My Entire Life

By Marcus Freestone

If you were given a few months to live, what would you do? What, if anything, would be worth doing? Would you just curl up in a ball and give up? Would you drink or drug yourself into a stupor? Would you rage against the unfairness of it all? Or would you write a book about your life and try to make sense of it all while you still can? What would it be like to visit your favourite places and do your favourite things for what you know is the last time?
Find out in this tragi-comic journey through a life that is about to end, in the words of the person who has to live it. With social commentary, existential and psychological exploration of the human condition, and a few jokes to lighten the mood, this novel follows one man for his entire life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marcus Freestone
• Release date: Oct 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370217632

Marcus Freestone

My main work is the T14 series of thrillers about a futuristic, high tech counter terrorism agency headed by a man with a computer implant in his brain. The first book "The Memory Man" is permanently free in e-book. I also have a series of novellas on the subject of mental health and psychology. My most popular book is "Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life" which has had 200,000 downloads. It deals with psychology, philosophy, depression, anxiety, mental health in general and the human condition.I have also released more than 50 albums, ranging from metal and rock to jazz and ambient/electronica. And last but not first I also produce the "Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life" podcast and "The Midnight Insomnia Podcast", a comedy show with ambient music and abstract visual images.

Book preview

MY ENTIRE LIFE

by

MARCUS FREESTONE

ALL MATERIAL © COPYRIGHT MARCUS FREESTONE 2017.

ISBN 9781370217632

Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Although I have used a few real events and observations from my life and the genuine geography of South Wales, this is not an autobiography and the main character is not me, he has lead a very different life from mine. All the characters, the story and the clinic where he works are entirely fictitious.

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PROLOGUE

I am dying. Those three words and all that they entail are a necessary preface to everything that follows. There are so many vapid and insubstantial celebrity autobiographies around nowadays that I feel compelled to include at the outset the reasons for my writing down my life story. I am not a celebrity and you won't have heard of me. Indeed, at the moment of writing these words I have no idea whether anybody will ever read this. When I found out recently that I was dying I felt an overwhelming need to make sense of my life, to persuade myself that it has all been worthwhile. And so I decided to write down my memories in an effort to put them behind me and make the most of what remains of my life. Initially I was doing this purely for myself as a therapeutic exercise but it quickly transformed into a fully fledged autobiography.

I can't deny that much of the shape of these writings has been informed by the fact that I have been a practising Psychotherapist for the last twenty years. Doctors, Christians, Homosexuals – why are they always practising? How long does it take to get good at these things? A feeble joke I know but you'll forgive the indulgences of a dying man. Anyway, moving swiftly on, I have to admit that I have been analysing my life experiences and searching for explanatory patterns, for causes and effects. Whether that will be of interest to anybody else I have no idea but I have found it somewhat useful and enlightening, especially to compare my life with those of some of my patients. If nothing else it has been an enjoyable psychological exercise that has helped take my mind off what is around the corner.

As I write this prologue the story is almost finished, though obviously the ending will be left somewhat hanging because I won't be able to write And then I died. The end. or something of that conclusive nature. And when the end does come I'm sure that I won't want to be writing down all the awful details. So I don't currently know what I will do with this story of mine. At present nobody else has read a single word. Tomorrow I may decide that it has fulfilled its purpose and destroy it. Alternatively one of my friends may decide after I am dead that it is worthy of publication in some form. Maybe you are that friend reading it now. Whoever you are, I have been as honest as possible and left very little out. I didn't start this as a book, it was a purely personal exercise and I still don't know what the sum total of these words is. However, in case anybody does read it I have gone back and added explanatory passages so that my reminiscences will make sense to people who are not me. Whether this has in fact turned it into a genuine book or whether it remains a series of rambling memories that will mean nothing to anybody else, I don't know. Perhaps what you are reading has been edited or substantially rewritten by somebody after my death, I obviously have no way of knowing. Maybe somebody has stolen my life and used it as the basis of a fictional novel, and what you are now reading is a heavily mangled and distorted version of what I actually wrote. If that is the case then I hope that they have at least had the decency to not wildly misrepresent me.

