Chapter 17: Ballroom Blitz

It was time for me to address the congregation. I was at the head of the procession, on the back of my horse, Toby, and I was nervous. I was thinking, 'Please don't let me fall off,' because I knew that would be the single worst thing I could do for counter-culture. If I fell off the horse and it all went tits up, it would not only be on telly, I would be on the front page of every tabloid. Fortunately for me, I am sure Toby knew this too. No matter how disloyal the human contingent at Ingols Hall had proven, he did not let me down.

'Thanks for having me,' I said. 'It's been an absolute, educational experience. I can't deny I have felt like a Pagan in a Roman governor's house. I have learnt so much and the one thing I have learnt is that people like us can talk, which, up to this point, I was pretty convinced it wasn't possible. But I think it says something about the human condition that we are at least prepared to speak, but that not withstanding, I have a two-year-old, I'm not very pleased about the way a lot of two-year-olds are being treated around the world, especially in war zones and all I'll say is that I really hope the troops are brought home as quickly as possible.'

Then, at that moment, the horse decided that was when it would leave. It was the perfect point. I patted the horse, very leisurely, did the exact circular turn I was supposed to do, and we walked out of the arena. Voluntarily. I could not have planned it. The horse was the equivalent of a seventy year old, so he may have just thought, 'I'm thirsty'. All of that is on camera and it could not have looked better. I was in shock. Suddenly I was moving. It was as though the horse knew that that was it. It also knew I was in a panic.

Now as a result of what I had said, however, Redman was not happy. He was sitting at the table I found out later that I was supposed to be sitting at, in the chair I was supposed to be sitting in. His last attempt to defend the British Establishment from me was to make sure I was not at the table where the British army officer overseeing the occupation of Basra was sitting. He was next to Redman, who would have been sitting next to me and, yes, there would have been bloodshed. Rightly or wrongly, he avoided that happening and took the head table. I was tucked away somewhere next to the supermodel in order to try and pacify me. I apologise if she ever hears this but she was not my cup of tea. I find supermodels a bit wispy. They are not rugged and hard enough for me.

Redman had the bloke from Basra. The important thing is Redman had the table, and that meant he had the microphone. Because, obviously, every year Gerard Braughn has the head seat with the microphone. Now, if I had been asked to MC that, now that would have been nearly as good as getting our band on. Rightly or wrongly, he did do the appropriate thing. He took the reins as you would do, if you will excuse the pun, and then he used his power to ridicule us, because I mentioned the Iraq war. I thought, "you bastard. Who wants to see another person killed? Really? You do?"

This bloke from Basra was flown over from Iraq especially for this party. At one point, because he was pissed, Redman tried to introduce me to him and I turned my back in disgust and walked off. He was grinning. He thought I would have to be pleasant. Then I had to talk to the bouncers about the possibility of offering the officer out, taking him into the car park and giving him a battering, manus et fucking manus. They were into it. Oh yes! The boxer who was there, the top-level, black boxer, he was into it. He thought it would be a scream. I did not do it though, and I am glad I did not. I did wonder if 'Mr British goddam Empire' would go for it, which I doubted, and then I thought I would have been forced to attack him, in a horrible, South London manner, and just drag him outside by the lapels. After all, within my frame of reference this man was a child killer.

I do not believe he had ever had a proper fight in his life, though. A top ranking officer in the British army would probably never have had a real punch-up. They may have played at it, in training, but they have never even fought their own battles. They have never gone onto the battlefield with a gun. It would have been like Spartacus all over again. I would have been challenging Caesar here, because Caesar gets his gang to do his fighting and in any playground that is an appalling thing to see. I have seen kids do it. "My five boys are going to beat you up." The kid who 'owns' the boys never risks a finger. I do not like fighting. I think it is abhorrent and even though I can count on the fingers of two hands the amount of it that I have been involved in, that is still far more than enough for one bloke in one lifetime. I am just thankful I have never had to fight in a war, but if you believe in the dynamics of violence, if you believe that through violence human beings can reach a state of excellence, if you believe in dominating other cultures and showing how big you are, then let's have a fight. Because when you receive it, on the other end, in the way you will receive it from me, and it could include my teeth, then you are going to know what you have been putting other people through. I would bite the man's ear off. There can be no rules in a fight like that. I am not making rules with a man who breaks his own rules as a Caesar, or a Tsar or a Kaiser does. The evil side always fight amongst themselves when their ship is going down. When our ship is going down, we all become super-efficient at helping one another.

