LIFE — well, it’s all a bit touch and go really…Part 2
In life you have concerns; as a husband, as a parent, as someone running a business, as a human being just trying to lead a decent life, but let me tell you that nothing, absolutely nothing comes close to the emotion of contemplating the very real chance of you own death. When it’s all over and you’ve made it, and as you begin to recover, nothing is the same again, nothing has the intensity of that moment of absolute clarity, the pointed realisation of how tenuous life is, and it changes something in your brain, like making changes to a computer programme so that next time you use it it’s all different, all of those things you once were concerned about no longer matter. You now know what is truly serious, what really is important, and it changes your life. It really does.
After the Brighton period I went back to college and spent a few years passing some exams which was good in a lot of ways, but there was very little money and although I always worked at some job or the other — I had one regular job in a bakery overnight Friday making bread for sale in the shop on Saturday — this was a period of serious austerity. The college bar, the local pub and a student party on the day a new Beatles record came out, was about it.
And then I thought I might have a go at teaching and I got a job in a local Secondary school as a temporary teacher for a year — you could do that then, unqualified — and it was one of the best things I did as it taught me I really didn’t want to be a teacher. Four years at teacher training college and then the ghastly realisation on the first day in the job that you really didn’t want to do it. Nah.
As I was being wheeled away from the reception area, I looked back at my wife in tears and tried to remain calm, but inside I can honestly say I’ve never felt worse. I had no idea what was going to happen to me; I worked out that they were not going to cut me open as I had not been given an anaesthetic, but what lay ahead was a mystery. I was wheeled down some corridors and into a lift, then more corridors and soon I was in an operating theatre but with a difference, somehow it seemed almost like a large studio of some sort. People were chatting, someone offered me more morphine for the pain, which I declined, someone quite close was screaming horribly. This wasn’t good.
A cheery, German-accented voice told me that they were going to give me two local anaesthetic jabs in my inner wrist and he recommended that I go with the morphine, which I did, and the world suddenly went all warm and fuzzy and I hated it. After a while the effects of the morphine started to wear off and I said nothing, I didn’t want any more, I wanted to stay clear and experience what was going on.
Obviously being in an operating theatre waiting for some sort of procedure was not ideal, but I felt somehow better knowing that something was going to be done, and quickly..
I did a few disparate jobs in the city and ended up on an executive training scheme with a firm of stockbrokers that took me all round the firm to all the different departments while they assessed me and I assessed them. The boring office jobs in accounts and the like were plainly not for me but when I found myself on the actual Stock Exchange floor I realised I had found home. Racing round the market, checking prices, and slipping across Throgmorton Street to Slater’s Bar for a drink every half hour or so seemed like the ideal job. At the back of the market, out of sight of the visitor’s viewing gallery, pin-striped and stiff-collared brokers and jobbers played cricket with a ball made from a screwed up and sellotaped Financial Times and one of the jobber’s dealing books became a bat. Australian mining shares were all the go, and we bought and sold and sometimes even made a profit.
For some odd reason the firm saw something in me and offered me a 3 year deal where I went to London University while still working for them, which was brilliant; exam qualifications plus being paid at the same time, and I ended up with full qualifications in economics and investment and stuff which was higher qualifications than any of the 20 partners of the firm. I was now also qualified for membership of the Stock Exchange which was necessary to become a partner of my firm and now in my late 20’s I had a career all mapped out for me. Mmm.
A nurse shaved my groin, just in case they couldn’t use my wrist she said, but that wasn’t needed as they explained to me what they were doing. They went in through the artery in my right wrist, through the veins and up my arm and across my chest until they got to my heart where they would have a look round to see what was going on. It seemed to be all very matter of fact to them and it felt like they were about to change the brakes on my car, but this was incredibly serious, I knew. Heart surgery. Fuck.
They injected a dye into my heart and watched it flow until it stopped and there was the blockage. They inserted a balloon to blow up the blocked area and then 2 stents which are small tubes that hold the artery open and allow the blood to flow. This angioplasty is quite frankly, amazing.
Two hours later I was in a recovery room where the surgeon was telling my wife and me that the heart attack I had just had they called a ‘widow maker’ as the chances of survival unless I got to a specialist heart hospital immediately, as I had done, were 1%. I had a 70 % blockage in my main artery and I was incredibly lucky. Makes you cringe doesn’t it, and I’m welling up as I write this with the unbelievable emotion of it.
On a decent salary now I bought my first house at the age of 26, a small Victorian cottage which needed lots of work but I had the money and soon it was in liveable condition and I loved it. All my neighbours were young, and we were in and out of each other’s houses, glasses in our hands, and late nights and boozing became the norm. I still drank a lot of beer but now wine became a regular drink, white or red, both were fine with me.
On a mission to furnish the house in style I started going to the local antique auctions to buy Victorian fixtures and fittings, and soon I got to know a group of local antique dealers who seemed to live magical, unstructured and dissolute lives and it was so attractive. And it all took part mostly in the pub, which I was of course admirably well qualified for. I started buying boxes of odds and small cheap items and I took a stall at Camden Passage on a Saturday where I was shocked to learn that people actually wanted to buy this stuff, and some even asked me to find them some more for next week. A local dealer had been offered a shop in the Passage which was a bit too large for him and he offered me a half-share which I took and it was then that I began to see my future changing dramatically.
Saturday was always the best day. Arrive at the shop early, take as much money as possible and then into Fredericks for a boozy lunch, which meant the best part of the afternoon, and back to the shop to close up and then down to Camden Lock to some bar and then Dingwalls for an evening of drinking and loud music. Beer and wine were my regular drinks, but after a particularly heavy night, usually a Saturday, it wasn’t uncommon on the Sunday morning to go for vodka and tonic with extra ice and lemon, to cut through the grime of yesterday excesses.
I was up early most days to go to some antique market or the other, and then in my pin stripe suit and stiff white collar I would trudge into work late, and a bit uninterested. By this time I was coming up thirty with a proper serious job. I was a fund manager looking after charities, pension funds and high-value private clients. I had half a secretary and an assistant.
Often I found myself sitting in a bank main-board meeting to discuss investments and all I could think about was a grubby antique market, the gypsy-like characters I was dealing with and the excitement and the fun, and the incredibly different way of looking at life; no plans, no organisation and no thought for the future, and it was addictive and wonderful.
And now I was in the recovery area hooked up to a bleeping monitor, with octopus wires attached to me with an oxygen feed into my nose and regular hourly blood pressure checks. A constant stream of nurses and others checking me and inserting and changing cannulas, which enable them to put stuff in or take blood out at will rather than stabbing a separate hole each time, which makes sense. Someone did a blood test and then someone else came along and informed me that I now had pneumonia. Fuck, again.
This wasn’t good news and I now realised that the strange strangling noise I’d been hearing all morning was actually me wheezing. They added a huge vial of yellow liquid to my cannula and told me it was a powerful anti-biotic and I watched it slowly disappear into my body.
The next day someone else came in with an ultrasound and checked the strength of my heart. This is done by rubbing greasy stuff all over your chest and then running a sort of electronic reading machine over you that tells them what is going on inside. Your heart never functions at 100% capacity; in fact the average is around 55%. I later learned that the result of the ultrasound showed that my heart was functioning at 30%, so not really that good. Although 30% of 55% is better than 30% of 100%, or so I was told.
