JIM BOB
Driving Jarvis Ham

To Neil, for all the driving

If you’re reading this it probably means I’m not dead.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Jarvis Goes to Drama Club

Jarvis Gets a Girlfriend

Just This One Last Lift and That'll be It

Jarvis Goes to London

Jarvis Learns to Swim

August 31st 1997

Simon Aveton

Jarvis Reinvents Himself

Dean Bantham and Shane Prior

Jarvis Gives Something Back

Mark Halwell

Jarvis Buries a Millennium Time Capsule

Lloyd Morleigh

Part Two

Ham Alone

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for Driving Jarvis Ham

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

‘Would you drink a pint of your own piss?’

‘Yes I would.’

‘Eat some shit?’

‘No problem.’

‘How about someone else’s piss or shit?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you toss a man off?’

‘Of course I would.’

‘An old man?’

‘Yes.’

‘That old man who used to sit outside our school drinking white spirit?’

‘Yes.’

‘While your grandmother was watching?’

‘Yep.’

‘Would you punch a child?’

‘Uh huh.’

A car game.

To pass the hours between service station stops and hard shoulder/weak bladder toilet breaks. To lessen the boredom that is the drive up from Devon to London with Jarvis Ham as a passenger.

The Million Pound Game is a hypothetical question game, like what would you do if you won the lottery or if you had three minutes to live or you were invisible.

Jarvis would always win the Million Pound Game. He would have tossed off a tramp while his nan watched. For a million pounds Jarvis would eat shit and drink piss. He’d punch a child. He’d kick the kid and stamp on its fingers while it was on the floor. Let’s get this straight. Jarvis Ham would do it for less than a million. He’d do it for no money at all. Jarvis would do it for the fame.

Jarvis once told me that he had two big ambitions. Number one was that he wanted his life to become so unbearable, with all the fans and the stalkers and the photographers camped outside his house all night that he’d have to fake his own death. His other big ambition was to get shot dead by an obsessive Jarvis Ham fan.

True story.

Of course, if Jarvis did hit that kid I’d get two hundred grand. Twenty per cent of the million that Jarvis won for eating his own faeces or letting his grandmother watch him milk a tramp would be mine. I’d be a twenty per cent accessory to whatever filth or depravity Jarvis Ham put himself through to become a famous millionaire. As Jarvis Ham’s manager: the punched kid, the poo, the wee, the perverted sex with the homeless, everything that I’m going to tell you about. It’s technically one-fifth my fault.

PART ONE

The Ham and Hams Teahouse is one of five shops in a short row of businesses at the top of Fore Street. Inside it looks like an episode of the Antiques Roadshow. None of the furniture matches. The chairs don’t go with the tables; teacups sit uncomfortably on odd saucers. Knives, forks, spoons and sugar tongs all come from different cutlery sets. If it actually had been an episode of the Antiques Roadshow, the expert would have said, ‘If only you had the full set, I think, for insurance purposes, you would have been looking at fifty to a hundred thousand pounds. Unfortunately, what you have here is worth fuck all.’

The Ham and Hams Teahouse didn’t care. Variety was its spice of life. The leaflets on the counter next to the big old Kerching! style till boasted about it: The Ham and Hams Teahouse is not Starbucks, the leaflets proclaimed above a drawing of an impossible cake.

Next to the counter there’s a floor to ceiling glass cabinet that is a shrine to sugar. A cake castle. Half a dozen glass shelves packed with Bakewell tarts and carrot cakes, with sticky date, cream and treacle cakes. Big and high cakes topped with thick cream and fresh strawberries, looking like something the Queen might wear on the top of her head for the State Opening of Parliament. There are pineapple upside down cakes, victoria sponge up the right way cakes and tiramisu to die for. In fact, nut allergy sufferers have been known to play anaphylaxis roulette with a slice of chocolate and hazelnut panforte from the Ham and Hams Teahouse. From up to half a mile away, if you stood very still and quiet, you could hear customers licking their lips and saying ‘yum yum’.

The flag of the day in the postage stamp of lawn in front of the Ham and Hams this morning was the flag of the Cook Islands: a blue background with a Union Jack in the top left hand corner and a circle of white stars to the right. There was hardly any wind and the flag was barely moving. A middle-aged couple dressed in shorts and matching sweatshirts sat beneath a pub umbrella at one of the two tables outside the Ham and Hams, they were eating the fluffiest scrambled eggs you’ve ever seen, served on the toastiest toast of all time. I parked the car and walked towards the teahouse.

I could see Jarvis through the window. He was wearing an apron with a picture of a big fat cartoon plum on it – no comment. He saw me and held up two fingers, he mouthed the words, ‘two minutes’ and carried on serving tea and cakes to the tourists. I stood in the street and waited.

A newly blue-rinsed old lady came out of the hairdressers next door to the Ham and Hams. She smiled and said ‘hello’ in that Devon friendly way that freaks out visitors from London who think it’s some kind of a trick or a hidden camera show stunt. I smiled back.

‘Lovely day for it,’ the blue-rinsed lady said.

It was.

There were no paparazzi outside the Ham and Hams Teahouse this morning. No photographers on stepladders trying to get pictures of Jarvis through the window. Nobody jockeyed and jostled for position shouting ‘Jarvis! Jarvis! Over here!’ There’d be no warning of flash photography on the lunchtime news. Not today. The epileptics had nothing to worry about just yet.

The bell above the door of the Ham and Hams Teahouse tinkled and Jarvis walked out and straight past me like I was invisible. He was still wearing his apron. He headed towards my car. I sighed and aimed the key fob over his head, there was a beep beep and a flash of headlights.

‘Don’t cab me Jarvis,’ I called out after him, and then more to myself, ‘I’m not your chauffeur.’ But he was already halfway into the back seat and closing the door. By the time I reached the car he’d already be snoring. He could fall asleep almost instantly like that, like he had a standby switch.

While Jarvis slept in the back I’d obey the signs and drive him carefully through the village, and as I left the village another sign would thank me for having done so. I’d drive carefully as requested through all the other villages and small towns on the way to the A38 – although I’d ignore the sign as I entered one village that someone had altered with white paint or Tipp-Ex to read PLEASE D I E CAREFULLY. I drove on through Yealmpton and Yealmbridge, Ermington and Modbury, seeing signs along the way for Brixton and Kingston: strangely West Indian sounding names for such very white places.

Turning onto the A38, I’d put my foot down. I could now drive less carefully. Make a mobile phone call, take both hands off the wheel. Open a bag of crisps, read a newspaper, start a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle of the Houses of Parliament.

I’d search for a radio station that wasn’t playing sincere British indie guitar music, but I wouldn’t find one and after going round the FM waveband in circles a few times I’d settle on some local news and an overlong, inaccurate weather forecast. I’d presume the weather forecaster was broadcasting from a windowless basement after travelling to work blindfolded in the back of a van. I could have told him it was actually an average day for the time of year. For any time of year really; some bright sunshine, with occasional Simpsons clouds breaking up the otherwise pant blue sky. When we reached the outskirts of Exeter, just before we drove onto the M5 for the few miles of motorway that would take us to the A30 and the A303, it would rain. The radio weatherman was right there at least.

I’d look in the rear-view mirror at the sleeping Jarvis Ham. His chubby face flattened against the car window, his lips and nose distorted like a boxer captured in slow motion after a massive right hook. I’d try to work out what it was that made me not Jarvis’s chauffeur. I just couldn’t put my driving gloved finger on it. He always sat in the back. On all the many times I’d given him lifts I’d never once heard him call shotgun.