I kept looking for the cameras, but there seemed to be more of them than I expected, suddenly. One of the other businessmen told me some BBC film crew members were also there. These charity events are always filmed with regularity as a self-indulgence. They go to all of the parties. There were about five major 'upper class' ones in Yorkshire that weekend. These are rarely shown on telly. It is a pure self-indulgence funded by the British tax payer. The BBC film crew did not even want to be there.

If all this surveillance was supposed to make me feel safer, that illusion was soon snatched away. Two of the middle aged ladies there came up to me.

‘We're from the BBC. You do know you're in some level of danger here?’ she said.

‘What’s fucking new?’ I said.

'You know that one of the millionaires over there has been threatening to hit your director for sending up Gerard?'

'Well,' I said, 'bring it on! We know exactly what we're doing.'

'You're going to have to get the tapes of this outside of this environment a.s.a.p., as soon as you've finished here, ’ she said. ‘Because the more pissed they get the more dangerous it's going to be.’

She looked really worried.

'That'll be all right,' I said. Then one of Gerard Braughn's mates came lurching over to me. I say, 'mates', except they are not really mates of his. They are his competitors. He came swerving up to me. He was a dwarfish man, wide-shouldered and quite overweight. He was about my age too. He came veering towards me.

'It's all shit, isn't it?' he said to me.

'What?'

'What Gerard's done, it's all shit,' he said. 'It's just fakery. You know he's got a lot of statues in just for the film crew and a lot of furniture in?'

I can't believe a word you're saying, I thought, but why are you saying this about a so-called friend who is the host of the party you are at? Then I understood. It was because he hates him, really.

'We've tried to do some cultural stuff,' I said.

'What's that then?' he asked.

'I got my mate to do a ten foot high painting of Pegasus, the winged horse, as a present for us being allowed to stay here and to show that we're not cultureless.’

‘That's not art, is it?’ he said. ‘That's just graffiti, isn't it, old chap?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you can come and judge.’

This was all being filmed.

'We can do an art exposé. Is it art or isn't it?

He looked at me a bit concerned.

'Follow me,' I said. 'And your mates,' I added, because he had his usual heavies with him. 'Follow me outside and we'll have a look at the picture under a light and you can tell me if you think it's art.'

He was reticent. I think he thought we were taking him round the back for a kicking, but he had his blokes with him and there was just me. What threat could I be? So, he followed me round and we looked at the picture which was hanging on the external wall near the entrance to the arena.

'Well?' I asked.

He looked at it and he could not deny it.

'Yes,' he said. 'That's art.'

'There you go then,' I said. Off we went, back indoors.

'Aren't we discussing it?' he asked.

'No,' I said, 'I just needed your opinion on whether it was art.'

We went back inside and he looked round at me.

'You know,' he said, 'that five gangsters have been hired to follow you about? And if you do anything that they don't like, it could get a bit naughty.'

'You're joking,' I said.

'Oh no,' he said. 'Gerard's aware of your politics now. He's been in your bloody flat for a week and he's shitting it. He's been in constant collaboration with his estate, even though he wasn't allowed to be under the media rules.'

'We know all about that,' I said. 'That's already been divulged.'

'Well,' he said. 'Look behind you.'

I looked around and there were these five geezers in suits all standing there, looking at me. I just laughed.

'What possible threat do you think I'd be to them?' I asked him.

'I don't see that you'd be any threat at all, really.'

'This is appalling,' I said. 'I'm amazed at your attitude. He's supposed to be your mate.'

He just looked at me as if to say, "what the hell are you talking about?" Well, of course, he was also pissed.

'Please don't dig yourself more of a hole, mate. You are being filmed here!' I thought to myself.

