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Two sides of the story
‘I CAUGHT HIM LYING ON THE SOFA LISTENING TO TAYLOR SWIFT… GREAT COMEDY MATERIAL’
Alastair Campbell and his daughter on their multigenerational lockdown
In March, as Britain hunkered down, many families came together, with older children moving back in with their parents. So how did ‘boomer’ dad Alastair Campbell and his ‘very millennial’ daughter, Grace, cope with life under the same roof? And, more importantly, are they still friends?
‘Grace has been a supporter of my daily bagpipeplaying… though her coffeemaking isn’t quite up to scratch’
Alastair
‘I’m not gonna lie’ and ‘hundred per cent’ are two phrases millennials overuse as much as my generation overuses banal observations about the weather.
Well, I’m not gonna lie, I was hundred per cent worried when my millennial daughter chose to go into lockdown with me and her mum, and bring her boyfriend with her, taking advantage of the granny flat attached to our house that neither of the grannies ever wanted.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Grace to bits; we have a very close relationship, get on well most of the time, laugh a lot, share secrets, and do a podcast together, Football, Feminism & Everything in Between.
However, she can also be very high-maintenance, very loud, despite having two softly spoken parents who love peace and quiet, and a total hypochondriac. We are talking someone whose GP thinks that there should be an NHS equivalent of ‘wasting police time’, and that Grace should be charged; who in recent years has variously had heart attacks, skin cancer, lung cancer, pelvic inflammatory disease, and all manner of gynaecological issues no dad should have to hear about.
That she has complained about all of the above, and been found to be ill with none of them, was the main reason why, I’m not gonna lie, part of me wished she and her boyfriend had stayed at his flat in Brixton. I envisaged that the mildest night-time sniffle would lead to her coming into our room at 3am (as happened with the heart attack that turned out to be wind) to demand we call an ambulance and alert the Royal Free Hospital to have a ventilator ready. I envisaged too that our tempers, locked in the same space, would create too many of the ferocious rows that we can occasionally create out of absolutely nothing.
Many weeks in, I’m not gonna lie, she has been a revelation. Apart from one genuine eczema flare-up, there has been next to no illness talk, and no desire to call, let alone visit, a doctor; there has been much sincere gratitude about a well-stocked fridge and her mum’s excellent cooking; there has been considerable sympathy and, more importantly, great support for her technophobic dad trying to do meetings and interviews on devices he cannot operate solo; and day after day there has been good humour and good company from both her and her boyfriend.
Even on 30 April, her 26th birthday, an event in her mind every bit as significant as the Queen’s, she was totally chilled about just having a few friends take part in a ‘Grace-themed quiz night’ on Zoom. I sat it out, identifying closely with Frankie Boyle’s tweet: ‘I cannot tell you how lonely I would have to be to take part in a family quiz.’
Like me with my speaking gigs, Grace’s comedy work has collapsed, and given abject poverty is another of her exaggerated millennial worries, I thought this too would bring additional stress into the house. Again, I have been impressed by how well she has adapted. She has continued with comedy online and has a very exciting project in the works that will earn her some proper money. She might even start paying rent, who knows?
Her coffee-making is still not quite up to her mum’s standards, though it’s improving, and she has perhaps not taken my Tree Olympics idea as seriously as I would like. She has, however, been a wholehearted supporter of my daily bagpipe-playing, and it was her idea to pipe home our neighbour, Nurse Sissy Bridge, when she returned from a double shift and the street turned out for the first Thursday-night clap for carers.
Even when, after watching Misbehaviour, the film about Miss World, I showed her my dreadfully sexist cuttings from the ’80s, when I covered the beauty circus as a young reporter, my passionately feminist daughter was very forgiving.
‘Different era, Dad, different attitudes. I’m not gonna lie, I tell all my friends you’re a real feminist, hundred per cent.’
That’s nice, Grace. Thank you. Now, any chance you can get Mum to show you how she makes the coffee? Happy Father’s Day.
‘Football is the greatest cure for his mentalhealth issues, so I feared he’d plummet… But my worries were in vain’
Grace
A part of me was really worried about what my dad would be like in lockdown. He is secretly more sociable than he lets on. He likes his social life out of the house and then he loves coming home to peace and quiet. It’s really amazing that he and Mum have let me stick around!
My main concern was the pause of Burnley FC, which basically he loves more than his whole family combined, which I’m fine with. We all know well that football is the greatest cure for my dad’s mental-health issues, so I feared that he’d plummet without the lifeline of his trips north. It’s like depriving the Kardashians of plastic surgery. It just doesn’t work.
So the on/off depressions he suffers from, which I remember as a fairly regular feature of my childhood, was a worry. His mindset was unlikely to be helped by the fact that one of the first decisions he had to make on going into self-isolation, long before the Government was recommending it, was to postpone the publication of his book on depression, which was due out in mid-may.
I’ve not read most of my dad’s books, but I have read this one, and I was really excited for it to come out because it really is an important book that will mean a lot to many. He’s also very determined when it comes to this sort of stuff and he doesn’t like things getting in his way.
My worries have all been in vain. He had a dip for a few days mid-april, and has definitely been a bit manic much of the rest of the time, but he has poured that into writing, music and exercise, and it has actually been enjoyable to be around him. Perhaps the lack of football means he has to find other things to talk about.
It’s also been interesting to watch him and my mum being together 24 hours a day. I’m gonna be honest (that’s another phrase my dad despises), I worried that they would drive each other crazy. But actually, they have been #couplegoals. They get up really early and they’ve done a two-hour walk with the dog before I am even out of bed. Dad comes back and shows me pictures of trees he has taken for his ‘Tree of the Day’ competition on social media, and I pretend to be interested. One of the best laughs I have had was hearing him tell some hotshot TV executive on the phone that a country-by-country ‘pick your best tree’ TV show would morph into the first ever Tree Olympics, to replace the real one. He is inspirationally deluded.
He and Mum have also got a song bird recognition app, which makes them officially old in my book, so I have to listen to all the different birds he has recorded. Quite a lot of my comedy is about growing up with this person who is so different to how he is portrayed in the media, and his trees and his Shazam for birds have given me so much new material.
I haven’t seen or heard a single row between them, not even a little one, which again is not how I remember them when I was growing up. It’s made me realise that maybe it is other people and the pressures they bring into their lives that make them argue when they do.
My dad is the least domesticated person I know. He can’t cook and can’t make coffee – or says he can’t – and I have never seen him change a light bulb. Once my mum asked him to mow the lawn, and he said, ‘If I wanted to mow lawns, I would have become a gardener.’ But he has definitely been making more of an effort. I have found him unloading the dishwasher several times. I cannot tell you what progress this represents.
I also caught him lying on the sofa one day listening to Taylor Swift. That gave me great comedy material too. Like – he hates how I say ‘like’ when I don’t need to – finding out your dad identifies with songs about young girls who have been dumped by their boyfriend, it’s just too good.
My dad started to work for Tony Blair when I was a few months old, so I have been aware that he has this strange media persona all my life. The past few weeks have confirmed to me that while that persona is a part of who and what he is, there is so much more to him than that, and lockdown has reminded me it’s a lot of fun to be around him in all his complexity. Alastair Campbell’s memoir, Living Better: How I Learnt To Survive Depression (John Murray, £16.99), will now be published on 3 September