Giving Jarvis this latest lift from the South Hams up to London was going to be a more uncomfortable journey than usual for me, and maybe for him too. Not because the car was rubbish or because the roads were particularly bumpy. Far from it. The gearbox and the tyres were brand-new and the roads beneath them were smooth. The reason for my and perhaps Jarvis’s discomfort was that we both had a secret we’d been keeping from one another. Jarvis’s secret was that he’d been writing a diary. My secret was that I’d been reading it.

MARCH 31st 1972

Where were you born? Not the town or the country. The actual place of your birth, the venue? A hospital I bet. Or at home. Like Diana. She was born in Park House, Sandringham late in the afternoon on the first of July in 1961. She weighed a wonderful 7lb 12oz. I was born in a museum. And not just any old museum either. No way Jose. I was born in the British Museum. The British Museum. I was born in the British Museum! Imagine that. Mental. How brilliant was my birth. Correct. Very brilliant. And also, I almost forgot. It was Good Friday. How good a Friday is that? Correct again. Very good. More like Brilliant Friday. Very brilliant Friday. I don’t know how much I weighed and don’t say that you bet it was a lot or else.

Okay, so it’s not exactly Samuel Pepys (although Jarvis will eventually bury a cheese during a fire).

It’s not even a diary really. Not in the conventional sense. This first entry for example, can I call it an entry, even though I’ve just said it’s not a diary, otherwise we’ll be here all day? This first entry was written in black felt tip pen on the first page of a big purple scrapbook. The newspaper cutting about the Tutankhamun exhibition and more importantly about Jarvis Ham’s birth was glued to the front cover. On the next page of the scrapbook was the second diary entry. It’s another Tutankhamun one. It’s still not Samuel Pepys. Six years have passed. There’s a title.

JARVIS HAM – BOY ACTOR
JUNE 20th 1978

My first ever acting role was the lead in our primary school’s production of Tutankhamun the Boy King. I can’t remember the story. Obviously. I was only six. I do remember that the rest of the class were all dressed as my slaves and they carried me into the dinner hall on a huge golden throne. I had to wave at the audience below me as they all cheered and applauded. My wave was like the wave the Queen Mother does. The Mayor and his wife were there in the audience and probably somebody from the local council. I was six, I can’t remember all the details! All the mums and dads were there too and the teachers and headmaster and a vicar (a guess). I loved it when everybody was clapping and cheering. How do I remember that then, you’re asking I bet. I don’t know, but I do. I won a prize for my acting. Not an Oscar (not yet). I looked exactly like the real Boy King Tutankhamun did, even though I was six and he was nine. I hadn’t trained at RADA or anything. I was only six. Have I made that clear? But, even though I was only six I definitely remember that it was brilliant. Very brilliant.

King Tut.

I got him that gig.

We were six years – although you probably already know that – old when our teacher Miss – can’t remember her name – asked the class who would like to play the lead role. As she scanned the classroom for a raised hand I panicked. I thought she might not find a volunteer and pick me at random for the role.

‘Jarvis, Miss!’ I shouted out, pointing at Jarvis sat at the desk next to mine. The whole class turned to look at him as Miss thing thought for a moment, perhaps about how the cute kids always got to play the princes and princesses and maybe it was time to give the less fortunate uglier fatter balloon-faced kids a chance.

Why did the classroom seating have to be arranged alphabetically on our first day at school? Why couldn’t we have been seated boy/girl/boy/girl instead? Then I might have been sat next to sweet freckle-faced Suzie Barnado. Who knows, perhaps we’d be married now. With a houseful of sweet freckle-faced kids. Or why couldn’t I have just had a different surname? A name with its initial letter earlier or later in the alphabet. My stupid parents and their idiotic ancestors. If my surname had begun with an N or a P, I might have been sat next to Martin O’Brien on my first day at school. Martin O’Brien won three hundred grand on the lottery a few months ago. It was on the front page of the local paper. If my name had begun with an N or a P, I might have ended up managing Martin O’Brien instead of Jarvis and Martin would have had to give me £60,000 of his lottery cash.

The point is. I wouldn’t have been sat next to Jarvis Ham when the teacher was looking for her boy king and we could all end this story right here and get on with our lives.

‘Jarvis? Would you like to play the part of the Boy King?’ Miss I-can’t-remember-what-her-name-was said. She might as well have stood outside the school gates at home time and given Jarvis a free sample of heroin or crack cocaine.

Tutankhamun the Boy King would be Jarvis Ham’s gateway drug. Here’s my review of the show:

There was an American actor and comic named Victor Buono. He played the comic villain King Tut in the 1960s television show Batman. Look him up on the Internet. I hardly remember Jarvis’s King Tut performance, as I was only six myself, but for the sake of this anecdote I’m going to pretend that I remember the six-year-old Jarvis Ham’s King Tut being a lot more like that thirty-year-old plump and slightly camp actor’s version of King Tut than the ancient Egyptian boy child royalty that Jarvis was attempting to portray. I do remember that Jarvis had a beard that his mother had made from the inside tube of a toilet roll; it was covered in black and gold sticky paper and glued to his chin. His mother had also made the rest of his costume. She’d cut the top off a gold cocktail dress and made a headdress out of a tea towel that was held in place with a hair band wrapped in silver foil on top of her son’s royal balloon head.

The rest of the class, including me, carried Jarvis into the dinner hall on a golden throne: made from the headmaster’s office chair, covered in gold paper and decorated with hieroglyphics. It weighed a fucking ton.

It was not very brilliant.

After the performance was over our teacher congratulated us all for doing so well and she gave Jarvis a bag of Jelly Tots for his starring role. As we waited for our parents to pick us up and take us home Jarvis told me to hold my hand out and he poured six of the sugar covered jelly sweets into it.

My management commission.

Mister Twenty Per Cent.

The rest of the scrapbook was blank. What a waste of a good scrapbook. I suppose Jarvis might have started out with good scrapbook keeping intentions and then maybe he ran out of glue, or he lost his scissors. Or was this the beginning and end of the diary of Jarvis Ham? Just these two brief entries about the ancient Egyptian monarchy? Why couldn’t I have been sat next to sweet freckle-faced Suzie Barnado? I could have been reading her diary. I bet Suzie had some filthy secrets.

Then I found this shoebox:

I climbed into the car, adjusted the rear-view mirror and looked at Jarvis fast asleep in the back; his face squashed against the window and the start of a dribble slowly chasing a raindrop down the glass. Not really, it wasn’t raining, I’m just trying to insert a bit of poetry into the story. God knows it’s going to need it. He had the seatbelt pulled across his body but not fastened. He said it made him feel sick when it was fastened.

There was a new smell in the car. I think you’d call it funky, funkier than James Brown. I turned my head to look. Jarvis had taken his shoes off. They were on the back seat next to his big fat plum apron.

These shoes:

I thought about the shoebox and what I’d found inside it. There were some other newspaper cuttings. There were notepads and loose pieces of paper, stuff written on the backs of flyers and takeaway menus. I found a couple of photographs and some drawings, cinema tickets and hairdressing appointment cards and even one or two actual proper diaries. The shoebox was inside this huge old brown leather suitcase:

The suitcase had once been owned by an incredibly famous stage actor that I’d never heard of. Jarvis’s father had bought it at an auction for his son’s eighteenth birthday. It was covered in stickers of places in the world the actor had visited and the plays and musicals he’d appeared in while he was there.

