Graham Norton - So Me

So Me

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette UK Company

Copyright 2004 Graham Norton

Some names and identities have been changed in order to protect the integrity and/or anonymity of the various individuals involved.

The right of Graham Norton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN: 9781444717778
Book ISBN: 9780340833490

Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
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London NW1 3BH

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For Billy, Rhoda and Paula

You suffer me, you support me.

A S SOON AS I AGREED to write this book, I phoned my mother. I explained why I was writing my autobiography now Id just turned forty, my career was about to take new and exciting turns and without actually mentioning the vulgar sum of money the publishers had offered me, I asked her if shed like to spend her summers in that lovely house wed seen down in West Cork a few months earlier?

Write whatever you want, she said, which was her heavily disguised version of Congratulations.

I wasnt finished.

One thing though, Mum. Promise me you will never read it.

There was a long pause followed by a weary sigh that seemed to suggest Id missed something very obvious.

No, I wont want to read it, but Im sure I wont need to. Wont everyone be only too happy to tell me everything thats in it?

My heart sank. She was right.

This warning is for all of those people in my mothers life the friends, the neighbours, the girls at bridge, the people from the gramophone circle, the mechanic who services her car, the woman who works in that new place just beside the shop where something else used to be, the officers who check her passport at the airport, and the journalists who periodically darken her doorstep: my mother doesnt want toknow. All the important stuff she knows already, and all the other stuff she has no desire to know. If you break this perfectly reasonable code of silence just know that deep down you are not nor ever will be a good person.

From the Cradle to the Rave

C HILDHOOD: DULL. OH YES, TO the outsider looking in there was the cross-dressing, the bed-wetting, the moving house thirteen times, but for the little boy wearing his sisters dress, lying in a pool of his own piss, in a house that would never be home, there was little sense of thrill.

I wasnt lonely as a child, but at the same time I did spend a great deal of time by myself. This was for various reasons we tended to live in the middle of nowhere, I was sent to Protestant schools in the south of Ireland so I never knew the other neighbourhood kids, who were Catholic, and of course one cant forget the fact that I smelt of stale piss and sat around in my sisters clothes until I was eight.

I am aware that such early symptoms could (and possibly should) make way for a disturbed and traumatised adulthood, with therapists fluffing up the cushions on their couches, but as a friend of mine, Rose, put it so well, People get over things. My childhood was my childhood. It is only in looking back through adult eyes that I see that all was not as it should have been in a Janet and John sort of way. But I dont think I was that different from the other children. Show me a family and Ill show you a dysfunctional one.

What was brilliant about my parents was that they never made me feel like anything I did was out of the ordinary. Of course they tried to protect me, warning other parents that their kids room would smell like an old peoples home after I had been to visit, or advising me that maybe shorts and a T-shirt might be a better choice for a trip to the shops than several yards of curtain material wrapped around my body and a lace doily pinned to my head. Because they never panicked, and God knows what worried conversations went on late at night what they hoped were just phases turned out to be just that. When I headed off to boarding school my slightly stained mattress was as dry as unbuttered Swedish crispbread and I didnt insist on packing any pretty clothes. You can imagine my parents joy their good behaviour had been rewarded. Their son was normal and ordinary. Isnt life cruel?

I was child number two for Billy and Rhoda Walker. Their first, a girl, Paula, was already four years old when I was born in Dublin on 4 April 1963. When people ask me which part of Dublin I was born in and yes, conversation can be that dull I always say that I dont know, because I genuinely dont. We moved constantly. At first it was just around Dublin, but then my dad got a new job at Guinness as a sales representative and we really got into our stride.

I realise now that all the moving seems to have given me a slightly unhealthy relationship with houses. Now that I have money, I seem to buy them like people buy cans of tuna when they fear an impending food shortage. If the BigIssue deals with the problems of the homeless, I need a magazine called the Tiny Issue which deals with the problems of the chronically overhoused. Like, where did I leave my favourite sunglasses? To date I have my house in London as well as ones in Cape Town, New York and Cork. Perhaps I do take after my parents, but Im just too rich and lazy to actually move.

The first stop on our epic journey around Ireland was Tramore, which means big beach in Gaelic and is a seaside resort. Well, to be honest, and just in case anyone should use this book as some sort of holiday guide, Tramore is beside the sea but I dread to think what rough side of hell you would have to hail from in order to consider it a resort. Our house there was the first one I can remember. Twelve more to go.

In 1967 there was Waterford, a small city in the south-east corner of Ireland. Living here was different because we had proper neighbours and, because I hadnt started school yet, the other kids didnt know that I was a freak Protestant boy, and happily played with me. It was around this time that I realised that all families werent the same. The Connellys next door, for instance, didnt eat the skin off chicken what madness! I would stand like a small dog outside their back door and they would feed me the unwanted delicacy. The Kennys had to go to bed at six, which I personally blame for the failure of our plan to dig to Australia, and there was another family whose name I forget who put a blue sheet of plastic over their black and white TV screen to make it look like colour (children and adults united in thinking that this was not a great look). The boy of the house gained a certain notoriety when he started declaring that his daddy and God were the best drivers in the whole world. Had no one told him that thunder was God trying to parallel park?

Where else? Kilkenny that was where I became a choirboy and the Deans son told me how babies were made. I refused to believe him. That was what dogs did and surely God had some higher plan for his favourite creation? Sadly the Deans son turned out to be right; obviously the Supreme Being had been too busy trying to park.