Читать книгу The 50 List – A Father’s Heartfelt Message to his Daughter: Anything Is Possible - Nigel Holland - Страница 15

Number of challenges still to be completed: Er … still 50.

But number of challenges that are almost definitely going to be happening less than 10 days from now, all at once, and ON THE BBC no less: A big fat 3! Hurrah! Now we’re talking.

Just put down the phone to a man called Matt Ralph. He is a BBC television producer. Am amazed. What a difference a day can make, eh?

Everyone makes New Year resolutions, don’t they? Give up drink. Lose a stone. Read War and Peace. Be a Better Person. But having already made 50 of them before Christmas – way more than most people – come the New Year, I didn’t need to do much resolving. No, what I needed to do was get on and actually do them, and suddenly here we were, edging into spring, and barely anything had yet been done, bar a failed attempt to get someone to take some blood. I was beginning to feel that my deadline, 9 December 2012, my 50th birthday, was breathing down my neck.

I hadn’t even been able to get out and do much training for the half marathon, my initial burst of enthusiasm having been rained on from a great height. Frozen rain, in fact: the much forecasted, much anticipated and now interminable snow. And there are only so many times you can make a circuit of the coffee table before losing the will to live and/or becoming so dizzy you pass out.

‘You need publicity,’ my friend Simon Cox said to me firmly. It was a Tuesday, the kids were in school, and he was over to discuss business. He was a client now, as well as a close pal of mine, and once we were done discussing e-commerce solutions for his company, I’d showed him the new 50 List website I’d created – my pet project once the kids had gone back to school.

I’d also by now set up a JustGiving account. My mentioning the list on Facebook had brought a flurry of enquiries from friends wanting to know where and how they could make donations – and, more importantly, who I wanted to have them. So it made sense to make things official by putting that information on the website too, explaining that anyone who felt inspired to could donate direct to CMT United Kingdom, the charity that was the first port of call for people with CMT, myself obviously very much included. The money would then be split equally between ongoing research and supporting youngsters, like Ellie, with the condition.

I’d set myself a pretty ambitious target as well – to raise £5,000.

‘I know,’ I said to Simon. ‘It’s a lot to aim for, isn’t it?’

‘Which is why you need to get it out there,’ he said. ‘Fire people’s imaginations about it. Give them a chance to get involved. Local businesses even, maybe. It’s the sort of thing the local papers will jump on too, believe me. That might lead to sponsorship – financial help and so on.’ He pointed to some of the more outlandish challenges I’d set myself. ‘Which, by the look of this, you’re really going to need.’

Perhaps because I’d always thought I’d fund the list myself, it had never occurred to me to involve the local papers in what I was doing. I said so.

‘Are you mad?’ Simon laughed. ‘It’s January, remember – nothing doing. They’ll be all over this, trust me. Take a look out of the window. I reckon they’ll leap on any story they can lay their hands on right now that doesn’t need to include the word “snow”.’

I did as instructed and agreed he was probably right. I’d leap on anything that didn’t involve snow at the moment. Much as I didn’t want to be a grump and a killjoy, snow and wheelchairs were incompatible: that was a fact of life.

‘Seriously,’ he went on, ‘they’ll be all over this anytime. Tell you what. I have a friend who knows a journalist down at the Herald and Post. Let me have a word with her. See if she can get him to do a piece on it. Spread the word a bit for you. How about that?’

‘You think?’ I said. ‘You really think he’ll be that interested in all this?’

Simon grinned. ‘Nige, mate, you really don’t know what you’ve got here, do you? Just you wait and see, mate. Just you wait.’

And it wasn’t a very long wait. It was around 24 hours, give or take – no more than that – before a journalist from the Herald and Post was indeed on the phone wanting to talk to me and, having asked me a few questions about what I was up to, wanting to know when he could send their photographer round and get some pictures of both me and, he hoped, Ellie.

She was typically bemused at the prospect of being in the paper.

‘But why?’ she kept asking on the morning of the shoot. ‘Shoot’ – in itself a heck of a concept to get my head around.

‘So that everyone can hear about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it,’ I explained to her. ‘To spread the word, and I hope raise money for CMT.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but why do they want a picture of me?’

‘Because you’re one of the main reasons Dad wants to do it,’ explained Lisa. She was brandishing a duster with an expression of mild fanaticism. She had been all morning. Where dust was concerned, she’d be taking no prisoners. There was no way her living room would be featured in the local paper looking anything less than squeaky clean and perfect. I wouldn’t have been surprised to be given a quick buff and polish myself. She’d already given the dog the once-over.

‘But you don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ I added quickly. Although I was doing this to inspire my youngest daughter, there was no way I was going to make her do something she didn’t want to do. So if she didn’t want to do it, then so be it. Ellie is feisty and self-possessed, but she is also quite shy. And the last thing I wanted was for any of this to make her stressed, or for her to feel that she was being pushed into the limelight.

But she surprised me. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind. It might be cool.’ Then she hurried off upstairs to get changed into her favourite Minnie Mouse T-shirt.

Then, as they probably became sick and tired of saying in the papers that particular winter, the whole thing, to our amazement, snowballed. The piece appeared in the paper the next day – it even had its own front-page intro – and the phone, as a consequence, began ringing.

First it was a news agency, SWNS, who expressed great enthusiasm for handling my ‘story’, which was something I’d never even thought of it as. It was a project, my project, that was all. But they disagreed. It was very much a story, they told me, and one they were keen to put out to the nationals, to see what they might make of it, too.

