Sex & Bowls & Rock and Roll: How I Swapped My Rock Dreams for Village Greens

Why am I here?

Boff boff boff boff.

Why am I here? Here in Norfolk, pressed rigidly down into a dentist’s chair, being hit in the face with a hammer.

Lots of reasons.

The little picture reason is that I have a toothache; an abominably bad toothache that crept up on the roots of my incisors; a toothache that has lingered like a man in my area who has come round to give me a free consultation and a no-obligation quote.

The medium picture was the Harringay Station Herd, and the fact that my life seemed to consist of: wake up, fight my way to work, work, come home, listen to man weeing.

But the big picture was all to do with Strategic HR Initiatives.

Strategic HR Initiatives. The foundation stones of modern business. The management engines that are so vitally important to ensure that the companies of UK plc can innovate, thrive and come out clear winners in the global war for talent. There is nothing as pathetic as a moribund stuck-in-the-past company, doomed to hostile takeover, bankruptcy or a slow slide into sales oblivion because of the absence of great – or the implementation of poorly thought-out – Strategic HR Initiatives. That is why we must have them. And just as these initiatives invariably transform the fortunes of the smallest partnership to the most major conglomerate, so they have profound effects on individual employees.

This is what happened to me. Admittedly not quite in the way that was intended, but there you go.

I guess you would say that I had been quite successful in business alongside the musical accomplishments. Admittedly I hadn’t actually started any businesses, or employed any people myself, nor had I spotted an idea that had become really really big and had led to my share capital becoming millions of pounds overnight. However, I had managed to get paid every month without killing anybody or provoking employment tribunals or bringing the company to its knees by confusing ‘Press F1 for Help’ with ‘Press F8 to Delete Exchange Server’ on the IT system.

I just wasn’t entirely happy.

Modern, bland, large, rectangular. I was in a meeting room dominated by an impressive glass boardroom table – an artefact that had been hand-picked by somebody who knew the vital importance in business of impressive glass boardroom tables. I loitered at the back, nervously crushing and reforming my plastic tea beaker, thinking that perhaps I should be taking a more visible position with the other management types.

Dusty windows watched out across the City of London towards the bowling green at Finsbury Square – this was no glamour view, however, but the rooftops of low-rise rented office accommodation: fire escapes and heat extraction systems. Occasionally during a meeting I would identify the pipework of a particularly interesting heat extraction system and follow it around as far as my eye would go. It was a bit like examining the fantastic exhausts of a spaceship in the year 2508. The air shimmered above it, like on Venus.

Inside, we had no heat extraction system. The space was close and humid; there were too many people present. The lift was broken again – a succession of bodies staggered in, loosening ties with the sweat of a six-floor climb.

A succession of board-level speakers had lined up to intone to the room. This happened every week, as a way of motivating people for the days ahead. Words and phrases lumbered through the thick air towards and past me; some clung exhaustedly to the wall behind, some expired and slumped in defeat to the nylon carpet. It was, to all intents and purposes, a perfectly normal Monday morning.

And then, out of the blue, I had started to catch some of these words. And the interminable speaker of the moment drawling in a monotone as turgid as the very turge itself:

‘La la la la la la la know that we are all genuinely excited about this new Strategic HR Initiative that we’ve been working on.’

I gaped at the man. The words churned round my head as I tried to grip hold of them. And as the phrase settled down inside me I looked around the room and, to my horror, saw a sea of nods of interest and concentration and enthusiasm and thoughtful assent. Left, right, left again. Nods – genuine nods. And the fear gripped me, with the icy fingers of a creeping Gantt chart. These people were not pretending; this was no sham for personal corporate advancement, no calculated sucking-up to the powers-that-be.

I was in a room with people who were genuinely excited about a new Strategic HR Initiative that was being worked upon.

It was alarming. My eyes darted round the room looking for exits. I was too far away from the door. They would catch me and wrestle me to the ground and beat me and inject me with the Strategic HR Initiative serum that the others had been given. Catch me! Catch me and inject me! Tape an institutional hub across my eyes and force delivery outcomes into my anus. Brandishing photographs of Harringay Station and massive tubes of Toilet Duck.

That’s why I’m here.

Randy moves on a track.

If that’s why, what’s how?

How did this major change happen? What coup did I pull off, what stroke of daring, what gamble did I take with my life, risking it all on the throw of one die for the sake of a new horizon? Like a frontiersman of the early days of the American nation, what was in my mind as I grimly stowed a rifle and provisions in the wagon, pulled my woman close to me and explained that – for all the dangers, the unknowns, the immense hardships – sometimes a man has to strike out and face these, in order to carve a new life from the dust and rock?

‘I’ll expect dinner when I get in every night,’ said the LTLP. ‘A proper one.’

Sexual equality has come a long way in a very short space of time. For thousands of years there were very clearly defined roles for the genders: the men would do the fighting and hunting and making the decisions etc., whereas the women would do the stuff at home and have babies. Then, from the sixties onwards, society entered a period of hypocrisy. This was when women were ostensibly given the same opportunities as men, but thwarted at every turn with casual sexism. Meanwhile, blokes still would not get involved with domestic chores.

