Vicky, had cleaned and festooned that morning. It was the first time that I’d
seen the mustard coloured trouser suit of which her mother so strongly
disapproved. Vicky had hennaed her hair a dramatic shade of red that bled onto
her outfit. Together, the pair of them set the tone for a wedding that the
registrar would describe as very, em… modern.
Surrounded by friends and family and relieved of the
responsibilities of organisation, our mutual joy was so unconfined that the
registrar had to demand a little decorum and attention half way through the
service. After the handful of unofficial photographers had snapped us in groups
great and small among the roses of the public gardens by the roundabout, we
de-camped to the church hall in Tideswell, which the vicar had had painted specially
for us. Presumably this cost rather more than the £15 we had paid him to hire
the place for two days.
We ate a sumptuous meal prepared by the two charming male
friends of my boss at the time, who looked a little like a diminutive version
of Freddy Mercury. My mother and mother-in-law complained conspiratorially
about the background music I’d prepared for the occasion and my best man let
slip a four-letter word within earshot of my white-haired grandfather at the
conclusion of the speech he reckoned he’d screwed up. In the absence of her
irascible father, the bride was given away by her avuncular friend, Graham,
whose speech was as funny as his appearance at a party a year or so later as a
worryingly convincing Dusty Springfield.
The parents and everyone else over a ‘certain age’
disappeared for the party that evening in the same village hall and we danced
until the wee small hours. Anyone still in the area met up late the following
morning for an Indian lunch at the restaurant across the street where we lived.
Debs and I then took off for our honeymoon in the house in the Corrèze we’d
bought the year before, to be followed by my brother and his girlfriend. Being
of a more practical nature than I, my kid brother – a plumber then and now in
Guildford – was going to look at our 17th century folly and diagnose
whether anything could be done with it.
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