THIS MAN’S LIFE

THERE is this girl who stole my heart — and she calls me Daddy. Last Thursday, she broke my heart. Emilia, who is three years of age, looked the same as she did the day before or the week before. She had, however, moved into a different period of her very young life. It came out of nowhere. We were coming down a big slide at a play centre in Stillorgan when she turned to me and said: “Daddy, you don’t need to hold my hand. I can get down myself.”

I nearly fell off the slide in shock. I told Emilia that I mightn’t hold her hand now on the big slide but I will hold her heart forever.

She looked at me and smiled, like I was a mad character in her favourite show, Paw Patrol.

I was almost hurt; then, when I came to my senses, I was proud of her.

Still, I was wistful at the sense of something lost forever. I realised that part of her life is perhaps over, however slowly it happened. It is perhaps an indication of the shifts that happen in a relationship between a father and a young child: the things that are really monumental and earthshattering take place below the ground.

And then one day you wake up and your daughter is driving a car rather than sitting in the baby seat.

I dread that day. I enjoy the ritual too much: buckling her into the back, putting on her favourite CD (The Corrs’s Jupiter Calling) and driving her to her little school; unbuckling her, taking her out with her tiny school bag on her tiny back.

One day she is not going need that car seat any more. And the car seat will sit in the garage. Just a memory.

I don’t doubt (but I do fear) that next thing my beautiful little angel, my pride and joy, Emilia will be telling me that I know nothing about music — or life for that matter. At that point, I will begin to understand what my father had to go through with me.

Emilia may outgrow my lap one day, but she’ll never outgrow my heart.

I’ve been watching The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story on TV. I don’t think I could be accused of critical cruelty if I said that it doesn’t quite do him justice.

I met him once, at the opening of his £11m shop in the West End of London in the summer of 1992. The press and the public were like mobs outside the Palace at Versailles in 1789. They weren’t fighting for food. This was a status-conscious party with a few tons of caviar, smoked salmon and roast beef thrown in (it was like a scene from Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves) and washed down with an ocean of Champagne. So, the mobs outside the velvet rope in the West End were rioting for a glimpse of the Italian maestro’s guests milling up the red carpet... Kylie. Naomi. Elton. Sting.

People so famous, so full of their own importance, they didn’t need surnames.

I had gone as a guest of Britt Ekland and Brown Thomas buyer Ian Galvin. At the soiree, I chatted to head girl (the editor) at Vogue Alexandra Shulman, Sir Ralph Halpern, Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, and Joan Collins in a dress so blindingly bling that Stephen Hawking could have seen it from one of his black holes out in the Milky Way.

It was all a bit mad. But nothing unusual in that. Sting, in an entirely incongruous — and unexpected — designer vest, went walkabout with wife Trudi, stopping, on occasion, to talk to promoter Harvey Goldsmith and Elton John’s manager, John Reid. Sting was more over-thetop than Versace and Elton combined. It was difficult, though not impossible, to talk to a man with his nipples poking through his vest.

Britt introduced Ian and I to Mr Versace. Reggio Calabria’s most famous export said he was anxious to see more Irish women in his spectacular if overthe-top gear. Sweden’s most famous export since the Saab, Britt Ekland, escorted her VBF Mr Galvin all night and was on hand to introduce him — and I — to Elton John, who was beat into a Versace shirt and jeans. The star told me he was due in Stockholm the next day for a show.

It wasn’t Joan Collins’s night to relax either. “I’ve got to do a bloody ad in Amsterdam tomorrow!” she told me, as another army of photographers congregated behind her.

Later, over dinner in Britt Ekland’s house in Fulham, Joan — still resplendent in her extravagant white and gold Versace dress — revealed the real cause of her mood.

Despite its having been on the market for over a year, Joan, the poor lamb, was unable to sell her house in America. As such, she had resorted to the intolerable measure of having to live in it.

Alone.