Читать книгу Best Day of My Life: True stories to inspire, move and entertain - Told by a cross-section of the UK's celebrities and courageous everyday people - Giles Vickers Jones - Страница 12

TV Presenter

When you first begin to consider the greatest day of your life, you are instinctively drawn towards the landmark occasions in your life that stand out in the memory. The birth of both my boys, Bobby and Freddy, nine months of wondering what sex they were and not even checking for a good minute after, due to the miracle of childbirth reducing my legs to jelly, what would be any parent’s first thought. There are also career achievements certain to rank highly; we work most of our lives with different incentives, to climb proverbial ladders, get promoted, win the contract or take over the world so any steps towards our targets make great memories. Signing my first professional footballer contract with Leyton Orient, now that was a feeling I’ll never forget; and getting released two years later, that’s something I can’t forget either!

My first presenting job on C4’s Dirty Laundry, the auditioning, the agonising wait for any feedback and the pride I felt in watching my first show on a Saturday morning. The excitement when I received the phone call from my agent to tell me to pack my bags for Australia to present I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here with Kelly Osbourne, the joy at winning The Farm and being instantly met by my son Bobby after not seeing him for three weeks was like heaven, and getting to present on The X Factor grand final twice was monumental for me; being in front of 13 million viewers was a buzz I will never forget. I am very fortunate to have played at Newcastle United’s stadium in front of 52,000 supporters against my boyhood footballing heroes with my family watching, what a mixture of emotions that was! (I don’t like to mention the result!)

Come to think of it, I’ve done a lot of things that I can be very proud of but memories do not make up a day and that begs the question: how can you define one particular day in your life that stands out from the others? A favourite day typically would have to involve a mixture of fun, excitement, adventure and one outstanding moment to finish it all off but I think my favourite day contains so much more than that.

In March 2001, I had been selected from thousands of applicants to appear on the third series of the reality-TV show Shipwrecked filmed in Fiji over a three-month period; it’s within this, the best experience of my life, that all my best days were spent. The audition was a tense and nervy weekend at an outward-bound centre with 100 other hopefuls and the tasks we were put through were designed to test our physical and mental strength of character and to predetermine who would go well with who and also more importantly who would wind everyone up! I don’t think I was part of the latter but I certainly impressed Andi Peters with my party trick, so, after a 48-hour period of massive highs and lows, I was finally told I was going to the island and I have never felt excitement like that before. The prospect of going to Fiji and living on a paradise island for three months was huge – you couldn’t pay for a holiday like that!

I threw a big party at a local bar in Romford and invited all my friends just before leaving for the island. I can remember floating round the room so excited talking about the months ahead with all my friends. I’d had an idea to do something that would help me through the lonely moments when I would be missing friends and family, so I took a Polaroid of my mates and got a big drawing pad to stick them in accompanied by a message of good luck from that individual; to this day, that is still my proudest possession.

Before leaving for the island, I did all the things I loved and knew I would miss; the strangest one I recall was eating tricolore, my favourite dish of avocados, sun-dried tomatoes and mozzarella! I remember meeting everyone at the airport full of anticipation; we arrived at our destination a few days later, a neighbouring island called Dravuni, inhabited by Dravunians, a simple living community untouched by Western influence and seemingly better off for it too. These people taught us a few hunting and camping techniques and the hardest thing to do was shimmying up a tree to fetch coconuts; you needed Dunlop rubber on your feet and shins, not to mention more muscles than I actually had at the time to get higher than halfway.

Our first few days were spent telling the pretty girls in our group to stop sunbathing; unfortunately, some were quicker than others to realise that we had to be self-sufficient, living solely off what grew on the island – in other words, we were in trouble! I hadn’t even camped before, too much football and not enough scouts as a kid. I had a feeling before they even pushed us in the shark-infested waters to swim to shore that we were going to be as close to the true meaning of ‘shipwrecked’ as a production company could legally inflict upon us!

How does a favourite day come out of all of this uncertainty and hardship? Well, the first few weeks of grafting, team-bonding and constant hunger built the rest of the experience into more of a learning curve and enlightening adventure than any of us ‘kids’ could have imagined. The three meals a day of yam and coconut dulled our tastebuds so much in the first seven weeks that, when rice was made available, we mixed it with coconut milk and we thought we were living like kings. The first few weeks of sleeping on the beach in our sleeping bags getting walked all over by crabs made us into near-expert hut builders when the rain came, and the early arguments and petty squabbling caused by the shifting group dynamics and pressure of our self-dependency made us mature very quickly and appreciate the strength of our newfound friendships, seeing as we all relied on each other to get through the tough, lonely and hungry moments we were all experiencing.

In my opinion, for every challenge we face, there is a positive result at the end of it; for everything we lacked, we gained in other ways, and, for everything we take for granted at home and went without, we learned to appreciate at a level I never thought possible; that is why the best day of my life was spent on this island and this is how a typical day was spent on our island, Yakuve levu.

Many times I would instinctively wake up before sunset and spring to my feet excited about what I was about to witness; we all slept in a row of sleeping bags under the bright moonlight and a blanket of stars in the northern hemisphere. I had discovered something so priceless I kept it to myself at first; I would walk from the south beach through to the camp area then out to the other side of the island where the sea was always noticeably rougher and noisier. Some weeks earlier I had stumbled across a single coconut tree on the end of the long point that divided two beaches. I often enjoyed sitting beneath the tree taking a moment to take in the view and consider life on the island and the life that was waiting for me back home. On this occasion I tiptoed and zigzagged barefoot across the rock pools and climbed up to a grassy mound at the end of the point; then I sat sitting against my tree waiting for the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen. Every morning was different, sometimes, depending on the clouds, the sky would be a mixture of beautiful reds and oranges; if you looked left, you’d see a beach curving round into the rocky and mountainous east corner of the island and, right, you’d see a single coconut tree bowing down to the water again crashing into another beach, one of six we had to choose from. This understandably became a daily ritual, as I knew I wasn’t going to be seeing this out of my bedroom window at home very often!

