Free What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness by Anna Gekoski

to it. What had been going on in my life in the lead-up to my breakdown in 1986? New job, that was probably the key. Previously I was on the
Mirror
where, politically, I felt very at home. I was sort of a bit of a rising star on the
Mirror
. And then I got approached by Eddy Shah’s new outfit
Today
, and I kind of instinctively knew it was the wrong thing to do, but the more other people told me that, the more I was going to push myself towards it. I was flattered into it really. I was news editor of the Sunday operation and I think that made me the youngest news editor on Fleet Street. So it felt kind of like a big step for me. Politically it was stupid, as I’d gone from a sort of Labour place to, you know, Shah, anti-unions. So that probably fractured a few relationships, personal friendships in politics and stuff. My partner Fiona had always thought it was a bit, you know: ‘What are you doing this for? You’re fine where you are.’ That kind of thing. But I went.
    Then I suppose the other thing to acknowledge – and I didn’t acknowledge this until after I’d had my breakdown – was that I’d probably been drinking to excess for a long time. I mean my first warning from a GP about my drinking was when I was still at school. Yeah. And it’s like, looking back, I can see that it was a really steady part of my life for a long time. And I did have quite a capacity for drink, so a lot of people wouldn’t know I was drinking as much as I was. At university I drank way too much but I know loads of students do, particularly these days. And as a journalist, there was very much a drinking culture. Totally the norm, you know, to start the day with a hangover and end it pissed. That was the way for a lot of people. But I can see now it was just absorbing too much of my life.
    And then in the run-up to the breakdown, the kind of last few weeks, it was just this combination of things. Overwork, a sense that I was driving the whole thing – the newspaper – on my own. And I
was
to some extent, as we were so understaffed that I was doing half a dozen people’s jobs, but I was doing them all badly because I was always constantly looking to the next ‘legitimate’ – in quotes – reason to have a drink. And then the other thing that was happening was that I was starting to get really wired – you know, that sense of a kind of excessive stress, which I’ve known lots of other times in my life. And I think sometimes you can turn that into a creative force, and I certainly convinced myself that I could at the time. And I
was
quite creative – I was having some good ideas – but some were off the wall. So a combination, I’d say, of work, drink, a new environment where I didn’t feel comfortable, all of that leading to pressures with Fiona: you know, a lot of late-night rows on the phone because I wasn’t home and I was pissed and all that.
    The final kind of spiral down was the weekend before the publication of the first issue of the newspaper. So there was all this planning – quite exciting in its own way – and although I was news editor, I was doing a lot of the stories myself. And I thought it would be quite good, because of the political thing, to get something from Labour in the first one. So I persuaded Neil Kinnock – he didn’t want to do it – but I persuaded him to let me spend the weekend of the Scottish Labour Party conference in Perth with him. The plan was that I would meet him at the airport, head up to Scotland, just be part of his entourage, and do a big inside colour piece for the first edition. So quite a good editorial product.
    The night before – this would have been early March ’86 – I had a real mega, you know, on the piss. I was in this pub called the Lord High Admiral, which was opposite our offices on the Vauxhall Bridge Road, and I’d been in and out of there all day, and