Free My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up by Russell Brand

time, and Barney didn’t mind. I let them run about all over my bedroom and Barney would scuttle about, collecting them up and popping them back in their nest.
    Ah! Aaaaah! They were so beautiful. They were like people, living their little lives, growing day by day. Their eyes opened and they’d frolic and play and communicate by stamping their little feet like Th
    umper in Bambi. It was truly beautiful. A gerbil uto-pia: we were all equal and treated each other with respect; egali-tarianism wasn’t an issue, it was a self-regulating society founded on love.
    Then, the second they were old enough, the little perverts started fucking each other. “Oh well,” I thought, ever the liberal,
    “who cares if they’re related, as long as they’re taking precautions.” They weren’t. “Well, that doesn’t matter. We’ll soon have a mighty army of gerbils and we can begin a crusade to spread our values across the globe.” Weeks passed, gerbils germinated.
    I awoke one morning, lifted my bleary head from the pillow and glanced over toward the colony to see Sandy, one of the females, with a little pink baby in her paws, eating it. Just chewing into its head she was, as if infanticide was as natural a way to begin the day as a croissant. “Shake dreams from your hair,/My pretty 58

    How Christmas Should Feel
    child, my sweet one,” as Jim Morrison said, “. . . choose the sign of your day.” For me the sign of that day was a baby gerbil being eaten by its auntie. “Good portent for the coming day, d’ya think?” The second generation stuck rigidly to the Old Testament model and ballsed Eden right up. I had to impose apartheids, work out whose babies were whose, because they were all popping out nippers. I think Barney disgraced himself by getting pregnant with one of his son’s children; I despaired of them. I did consider a Sodom and Gomorrah– style smiting, preserving only Barney, but when I looked at their little faces my wrath was assuaged: “How can I stay mad at you? You incestuous, cannibal little slags.”
    Time now for a bit more of the ol’ cancer, my poor mother only four years into remission from the previous encounter fell ill once more. On this occasion, it was breast cancer, and she had to go back to that same grim, run-down Orsett medical facility in order to have a mastectomy. But Brenda (one of them numerous aunties who had been with my mum when I was born) really fought for her to get into the Royal Marsden in West London—the Manchester United of cancer hospitals—so she ended up going in there to have radiotherapy instead. I had to go and stay at my nan’s. My mum’s mother. So I was a little apprehensive.
    My mum used to send me these postcards from hospital.
    They were of chimpanzees dressed in a series of notable London costumes—beefeater, policeman, judge. On the other side it would say, “Hello Russell—hope you’re being a good boy.”
    There’d always be some encoded “Try and be a good boy” message stitched into it. Well, I wish I’d been naughtier, if anything.
    When I look back, it’s not those misdeeds that I regret—I’d do them again, I tells ya—but the times when I conformed. I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power 59

    RUSSELL BRAND
    over you at school—it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.
    As respite from the starchy gloom of my nan’s house, I’d sometimes get to stay at my dad’s. This was quite funny really, as he was an incapable sort of man—it was a bit like a John Hughes comedy, Uncle Buck, or Daddy Fuck, him trying to look after me in his bachelor pad in Brentwood, as if the man-child dynamic had never before occurred and we were pioneers, trying to work out this peculiar situation together.
    “What time do you go to bed?” he once asked me. Well,