If at times I seem cocky or over confident, if you think my childhood was too easy in comparison to yours, if you think that I should be more grateful for the life I've had, then that is a perfectly valid opinion; I have merely told things as they happened to the best ability of my memory. For better or worse, fascinating or dull, this is my life story – this is my entire life.

*****

After reading that introduction, my little insurance policy against this ever being read by anybody who has never met me, I feel the necessity to elaborate further. For some obsessive reason, and despite the chronic lack of time left to me, I have found myself coming back to this and turning it into something approximating a book. Given the financial security and career success I have experienced recently people could be forgiven for thinking that I have lead a charmed life, apart from getting a terminal diagnosis at forty five, of course. Some may see me as having been unfairly privileged and unbearably middle-class, but that certainly isn't my memory of childhood. Yes, I grew up in a nice house and we never went without food but my mother got the bus to work her whole life and my father only kept a car because he couldn't do his job without one. Neither me, my parents nor my grandparents have ever been abroad and it is only down to random luck and bereavement that I now enjoy a level of financial security denied to most people.

Anyone much younger than me won't remember the 70s and how great the basic cost of living was. Until my mother received her bonus and they were able to pay off the mortgage, everything in our lives was rigorously budgeted for. I remember going in the corner shop with my mother one day when my father was at work. Without the car we had no choice but to get food from one of the few tiny shops in the village. It was nineteen seventy nine so I would have been seven years old. It was the first time I became aware of the cost of food – or anything else for that matter – and I was shocked to discover that two tins of soup and a loaf of bread cost one pound fifty. That was more than an hours wages for most ordinary people back then. Today the same thing in a supermarket costs about one seventh of the hourly minimum wage. And the economy was so unstable during the 70s that prices would frequently escalate massively overnight. Often there would be shortages, as if rationing has been reintroduced. You'd go into a shop and there would be a sign saying No potatoes 'til Thursday or something similar. Either the lorry drivers delivering it would be on strike or there was a petrol shortage or some other economic crisis. Britain experienced a level of chaos that we have thankfully not seen since. Some people at the top end were immune to those sort of vicissitudes, but we weren't. Yes, my parents could buy a house in their 20s with two relatively modest incomes but paying the utility bills and putting food on the table was another matter entirely. Nowadays food, clothes and white goods are dirt cheap in comparison but hardly anybody can afford to buy a house, even on a twenty five year mortgage. I'm not saying that one state is better than the other I'm just pointing out how things really were back then.

And cars ate petrol like nobodies business. They were so inefficient that you had to plan long journeys around where the petrol stations were. When we went for a day out my father would sit down with a calculator and a sheet of paper and work out how much petrol we could afford and therefore how far we could travel. I bet nobody had done that recently.

Often our Sunday lunch would be fish fingers and baked beans, accompanied, as almost every meal in our house was in the 70s, by home made chips from the grease encrusted pan. Eating loads of potatoes was the cheapest was to have a filling meal, and back then they were still considered a vegetable, even after being deep fried in Lard. I wonder if anyone actually uses Lard anymore except for swimming the channel? My father's treat on a Sunday morning was sausage and fried bread cooked in Lard – it's amazing that he made it past forty. Sometimes an evening meal would consist entirely of a seemingly random collection of tinned items, usually with Angel Delight for afters. Come to think of it it's amazing that I've made it past forty.

Everything we owned would be used until it wore out, then repaired and used for another five or ten years. My mother darned socks and my father had a friend who resoled all his shoes. If an electrical item malfunctioned then my father or grandfather would dismantle it and sooner or later it would be back in use. The small black and white television I had in my bedroom was one my granddad found in a skip. He took it home, rewired it and bought a new tube – that was my main Christmas present when I was seven and I was absolutely delighted with it. None of my friends in school had a TV in their room. No workmen ever visited our house. If the roof leaked or a drain was blocked or something important fell off, my father would borrow or hire the requisite tools and fix it himself. The idea of paying the call out charge for a plumber was never even considered. One school holiday the bath tap jammed and I couldn't turn it off. I was nine and both parents were at work. I phoned my granddad and he came round and fixed it, showing me what to do if it happened again. Now people leave a perfectly good two year old sofa out in the street to fall apart in the rain.

