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

I’d had a boozy lunch and, you know: well gone. Phoned Fiona about half nine and said: ‘Sorry, I’m still working.’ She knew I was in the pub, she could hear the noise. So we ended up having a row and I thought: ‘Fuck it, I’m not going home’, so booked into a hotel – that big one near Victoria Station on the corner – and I got in there after the pub shut and I hit the mini bar. The next morning woke up, felt absolutely terrible, slept in my clothes, dirty, urgh.
    Then I thought: ‘Shit, I’ve got to get to the airport.’ So I got a cab, got to the airport, and by the time I was at the airport I was starting to feel really sort of . . . wired doesn’t really capture it, really sort of edgy. Conscious of the fact that I’m just a bit grubby and pissed, go and buy a toothbrush and a razor and all that. Went to a clothes shop, bought a new – can’t remember if I bought a new suit – bought a new shirt and tie. I became obsessed with blue and red – I’ll come onto that – bought this blue shirt, red tie. It was all political. Went to the gents, got changed and washed. And I’m just starting to feel edgy, conscious of people looking at me in a slightly different way. And there comes a point where you’re not sure whether that’s real or whether that’s paranoia. But people really
were
looking at me, because it’s quite funny to see somebody just taking their shirt off and throwing it in the bin and putting a new shirt on. You know, it’s like, to me it was normal because I had to get rid of this smelly, filthy, beer-stained, booze-stained shirt.
    Get on the plane, Neil and his people were just a couple of rows up, so I had a chat with Neil. When we get to Edinburgh they all get off and they’d given me the itinerary, but because I was going to be doing something else while I was up there, I’d hired a car. So I got in the car and I headed off to a naval dockyard in Fife that they were visiting in Gordon Brown’s constituency, to link up with them there. And I can’t remember where it was but I was driving along and I get on this roundabout and I just can’t leave the roundabout. I’m in the car and I’m just going round and round, and round and round. And I’m thinking: ‘What the fuck’s going on? Where are you going?’ And I’m going between rational and irrational. My rational mind is saying: ‘You shouldn’t be driving’, and my irrational mind is sort of saying, you know: ‘There’s some deep meaning going on here.’ God knows how many times I went round.
    Eventually I literally had to force myself off the road and I headed to the dockyard and this is some naval secure base, right, and I’m parking my car in a car park and I’m giving the key to this guy and I’m saying: ‘Look I can’t cope with this car, you’re going to have to take care of it.’ And I said: ‘Can I make a phone call?’ Because I didn’t have a mobile then. Go in to make a phone call and I phoned the managing editor of
Today
and I said: ‘I’ve hired a car at Edinburgh airport but I’m leaving it at this naval dockyard and I don’t care what happens to it, it’s your responsibility.’ Put it down.
    So off I go and then I get down to near where Gordon and that lot are, but because I’ve been wasting – losing – time, they’ve gone. So I thought: ‘I can’t drive’, so I get a cab and I’m now feeling really kind of, you know, like I say wired doesn’t get it. Just really, a sense of almost like a hum inside me that was going ‘whir, edge, edge, edge’. I get to the edge of Perth, so quite a long cab ride, get to Perth, and . . . where did I go? I went to this hotel where I knew they were staying, and now there’s going to be this conference, meeting loads of people