I don’t keep a diary, although part of me thinks that perhaps I should. Anyway, I don’t. I’ve always found reading other people’s diaries becomes very tedious and seldom entertaining. I suppose keeping a diary can help future generations to assess the personal solar systems of the famous, the notorious and the merely self-important, but in the main I find diaries terrifically dull. More fool me for believing that they should be otherwise.
A brief extract from my life might read:
Monday 12 February. Answered the door. ‘No, I don’t want any fish, and I’m not in need of any hi-fi speakers, which you’ve obviously stolen and secreted in your anonymous white van parked where the CCTV can’t read its deliberately filthy number plate …’
One rather wished for a Jehovah’s Witness. At least I could have had a good argument, even though we wouldn’t have really got anywhere.
The cat has been shitting in the plant pot again. This accounts for the smell of crap that I mistakenly blamed on the drains. Not content with trying to drink the water out of the toilet, he now insists on presenting his bottom to me and puckering it like a sea anemone before taking his siege perilous on my chest and making biscuits with his claws on my T-shirt. This cat is by far the biggest rock star in the house.
This is the sort of stuff that diaries are composed of. I’m inclined to change the word ‘composed’ to ‘composted’ and suggest that this might well be the outcome most of them deserve.
It’s the mundanity of the diarist’s daily life versus their legend that makes me most wary of the genre. Richard Burton writes scathingly of his ‘underdone and dry halibut’, devoting several calories of effort to describing the undistinguished white wine that accompanied it; Joseph Goebbels finds time to comment on all manner of inconsequential family events while getting on with his role in launching and directing the Holocaust.
In spite of all these shortcomings, perhaps I should keep a diary for a bit – just to see what happens. It could even turn into a sequel to this book, although a second self-penned book about me sounds a bit suspect. In the meantime I’ve got 40,000 words of stories that for one reason or another never made it here: Ted Nugent discussing how to deal with a man holding a pointy stick; touring Scotland in a stolen car with a plastic goose on the roof; launching a practice thermonuclear strike from a submarine, only to fail dismally; the world of cross-dressing airline captains; disastrous flaming sambucas; the cultural insights gained from flying the Haj pilgrimage. These – and many others – are still to be revealed.
If the truth is ever told about my driving abilities then I might find it necessary to flee the country, although I’ll admit I did nearly kill Garry Bushell in Florida by accident in an incident that still divides public opinion.
Then there’s the whole world of public speaking, entrepreneurial enterprises, crooks and conmen that’s barely touched upon in this book. And, of course, there’s the not-so-small matter of an Iron Maiden tour on a 747, plus the tour that’s taking place as we speak.
So, it’s not that a little bit of water has passed under the bridge since 2015; it’s just that the equivalent of the Hoover Dam has built up in the interim.
‘Watch this space,’ as they say … whoever ‘they’ are.
I had been circling for two hours over Murmansk, but the Russians would not let us land.
‘Landing permission denied,’ said in the best Star Trek original-series Mr Chekov accent.
I didn’t know if this controller was an Iron Maiden fan, but he would never have believed me anyway; a rock star moonlighting as an airline pilot – incredible. In any case, I didn’t have Eddie on board and this wasn’t Ed Force One. It was a fishing expedition.
A Boeing 757 from Astraeus Airlines with 200 empty seats and me as first officer. There were only 20 passengers from Gatwick to Murmansk: lots of men called John Smith, close personal protection, all of them armed to the teeth. Not that Lord Heseltine needed it. He was pretty good at swinging the mace around when he had to. Then there was Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph. He was on board too. I wondered if the Soviet controller read any of his leader columns. I thought not.
‘What sort of fish are there in Murmansk?’ I had enquired of one of the John Smiths.
‘Special fish,’ he deadpanned.
‘Big fish?’ I offered.
‘Very big,’ he concluded as he left the cockpit.
Murmansk was the headquarters of the Soviet Northern Fleet. Lord Heseltine was a former Secretary of State for Defence, and what Max Hastings didn’t know about the world’s armed forces wasn’t worth printing.
The world below us was secret and obscured, submerged beneath a cotton-wool bed of low cloud. To negotiate, I had a radio and an old Nokia mobile phone. Incredibly, it got a signal halfway round each holding pattern, and I could text our airline operations who would talk to Moscow via the British Embassy. No sat phone, no GPS, no iPad, no Wi-Fi.
As James Bond says to Q at the beginning of Skyfall: ‘A gun and a radio. Not exactly Christmas, is it?’
After two hours of going round in circles, physical and metaphorical, the rules of the game changed: ‘Unless you go away, we will shoot you down.’
One day, I thought as we turned and headed towards Ivalo in Finland, I should write a book about this.
The events that aggregate to form a personality interact in odd and unpredictable ways. I was an only child, brought up as far as five by my grandparents. It takes a while to figure out the dynamic forces in families, and it took me a long while for the penny to drop. My upbringing, I realised, was a mixture of guilt, unrequited love and