I am not trying to claim any kind of working-class street-cred from all this, I'm merely noting the reality of my upbringing. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, maybe it's the echoes of the father's political and social views, but I feel the need to justify myself in case anybody ever reads this. It's strange: my father never appeared to feel any guilt about moving up the social ladder, but in reflecting upon my life it seems that I do. Perhaps I feel that I haven't worked for it in the same way as he did.

Anyway, that's enough faffing about: this is my life.

CHAPTER ONE

I was born in Cardiff Royal Infirmary in 1972. To save you doing the maths I am now forty five. Cardiff Royal Infirmary is a hideously ugly building and must have been so even on the day it was opened. It is precisely the sort of building where you expect to see men in brown flared trousers with huge sideburns being chased down a fire escape by John Thaw or Lewis Collins. It is a building of two halves. One half of the building will be familiar to people all around the world because it was featured in an episode of the rebooted Doctor Who, the one where Richard Wilson turned into a scary gas mask creature. I remember walking past at the time and being surprised to see a World War Two tank in the car park. I knew the NHS budget was under pressure but surely this wasn't part of a new fleet of ambulances? With big production values, a smoke machine and the natural greyness of the Welsh sky, the entrance gates looked amazing on television. I, however, was born in the other half of the building, the much uglier half, which is now a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. I try not to take that personally.

Recently I was on a bus going along Newport Road into town and I noticed that the building where I was born has been sold and is currently being demolished. I can't help but see that as a cruel irony – I am dying and the place of my birth is being torn down and erased from history, as I soon will be. Anyway, on to less maudlin matters.

It seems odd to me that my childhood is now an historical era. Frank Zappa, the American guitarist, satirist and all round genius, once said that the world will end not in fire or ice but in paperwork or nostalgia. In the early 90s, not long before he died, I heard an interview with him where he expanded on this theme and talked about how the cycle of nostalgia was rapidly speeding up – that the distance between the event and nostalgia for that event was getting ever shorter. I was nineteen at the time but even so I couldn't help agreeing with him. There was a TV programme back then called The Rock and Roll Years. It was an odd show that put footage of news events of past years against a soundtrack of popular music. When I heard the Zappa interview I remembered that a couple of years earlier I had been watching that programme and they were doing the 1980s – before the decade had even finished. At the time I thought that was oddly precipitous and Zappa's words reminded me of this new phenomenon. Having lived through the real version of the 70s and 80s I saw little to be nostalgic about, even then.

When I first went to the Science Museum in London in my mid-thirties I was confronted with my childhood as an exhibit. In a large glass case on the ground floor, next to the spaceships, Stevenson's Rocket and other marvels of technology, there is a domestic section. Amongst these 'historical' items is my first computer, a Commodore Vic 20, and pretty much the entire contents of my childhood bedroom: a Bontempi organ, a tiny black and white portable television, a ghetto blaster, an Atari games console, a Rubik's Cube. I found it bizarre that these were considered noteworthy items in the context of everything that surrounded them, including the first particle accelerator and one of the capsules that went to the moon. Historical eras used to last for hundreds or thousand of years, now they are measured in partial decades. On Twitter and the like they are measured in minutes.

Cardiff is the capital city of Wales, which is the small bit to the left of England, lest these words one day be published in some form. I feel the need to state this because many people outside the UK seem to think that Wales is a suburb of London. Perhaps I am being too cynical. Cardiff is probably more internationally known these days because Doctor Who and Sherlock are filmed there. Beyond that there are not many other things that Cardiff is known for. People will definitely have heard of Roald Dahl but probably not realise that he was born in Cardiff, as was the singer Charlotte Church and Terry Nation, inventor of the Daleks. Beyond that there are a few Welsh people known around the world: Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton, Dylan Thomas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Manic Street Preachers. The classic 1960s TV show The Prisoner was filmed in Wales, as was the opening scene of An American Werewolf In London. The Brecon Beacons is the training ground of the SAS and their barracks are in Hereford, a town that straddles the Anglo-Welsh border. Hay on Wye hosts one of the world's premiere literary festivals. Wales has produced a few international cricketers and three snooker world champions. There's also rugby and football but I can't stand either of those. Rockfield, situated on a Welsh farm, is one of the most famous recording studios in the world. Bands who have made albums there include Queen, Adam And The Ants, Black Sabbath, Rush, Be Bop Deluxe, Bullet For My Valentine, Catatonia, The Cult, The Damned, Dr. Feelgood, Hawkwind, Judas Priest, Robert Plant, and Sepultura. With a population of only three million that's probably about an average stance on the world stage. Oh, there is also a Prince of Wales, but he's English/German. English people of a certain age tend to associate Wales with coal mining (which no longer exists) and lava bread (something made of seaweed which I don't believe anybody has ever actually eaten). There is a perception of Wales as a backwards, unsophisticated place, which I deeply resent. Cardiff is just like any English city but smaller so it's easier to get around. Mind you, if you go up the Rhondda valley you will fall off the edge of the world...

