Spine: Some Notes

  I undersell my books. People ask me about them and I make jokes. I bat away interest. I apologise for them, as though they are an embarrassment to me. They're not. I've written three books and I'm proud of them, because they're very good. 

No, it doesn't sit right with me. I DO believe this, but my social training won't allow me to say it, or even type it. So I've written these notes, so I can learn them and talk about the books, my intentions, properly. Ask me what the book's about, why I wrote it. This is what I'll say.  

                                                                           Spine

Spine is a book about having a bad back. Eventually, everyone has a bad back. We are inefficiently designed monkeys, with stupidly big heads and no tails to counterbalance them. If you were of an ancient astronauts bent, I would advise you to look no further than the cobbled-together, jerry-built nature (or nurture) of the human body. We're a mess. Paragon of animals? Parody of animals, more like it.  We're a wonky shape and eventually we'll pay for that wonkiness in molten agony at the base of the spine, just about the spot where you got that tramp stamp in the 90's.

     It happened to me, the trauma not the tattoo, so I saw a doctor who prescribed Pilates and I was enrolled in a six-week course with several other geriatric crocs, doing their exercises in their gardening clothes. And, as I was wheezing and sweating through a selection of incredibly basic moves, I thought this reminds me of something. Being obliged to turn up week after week and suffering a series of agonies on the off-chance I might improve myself? Remade and remodelled by the hands of a plausible professional from the cruel-to-be-kind school? This is just like my first book, Teeth. I could write a companion volume, with illustrations, a glossary of terms, and a similar cover so the formatting is identical. I started writing down sad-sack situations I found myself in, attempting to improve myself, often while I was horribly hungover. Spine mirrored the first book, being based around a series of appointments, but it contains less jeopardy. In Teeth, actual bone splintering violence was permitted against my person. There were questions about body dysmorphia, social acceptance, and what bad teeth signify in culture. Spine was the mystery of why a man who did not exercise, seemed constantly drunk, and spent all day sat in front of a computer and all night lying on a sofa watching horror films, was out of shape and corseted with agonies. Send for Jessica Fletcher! This book wouldn't have the gristle and heft of the previous one. It was just complaints about farting pensioners and having to wear sports attire in public. Who wants to read that?

     Luckily, some twenty years earlier I shattered my knee, was admitted to a hospital that gave me the MRSA virus, I had to stay there for several months over the summer, have a series of blood transfusions and operations to clean my knee so they wouldn't have to chop my leg off. It didn't heal properly, it's a different length and shape than it was, and it causes me a lot of pain to this day. I suspect it is the chief architect of my back problems, but I also have a big head and no strong, prehensile tail to counterbalance it, though that is a problem I share with all other human beings. I believe the actor Michael Brandon was born with a tail, but I don't think it was very big. And I'm not sure he still has it. Maybe Glynis Barber insisted he keep it. She likes tails.

     So, there's blood and disease and pain and trauma, and an alternative narrative strand from my ex-girlfriend Chloe, who had to go through the whole ordeal with me. Well, she didn't have to, but she did, which was very kind of her. And, on the upside, I kept my leg, and I still use it today. It's never gone out of style. Chloe didn't remember much but she was honest enough to say that the three stone I lost in hospital, plus the newly ripped physique I developed from walking everywhere on crutches – it's very toning – was her aesthetic preference. Sadly, I moved in with my parents to recuperate when I got out of hospital, and the first thing they did when I got home was buy me a bottle of champagne and a takeaway curry.

     Slender John was already gone.