Laid in Chelsea Read online

  I think it was Mum who took the stand first and announced in the kindest way possible that they were going to get divorced. At that age, we didn’t really understand what they meant at first and it was all very confusing, until they explained that although they were still going to be friends, they would no longer be married to each other.

  They had seemed so content that it made no sense to me at all. I remember sitting very still and taking it all in. I just stared at them with a blank expression while my sister cried beside me. I think I was too young to really get my head around the enormity of what they were telling us, whereas Amelia was that bit older so she knew what it meant in the long term.

  They tried to help us get to grips with the fact that they were going to be living apart, but I couldn’t understand why they didn’t love each other anymore. It took a long time for it to properly sink in, but once it did a small part of the fairytale had died.

  I was worried that they wouldn’t be happy any more, and I wondered how they could bear being apart from each other when they had shared a house, a bedroom … everything. It seemed like a very odd thing to do, and in my eight-year-old mind I thought that maybe they would just start loving each other again and it would all be fine.

  My sister and I used to watch the film The Parent Trap and discuss how we would use the same tactics to get our mum and dad back together. We thought if we could set up some cunning situations where they had to spend time with each other, they would fall back in love and live happily ever after. But of course that’s not how things work. It’s funny how a child’s mind thinks.

  After the initial shock and sadness wore off I was secretly slightly happy when I realised that I would now have two lots of presents every Christmas and birthday. In fact, despite the divorce initially being a huge blow, I realised that the whole thing was actually going to work in my favour in the long term.

  A new, weirdly exciting phase of my life was about to begin, and with more presents and two houses, I would surely look cool enough to pull any girl now … But while I was already mentally writing out extravagant gift lists, my sister was still distraught. In my child’s brain, I saw it as the start of a new chapter, whereas she saw it as the end of one. I guess everyone deals with divorce differently, and I think the best thing parents can do is to keep the kids out of it as much as possible.

  My parents said they would make sure that both of my new houses had a pond, which was another massive bonus. For some strange reason I was, and still am, obsessed with fish. I’m a Pisces, so that may have something to do with it. You may (or may not) be interested to hear that I’m a keen deep-sea fisherman and have a fishing boat moored in Hayling Island, just off Portsmouth, which I take on regular excursions around the world. See, I’m not so camp after all!

  Anyway, I’m getting distracted. Let’s get back to the story.

  From what I remember my parents’ divorce was really quite amicable. Amelia and I were kept out of all of the proceedings, and not once did we see any kind of arguments between them. I don’t think there was any big drama when it came to their break-up: they had simply fallen out of love with each other.

  The only thing that did upset me was the idea of my dad cross-dressing. As a child, Mrs Doubtfire was one of my favourite films. It must have made quite an impression on me, as I once got very upset believing that the only way Dad would be able to see Amelia and I was if he dressed up as an elderly woman like Robin Williams did in the film. I think a whole generation of divorcee Doubtfire kids genuinely believed our fathers now had to become transvestites.

  As I started to get older, I refused to let my parents’ divorce give me a skewed attitude to relationships. I have friends from broken families and as a result they’ve become really cynical about love, but I believe that just because one relationship doesn’t work out it doesn’t mean that they’re all doomed to fail. Anyway, there was no way I was going to let my parents’ divorce put me off my quest for the perfect partner.

  As part of the divorce negotiations my sister and I were given the choice of who we wanted to live with. It was a hard decision to have to make but I was a massive mummy’s boy so Amelia and I lived with Mum, moving to a housing estate called Highwood Park in Hedge End, near Southampton.

  Initially Dad stayed in our family home before buying a new-build in Southampton, so he wasn’t far away. We saw him at least every other weekend, and continued to do so when he later bought a new house on Hayling Island. I was excited about this new beginning, but it turned out to be a horrible time. It was around 1997 and my sister had just turned 12 when she decided that she wanted to go to boarding school. I think she wanted a bit more independence and it was also her way of trying to put our parents’ divorce behind her.

  When Amelia left I was alone living with Mum, and it soon became clear that she wasn’t coping with the divorce as well as we’d all thought she was.

  Mum seemingly became terribly thin and weighed six and a half stone, and being the only person around, it fell to me to comfort her. I hated seeing her so lonely and at the time she felt like she didn’t really have any sort of social life, which must have been terribly difficult for her.

  As soon as I went to bed at night she would open a bottle of Martini – which would be empty by the time I came down the next morning. She would sit in the kitchen smoking hundreds of cigarettes, and playing the same two songs over and over again. The songs were Scarlet’s ‘Independent Love Song’ and ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ from the Evita soundtrack, and even now when I hear them I am instantly transported back to those Martini days.

  Even though she was obviously very low, I never regarded Mum’s drinking phase as her being an alcoholic. It was more of a, ‘I’m going to get drunk and forget all my troubles because that’s what I need to do right now’ kind of thing. Ab Fab, if you will. In years to come I was to know exactly how she felt. To this day Mum is my absolute rock, and we get drunk and talk about life and love and dance to ‘New York, New York’. She is my favourite person on this earth.