In the suitcase with the shoebox there were two videocassettes, an Oscar statue, more notepads and books and various other bits of crap. It’s this collection of junk that I’m calling Jarvis Ham’s diary. It’s more of a boot sale than a diary. A boot sale that Jarvis had been secretly keeping and I’d been secretly reading.

I imagine some people would think I was nosy. You should never read other people’s private stuff. Especially diaries. Apart from anything else, you might find out things about people you’d rather not know about them. No shit Sherlock. Now you tell me.

As Jarvis’s manager though, it didn’t seem unreasonable to me that I should be entitled to read my client’s memoirs. And it’s memoirs that I imagine Jarvis would have liked to think that his collection of crap amounted to. Not a diary. Diaries were for teenage girls. The Memoirs of Jarvis Ham would be a seminal work of non-fiction that would one day be compiled, put into chronological order, published by Penguin or Faber and Faber and serialised in the Sunday papers. It would be read by a million Jarvis Ham fans and made into a Hollywood movie starring Tom Cruise with Jarvis himself modestly taking a cameo role as his own father. The Jarvis Ham memoirs would be a big fat doorstep of a book with black and white photographs. All it needed was some idiot to make sense of it all and put it into chronological order.

I opened a window to let the funk out of the car and I pulled slowly away from the Ham and Hams Teahouse and drove up Fore Street. We passed the ladies hairdressers: called simply, Mary, where both Jarvis and I had had our very first professional haircuts on a Saturday morning; when Mary would cut the hair of the young sons and grandsons of her more regular female customers.

We used to think there was something space age about the big hydraulic chairs at Mary, the way they moved up and down and the noise they made when they did so. The big hairdryers seemed pretty sci-fi too. Sitting in those big hydraulic space chairs we watched the old women in the mirror, reading their magazines with their heads drying inside what we imagined might have been space helmets or perhaps some kind of brain sucking gizmos, and for a while we believed that Mary and her customers were from another planet – which of course they were.

Next door to Mary there were two estate agents: a disproportionate amount for such a small village. When the tourists were full of tea and jam and clotted cream from the Ham and Hams Teahouse they’d waddle up Fore Street to look in the estate agents’ windows. They were the only people in the village who could afford to buy anything advertised there.

At the top of Fore Street was the shop that sold everything else, from baked beans to condoms and everything in between. In the summer months the pavement outside the shop would be taken up with flip-flops and inflatable dinghies, and then during the tourist drought of winter they’d put out the Christmas trees and dancing Santas. Next to the shop there was a red telephone kiosk and a small post box on a stick. It was the one hundred and twenty-third building in the street, hence its piss your pants clever name: 123 Fore Street.

As I drove up Fore Street I stuck my head out of the window and breathed in the aromas of fresh baked bread and scones coming from the Ham and Hams Teahouse. I inhaled the powerful chemicals of the curly perms and demi-waves wafting out from under the astronaut helmets at Mary and the Hugo Boss on the cheeks and chins of the apple-faced young men who worked in the estate agents. If it were winter there would have been the scent of pine from the Christmas trees outside 123 Fore Street. But it was the end of summer and as I drove past I could smell the inflatable alligators and dinghies cooking in the August sun. I loved the smell of Fore Street in the morning. It smelled like victory.

I drove over a bump in the road and Jarvis’s head bounced off the window.

‘Are we there yet?’ he said. He wasn’t joking. It was one of his favourite car journey games: to repeatedly ask me whether we were there yet until I eventually lost my temper. Oh how we’d both laugh. This time though, Jarvis thought we might actually already be there yet. We’d been driving for less than five minutes.

‘Not quite,’ I said.

‘If there’s a shop,’ he said mid yawn, ‘I need to get some things.’ And then he flicked his standby switch and he was fast asleep again.

Turning right at the top of Fore Street we drove past a church. There was a sign outside the church that read, ‘Come Inside, the Holy Water’s Lovely’. Hilarious. That was one of mine. If we’d driven in the other direction we would have passed a different church. The sign outside that church would have been ‘They don’t call Him God for nothing’. That was mine too. It’s a stupid job but someone’s got to do it. I also write jokes for ‘luxury’ Christmas crackers and ice-lolly sticks and the fortunes in novelty fortune cookies – stuff like ‘This fortune will self destruct in five seconds’ and ‘Go home, your house is being burgled’. And here I am critiquing Jarvis Ham’s diary. Jesus. Anyway, here’s the third entry. There’s been another jump in time – he’s fourteen now – oh, and I can’t apologise enough, Jarvis Ham is a terrible artist.

JULY 2nd 1986

DIANA

You came to Devon today

You opened a leisure centre

You pressed a button and turned on the flumes

You played snooker for the press

And then you went walkabout

You walked about past Milletts, past Marks and Spencers

People gave you flowers

And they sang happy birthday

I waited behind the barrier

I waited

I reached out

You touched my hand outside the Wimpy Bar

And then you were gone

His poetry is diabolical too.

I was in Exeter with Jarvis that day. No drawings from me though. Or poems. I could write one now I suppose.

DIANA

You came to Devon today

You opened a leisure centre

You pressed a button and turned on the flumes

You played snooker for the press

And then you went walkabout

You walked about past Milletts, past Marks and Spencers

People gave you flowers

And they sang happy birthday

Jarvis waited behind the barrier

He waited

He reached out

You touched his hand outside the Wimpy Bar

Where I was eating a Spicy Beanburger

With chips

And then you were gone

I don’t feel good about it now. I know I missed out on a big local occasion and being a part of history, especially with what would happen in Paris and all that, but I wasn’t really a big Diana fan and certainly not a super-fan like Jarvis was. Jarvis loved Diana, worshipped her, and after she touched his hand in Exeter when he was fourteen he thought she probably loved him too.

I had just become a vegetarian at the time though, and Wimpy had recently launched their Spicy Beanburger – they were the first UK burger chain to sell a veggie burger. Teenage vegetarians living in small Devon villages in the nineteen eighties didn’t get a lot of opportunities to eat veggie burgers. So while Jarvis waited patiently for his princess to come, I ate like a king. A burger king.

It was a busy day in Devon for Diana. She opened the leisure centre and a supermarket and a library. She turned on the water in the swimming pool, setting the flumes and wave machine in motion. She played snooker: being applauded by all the patronising local big cheeses and yes-men for holding the cue the wrong way and making a foul shot. Then after that Diana had lunch at the Guildhall, watched a pageant depicting one hundred and fifty years of the police service, before finally going on a walkabout, culminating in her touching local dignitary Jarvis Ham outside the Wimpy.

When Diana opened the leisure centre she unveiled a plaque, the plaque would later on mysteriously disappear. It was a big local news story. People were outraged. The plaque was never found.

Yes that’s right, you guessed it. I found it in the shoebox.

Not really. I didn’t. God knows where the plaque went. It has nothing to do with this story.

By the way, when Jarvis wrote about his birth and glued the newspaper cutting about Tutankhamun into the scrapbook I imagine it wasn’t done at the actual time. The language he uses is pretty childish – it’s a writing style that Jarvis will stick with for most of his life – his writing may come across at times like it’s being dictated by a child who’s just learning to read out loud in front of the rest of the class. Expect quite a lot of And there was a man. And his name was Roy. And Roy had a dog. And it was called Rover. And Roy had a stick. And Roy threw the stick. And Rover fetched the stick. That kind of thing. Sorry. Don’t shoot the messenger.