I do not know whether he got to sign a release form. Everybody at the party in Wales had to sign one as soon as they turned up there, because that meant that they were allowing Armada TV to film them. I suppose it must be taken as read that guests at parties like this were going to be filmed by media corporations. There were certainly enough paparazzi about.

Of course, Redman got pissed and he lost control. I think he regretted this in the long term, but at the time he firmly believed in what he was saying. He took the microphone.

'As you might all be aware, there has been a life-swap show being filmed and the finale at our end is this ball and Gerard has been very amusing. We have all found it very amusing that he has done this without any of us knowing. He was under the impression that he was going to be swapped with a dustman from the East End and that it was in fact a wife swap, but then they told him it was a life swap.'

Everybody laughed, at his expense, which, I thought, was another example of their lack of camaraderie.

'But as we all know,' he went on, 'Gerard has probably passed it off with the usual good humour we all admire in him. He has swapped Ingols Hall for Piss All.'

I did not want to hit him when I was shouting at him later, but at that point, yes, I wanted to hit him. My wife probably wanted to do far worse than that to him and I was holding on to her to stop her.

'At this moment,' he said, 'he's probably sitting in a tent with a load of crack addicts on a travellers' site, indulging themselves in drug use.'

He did not mention this was to raise money to save a school, and at the same time we had got our artist, Skip, to come in a paint a beautiful picture. Because our band had not been allowed to play, in return they had told us that we could auction something off at the end of the evening and that would be this artist, who would then become an artist in residence at anybody's house who wanted him, for a week. I thought it was a very romantic, Renaissance idea. They warmed to it. The whole organisation knew. Redman was intrigued by this. All of the guests knew because it was on the menu that this artist was going to be auctioned off in order to raise money for a primary school near us in Wales that was threatened with closure. All the other lots were to raise money for The Countryside Alliance. As arranged, whoever bid for and successfully won Skip would then be allowed to have him for a week as an artist in residence. He would then paint anything they wanted.

Redman did not mention that the gig at the other end was a charitable event. He did not give the impression that it was in any way cultured and that we had booked “The Cranks”.... teenage post-Punk grunge rockers whose middle-aged bass playing originator has been “New Age” since before the term entered popular use. They witnessed a performance by “The Hoochie Coochie Band”.... middle-aged blues rockers shooting straight from John Lee Hooker's hip. They witnessed a performance by Nik Turner's “Allstars”.... acid jazz for the 21^st century. Let's face it, for those who know, Nik Turner is to post-sixties electrically amplified music what Elvis was to hip rotation. Our life-swappees would never have attended a hipper happening than the one in West Wales that week. The DJ skills alone would have provided a soundtrack to the night the likes of which they would never have heard before.

They would have been in the company of a couple of hundred of our mates & extended family in a social environment to die for. Our mate's wicca work statues alone would have caused a sensation. Three fifteen foot African women with drums that had been everywhere in 2005 from Glastonbury to The Blue Rock Free Festival in West Wales.

He didn't mention that Gerard had helped Carrot & Hannah {who got us into this project in the first place} set the party up with his partner & son. He didn't mention that Alice & Bertie had trained Gerard to play music or that at the time of 'our' ball he would have been performing with great enthusiasm.

I wasn't expecting him to go into detail but some explanation would have been appropriate.

Redman was not doing this justice & I had discussed it all with him in the week..

Kiran and I approached the microphone to explain that the event in Wales was for charity, but he would not let us have it. He turned his back to us so that there was no way that we could get to it. He was like a kid. "It's my microphone!" There was no forum for debate here at all. So, we walked away from him. I did not want a scene on camera right there. We had the auction coming up with Skippy who had done the painting of Pegasus. He had not been allowed to sit at the tables, by the way. He was considered 'staff' for having done the picture. He was not given any food, either. Everyone gets to break bread at the places we go. There is no 'you get food and you don't'. But then Redman went on. He got carried away. I could see him thinking, "I've won, game set and match, I can humiliate this couple and their mates. It is all going to be on film and we will have the last laugh." He was definitely very drunk by this stage. I was not, even though I had had a couple of pints and a wine, I was solid as a rock. I could have done a driving test, I was so fired up, even though I would have been an orange on a breathalyser.

