Floyd - Stirred but Not Shaken

The Autobiography

With James Steen

PAN BOOKS

The anteroom was brilliantly lit by cut-glass chandeliers that hung from the high ceiling. Stewards in their white mess jackets, with golden epaulettes and long black aprons, were shuffling with trays of drinks.

The members had come from all over the country to be at the annual games night of the Alexis Soyer Appreciation Society, though this grand title was merely a euphemism for the excuse to have the mother of all piss-ups.

They held elegant cigarette holders, smoked fine cheroots and wore moleskin waistcoats. Despite their posturing and this crescendo of back-slapping and bullshit conversation such deep subjects as the runners and riders at Haydock Park, the inevitable outcome of the Ashes, boasts of sexual conquests and stories of huge wins at the roulette table there was not a gourmet among them. They were gourmands, guided by insatiable stomachs rather than the rules of the so-called art of fine dining. They strutted in their well-cut suits inherited from their fathers and grandfathers, with their hand-made, high-polished but down-at-heel boots and shoes.

It was like some weird Orwellian farcical nightmare of pigs about to root gluttonously around the trough.

But before dinner there were games. The dining room was oval and in the centre was a boxing ring; the first event of the evening would be the traditional ten-round bare-knuckle boxing match, the victors reward a suspension of the clubs subscription fees, a crate of port and a dozen jeroboams of Taittinger Comtes de Champagne. Money, unlikely cheques and scrawled IOUs were passed among the assembled crowd as they placed their bets on what was usually a very brutal fight.

The master of ceremonies called the house to order, the members took their seats, and the fighters were pompously and ceremoniously announced. There was a stirring burst of the huntsmans gallop from the minstrels mezzanine gallery and the battle commenced amid cheers, boos, cries of, I say, well done... harder, boy, harder... keep your left up, no, keep your left up... oh my God, the boys a girl.

In the excitement, I drank whisky after whisky. Some members I hadnt seen in many years and I couldnt remember their names or their faces.

The crazy evening continued. The boxing ring splattered with blood, vomit, piss and water was quickly cleared and a regiment of waiters fluently assembled the enormous polished dining table, which was swiftly adorned with fine silver plate, shimmering claret goblets and solid silver trophies.

Soup was served, the oysters were gulped, whole lamb was carved with dexterity by an ancient matre dhtel who surely had been Dr Jekyll. Sweetmeats and trifles came and went. Chteau dYquem evaporated like an oasis in the desert. The port spun in ever-decreasing circles and the cigar smoke billowed purple waves, clouds above our heads as the evening slipped away and glided down the teak passageway to my bedroom, where I twisted and turned uncomfortably on this hard mattress.

I tried to reach the bedside table for a glass of water but with the tubes from my nose and electrodes on my chest and the ventilator choking my breathing I could not move. Feebly, I pressed a red button, expecting one of the stewards to arrive.

I was sweating. I was frightened.

No steward arrived. Just a man in a white jacket with a stethoscope and a briefcase, from which he took a syringe and injected my arm.

Some hours, or maybe days, later morning came, along with the cool, clean-shaven posse of doctors and specialists who grouped themsleves around my bed, talking about me while they pressed their cool fingers over my stomach.

They talked jocularly and loudly with one another about this remarkable recovery that had occurred.

I said to them, How did you enjoy the dinner and the boxing? Silence. I said, Well, surely you were there. It was a great night. I mean, there was the betting, there was the port, there was the whole baron of lamb, and then there was dawn. How do you manage to have such a place in what appears to me to be a hospital? It was a hospital.

Mr Floyd, you have been hallucinating. The medication we had to give you to keep you alive together with the effects of how can we say it? an overindulgence in alcohol... The night nurses recorded your cries and your conversations with yourself.

You were suffering a nasty case of delirium tremens, continued the doctor. DTs, Mr Floyd. We have played our part. Now it is for you to play yours. Drink again as you have before and you will die.

It was not until weeks later, still in the early months of 2008, that I discovered that for two or three days and nights my twenty-five-year-old daughter Poppy, who had flown from her home in France, and my forty-year-old son Patrick, who had taken the bus from his home in Bristol, had been with me in that hospital in Staffordshire. They had sat beside me holding my hands and willing me to pull through.

I was completely unaware of my childrens presence but without them I would not be here to tell you this story you are about to read, this story about a cook who became what to my mind is glibly and spuriously called a celebrity (I prefer the term curiosity). A cook who was shaken from the roots of his passion for food and stirred into the mythical and meaningless world of showbiz.

But I am here to tell you that, despite all that I hope you will now learn about Keith Floyd, you will see that although he was stirred he is no longer shaken. Im still standing.

Lets go back ten years, shall we? Or was it fifteen? Im damned if I can remember. Though does it matter?

I was sipping a shot of iced vodka and sucking caviar and soured cream off the little blinis in the front end of a 747 on a Qantas flight from Heathrow to Sydney. The chief purser showed me a copy of the Sunday Mirror, which contained a damning and embarrassing two-page article on my so-called riotous alcohol-driven sex life as described by an ex-girlfriend.

He said, Just to tell you, Mr Floyd, I have suppressed all the copies of the Sunday Mirror on the plane so you can walk freely without people staring at you. Thats what I call service.

Even in the comfort of first class its hard to while away the time. I have difficulty in sleeping on planes. Invariably I dont like the movies that are on offer, I exhaust books and magazines all too quickly and sometimes I just slip into an introspective, reflective mood. I think thoughts like, who am I? What am I? What would my father think of me flying first class to Australia when his own sister took a 10 passage for a new life in the 1950s? Hed be amazed.

As I sipped and as I sucked, I reflected on my three failed marriages and my friends who had managed to stay married.

What is it about me that I always appear to have set one foot out of line, even if I havent? And at the risk of being accused of protesting too much, I dont think I have been a bad husband, though wed all say that, wouldnt we?

And I thought of friends of mine, no names, no particular pack drill, but a mate of mine who shall remain anonymous married to an absolutely magnificent woman. He didnt come home until four in the morning. When his wife asked where hed been, he said, Oh, I was having a drink with Floyd. He wasnt.

So I have got a kind of reputation. Many of my friends wives mistrusted me. As a restaurateur it is the nature of my business to be outgoing, courteous, flattering or indeed even flirting with lady customers, or spending time, sipping port, with their husbands. Its just what you do. It doesnt mean that you are chatting up people all the time.

I was thinking about old friends Mark and Joy and David and Celia. Now, neither Mark nor David were what you could call saints, being good old drinking boys. But they managed to maintain their marriages perfectly well.