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 9

Matt Beaumont

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The best day of my life? I’ve had loads. I don’t think I’m particularly blessed, only averagely so. I actually believe that most of us have had several best days of our lives. The thing about best days is that, when one comes along, it feels better than all the previous bests by virtue of its freshness, the very fact it’s the one we’re having right now. It will stay the best of the best days until another one comes along, hopefully soon. Here, in chronological order, is a vaguely representative selection of mine:

Five days in July 1967: a camping trip with five classmates. Six boys in a jerry-built tree house in a forest, the nearest teacher (in fact, the only teacher) in a farmhouse over 200 yards away. We lit fires, swam in dirty streams (in our underpants!), rolled in mud and assaulted haystacks. The teacher even let us take the wheel of his Morris Minor van. For heaven’s sake, we were eight years old! I still get giddy at the memory.

Today this would breach so many health and safety directives it would be the focus of a public inquiry. And if I gave up the teacher’s name, he would be hounded out of his retirement home and placed on a Home Office blacklist. Don’t worry, sir, I’ll never talk.

July 1969: for one day and one day only, Malibu sunshine and Bondi surf on Whitby beach. None of us had surfboards and, even if we had, we wouldn’t have known what to do with them. This being Yorkshire and us being practical folk, we would have fitted them with legs: excellent ironing boards. With or without surfboards, though, those waves were still the most exhilarating and terrifying things I’d ever seen. The Beach Boys were probably playing on a radio somewhere, but I didn’t notice.

May 1975: running away from school. Standing on the A1 at Scotch Corner with my thumb in the air, waiting for (I imagined) an 18-wheel Mack truck to pick me up and carry me to (I imagined) Badassville, South Dakota, where I was going to begin living my personal road movie. I got as far as Pontefract, but for a moment back there…

Incidentally, I believe that every great day has its obverse, the bloody awful day. (If you believe in that sort of rubbish, you’ll say it is all part of some great cosmological balance.) The obverse of my running-away-from-school day followed hot on its heels, the day after in fact. It was my return to said school. Parents, never send your child to a boarding school. They are not run by nice people.

October 1976: Middlesbrough 3, West Ham United 0. I’d been to football matches before and I’ve been since. This one, an autumn fixture in a season when Boro competed for nothing in particular, stands out in my memory like a French manicure on a bricklayer. Most of the previous times I’d seen my team, they’d been prosaic at best. This time, though, it was like watching Real Madrid. OK, Real Madrid playing in clogs and lost in a miasmic smog of chemical discharge from ICI Billingham. But West Ham did have Clyde Best, who, in the fug, looked vaguely like Eusebio. It could have been a Real–Benfica European Cup tie, then. For the record, the goals came from Armstrong, Foggon and a beardy Souness.

November 1978: the Clash, Middlesbrough Town Hall. Two golden memories set in Middlesbrough? I suspect that’s two more than it has ever been awarded. This was one of many times I saw the brilliant Clash, but this show was definitely the best. They were promoting their second album, which wasn’t their finest. Maybe that meant they had to work twice as hard and play twice as loud to compensate. Who knows? Whatever their motivation, they were possessed and they blew me away. And they literally blew the glasses off my face, which were crushed beneath 500 bouncing pairs of DMs. Hooray! They were vile glasses.

31 December 1993: New Year’s Eve in balmy St Lucia. Like, duh, of course it was good. But believe me, I’m not a big one for parties, especially New Year parties. For a start, parties involve dancing. To say I have two left feet is an insult to left feet everywhere. I hate dancing. But for a full 60 minutes I achieved a nirvana state of drunkenness where I dumped my inhibitions at the foot of a palm tree and believed I could groove like MC Hammer (ridiculous pants, but, admit it, the man could dance). Miraculously – and this was what made the moment so special – Maria had reached an identical state of grace. ‘You didn’t tell me you could dance,’ she squealed delightedly. I should point out that Maria is, among other things (one of them being my wife), a dance teacher. Consequently, she has Very High Standards – which, for a glorious hour, she tossed wantonly to the wind.

October 1999: the birth of Holly. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t mention my kids in this piece. But when your daughter is born within a couple of hours of a publisher saying yes to your first novel, well, that’s a pretty amazing day and it would be dishonest to ignore it. I didn’t actually get the call telling me about the book deal in the labour room. No mobile phones allowed, you see. I had to wait till I got home. There I was, staring at my gorgeous baby, my agent in my ear telling me that, given a fair wind and a decent royalty rate, I might actually be able to afford to keep this vision in Disney Princess outfits.

Tomorrow: I just know it’s going to be an amazing day.

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

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