'I'm going to have you,' I thought.

He continued, 'Since the London bombings we don't allow any Pakistani polo players onto our tour bus.'

I'm sure he was referring to the polo players of Pakistani origin who were on the England team. They were not allowed on the same vehicle as the white players, because we were 'at war'. You bastard, I thought. You have just insulted my wife, and everybody knows she is the only Asian in this tent. You have just humiliated my wife in front of eight hundred people, I thought. These fuckers didn't differentiate between Pakistani, Punjabi, Rajistani, Gujurati, Bengali or any other Asian cultural group. They were all just “darkies” to Redman.

Redman, you are a wasp in my ice-cream but I am going to chew you, swallow you and shit you out in front of your mates, you evil motherfucker! By then, Kiran knew I was at Rage Central.

'It's all right,' she said. 'We've got the auction, we've got the auction, just calm down.'

'He's finished,' I said. 'I'm going to take his mind out and I'm going to stamp on it and I'm going to shove it up his arse. He's a fucker, I'm not having that.'

I did not want to hit him at this point, funnily enough. That came with the 'Ingols Hall - Piss-All' comment. That was very Dickensian, very "let's tread on the peasant." I said to myself, hang on, we have got more records, more CDs, more books, more cultural artefacts than Gerard has got on a five hundred acre estate. His taste was expensive, but it was tacky. He had the smallest library of books for a house that size I had ever seen. I only found fifteen CDs, and two of them were Elton John. So do not tell me he had swapped Ingols Hall for Piss All. Redman knew I was well-read because we had talked about history. I wondered what he thought I did do of an evening. "I like digging my hands into mud and slapping it onto my head in my wode hut! In fact, my relationship with the earth is very profound. I just roll about in it like a pig of an evening, because I can't read, I can't write, and I haven't got ears, so I don't understand music!" Half the books Gerard had were about the history of the RAF.

The auction lots came up and, of course, ours did not. To begin with Skip was “Lot-1”. Then he was put back to “Lot-4” to give our camera crew time to prepare. I was quickly told it had been pushed to the end. The cameras waited and waited. By “Lot-15” Skip had not been mentioned. Then Redman announced that the auction was over. They had blown out any chance of raising money for the school. All the money went to The Countryside Alliance. That was the ultimate humiliation.

When the lot did not get mentioned, I went up to my P.A. who had, I would say, a cheeky, almost puckish sense of humour, and she had been quite willing to encourage me to see this thing through. On this occasion, she had let me down, probably more even than Redman. Our lot had not been called and this woman, who was supposed to be my P.A., who had been very supportive, who had got the whole thing put onto the menu for the proceedings, in writing, was acting as though we had never even discussed it with her. I went up to her. The cameras were following me around like they were stuck to me at this point. I walked right up to her face to face & said 'Out of fucking order!'.

'What?' she said, looking shocked.

'You know what I'm talking about,' I said. 'You know what you've done.'

That was when I turned to all the guests.

I hollered. Over twenty years of projecting my voice in insanely loud bands came in very useful here. 'You lot didn't even want the likes of us educated in the first place. That you're prepared to see a retraction in the primary school system, with even fewer kids gaining literacy skills is disgusting. You think you've shot yourselves in the foot by the fact that I can even read at all. You really do think it's that "us and them"? It isn't about "us and them". There's no "us and them" you motherfuckers. It's about you and me, and that person there, and that person there.'

In fact, my knowledge of British history was a slightly more detailed take than theirs, from any conversation I had. They took things for granted and do not read up on them. I do because I want to try and understand why I find this society so painful.

Then I just stormed off and strode back to the manor from the arena, fuming. The cameras were following me as I went. We walked through the kitchen area. They had tucked away a lot of the servants, the people preparing the food, obviously from a company brought in to do it, and I noticed that they were mostly black. What I had found at the front entrance to the dining area, next to the arena was a statue of a black slave boy, from the Deep South of America, all kitted out like a jockey, with a serving tray in his hand. How can this be happening, I thought. This is not the twenty-first century. It is not even the twentieth. What the hell is this all about? Then to notice that they had mostly black staff, whom I had had on the periphery of my vision, I had noticed that some of the waitresses coming out were black. I went back-stage and it was like a bad day in old Louisiana. I looked at them all.