Although I was born in Cardiff I didn't live there until I was twenty four. Until then I lived in a small village a few miles down the road. I was amazed to discover recently that it has its own Wikipedia entry, which just goes to show that the internet has got way out of control and people have far too much time on their hands. The only notable thing about it is that part of the TV series Gavin and Stacy was filmed there, and it was also home to the actor Ray Smith (who played the boss in Dempsey and Makepeace) and his son Pepsi Tate (bass player from the 80s glam metal band Tigertailz). I was never into the whole glam thing but I like Pepsi Tate because he drove an MG Spitfire.

It was a quiet place to grow up, with lots of fields and woods, even a bit of an old castle. You could ride your bike in relative safety and there were plenty of places to play. The reason that I now feel the need to spend regular time in other places, in the countryside or in more idyllic locations than my current home, is that I've never truly adjusted to living in Cardiff, in a city, after my languorous, lazy childhood. I don't like traffic and noise and crowds of people, and have always railed against the metropolitan idea propounded by the majority of journalists and media types that sophistication equals a high street full of coffee shops and that living somewhere rural automatically implies that you are a backwards, socially inept, uncultured country bumpkin. Yes I grew up in a village with a population of three thousand but I wasn't on the moon. I wasn't hermetically sealed in the nineteenth century, although that is still the perception many English people have of Wales, even today. I read as many books as anyone else, probably more than many metropolis dwellers, because there was nothing else to do. I felt from a very early age that the human brain was an infinite vessel and I always wanted to fill it with as much learning as I possibly could. When I was a child there were three television channels, no internet, no mobile phones, no videos, so I always had lots of time to fill, and I chose to fill that time with reading, learning and thinking. People often bleat on nowadays about being time poor but those are always people of great privilege with interesting, well paid careers, usually in the fucking narcissistic bubble of the media. As if their lives and those of their precious offspring are so important and central to the continued existence of the universe that they have no choice but to constantly be prattling away on their iPhones whilst driving their brats around Hampstead in their urban tanks. But there is always a choice. You don't have to follow everything that is happening in the world, indeed it is utterly impossible. There is so much commentary now, probably more than actual content, and it is largely facile and redundant. There are more TV shows commenting on other TV shows than actual TV shows, and the majority of news nowadays isn't actual news but journalists commentating upon the opinions of other journalists, as if that is of any interest to anyone outside of their own solipsist world. Sorry, I'll get off my hobby horse now.

It was a nice place to grow up but from an early age I always saw myself leaving sooner or later, and never going back. My horizons were sufficiently narrow back then that living in Cardiff as an adult was about as adventurous as my plans got, and that indeed is the way that my life has worked out. The centre of Cardiff has changed radically during the last forty years but the rest of it remains more or less untouched, which I find comforting. I'm not one of those people that thinks progress for its own sake is always a good thing, neither do I believe that keeping things consistent over decades is necessarily a sign of stagnation. If it ain't broke don't fix it. The street where I now live looks pretty much the same as it did when I was born, and I know that as empirical fact because I used to walk around this area with my parents when I was an infant. Roath Lake has been a constant part of my life and I have photographs I took in the 80s with a real camera with film and silver halide crystals that shows that it was almost indistinguishable then from how it looks today. When I was four or five it seemed as if it took us the entire day to walk around it but now I know that it's in fact at most a half hour stroll