Anyhow, the way Jarvis has written about his birth may be childish but the cutting out and the gluing is beyond the abilities of a nought year old. The same goes for the bit about his first acting job.

The Diana poem, however, happened live. Jarvis wrote it when he was fourteen. And the drawing. He showed me them both at the time. I remember lying about how good they were.

It was the same day that Jarvis had come out to Ugly Park with me to talk to my evil stepfather Kenneth about him perhaps getting a job or doing the washing up once in a while, or better still, getting out of town so me and my mother could return to the single parent/only child domestic bliss that we’d been perfectly happy with before he’d shown up.

Ugly Park – okay, Ugbury Park – was a small council housing estate on the outskirts of Mini Addledford, the village where Jarvis and his parents lived. It was like a theme park – its themes being urban decay and inner city depravation. At weekends and on Bank Holidays people from the surrounding villages would drive out to Ugly Park to ooh and aah at the dogfights and the graffiti and to film the boy racers on their camcorders as they bombed around the estate in their stolen cars before crashing them into a wall and torching them.

That’s not true. I’m exaggerating. But for the six months that my mother’s boyfriend Kenneth moved in that’s what it felt like. It felt like this:

And what I really wanted it to feel like was this:

I would have loved to have had a mother who made costumes for me and a father who baked cakes and wasn’t drunk in an armchair all day long, burning holes into the upholstery while he fell asleep watching the horse racing with a fag on.

And then there was the bullying.

I’ve compiled a typical week’s worth of Kenneth bullying episodes into one fun-packed omnibus edition to illustrate.

It was a Tuesday. I came home from school, mum was at work and Kenneth was in the front room, drunk, sitting in his armchair – that used to be my armchair – and shouting abuse at Basil Brush. I went into the kitchen and made an elaborate sandwich from the ingredients I’d bought on the way home from school (there was never any food in the cupboards at Ugly Park). I took my sandwich into the front room and as I made my way past Kenneth towards the sofa he leant over and took the sandwich off my plate and stuffed it into his mouth. When I complained Kenneth raised his hand, showing me the back of it in a way that was supposed to tell me he’d hit me with it if I didn’t shut up. He’d never catch me I thought. It would probably take him half an hour to get himself out of the armchair. But I couldn’t be sure. And even if the backhanded slap didn’t hurt, the nicotine stains on Kenneth’s fingers would probably give me cancer.

I sat down on the sofa and opened my bag of crisps and can of Coke. Kenneth leant over again and snatched the crisps from me and crushed them into a bag of Cheese and Onion crumbs before handing them back. He then launched himself out of the armchair with the aid of a massive fart and walked off to the toilet to piss all over the toilet seat and floor, putting his cigarette out in my can of Coke along the way.

Kenneth would never bully me in front of my mother and when I tried telling her about it she thought I was making it all up because I was missing my real father. I wasn’t. He was no Atticus Finch or Doctor Huxtable either.

You know how when you’re young there are people you call your aunt or your uncle even though they aren’t related to you? Jarvis’s parents were like a mum and dad version of that. Which would have made Jarvis my brother I suppose. Okay, bad analogy. But while Kenneth was living with us at Ugly Park I spent more time with the Hams than I did at home. I liked the pots of tea, the biscuits and the cakes. I liked the family board games, the Charades and the I Spy. There was an open fire in the living room and food in the kitchen cupboards. Jarvis’s house always smelled of freshly baked bread and flowers. Ugly Park smelled of ugly.

Sometimes I’d go to the Ham and Hams with Jarvis after school and I’d feel so at home that I’d forget to go home.

One day I went back to Ugly Park after sleeping the night in the spare room at Jarvis’s house and there was a fire engine outside my house. Kenneth had set fire to the kitchen. The fire brigade had found him asleep in the armchair, fifteen feet of ash hanging from a cigarette on his bottom lip and children’s TV on.

He had to go.

So Jarvis and me bunked off school one afternoon and went to Ugly Park to talk to Kenneth. I was too scared to confront him on my own and taking Jarvis with me seemed like a good idea (the only idea) at the time.

I knew my mother would be out at work and Kenneth would be drunk and half asleep on the sofa when Jarvis and I walked into the front room. When Kenneth woke up and saw us both standing above him, all menacing and purposeful, he’d be terrified. I imagined this is what Kenneth would see:

In reality, it was more like this:

Kenneth woke and he stood up – faster than I’d ever seen him move before – and perhaps it caught Jarvis unawares, because I doubt he really meant to slash Kenneth across the arm with the cake slice that he pulled out from inside his jacket. There was a bit of blackcurrant jam on the cake slice; it was made of stainless steel, a bit like this:

I don’t know why Jarvis had come tooled up. Or cutlery-d up, and I don’t know what he was expecting to do with the cake slice. It didn’t even have a pointed end. What was he going to do? Ice Kenneth?

Which shows what I know about cutlery.

The cake slice cut into Kenneth’s arm like it was a blancmange and Kenneth’s blood sprayed onto both Jarvis and me.

We were blood brothers now.

We ran away from Ugly Park, all the way back to the Ham and Hams – throwing the bloody cake slice into the river on the way, like we were in a gangster movie. We washed the blood off in the bathroom at Jarvis’s house and Jarvis’s dad cooked us dinner. We didn’t talk about what had happened with Kenneth, although we were both expecting the police to knock on the door at any moment. They never came.

After dinner we played Monopoly with Jarvis’s mum and dad and I let Jarvis buy Mayfair and Park Lane because they were his favourites. I stayed the night in the spare room but didn’t sleep.

When I went home the next day my mother was alone. Kenneth had left Ugly Park – via Accident and Emergency – saying to my mother that her son and his friends were all mental.

Ugly Park didn’t seem quite so ugly any more.

None of that was in the scrapbook or the shoebox.

In fact, other than Jarvis’s birth, his first acting job and meeting Princess Diana outside the Wimpy there was no record of any other event in the shoebox or the suitcase for the first eighteen years of Jarvis’s life.

I could fill in some of the gaps for him of course. There are a lot of gaps. I could tell you Jarvis was picked on a bit at school. That might be important, I don’t know. He was called Piggy and Pork Ham and Fathead, and that was just by the teachers. I’m joking of course. The other kids did take the Mickey out of Jarvis but it didn’t seem to bother him all that much.

What else? Jarvis was neither an underachiever or an overachiever at school. Academically at least, he was average. He wet himself in the classroom twice that I’m aware of, but that had more to do with bad teachers on a power trip putting the fear of God into schoolchildren if they ever dared ask to be excused for five minutes to go to the toilet.

He loved drama at school. From the day that Miss whatever-her-name had chosen him to play Tutankhamun he wanted more. He didn’t get picked for any further lead roles though and he had to be content with being a king carrier like the rest of us, but he loved it anyway. Jarvis liked dressing up in the ludicrous costumes his mother made and talking in even more ludicrous accents and voices.

At secondary school there were fewer opportunities for his acting skills. There was no proper drama department and Jarvis always said his English teacher didn’t like him and so never picked him for any of the end of term productions.

In his last year of school he took a lot of days off with made up illnesses and on the final day of the last term he went home early before all the tears, shirt signing and flour and egg fights. He said that people had been throwing eggs and flour at him at school for the last five years so why would he choose to stay around for another afternoon of it voluntarily?

