Potent quoteables
I don’t know where he got the idea that people wanted to hear him playing ‘The Threshing Machine’ or doing an impersonation of Della Reese, but, bless him, he remained absolutely convinced that they did, in the face of some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary.
I attempted to fix the situation by panicking wildly.
Sometimes you fuck up, and you have to hold your hand up and admit it.
I decided that something about the sheer ridiculousness of the situation appealed to me, and carried on.
It was as if someone had taken the story of me and my dad and written a happy ending for it, instead of what had actually happened in real life. I couldn’t handle it at all. I was so upset that David literally had to help me out of the cinema. If he hadn’t, there’s every chance I would still be sat there now, heaving with sobs.
Mum always knew which buttons to press, because she had installed the buttons in the first place.
Bob announced that he was quitting his job and stormed out, adding, as he left, that my career would be over in six months without him. Whatever Bob’s talents were, clairvoyance was clearly not among them.
But I’d rather try and build a bridge to someone on the opposite side to me than put up a wall.
but then, maybe I had to go through all that to end up where I am now. It’s not where I expected to be at all – married to a man, a father of two, both things that seemed impossible to me not that long ago. But that’s the other lesson my ridiculous life has taught me. From the moment I was ushered out of a failed audition and handed an envelope of Bernie’s lyrics as I got to the door, nothing has ever really turned out how I thought it would. My history is full of what ifs, weird little moments that changed everything. What if I’d been so upset by failing my audition that I’d dumped Bernie’s envelope in a bin on the way to the station? What if I’d stood firm and not gone to America when Dick James told me I should? What if Watford had beaten West Bromwich Albion that Saturday afternoon in the early nineties and lifted my spirits, so that I didn’t feel the need to call a friend and beg him to bring some gay men to dinner? What if I hadn’t noticed Lev at the orphanage in Ukraine? Where would I be now? Who would I be now? You can send yourself crazy wondering. But it all happened, and here I am. There’s really no point in asking what if? The only question worth asking is: what’s next?