  Mum was paying for half of our school fees so she had no money at all. Any spare cash she had after she had bought the household essentials went on Martini and presents for us. She bought me a gecko called Spike from a car boot sale for being good at school, and he soon became my confidant. I felt so terrible for her, but as a 10-year-old I couldn’t do an awful lot to help, except cuddle her whenever she needed me to.

  I have no idea what happened money-wise when my parents went their separate ways, but I do know we were really struggling.

  Dad is a wealthy man these days, but I don’t know if he had money back then. He’s not someone who flaunts it – he lives in a normal house and drives a normal car. Amelia and I always went to private schools, but I had no idea at the time that that was anything to do with wealth. To be honest, I just assumed everyone paid for education. A private education is all I’ve ever known and when I was that age I assumed everyone attended a school that resembled Hogwarts.

  All of her life Mum had dreamed of becoming a radio presenter. She’s blonde and glamorous and always looks immaculate so she would be amazing on TV, but radio has always been her passion and she would do anything she could to be involved in that world. Some of my most vivid memories of childhood involve me spending hours on end in radio studios in my pyjamas because Mum was working at Max FM most evenings.

  The work was all voluntary and the radio station probably reached about 50 people in the Southampton area. It was the most unglamorous place you could imagine. We’d have to stay there until 11pm and I’d often fall asleep on the sofa of the studio. I remember getting very excited when Mum used to give me 20p to go and get a hot chocolate. It was the highlight of those long nights.

  It got to a point when in order to earn a bit of spare cash Mum took a job delivering videos to the local video rental shop. She was paid £80 a week, but £70 of it went on babysitters for me when she was out delivering.

  I remember my best friend Rupe
rt’s mum sneaking kitchen rolls and cigarettes into our house and hiding them so Mum didn’t realise. She’d stumble across them and assume she’d bought them and forgotten about them. How she never caught onto it I’ll never know!

  Also, most of my clothes were handed down to me from Rupert, but back then he was a lot fatter than me so I spent most of the 90s in clothes that were ‘you’ll grow into them’ huge, and often had a massive ‘Gap’ logo on the front. Not very chic, I’m sure you’ll agree.

  Rupert’s parents, Joanna and Charles, later discovered that he was hiding boxes of cereal in his bedroom to eat throughout the night, which sparked the weight issue. Rupert hit puberty alarmingly early, and had he not been caught with cereal and shed the pounds he would have resembled a young, bum-fluffed version of George Michael, which is never a good look. His mum made sure he got his upper lip sugared regularly for the next two years until he learned to shave. Sugaring is basically waxing, but camper – especially when you’re meant to be shaving.

  There are 12 days between Rupert and I and we’ve been best friends ever since we were born. If it’s at all possible, his love life has been more disastrous than mine. We’ve basically grown up bonding over masturbation stories, and a series of crap relationships. He now works as a very serious doctor and is still useless in love.

  I used to spend half my life at Rupert’s house when I was growing up and I always felt slightly inferior because his parents were still together and very much in love. They lived in a gorgeous house, had horses and money was never a problem. Rupert would always have the latest PlayStation games, whereas I would be a year or so behind because they always went down in price when their popularity waned. I would virtually live on his bedroom floor for weeks after the latest release. The day he was given a DVD player was momentous because they were so rare, and we were glued to his sofa for an entire summer as we made our way through a series of Jilly Cooper-esque, soft-porn, 80s rom-coms that his mother favoured.

  Rupert’s house was stylish, always immaculate and smelt like you were walking into The White Company. It was a heady mix of fresh laundry and beautifully scented diffusers, candles and room sprays, whereas my house was more Martini and Air Wick plug-in. Mum went through a stage of putting vinegar everywhere because apparently it gets rid of the smell of smoke, but it just made everything smell very acidic and the saucers of light brown liquid looked terribly unsightly.

  Joanna and Charles are the kind of parents that you dream of ultimately having as your mother- and father-in-law one day. Joanna is very glamorous and completely mad. On more than one occasion I’ve caught her hoovering at 7am completely naked, or walked into their bedroom to find her, again naked, frying under her personal sunbed with a cocktail.

  I’ll never forget the time Rupert and I decided to go though her knicker drawer for some reason, and we discovered a collection of vibrators that could rival Cheska’s. I think Charles just accepts his wife’s eccentric ways after 40 years of marriage.

  When I was a kid all I wanted to do was go out and play with Rupert, or sit in my room pretending I was a marine biologist. I’d spend a lot of time reading the notes the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society sent me about my adopted killer whale, Sharky.

  I learned from the silent days I whiled away in my bedroom that being alone is my idea of hell. There is nothing I hate more than having to spend time in my own company – I have no one to laugh at my stupid jokes or listen to my woes. I need to bounce off other people.

  Nowadays, if ever I do find myself on my own I make sure there are two bottles of red wine and 40 cigarettes to keep me company. I’ll watch Will and Grace or Sex and the City because they always talk about sex and relationships, so it feels just like being with Binky and Cheska.

  If you speak to anyone who went to boarding school they will always say the worst thing about it was going back on a Sunday evening after a weekend at home. Especially during winter when it was raining and cold and you’d been pulled from the comfort of your bedroom following a warming Sunday roast and a David Attenborough special.