Jarvis had no brothers or sisters but he did have two parents – one of each – and when he left school he started working full time with them in the Ham and Hams Teahouse.

At weekends Jarvis used to put on little shows for his parents in their front room. He had a magic set, with a top hat and a wand and a collapsible card table that he’d cover with black cloth to put all his tricks on. He was a shit magician if that helps the story.

Jarvis also did impressions of people from TV and had a terrifying looking ventriloquist’s dummy called Ronnie that his dad eventually had to get rid of as it gave Jarvis’s mother nightmares. There’s an old photograph of Jarvis with Ronnie on the mantelpiece in the Hams’ living room, and if I was cruel – which I’m afraid I am – I’d say that when I looked at the photograph, I found it difficult to tell which one was the ventriloquist and which one was the dummy.

On Jarvis’s sixteenth birthday his mother was rushed to hospital with breathing difficulties. After two weeks in hospital she was in a wheelchair for a while. I hilariously used to refer to her as A Mum Called Ironside. Jarvis always laughed, so that was okay.

Perhaps by being reticent with the diary action for the first eighteen years of his life Jarvis has actually done us all a favour. Nobody really likes that opening twenty or thirty tedious pages of a too big celebrity autobiography when the author bangs on about their childhood and about what their grandparents did in the war, when all we really want to read about is the up to date juicy stuff with all the famous people and the sex and the drugs and the fighting.

If the gaps in Jarvis’s adult life really do annoy you though, why not fill them in yourself. People are mad for audience interaction these days. It might even be fun. In those months in 1992 for example, when not much happened because Jarvis was busy reading this book:

Why not imagine he was playing football for England instead.

Or on the unfilled diary pages of 1993 and 2002 you could pretend he was building an ark because God had told him in a dream that a big flood was going to wash Devon into the sea, or you could pretend he was baking a massive cake for the Queen or something. Seriously, go ahead. Make it up. I wish I had.

But perhaps you honestly can’t be bothered to do that and you’d just prefer the truth, no matter how dull.

In the first half of 1993 Jarvis was flying model helicopters and blowing up balloons at a toyshop and for nearly all of 2001 to 2010 he was depressed. There. It’s this year’s Bridget Jones. Call Hollywood.

Right. Let’s get on with the sex, the drugs and the fighting.

I turned up the in-car radio to drown out the in-car snoring, adjusting the volume knob like I was cracking a safe. Turning it up loud enough to drown out Jarvis’s snoring but not loud enough to wake him up.

If a fast song came on I’d put my foot down and accelerate with it. I knew these narrow B roads like the back of my hand. I knew the high hedges and the telegraph poles. The farmhouses, the churches and derelict barns converted into open plan holiday homes. I knew the village post offices and which farm shops sold fresh eggs and cheese, and which sold honey and strawberries. I knew where the trees on either side of the road would appear to bend over to touch each other’s fingertips, creating a tunnel over the road. I knew when we were coming up to a red telephone box or wooden bus shelter. Cows. Horses. Sheep. Potholes and pigsties. That’s what the back of my hand looks like.

I’d driven down this particular road hundreds of times. I could take the curves and corners at speed, like a rally driver. I knew where the really narrow parts of the road widened slightly in case I needed to pull in to let an approaching vehicle pass. I could drive with my eyes closed. I could take my hands off the wheel and let my mind do the steering. Sleep-drive: navigating by driving over the cat’s eyes and potholes. My car could read Braille; it’s these new tyres. At the moment I was stuck behind a tractor.

I waited for the road to widen so I could overtake. I watched blades of straw rain softly down from the back of the tractor’s trailer onto my windscreen. I heard Jarvis, sensing the car’s drop in speed, shifting restlessly in his sleep in the back seat. I was really hoping to get as far into the journey as possible without him waking up. In many ways I was like a new and exhausted parent transporting an insomniac newborn baby. Don’t wake up, don’t wake up.

I looked at the petrol gauge. The needle was practically on the E. Why hadn’t I filled up before I left? I tapped the gauge with my fingertip but it didn’t move. I rocked side to side in my seat hoping that might shift the petrol about in the tank and give me a few more miles. The needle stayed on the E. I was going to have to stop for fuel. Arse candle. If I stopped at a garage Jarvis would definitely wake up. Balls.

The tractor turned off and I overtook. The tractor’s driver waved as I passed. I waved back. I didn’t know him. This is Devon.

The nearest petrol station was next to a closed down Mister Breakfast. The rusty sign was still there outside the boarded up roadside restaurant. With its picture of a cartoon chef in a wife-beater string vest, a knife in one hand and a fork stabbed through a sausage in the other, welcoming passing hungry drivers in with his toothy grin. Mister Breakfast had a big droopy moustache and a chef’s hat. He looked a bit like the Swedish chef from the Muppet Show. Someone had spray painted the word ‘cock’ on his hat.

As I pulled into the petrol station next door to the closed down restaurant, I felt – what does nostalgia feel like? – I don’t think it was nostalgia.

JANUARY 16th 1991

Today was my first day working at Mister Breakfast. I had to show customers to their tables, take their orders and bring them their meals. I’ve done this all before of course at the H and HTH (the Ham and Hams Teahouse, abbreviation fans). It’s what people call a busman’s holiday (I think). I also had to make the toast and I burned it three times. Geoff the chef (that is honestly Geoff’s name) said that famous people sometimes come in to eat here. Mostly rock bands. And sometimes people from the television or a whole rugby team. Imagine if Diana came in. I wouldn’t know what to do. It would be brilliant though. I wouldn’t burn her toast that’s for sure.

I worked at Mister Breakfast with Jarvis back then. It was my first ever job. The uniforms looked ridiculous. That’s what I remember most. Stupid hats. I think we were supposed to look American. We didn’t. We had to wear a badge that said Master Breakfast – including the female members of staff – until we were mature and qualified enough to fry stuff without setting fire to Devon, and then and only then would we be allowed to call ourselves Mister Breakfasts and get a new badge. Christ, such aspirations and dreams, I’m surprised our young heads didn’t explode at the thought of it.

JANUARY 30th 1991

Geoff says because of my experience working in a teashop since I was twelve I can cook breakfasts now. It’s only frying eggs and sausages and bacon and using a microwave but standing behind the counter in the kitchen where all the customers can see you, I suppose it’s a bit like being an actor on a stage and the customers are the audience. Being a chef is like being a film star.

Yes Jarvis, a film star. That’s exactly what it’s like.

Tom Cruise in Cocktail. That’s what he was thinking of.

Jarvis liked to spin and flip the ketchup and brown sauce bottles when Geoff wasn’t looking, throwing them into the air and catching them behind his back, on the off chance Princess Diana might drop in for a Full American English or a plate of pancakes and a pot of tea and think she was being served by Tom Cruise. Jarvis had made me take a bus into Plymouth to watch Cocktail with him three times when it came out. I hated it slightly more each time.

During my time at Mister Breakfast I never got to cook anything but I did have to handle an abattoir worth of dead animals in spite of my vegetarianism and I swept the floors and cleaned the toilets. The pay was pitiful. The soft toy Mister Breakfasts I had to embarrassingly try to flog to the customers looked like they’d been won at the worst fair in the world and were probably held together with pins and asbestos and stuffed with bandages and nappies. The souvenir t-shirts with their slogan ‘I Got My Fill at Mister Breakfast’ would prove to be in particularly poor taste after what was to happen there. Maybe that would have made a better slogan: ‘Mister Breakfast – In Poor Taste’. They could have had it printed across the front of their stupid hats.