So they did, and they came back to me the following morning to tell me that it had also now been published in Metro, the Sun, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Telegraph. Not huge pieces – only a few column inches in most cases – but I was flabbergasted, as was Lisa, and all the kids.

The days that followed were no less surreal. In fact, they rank among the craziest and most overwhelming I’ve ever experienced.

Next came the calls from various radio stations. Would I be prepared to talk about The 50 List on air? Absolutely.

Then magazines. Would I be prepared to do interviews with them? Naturally. Then TV – 5 News, to be precise. Would I be prepared to travel down to London to be on their programme and tell the world how the idea of The 50 List had come about?

By now the phone was ringing almost constantly. No sooner had I hung up on yet another enthused researcher, and gone into the kitchen to give Lisa the latest update, than – brinngg brinnggg! – straight away it rang again.

‘Can you believe this?’ I asked Lisa every time it started up again. ‘So this is what 15 minutes of fame feels like, is it?’ I’d never dealt with anything quite so manic in my life.

Happily, the news agency stepped in to help us out, and became the contact to whom I could direct all the callers. This left me and Lisa free to think about what we could and couldn’t do.

The reality was that going down to London, to Channel 5, would be something of a mission. It would mean an incredibly early start and a complex journey via public transport; and both the prospect and the expense were a bit daunting. But it would potentially be a brilliant way to help my cause – and, I hoped, help me reach my fundraising target. Should I go?

I was still dithering when the email came in this morning – the email that topped them all. The big one.

Hi Nigel,

I’m a director working for The One Show at the BBC. I read an article about you and your daughter Eleanor in today’s Metro. I was sorry to read about your daughter’s diagnosis but it sounds like you are doing something really amazing to inspire her.

I wondered if I might be able to find out more about your challenges with the view of possibly helping you set up and complete some of them and film a piece about it for The One Show? If this sounds like something you might be interested in please feel free to get in touch. I’ll be happy to answer any questions and we can discuss what is possible and what is not.

Thanks for your time and hope to hear from you soon.

Best,

Karolina

I got straight on the phone, which was how I got to talk to Matt Ralph. And though I still can’t quite believe it, it’s all fixed. On 23 February I get to complete not one but three of my challenges: I’m going to do an indoor skydive, take a 4x4 off road and go powerboating as well. Now we’re not only talking the talk, as they say, we’re walking the walk, too. Well, sort of.

* * *

Not every test I had during my childhood involved needles and pain. Sometimes the tests were just very odd. One time, when I was around 14, I was summoned back to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square, London, where they wanted to glue a load of electrodes to my head, which would then be connected to a large machine. Naturally, by now, I was wary of anything that anyone in a white coat did, so it took the doctor some time to convince me not only that he wasn’t going to kill me but also that there wouldn’t be any pain involved.

‘You won’t feel a thing,’ he kept telling me. ‘You can’t. Because brains can’t feel pain – did you know that? All that’s going to happen is that the machine is going to read all the messages that your optic nerve sends to it.’

Which sounded worrying in itself, but I had no choice other than to go along with it, and sat patiently while he prepared me for his investigations. First he used a chinagraph pencil and a tape measure to make marks on my scalp where the electrodes needed to go. He followed this up with globs of glue, to which he stuck small white discs, to which he then connected a load of wires. These wires, around a dozen of them (one for every disc), were connected to a large (and I do mean large) metal cabinet, the front of which was a sea of lights, dials, switches and oscilloscopes, none of which, he hastened to add – once I was finally connected to it, and frankly terrified – were out to do me any harm.

The only harm done that day was to my sanity. I had to stare at a moving dot in the middle of a chequered board, and that was it. Nothing else. For an hour. I’ve never sat and watched paint dry, but I imagine the two are similar. Certainly my dad, who was supposed to be there for moral support, soon closed his eyes and had a sneaky 40 winks.

But as with any kid, there was a feeling that was much worse than boredom, and I was about to have my first taste of it: acute embarrassment. With the first test done and my cables detached from the machine, we were instructed to go off and get some lunch, before returning for some more tests in the afternoon. It was summer, I recall, and with no facilities on the premises, Dad decided the best thing would be to go and get something to eat at the pub on the nearby square and, as the sun was shining, to sit outside. Which was all well and good, except that with my bunch of cables – temporarily bound and now neatly taped to my shoulder – I still looked like something from a science fiction movie. And a scary one, if the stares I attracted were anything to go by, which seems a bit harsh, in hindsight, considering they were probably all nurses and doctors and must have been used to such sights. My humiliation only subsided when I saw another boy walk by and noticed that he had the same bunch of cables glued to his head. Had we been older, perhaps we would have shared a sympathetic exchange of nods. As it was, I could only count myself the lucky one, because he had it worse: he was in a dressing gown as well.

But not all my experiences of hospital were negative. While most of them involved pain, stress or ritual humiliation, sometimes they were actually very joyful. By the time I was 16 my brother Mark was into motorbikes, as were his mates, and when I was an inmate in the hospital for some more tedious tests a while later, a bunch of them decided to come and visit me. I was up on the second floor, but even so, you could hear them arriving before you could see them and the sound of them parking was fantastic, just like a fusillade. I looked out and there they all were, leather clad and looking impossibly cool. I couldn’t have been more thrilled to see them.

Even nicer was the reaction of the nurses and other patients, when they saw the six young men in biker gear striding down the ward. No one could say anything, of course, but their faces were a picture. When they all left – having been perfectly polite, and not outstaying their welcome – I rushed to the window again, to see them roar off as one. I felt so proud, and so subversive, that I thought I’d burst.