  One particular Sunday Mum and I were returning home from taking Amelia back to her boarding school listening to the radio, as we always did. Elton John had just released ‘Candle in the Wind’ and I remember that it was playing on the car radio while we talked. I was thinking how lucky Amelia was that she was going to be spending all week staying with her friends in her dorm in a constant sleepover. Something clicked and I turned to Mum and told her that I wanted to go to boarding school like her.

  My mum later told someone that was one of the saddest days of her life, because although she really didn’t want me to go, she couldn’t stop me. It was my choice and my decision and I had to make my own fate in life.

  I’ve always followed my instincts and it felt like the right place for me to be. I wish I had understood back then what my mum must have been feeling. She had been through a divorce. She was living in a new house with no money, and spending her evenings with nothing but a bottle of Martini for company. It must have felt like the final straw when her youngest child decided he wanted to leave home, aged nine.

  Later that month I started to board at the same school as Amelia: West Hill Park in Titchfield, Hampshire. Because I had already been a day pupil at the school I had friends, so I felt OK about being away from home and I thought I would be fine. I took my teddy (imaginatively called Teddy) with me, as well as Whaley (I think you can probably guess what he was). Teddy has long since retired and he now sits on Mum’s bed. I also took my Spice Girls Spice album with me, which was one of the first albums I ever had and still one of the greats. So with baggy clothes, my luxury items and a bowl haircut, I started boarding school.

  My first day was like any other, but it came as quite a shock to not go home to my own bedroom when the end-of-school bell rang. Instead, I was going back to a room of 15 boys. I kept telling myself I would get used to it and I was going to have the time of my life. For the first months I found it quite scary and I remember crying a lot in the night, so I must have been terribly homesick.

  The building was rumoured to be haunted and there was something called the midnight dash that new boys could do to prove their worth. You had to run through the dorms, past the headmaster’s room, then through a door that took you to the back of the stage in the main hall. That area was terrifying anyway, let alone in the dead of night. The idea was that you would get all the way to the dining hall, where you would grab a knife, fork and spoon to prove you’d been there, and then you had to run back upstairs, quietly slide past Matron’s office, and get back into your own dorm. If you could do that, you were really cool. I was never that cool. Instead, my friends and I took the other option and used to spend our spare time singing our favourite Disney songs in the dorm. Far less rock and roll, but I was never going to be one of the top boys who ruled the school, even when I was older.

  I’m horrendously dyslexic and back then I had absolutely no passion for learning. I’m creative so I know what I want to say and how I want to say it, but it was hard for me to get things down on paper at that time. I would stare out of the window and think of things I would much rather be doing. As a result I was never top of the class, which upset me greatly as I am a total perfectionist.

  I know it sounds very worthy, but to make myself feel better I started getting involved in anything to do with charity. I’ve always genuinely liked doing things for charity, and also it gave me a focus away from the academic side of things.

  I used to win the Charity Shield every year because I was involved in every good cause going. To be completely honest, I knew that the teachers couldn’t get angry if I said I was spending time raising money for the homeless when I should have been doing my homework – a foolproof plan. It wasn’t that I wasn’t clever and capable, because I was. I just rather liked the idea of being an actor and had absolutely no interest in academia, especially in subjects that I knew would never be of use to me, like algebra, which is complete bollo
cks. If you really don’t understand it, move on, you’ll never need it.

  As I got a bit older I realised that fame wasn’t just going to come knocking without me having any kind of talent. Back then, fame to me was Cilla Black and Dale Winton. It was the old legends that reigned supreme and they had worked bloody hard to get where they were.

  Therefore I decided I needed to pursue a passion that might one day help me to become an actor. So I began to work enormously hard on becoming a real Shakespearian actor. I started reading his plays and attempting to act them out when no one else was around. I dreamed about being on the stage at The Globe Theatre wearing purple tights and quoting lines from Hamlet. Instead I’ve ended up making a living out of being completely ridiculous on reality TV. Funny how things turn out!

  I never felt outnumbered by my mum, her sister and their friends. I still saw my dad a lot so I had a strong male role model, and I also had a lot of male friends, so I think I had a good balance, and this kept me as straight as possible for as long as it could.

  Ever since I can remember I’ve hung around with people who were seemingly more mature than me (many of my best friends are now in their 50s) and school was no different. Well, the other kids weren’t in their 50s, but I was hanging around with the guys in older years so I could learn from them – especially about girls. The older boys were at the kissing/feeling up stage, which was far more exciting than our silly crushes that were clearly going nowhere. It would be years before I’d even get to glimpse my first pair of boobs.

  Until then, the standard reaction amongst the boys in my year was that girls were just a bit shit – they were boring and they cried. But suddenly things had changed and they started to see girls as something other than an annoyance.

  The first girl I ever properly fell for at boarding school was called Olivia. I was around nine or 10 and I remember thinking that she was incredible. She had long blonde hair and she sucked her thumb a lot so her teeth were quite goofy, which at the time I obviously thought was quite attractive. She also had a large mole above the right side of her lip, just like Cindy Crawford, who was one of my pin-ups at the time.