Nobody had heard of the Breakfast Killer back then, those shirts and soft toys are probably going for a fortune on Internet auction sites now. If only I’d saved a few. Oh well, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I worked at Mister Breakfast for nearly a year and in all that time neither Princess Diana nor anyone off the TV or a single recognisable rugby player ever came in to eat any of our disgusting food.

I stopped the car at one of the small petrol station’s pumps and switched off the engine.

‘Are we there yet?’

I filled the car up with petrol and went into the shop to pay. Jarvis was already there, standing by the crisps jigging from one foot to the other.

‘The toilet’s broken,’ he said.

I looked at the man behind the counter. He had his back to us as he filled a shelf with cigarettes.

‘Flooded,’ the man said without turning to face us. Even without seeing his face it was obvious the man was in a foul mood about something.

Jarvis tilted his head and looked at me like a puppy that had just eaten my homework, and even though Jarvis was in his late thirties and not my developmentally challenged son, I asked the man behind the counter, ‘Can’t he just pop in quickly?’

‘Not unless he’s got flippers and a snorkel he can’t,’ the man said before finally turning round to face us. ‘What pump number was it?’

The friendly Devon ways that freaked out visitors from London must have bypassed this petrol station. I looked through the window at the minuscule garage forecourt and its two petrol pumps. Mine was the only car there.

‘That one,’ I said, pointing at it.

‘Number one,’ the man said. ‘Forty pounds and a penny.’

Jarvis was now doing the quick march on the spot and also grabbing the front of his trousers. I gave the man behind the counter two twenty pound notes and he made a show of holding them both up to the light and examining them.

‘There’s a lot of forgeries about,’ he said and looked at me, ‘And a penny.’

I rooted around in my pockets for a bit and then gave him another twenty pound note.

‘Can I have a receipt please?’ I said.

Jarvis left the shop in a hurry as the man behind the counter slowly counted out my change in as many small denominational coins as possible.

I walked back to the car where Jarvis was still hopping from foot to foot.

‘Go in the trees,’ I said.

‘Someone might see me.’

I looked around. Apart from the fast passing cars and Devon’s grumpiest man in the garage shop there was nobody about.

‘Will you keep a look out?’ Jarvis said.

I followed him over to the trees behind the closed down Mister Breakfast and stood with my back to him as Jarvis relieved himself.

‘Remember when we worked here?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘When?’

‘You used to spin the sauce bottles.’

‘The what bottles?’

‘The sauce bottles.’

‘I did?’

‘Yeah, like Tom Cruise.’

‘Tom Cruise?’

‘In Cocktail.’

‘Don’t remember.’

‘You do.’

Jarvis came out from the trees, still zipping his flies and looking down at the front of his trousers.

‘For a million pounds …’ he said.

‘No. I wouldn’t.’

Why couldn’t I have been sat next to sweet freckle-faced Suzie Barnado?

JARVIS GOES TO DRAMA CLUB
MARCH 8th 1991

Drama Club was brilliant tonight. We played a game called Meeeoowwwmmm Screeech! where we stood in a circle and passed a toy car around. If we had the car and somebody shouted Screeech! we had to quickly stop and pass the car back in the opposite direction. We also played another game where we stood in a circle and one person had to leave the room and while they were gone one of the others would be made leader. When the person came back the leader would do small movements and the others would copy him and the person who’d left would have to guess who the leader was. It’s difficult to explain on paper.

MARCH 15th 1991

At Drama Club tonight we sat in a circle, Pamela started a story and threw a tennis ball to one of us. When we caught the tennis ball we had to carry on the story. I would have been brilliant at this but I’m rubbish at catching.

MARCH 23rd 1991

At Drama Club last night we made a short list of ideas for our spring production for Local Heroes of History Month. It’s going to be brilliant. Very brilliant.

MARCH 30th 1991

Tonight everybody stood in a circle and one of us had to be a murderer and one of us a detective. The murderer had to kill everyone else by winking at them and the detective had to guess who the murderer was before they’d killed all of Drama Club. Just before it was time to leave Pamela told everyone to stand in a circle for a new game. She told us to close our eyes. The next thing that happened was everyone started singing happy birthday and when I opened my eyes Sandra had brought in a birthday cake for me. I blew out the candles and everybody cheered and someone started shouting ‘Bumps! Bumps!’ but I don’t like the bumps and so they let me off. It’s not actually my birthday until tomorrow but I didn’t let that spoil it.

APRIL 6th 1991

I was very disappointed to not get the role of Sir Francis Drake in Drama Club’s production of El Draco for Local Heroes of History Month.

The actual medium of delivery of that last entry probably tells us more than the words themselves. I’ve taken it out of context. Here it is back in the context I found it.

Jarvis Ham

Ham and Hams Teahouse

Fore Street

Mini Addledford

Devon

Pamela Finch Masters

The South Hams Am-Dram Players

The Hall

Parsonage Road

Devon

6th April 1991

Dear Pamela,

I was very disappointed to not get the role of Sir Francis Drake in Drama Club’s production of El Draco for Local Heroes of History Month.

Yours faithfully

Jarvis Ham

PS: I feel I can no longer attend Drama Club

After Jarvis leaves Drama Club the diary action goes quiet for a bit. And then this is published.

JUNE 7th 1992

And then it all goes quiet again, because Jarvis has always been a slow reader.

Until.

DECEMBER 2nd 1992
DIANA (REVISED)

When you came to Devon that day

To open a leisure centre

When you pressed a button and turned on the flumes

When you played snooker for the press

And then when you went walkabout

When you walked about past Milletts, past Marks and Spencer

When people gave you flowers

And they sang happy birthday

When I waited behind the barrier

When I waited

When I reached out

And most of all when you touched my hand outside the Wimpy Bar

And then you were gone

Were you sad then?

We’ve just turned onto the A38, onto the Devon Expressway. The trees are now too far apart to touch each other. If you look out of your window to the left you’ll see Dartmoor in the distance. There’s a jack-knifed artic and traffic backed up behind it over on the right, London and the North are up ahead and Jarvis Ham is in the seat behind. He’s reading The Stage newspaper. He’s taken his shoes off again.

These shoes:

The Devon Expressway. It sounds a bit sci-fi doesn’t it, like it’s a monorail across the moon or something.

It isn’t.

The A38 is a major English trunk road that runs for 292 miles from Bodmin in Cornwall to Mansfield in Nottinghamshire and the Devon Expressway is a forty-two-mile stretch of the A38 between Plymouth and Exeter. It’s not important.

‘Actors wanted,’ Jarvis says, reading out loud from The Stage (the newspaper, he’s not on a stage – God forbid). ‘To be represented by an exciting new agency and personal management company.’

‘You know those things are always a con. They just want your money.’

‘Okay,’ Jarvis said and scanned the ads again. ‘Lookalikes wanted then. Who do I look like?’

‘Whom,’ I said.

‘Okay. Whom do I look like?’

I looked at Jarvis in my rear-view mirror: my Jarvis-view mirror.

‘How about Elvis?’ he said.

I looked at his balloon head and his baby face. His rainbow coloured hair and bright red hospital radio DJ glasses.

