Yellow

Tales from the past

‘Nougat’ - that’s what i remember saying when asked what i wanted to be when i was grown up. (‘Nougat’ was the name of my teddy bear.)

After that i briefly wanted to be a guardsman with a bearskin until around the age of 5 or 6 I changed direction again: i decided i wanted to be an artist like ‘Michael Angelo’, whom I imagined to be sketching in chalk on the pavement. my aunt (the wife of my maternal uncle) did illustrations for magazines and a friend of theirs did the pictures for books by Leon Garfield, who was the father of a girl at my school. it was within the realm of the possible.

I used to fill a fancy notebook with drawings inspired by tv shows like ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘The Flashing Blade’ until one day i had my best friend from school round and i wanted to impress him by having a fire in the garden. i didn’t have any paper to hand and so i foolishly decided to burn the notebook. somehow i knew it was a bad idea; i regretted it and i unconsciously blamed my friend. his name was Rupert, though he changed it to Mark at senior school.

I too grew self-conscious. i remember aged 13 doing a portrait of a classmate entirely in straight lines that was put on the wall of the art room. but around that time i seem to have given up art at school; i’d become highly embarrassed at anything that revealed my personality. i gave up piano lessons at the same time - i’d only kept them on because there was a chance you could use them to get out of PE. luckily i kept noodling on the piano in the dining room at home and that led indirectly to my sister’s best friend’s boyfriend asking me if i wanted to be in his band. (i played the Moog Prodigy, a monophonic synthesiser.) i knew in my heart i wasn’t really good enough but bands or songwriting partnerships or soundtracks to self-made super-8 movies filled the 1980s until on 1 january 1990 i officially faced facts and gave up thoughts of a musical career - and returned to noodling on the piano.

What was it about the life of an artist that attracted me? was it just sitting in pubs when they were quiet in the afternoon, with a notebook? i worked for magazines to pay the rent and it was only when one went bust in 1992 that i decided to write something which had a beginning, a middle and an end - not a picture or a piece of music but a screenplay. so another career was born, which actually supported me. but the problem with screenplays (and bands) was that i had to resemble - or rather *thought* i had to resemble - someone else’s screenplay (or band).

I spent 15 years being paid to write screenplays for films that were seldom made. for every 5 i wrote, one saw the light of day - not a particularly satisfying result. i was growing increasingly disillusioned; something had to give. i thought of retraining as a psychotherapist but in the end i was blindsided by a stroke. it partially wiped my brain, at least the interior-dialogue part that wrote the screenplays. at first, in hospital learning how to talk again, i was back to ’Nougat’.

‘Yellow’ was reputedly the first word i spoke post-stroke. i didn’t remember why and i wondered what it signified. the yellow brick road? yellow submarine? the clouded yellow? being a coward? because of that word, a friend gave my a yellow throw and yellow cushions for my sofa. years later i found an exercise book in which my wife had noted the words i said in the first 10 days post-stroke. i said ‘yellow’ on the 6th day - the first two-syllable word i had spoken, after ‘yes’, ’no’ and ‘oh’. the reason turned out to be that i was playing a game with my children in the hospital car park that involved spotting yellow Minis. (my youngest was only 6.)

In hospital after the stroke I briefly tried one-handed piano playing, with a cellist employed by a musical charity doing the right hand; the ABBA songbook was the only thing we had in common. later I also tried a class drawing with my non-dominant hand, which was now inevitable; I only went once.

Little by little, in spite of the gap in my inner dialogue (or even inner monologue) I returned to writing, which I could do one fingered on my laptop (or the iPhone, at the moment, though the keys are a little too small). I wait until a memory from my past emerges from the chaos that is my brain, usually at 3 or 4am when all else is quiet. each sentence leads very gradually to the next, over days or weeks. often it peters out. the ‘notes’ section on my computer is full of half-baked memories.

That’s what i have left of my 5-year-old’s ambition. sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. but it’s a start.