This Is Your Life by John O'Farrell Read Free Book Online Page B

pig, you sometimes let your wife choose what she would like to do on some days, so the two of you do not spend the entire holiday arguing. You treat her very much as an equal but fortunately she likes to do exactly the same things that you do anyway. Your wife is like a feminist, but beautiful as well. But not beautiful in a tarty way. In fact, she is actually very intelligent and it would even be all right if she wore glasses like Felicity Kendall did occasionally in The Good Life.
    Your children are much more like you were. They are not all bossy like your brother Nicholas. You are a good parent who realizes that your children are more mature than you give them credit for and they are allowed to watch programmes that may offend some viewers, especially those watching in family groups. Your wife would never take your son to get his hair cut at a woman’s hairdressers where his French teacher was having her hair done at the next mirror.
    I suppose the trouble with your level of fame is that it seems like there is nowhere you can go where people don’t recognize you! Some people will probably envy your wealth and fame but it’s hard for them to understand that the grass always seems greener on the other side. From where they are it might seem much nicer being really rich and having a huge house and being able to buy whatever you want and having everyone love you and giving you whatever you want all the time. From where they are that must seem like a really attractive lifestyle. But they’re only looking at the positive side of all that, they don’t think about the downside, like having to give autographs sometimes.
    There are pros and cons to every lifestyle, I’ll write again soon.
    Mine sincerely,
Jimmy
    The depression I felt on the night after my birthday was no doubt deepened by the realization that the teenage Jimmy had had such high hopes for me. The more I read of these hubristic letters, the more I sensed that I must be a terrible disappointment to myself. I suppose if you are going to attempt to predict the future, there’s no point in prophesying the mundane. Nobody would have been very interested in Nostradamus if he’d written: ‘And in the land of the Angles, there will be much drizzle, And a great nuisance shall be felt, when no buses come for ages and then three come along at once.’ When we watch toddlers playing with Lego we say: ‘Oh look, he’s going to be a great architect when he grows up.’ Not: ‘He’s going to work for a building company, but be mainly based in the office, sorting out everyday software problems on their integrated network system.’ So I understood why I had foreseen such an exciting life ahead of me – it must have been more fun to write about. And now I was supposed to smile at my naïve fantasies and think, Well, thank goodness none of that came true, thank goodness I’m where I am now. Except I didn’t feel like that at all. I still would have loved to appear on
This Is Your Life
and listen to a catalogue of my successes and pretend to blush as it was revealed how much tireless charity work I had put in to help the otter sanctuary. I still desperately yearned to be someone. Here was Jimmy Conway’s success story, and that was all it was: a story.
    I wonder if in the old days ploughmen ever felt they were stuck in a bit of a rut? It was now 3 a.m. on the third Sunday in September in the wet and windy seaside town of Seaford. All night the wind had whistled like a
Scooby Doo
soundtrack, banging wooden gates and spinning polythene bags along the seafront. Betty was sitting beside the bed staring at me expectantly, shaking with excitement as to what I might do next.
    â€˜Go to bed, Betty,’ I mumbled, and she reluctantly slunk off to her beanbag. Before she finally lay down she liked to walk around in little circles a few hundred times, endlessly scrunching the squeaky polystyrene gravel inside like