which strings to pull, to check me out, and I was immediately admitted to the Whittington hospital in Archway. Between the three of them, they probably saved me from something more serious.
‘Do you ever get rectal bleeding?’ they asked at the hospital . ‘On and off.’ ‘On and off for how long?’ ‘Ten or fifteen years, I suppose.’ It hadn’t really occurred to me that I had been ill for some time. But I’d had various ongoing bowel problems since getting ulcerative colitis as a teenager , which hospitalised me the day after I first saw The Fall live, the acidity of Mark E. Smith’s onstage persona perhaps being too much for a young boy’s stomach to take. And these problems had intensified since I first becamea full-time stand-up, to the point where I stopped even noticing that continuous rectal bleeding, the billowing clouds of flatus and the eternally unstable stools that made visits to the toilet during the nineties and the early part of this century such a constant source of amusement to me and others. The smell of farts hung around me perpetually as if it were, as Frank Skinner said in the most poignantly eloquent moment of stand-up he ever wrote, ‘an ermine cloak’. In retrospect, it comes as no surprise that I should have been heading for hospitalisation. My diet from 1991 to 2004 consisted mainly of Diet Coke, beans on toast, crisps, Wheat Crunchies, margarine, lager and curry. To paraphrase the late satirist and crackhead Willie Donaldson, ‘You cannot eat as I have ate and not end up like this.’ It turned out I had a serious attack of an ongoing condition called diverticulitis, a step up from the ulcerative colitis I’d had as a teenager. I was rushed up to a vacant hospital bed and put on a drip and lots of drugs.
During the hours of darkness, the hospital experience had all the oddly comforting and hallucinatory grace notes that I remembered from childhood tussles with rare diseases and broken bones. Nurses at nursing stations in the night, lit by softly glowing desk lamps, their soft voices humming just at the edge of audibility. Croaks of pain in the dark from behind drawn curtains. Minimalist cycles of fluttering electronic bleeps and blips. Stomach gurgles and apocalyptic farts. One night, I remember, I staggered to the TV room with my drip to try and watch the first ever episode of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!. I was alone with a cup of tea and the telly, and things were momentarily normal. A thin man with a beard came in, wearing just pyjama bottoms and a brown leather jacket with a picture of a wolf on the back. He asked if he could join me. Then he stood between me and the television, pulled down his trousers, pointed out, one by one, the weeping wounds on his legs, and then started to rub petroleum jelly into them in a vivid ooze of blood, pus and the translucent gel. I had to go back to bed. I never did become an avid viewer of I’m a Celebrity. When you’re hospitalised in a big city in the NHS system, you realise how many people are not especially sick, just lost and confused, alone and with no one to love them.
I lay awake at night, doped and thinking. People get ill. Then they die. I’d been ill and I hadn’t known. Perhaps I might have died? This seems hysterical and banal now, and part of me knew it was hysterical and banal at the time, but that did not make it any less arresting. I did not want to die yet. I had things to do.
I was discharged with dietary advice. For the foreseeable future, try and eat lots of roughage, maybe a baked potato every day. And drink lots of water. No coffee, no carbonated drinks, and, the man suggested confidentially, if you must have alcohol, something flat and soft like Guinness. Guinness was my favourite drink and I loved baked potatoes . I’d be fine.
My mother was away, and she invited me to go and stay in her house to recuperate, so I unclipped my drip, rescheduled the remaining Soho Theatre gigs and drove west, to
‘Do you ever get rectal bleeding?’ they asked at the hospital . ‘On and off.’ ‘On and off for how long?’ ‘Ten or fifteen years, I suppose.’ It hadn’t really occurred to me that I had been ill for some time. But I’d had various ongoing bowel problems since getting ulcerative colitis as a teenager , which hospitalised me the day after I first saw The Fall live, the acidity of Mark E. Smith’s onstage persona perhaps being too much for a young boy’s stomach to take. And these problems had intensified since I first becamea full-time stand-up, to the point where I stopped even noticing that continuous rectal bleeding, the billowing clouds of flatus and the eternally unstable stools that made visits to the toilet during the nineties and the early part of this century such a constant source of amusement to me and others. The smell of farts hung around me perpetually as if it were, as Frank Skinner said in the most poignantly eloquent moment of stand-up he ever wrote, ‘an ermine cloak’. In retrospect, it comes as no surprise that I should have been heading for hospitalisation. My diet from 1991 to 2004 consisted mainly of Diet Coke, beans on toast, crisps, Wheat Crunchies, margarine, lager and curry. To paraphrase the late satirist and crackhead Willie Donaldson, ‘You cannot eat as I have ate and not end up like this.’ It turned out I had a serious attack of an ongoing condition called diverticulitis, a step up from the ulcerative colitis I’d had as a teenager. I was rushed up to a vacant hospital bed and put on a drip and lots of drugs.
During the hours of darkness, the hospital experience had all the oddly comforting and hallucinatory grace notes that I remembered from childhood tussles with rare diseases and broken bones. Nurses at nursing stations in the night, lit by softly glowing desk lamps, their soft voices humming just at the edge of audibility. Croaks of pain in the dark from behind drawn curtains. Minimalist cycles of fluttering electronic bleeps and blips. Stomach gurgles and apocalyptic farts. One night, I remember, I staggered to the TV room with my drip to try and watch the first ever episode of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!. I was alone with a cup of tea and the telly, and things were momentarily normal. A thin man with a beard came in, wearing just pyjama bottoms and a brown leather jacket with a picture of a wolf on the back. He asked if he could join me. Then he stood between me and the television, pulled down his trousers, pointed out, one by one, the weeping wounds on his legs, and then started to rub petroleum jelly into them in a vivid ooze of blood, pus and the translucent gel. I had to go back to bed. I never did become an avid viewer of I’m a Celebrity. When you’re hospitalised in a big city in the NHS system, you realise how many people are not especially sick, just lost and confused, alone and with no one to love them.
I lay awake at night, doped and thinking. People get ill. Then they die. I’d been ill and I hadn’t known. Perhaps I might have died? This seems hysterical and banal now, and part of me knew it was hysterical and banal at the time, but that did not make it any less arresting. I did not want to die yet. I had things to do.
I was discharged with dietary advice. For the foreseeable future, try and eat lots of roughage, maybe a baked potato every day. And drink lots of water. No coffee, no carbonated drinks, and, the man suggested confidentially, if you must have alcohol, something flat and soft like Guinness. Guinness was my favourite drink and I loved baked potatoes . I’d be fine.
My mother was away, and she invited me to go and stay in her house to recuperate, so I unclipped my drip, rescheduled the remaining Soho Theatre gigs and drove west, to
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