That was a special start to the day; the next task was not considered so special at the time but looking back I’d say otherwise. On leaving the point, I would join the rest of the group in a very good mood. In the camp area, jobs would be delegated for breakfast duties and on this particular occasion I was elected alongside a few others to go and dig up the yam for today’s speciality … yam with yam on yam. We would take a washed-up dustbin pierced by a long branch with two people either end round to the plantation area and dig up as much yam as we thought we needed for the day. It sounds easy but we were using a shovel and we were on a steep hillside digging into tough terrain trying not to chop the yam in half, and, oh yeah, the earth was swarming with ants and, as I never wore any shoes, they weren’t very pleasant on the feet. However, there was a lot of banter and satisfaction when returning to the group feeling like the provider and I could then sit and watch the wood collectors make their fire and the cooks slaving away, endeavouring to make the perfect yam dish. It didn’t taste very nice but, when the rice came a few weeks later, we had the most memorable mealtimes I’ll ever experience – talk about being grateful for what you’ve got.

After breakfast, a few of us went to check the net we had received from the Dravunians as a gift; we stretched it in a channel between two islands the day before and we were optimistic we would have caught some impressive fish to have for lunch. I was one of three that swam out to investigate, and this was a nervy moment because we knew sharks swam in those waters – not massive ones but in my book a shark’s a shark! We had snorkel sets too and when we got close we dived; as I held a net bag open, one of the Aussie lads, Geordie, a farmer from Brisbane, stuffed the barracuda inside. We got halfway along and realised there was a 2ft shark stuck in the net, so we rose to the surface to quickly talk tactics and decided we would have to kill it because it was distressed and injured from being tangled up overnight. We went to shore, got our cooking knives and headed back feeling a bit like cavemen! When we got back, it had already died, so thankfully no gruesome hunting methods were required and it was at this point that I could actually understand where the insanity in the Lord Of The Flies book originated from. We cut the shark out of the net and guided it back to land; by now, the rest of the group were eagerly awaiting our catch and gave a massive cheer when we revealed what we’d be cooking. It turned out that the ammonia in the shark’s skin tasted a bit like urine and, although shark was good meat, it just wasn’t a good taste, and we agreed next time we got a shark in the net we would let it go.

We had built a boat previously and I had the honour of naming it after my brother Spencer; because of his disability, the group were very kind, and so this day the HMS Spencer set sail for a neighbouring island to see if there was anything we could take back in the way of food. I was on the boat with five others and we were all paddling with coconut-tree branches; it took a fair while to get there against the wind but we weren’t disappointed with what we found, as the production company had left us a jar of sweets, a pineapple (half-eaten by a crab) and two goats! Getting them on the boat and back to our island was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen; the noises these poor animals were making went right through you and, if it wasn’t for our crazy Sicilian Salvo, a stripper from London, and his rope skills, we would have left them there. The best thing about this adventurous part of the day was that, for the first time since landing on the island five weeks earlier, we were actually away from there; it felt as though we had been freed and we cracked open a few nuts to celebrate being outside of the bubble.

For me, the group was a mixture of very different characters, some you got on with better than others; when you’re at home, you can avoid people, turn the phone off, close the curtains, but, here, you were in the same company for most of the day so it was a pressure-cooker situation on many an occasion.

We enjoyed a peaceful look at our familiar surrounding islands from this different and welcome angle before returning to the group rejuvenated and again popular because of our plus-two on the boat.

There wasn’t time for much before the sun went down but I took a walk with my good friend CJ, a schoolteacher from Manchester and told her all about my trip; we often collected shells to make bracelets as the production people had kindly given us some string to thread them all together. It was a beautiful thing to do as the sun went down, chatting to a friend, enjoying our time on the island and talking about how much our trip would change us as people and influence what we did when we got home; we also discussed quite regularly what chocolate bar we would eat first on our return!

When the darkness crept in and the crew went back to their comfortable beds on the neighbouring island, we would be left to create our own entertainment. Fortunately for us, there were lots of characters around to make things interesting and Geordie had brought his guitar as his special item, which, due to its popularity, proved also to be the group’s special item. We would sit round a fire on the beach talking about our lives, what we wanted and what we had, telling stories and singing songs; luckily Geordie had quite a few in his repertoire and we sang our hearts out under the stars on many a night.

This evening was particularly special because Randy, an actor in the making from LA, brought a bottle of Southern Comfort and it didn’t take the whole bottle to have an impact on all of us; with nothing in us except the odd helping of yam, we were all easily guilty of being the biggest lightweights on earth! It was amazing how 16 teenagers could be alone on a big island in the middle of the Pacific and still feel so safe and content, despite the distance from home and the emptiness in our stomachs.

My evening ended with my favourite people, lying next to each other looking up at the stars in a neat line of sleeping bags with only faces visible; we would take it in turns to remember a song, and everything was somehow nostalgic and each song remembered was like something on a jukebox from years before. We were without money, machinery, gadgets and phones! But were these things missed? It was like I forgot they ever existed.

We are unbelievably versatile as human beings and we can adapt to whatever situation we find ourselves in. With this in mind, this particular day always reminds me of the huge lesson I learned six years ago on my own little paradise; it’s not the success or materialistic things in life that define us, it’s what’s inside our hearts and our heads that makes us special.