'You should have more self respect than to work for these bastards,' I said.

'Don't have a go at these people,' Kiran said. 'They're forced into it for god's sake. They've no choice.'

My outrage was just losing its focus. It was becoming like, 'I'm fucked off with the human race' now, and I know that sounds as though I had become particularly misanthropic, but I had hit a peak. I was more disgusted than I had ever been in my life. It was here, and it was amongst them. My disgust had almost reached a combative level.

I walked up to my life-swappee's hundred-thousand pound Range Rover and I booted it in true, Teddy Boy manner. All of that is on film too.

'Quick,' the director said, 'we'll have to edit that out otherwise our lawyers will go mental!'

I do not think it looked like it was dented, but who am I to know? I was not bothered at the time I stormed into the manor.

'If everybody downs tools, we won't be treated like slaves,' I said to Kiran.

'Well, it's not their fucking fault,' she said.

'It's probably not for a white bloke to say that to them,' I said. 'Maybe you should have done it.'

We were a bit on fire. The camera crew were looking a little scared. Skip looked at me. He has looked at me like that once or twice before and I have looked at him like that too when he has got out of order and I have thought he was about to do physical violence, and I did not want to be about when it happened, and, by the way, 'you're wrong, you're terribly wrong.' Skip was looking at me as though I were wrong. He has gone too far. Craig has lost it. He has kicked the car. Something really terrible is going to happen. Then he walked off. I did not blame him. Get out, I thought. I did not want a little conscience pixie in my head while I was going through a massive psychosis. I was so glad that he had decided to leave. He went straight back to see how we had left everybody. Walking off was not a gratuitous act, he was genuinely worried.

'I'll go and check on the other eight hundred people who might be lynching you this evening, you little fucker, putting me through this.'

It was one of those looks. We have all been that to each other over the years. A friend of ours has had this habit of running across car roofs, which had always disgusted some of our other mates.

'That's somebody's property! How could you have got like that?'

I was upset that Skip was not angry, but I think he was just happy that he was not going to have to spend a week as an artist at some rich person's house. On the other hand, though, I did feel annoyed that he had not closed ranks and felt outraged that his art was not going to be represented. And then Redman came walking in. He did not get a word in. He did not even get a chance to say, 'Hello'. He looked a little concerned about why we had left but he did not even have the opportunity to say, 'I am a little concerned about your behaviour' or what I had said or anything. I hit the Rage Bullseye.

'You're a murderer,' I said to him. 'You're a child killer. You and your friends are responsible for child death around the planet. You had the nerve to introduce me to an officer overseeing the occupation of Basra, you're either insensitive or evil. You know what I think about your pals in the RAF? They're no better than the Luftwaffe during World War Two!' You don't deserve that Spitfire parked outside! You think you're a Christian but Jesus would have hated you. And yet, you were someone I felt I was building a goddamned bridge with, was almost a friend of! That we had come to this moment in our lives between us, the same age, that we were meant to meet and learn something about the world we live in, and you end up humiliating us, fucking offending my wife, and you expect me to take that, and touch my cap and say, "bless yer m'lud"? You're a nasty, evil bastard.'

I thought Kiran was going to have a go at me, because this man looked scared. I was really shouting. It gives me great pleasure to say it, and I am really sorry that there is a demonic side to my personality, but I take great masculine pride in the fact that he was shitting his fucking pants. He was expecting violence and he knew that if it had to come to that I would be all over him like a pit-bull on a poodle, even though he was taller than me. It would have been like a pig on a potato, but I did not once feel like doing that. I had felt like it for a fraction of a second earlier in the evening, but this was far more serious than physical violence.

'You trained to be a Christian priest,' I said. 'You've got nothing in common with Christ. You're a Roman, it's the same thing, it's senates, it's Caesars, it's Praesidiums, it's gladiators, it's legionaries policing the planet. You don't even know what I'm talking about,' I said.