‘Maybe if he was still alive.’

‘What?’

‘Who knows what direction he would have gone in,’ I said, ‘if he’d lived. The fourth age of Elvis.’

‘What?’ Jarvis said.

‘After Young, Movie and Vegas Elvis.’

I looked at his face in the mirror again. ‘Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear closer than they are’ it said on a transfer at the bottom of the mirror. Jarvis looked up from his newspaper.

‘Do you think he’s really dead?’ he said.

‘Huh?’

‘Elvis. Do you think he’s really dead or that he faked his death?’

‘No. He’s dead, definitely dead. The King is dead,’ I said. ‘Or on the moon.’

‘That didn’t happen.’

‘Pardon?’

‘The moon landing,’ Jarvis said.

‘Landings.’

‘What?’

‘Landings. There’ve been six manned moon landings.’

‘Really? Six?’

‘Yep.’

‘They didn’t happen,’ Jarvis said in a way that told me there could be no argument about it. ‘For a million pounds,’ he said. ‘Would you fake your own death?’

‘I sometimes think I already have.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know Jarvis. I just said it. Thought it would sound clever. Surely you have to be famous to properly fake your own death anyway.’

‘If you were famous then, for a million pounds would you fake your own death?’

‘If I was famous I probably wouldn’t need the money.’

Jarvis hated it when I didn’t take his games seriously. I looked at his balloon head inflating in the rear-view mirror and to avoid it bursting and ruining my freshly valeted car seats with Jarvis brains, I decided to play along.

Sort of.

‘There’s no way Elvis faked his death,’ I said. ‘Apart from the fact that he surely would have picked a more heroic cause of death than sitting on a toilet eating a peanut butter sandwich if he had faked it, apart from that, if Elvis was still alive he would have said something by now just to put a stop to all the people impersonating him, especially the shit ones, which is nearly all of them. Did you know – and I’m making some of the facts up because I can’t remember them – but there are around one hundred thousand Elvis impersonators in the world. There were only a hundred and something at the time of Elvis’s death. If this rate of Elvis growth carries on, by 2019 a third of the world’s population will be Elvis impersonators.’

‘Are you just saying this to sound clever as well?’

‘No, it’s true.’

‘Well, anyway,’ Jarvis said, but didn’t finish what he was going to say and went back to reading the job ads in The Stage.

You know how some people desperately want to get into the music business and so they get a job in a record shop? Or how actors work in call centres selling boiler maintenance cover and serve cocktails on roller skates wearing a tight t-shirt with no bra because it’s good acting experience? I mean: have you looked at the acting job ads in The Stage lately? Those are the only vacancies you’ll find there. Croupiers wanted for cruise ships, strippers and pole dancers needed urgently. Six pages of vacancies for door-to-door mobile phone salespeople and high street charity muggers, and maybe one acting job, that’s unpaid and has already gone.

In 1993 Jarvis got a job demonstrating – and mostly crashing – remote controlled helicopters into the floor of a toyshop and making unrecognisable balloon animals in the hope that it would be his big break into acting, one small step onto the yellow brick road that would eventually lead him to being presented with a real version of this piece of misspelled tacky plastic:

Jarvis had it made for himself at Southamleys toyshop when he was working there as Devon’s worst toy demonstrater – it was in the old actor’s suitcase. The job ad from The Stage was in the shoebox. There was also a 1986 Charles and Diana Fifth Royal Wedding Anniversary Diary in the shoebox, where I found the next series of diary entries. At last, a bit of love interest.

Because the diary is for the wrong year all the days of the week are wrong.

JARVIS GETS A GIRLFRIEND

MONDAY SATURDAY NOVEMBER 8th 1986 1993

After a boring amount of time spent working in the most boring job in the whole boring world something happened that wasn’t boring. There’s a new girl who works in the food hall at the garden centre. And she looks like Diana. (Lunch = fish fingers, chips and peas)

THURSDAY TUESDAY NOVEMBER 11th 1986 1993

I stood in the longer queue at the food hall yesterday because the girl who looks like Diana was working on that till. The queue was so slow I nearly didn’t have time to eat my lunch. (Lasagne)

MONDAY SATURDAY NOVEMBER 15th 1986 1993

Some schoolboys came into the shop today and stole the helicopter I was flying. They just snatched it out of the air and ran away with it. The manager called the police but they didn’t catch them. The funny thing is they won’t be able to fly the helicopter because I still had the remote control, ha ha ha.

WEDNESDAY MONDAY NOVEMBER 17th 1986 1993

Chose the slow and long Diana lunch queue again. (Some pasta dish or other)

THURSDAY TUESDAY NOVEMBER 18th 1986 1993

Today those schoolboys came back and stole the remote control.

FRIDAY WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 19th 1986 1993

I think the name badge of the girl who looks like Diana says Jennifer Fer. I didn’t want to look too long in case she thought I was a sex pervert. (Fish cakes)

SATURDAY THURSDAY NOVEMBER 20th 1986 1993

Jennifer Fer (that’s definitely her name) (Shepherd’s pie and a banana milkshake) (Not together)

SUNDAY FRIDAY NOVEMBER 21st 1986 1993

Helping Dad in the teahouse today because Mum is ill. Kept thinking about Jennifer Fer.

MONDAY SATURDAY NOVEMBER 22nd 1986 1993

No Jennifer Fer in the food hall today.

TUESDAY SUNDAY NOVEMBER 23rd 1986 1993

Still no Jennifer Fer.

Uh oh, another poem.

TUESDAY SUNDAY NOVEMBER 23rd 1986 1993

Jennifer

Jennifer

Jennifer Fer

Jennifer

Jennifer

Jennifer Fer

Obviously a work in progress.

WEDNESDAY MONDAY NOVEMBER 24th 1986 1993

Jennifer is back! (Mushroom stroganoff)

THURSDAY TUESDAY NOVEMBER 25th 1986 1993

Jennifer gave me an extra roast potato with my lunch today. She had tinsel in her hair. And extra gravy (Not in her hair) (On my plate) (ha ha). After work I went to watch a local DJ switching on the Christmas lights in the village. They’d built a small tower from scaffolding and he stood on a platform on top of the tower next to a lady from the council and together they pulled (or pushed) a switch and the lights came on. It was rubbish. I wish Jennifer Fer was there though. One day I will have to come back by aeroplane from Hollywood or somewhere to turn on the Christmas lights in my old village. Maybe Jennifer Fer will be with me. But maybe she’ll be called Jennifer Ham then.

FRIDAY WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 26th 1986 1993

Jennifer sat at the same table as me on her coffee break. There were lots of other emptier tables she could have sat at instead. So it must have been her deliberate choice. She said hello and I said hello but then I had to say goodbye straight away as I was going to be late back at work. She smelled of Fruit Salad chews. (Can’t remember what I ate)

SATURDAY THURSDAY NOVEMBER 27th 1986 1993

At lunchtime someone set off the fire alarm in the food hall and we had to all go and stand outside until the fire brigade came. When we were outside Jennifer Fer came up to me and asked me what my name was and where I worked and things like that. I told her I demonstrated model helicopters at the toyshop next door, although I was really an actor and it was good practice for performing for the public. (Sausages, green beans and potatoes) ((Left to go cold on table during fire alarm)) (((It wasn’t me who set off the alarm just so I could talk to Jennifer Fer))) ((((Although it would have been a brilliant idea if it had been))))

SUNDAY FRIDAY NOVEMBER 28th 1986 1993

Helping Dad again. Dropped a trifle and Dad started to cry a bit. I think it’s because Mum is ill. Kept thinking about Jennifer.