It is impossible to say why the final sea-change occurred: perhaps it was the sudden nineties surge in the average male’s confidence about their sexuality, perhaps it was the advent of The Vicar of Dibley on BBC1. But we are happily out of the sexist Neanderthal period, and it is not unusual at all now for men to do women’s jobs like housework or cooking. Twenty years before, options simply wouldn’t have been available to me, and I would have been forced to remain a stressed, insomniac, on-a-downward-spiral putting-a-brave-face-on male provider. But with a flash of fortune, I was the beneficiary of a second sexual revolution.

I became a househusband, and I’m not ashamed.

(‘Househusband’ is not quite the right word, as it is a bit effeminate. But it will do as a short-term description.)

So that was it. I shed the trappings of Neanderthalism and stepped bravely into my own corner of twenty-first-century post-Dibley Britain. The LTLP took her massive and important new job in the east of England, and I took my huge leap of faith. I packed up, I handed in my resignation. We said goodbye to friends, goodbye to Harringay Station, goodbye to meeting rooms and motivational addresses, goodbye to Adam in the flat upstairs with his enormous toilet.

And, gobsmackingly, I said goodbye to the band.

Taking my last few big gulps of choking, Strategic-HR-Initiative-polluted London air, I had felt joyful for the first time in a decade. A stressed businessman, with all the trappings of success but with no time or energy to make the most of them, I was downshifting to the countryside to enjoy a better quality of life. Truly, it was a unique step that I was about to take – a pioneering move that I couldn’t believe that anybody else had ever thought of, ever.

‘You won’t know it…I’ll be right behind you…don’t try and run away…’ There should be an emergency Randy Newman button on MP3 players for just this situation. You would press it and it would immediately leap to something cheerful by S Club Seven or the Proclaimers. ‘Little girl…wherever you go…’

The dentist now has my tooth by the pliers, gripping the crown and pulling and wiggling hard. It is like a surreal silent movie. I half expect him to put a boot up against my chest to aid leverage, or to use the pliers to pull my head back and forth exaggeratedly, bashing it alternately against the mouthwash basin and the headrest. I would laugh, except he is pulling my tooth out with pliers having hit it repeatedly with a hammer.

A few more yanks and my old artificial tooth thing is no more; I have a huge gap in my mouth that is dripping pus and blood along with an unidentified fragment of metal that appears to have been left in there by a previous dentist. We take a two-minute break before he starts to clean out the abscess – but it could be two hours for all I know, such is my state of stunned distress. Randy croons dolefully in my ears.

When I was a small child, I fell off my bike quite spectacularly, via the simple mistake of trying to emulate not just US daredevil Evel Knievel and his stunt bike, but the plastic US daredevil Evel Knievel that you could wind up and send soaring over a dozen Matchbox lorries, as featured on Channel 4’s I Love the 50 Top Toys That You Should Not Try to Emulate. I required an immense amount of dental surgery as a result, but I cannot remember those particular times being as bad as this. I suspect my teeth have become more sensitive as I’ve got older. The session finished, I take my jacket with shaking hands and stumble from the surgery in a dull state of shock.

The road outside is noisy; market town traffic passing each way, a brewery lorry unloading. But I hear nothing. I just walk, my eyes fixed on some random point in the far distance, my mind blanker than it has ever been. I take out my mobile phone to ring the LTLP, but a passer-by looks at me very oddly and as I do not feel like talking anyway, I shove it back into my trouser pocket.

I feel utterly alone. With shock I realise that I am already sinking into negative thoughts so early in my brave battle against tooth abscess. I should do something positive. If I write to the Observer demonstrating that I can face tooth abscess with wit, good-humour and poignant humanity then they will probably give me a column in their magazine, ‘Tooth Abscess and Me’. Being the person who brings the ‘TA’ word out of the darkness of taboo and into an environment where people are not afraid to talk might be my crowning achievement in life.

‘Crowning’!

Even in my lowest hour, I can still laugh at my own very funny jokes. I rejoice in the smile that spreads across my war-torn face as I traverse the mini-roundabouts and head towards the centre of town and the pharmacy.

THREE (#ulink_9d49e794-e917-5347-80ef-e5c74be7fb54)

Return of the grievous bowls players

Past the shop, past the village pub and south, where the cottages peter out and there dwell just deer, pigs and pheasants. Across the Peddars Way, the ancient thoroughfare that brought the Romans from Suffolk to their holiday villas on the north Norfolk coast; down through the fields and woodlands of the Royal estate to the main road. Popular Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans spurs us on, playing ‘Can You Feel It’ by the Jackson 5. If there was ever a record to pump you up for a bowls match then it is ‘Can You Feel It’ by the Jackson 5.

Game one. Game on.

Unusually, we have a passenger. Karen has joined us this year, from another club. It is her very first game for us, and she will probably be intimidated and nervous. Big Andy and I put her at her ease in between funking along to the music.

‘Canyoufeeeeelit!’ I sing, indicating right.

‘It’s quite a nice green tonight, although you wouldn’t expect it right in the middle of town,’ says Big Andy.

‘And it’s directly behind the pub,’ I add. ‘Although to be frank it was a bit lively in there when we went last year. ‘Bahbahbahhhh-bahhbahbahcanyoufeeeeelit.’

‘Wasn’t there a fight or something?’ he asks.

‘I don’t think it was exactly a fight,’ I recall. ‘I think it was just a bit lively. There was lots of shouting and stuff. Certainly I remember the barmaid running in and hiding behind the door. But then it was almost…six o’clock on a Friday night.’ I slow down as we approach a roundabout. ‘Baahbahbahhhbahhhbahhhbahhh-canyoufeeeelit!’ I add.