Well, instead of Kiran saying, 'Stop shouting at him,' like she normally does when I start losing it with people like that, she hit him even harder. She got up on a chair. Well, that is just classic South London behaviour. She was looking down at him, waving her finger in his face.

'You evil, evil, evil, evil, evil man!' she screamed. 'That you should imply that primary school teachers are lazy? That you should suggest that children shouldn't have primary school education at all? You evil, evil, evil... You think wearing the fur of an endangered species is clever?'

He had never been spoken to by a woman like that, and black, and higher up than him, and fucking terrifying. I thought she was going to drop-kick him in the head. She has drop-kicked me in the head before and she was wearing boots. Maybe she should have, because that would have made the biggest TV moment in history. It would have been wrong, I am sure, and we would have been crucified and you don't want another Jesus and Mrs. Jesus do you? It had all gone too far.

We unloaded on Redman. It was not really an argument. I was lecturing him. He was the naughty school kid and our row at the end was me trying to scare him into being better behaved, which was the last and most extreme thing any teacher can do when they have given up on a child. It is not something that is necessarily right and it is not something anyone wants to do, unless they are a psycho, but there comes a point in everybody's life when you have got to say, yes, you are a complete and utter bastard, and people hate you. Most of the people around you hate you. You all hate each other up here. I saw a lot of that. I did not see any affection between Redman and his partner, not like there is between me and Kiran.

'You've insulted me,' I said, 'and my family, my mates, the film crew and the fucking artist that has left a beautiful gift for this estate. I nearly started to like you. I actually thought that at times you seemed like a sensitive, intelligent man. If it weren't for you I might not have ever got on a horse. After tonight you can shove it up your arse!”

I never felt that any of them were close to hitting me at any stage and I am quite surprised. If I had met a working class bigot in a pub on a similar level there would have been a scrap. It is almost as though they are not capable of fighting their own battles. Redman had to hire some gangsters to do that for him if it had come to it although I had other businessmen say to me that it was all bollocks and he had not hired them and they were just people he knew. There was no truth in that place.

There was a lot of swearing from Kiran, too and I think that Redman found that personally shocking. I do not believe he had ever heard a woman use language like that. In the pause between her finishing and me starting again, he looked really upset.

'Do you have to use language like that?'

Well, that pushed me over the edge. That was the final one. Now you 'die' and I walk away. I cannot face this kind of ignorance and stupidity any more. I felt like John Lydon, mixed with Che Guevara mixed with Gandhi, mixed with Penny Rimbaud out of Crass mixed with all the other blokes, millions of whom there have been, who think this is absolutely fucking, wrong, stupid, and obviously so. I had no doubt that I was on the side of peace, justice, truth and fucking harmony.

There I was countered with the quite amazing proposition that my foul language was more of an offence than the whole nature of the argument on what the fucker had done vis a vis not allowing us to get some money sent to a school in danger of being closed down & his support for the bombing of Iraq.

What's that line in the film Apocalypse Now? “They train young men to drop fire on people but they won't allow them to write 'fuck' on the side of their aeroplanes because they say it's obscene”.

'It's down to this,' I said. 'That's it isn't it? Swearing is worse than bombing little children, eh? That's where you're from. Well I'll give you another little working class phrase that your class isn't partial to... FUCK OFF!'

I stuck my fingers up right in his face and then walked out, and as I did so, in the distance you could hear him asking the camera crew.

'Am I allowed to get a word in?'

'It doesn't look like it,' they said, speaking on my behalf rather than theirs. And it was on that that I had to go back, but he had done as I had asked and fucked off. The crew immediately interviewed me and Kiran.

'How do you feel about that?'

'How the fuck do you think we feel? We're fuming!'

The cameras followed me into the massive conservatory area, all under glass next to the enormous swimming pool.

'I think they're a bunch of cunts,' I said, 'and I also think we're in a bit of trouble here, and basically, I think you should get all the film off site now.'

Which they did. I thought they would go, 'no, no, you're all right, we'll have an interview and a cup of tea...' Fuck that! They were cramming the film into their bags, packing their equipment up - outside the back door - car waiting for them - voom!