TUESDAY SUNDAY NOVEMBER 30th 1986 1993
ST ANDREW’S DAY

Jennifer came and watched me fly helicopters.

WEDNESDAY MONDAY DECEMBER 1st 1986 1993

I was in the lunch queue and Jennifer Fer pinched and punched me for the first of the month. (Shepherd’s pie)

THURSDAY TUESDAY DECEMBER 2nd 1986 1993

I’m taking Jennifer out on Friday!! (Baked potato and coleslaw)

‘Could we have a table by the window please?’ Jarvis had asked the rather handsome young waiter when he came in through the restaurant doors with Jennifer Fer as though he was some Hollywood big shot and it was a packed out exclusive and impossible to get a table in sort of restaurant.

It wasn’t.

‘Your usual table? Certainly sir. Can I take madam’s coat?’ the rather handsome young waiter said. Jennifer took off her green waterproof raincoat and handed it to the waiter, who looked around for a cloakroom or a coat hook on which to hang it.

There wasn’t one.

The not packed out not exclusive and not impossible to get a table in sort of restaurant had no cloakroom or coat hooks. It was a Mister Breakfast. The same Mister Breakfast Jarvis Ham had not long ago left to pursue his acting career (demonstrating remote control helicopters at a toyshop on the edge of a field between a farm shop and a garden centre on the A38 half a mile away). The same Mister Breakfast where I was still working. Still working, still not cooking. Still only Master Breakfast. Yup, you guessed it Poindexter. That rather handsome young waiter was me.

I showed them to a table by the window. Where the sun had faded the Formica tabletop and somebody had carved the word DIE into it. I would have pulled Jennifer Fer’s chair out for her but it was bolted to the floor. I folded her raincoat over the back of the chair, gave her and Jarvis laminated menus – also faded in the sun – and took out my order pad.

‘Drinks?’

I brought them their drinks and their meals and I acted like the perfect waiter and kept up the pretence that Jarvis was a local big shot to help him impress his girlfriend. And how could she not be impressed by a man who chose to walk her, in the pouring rain, dodging the speeding traffic and exploding puddles, along the busy slip road from the garden centre to one of Britain’s worst roadside restaurants for their first date?

As they were eating their dessert I refilled the tomato shaped plastic bottles and wiped the egg yolk and gravy off nearby tables so I could eavesdrop. They seemed to get on like a house on fire.

‘I think I’ll make acting my life,’ Jarvis said as he poured Jennifer Fer a fresh cup of tea and the lid of the stainless steel pot flipped open and tea spilled onto the table and flowed slowly into the grooves of the word DIE – you didn’t get this kind of stuff at the Ivy.

While Jennifer watched the tea Jarvis stared at her name badge like he was a sex pervert or something. She was still wearing her food hall uniform and still had tinsel in her hair. She’d been serving Christmas dinners all day in the garden centre’s vast food hall to coach loads of old ladies on turkey and tinsel days out and she hadn’t had time to change. She looked nothing like Princess Diana by the way.

‘It wouldn’t fit,’ Jennifer said, catching Jarvis staring at her name badge. ‘My actual name. It’s Jennifer Ferminalitano. So they shortened it. Plus, there was another Jennifer already working in the food hall. Although, you know, I think really they couldn’t pronounce it or be bothered to learn how. Do you know where the ladies is?’

‘Ferminalitano? Is she from somewhere exotic?’ I asked Jarvis while Jennifer was in the ladies.

‘Totnes.’

He’s funny isn’t he, Jarvis Ham. Look at him in the back of the car there now, reading his show business newspaper. Still daydreaming his daydreams. Look at him there, off in a world of his own. With his funny coloured hair and his hospital DJ glasses. Jarvis the loveable clown. Aw, isn’t he sweet. Maybe you even feel a bit sorry for him.

Don’t.

Seriously, don’t.

You’ll feel stupid later on.

Drivers rarely get carsick. It’s something to do with focusing on the road ahead and so not seeing things contrary to what their inner ear perceives. Something like that. Thinking about this next 1993 diary entry almost made me the exception that proved that rule.

WEDNESDAY MONDAY DECEMBER 8th 1986 1993

Went for a walk through the garden centre with Jennifer after lunch. We stopped under some mistletoe and kissed.

Bleeeuuurrgghh. Somebody open a window.

THURSDAY TUESDAY DECEMBER 9th 1986 1993

Jennifer had drawn a heart shape with cream in my tomato soup today.

Seriously, someone open a window.

FRIDAY WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 10th 1986 1993

John Major has said that Diana and Charles are separating. I think some of the stuff in that horrible book may have been true. Diana must have been so desperately unhappy. I feel sick if I think about it too much. I hope what’s happened to them never happens to Jennifer and me. It will never happen to Jennifer and me.

SATURDAY THURSDAY DECEMBER 11th 1986 1993

I tried to talk to Jennifer about Diana today but she said she wasn’t really bothered. I told her about the book I’d read and about how Diana was unhappy all the time and how she cut herself with a lemon slicer and deliberately fell down stairs and I suggested that Jennifer might like to read the book but she said she didn’t. She said she’s a republican and the Royal Family are all a waste of money. I thought we were going to have our first argument. I hope John Major wasn’t going to have to make an announcement about us (that’s a joke).

WEDNESDAY MONDAY DECEMBER 15th 1986 1993

PRINCE CHARLES BAPTISED IN THE MUSIC ROOM AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE (1948)

I crashed a helicopter into a child’s face today by accident. The child’s father complained to the manager and I was moved to filling helium balloons ‘for my own safety and everybody else’s’ until next week.

TUESDAY SUNDAY DECEMBER 21st 1986 1993

I’m back on the helicopters. The manager said (exact quote), ‘In all my years in this bloody business nobody has ever burst quite so many balloons as you did last week Jarvis.’ Jennifer said that I should be proud as (exact quote number 2), ‘It’s nice to be a winner.’

FRIDAY WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 24th 1986 1993

It’s been very busy at work. I can’t wait for Christmas.

SATURDAY THURSDAY DECEMBER 25th 1986 1993
CHRISTMAS DAY

I wish Christmas would end. Jennifer. I miss her so.

SUNDAY FRIDAY DECEMBER 26th 1986 1993
BOXING DAY BANK HOLIDAY (UK & EIRE)

3am. I can’t sleep. Jennifer wasn’t in the food hall at lunchtime today. I should have asked one of the women working there where she was but I didn’t. I think she doesn’t work on bank holidays.

MONDAY SATURDAY DECEMBER 27th 1986 1993

Jennifer wasn’t there again. I asked a woman who was clearing tables. She said ‘Jennifer? Is she a relative?’ I said she was my girlfriend and the woman looked at me funny. She then went away into the kitchen and came back with the other Jennifer, who was about sixty years old. I explained everything and the sixty-year-old Jennifer said that Jennifer Fer has left because the turkey and tinsel offer is finished and she was only there for that. I panicked and left.

TUESDAY SUNDAY DECEMBER 28th 1986 1993

At the food hall they wouldn’t give me Jennifer’s address or phone number because it’s confidential. How can it be confidential? It’s a food hall, it isn’t MI5 or something. I crashed a model helicopter into the ground in the afternoon (on purpose).

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