When I was 29 I went to Italy. But not on holiday.
I went there with my first wife in 1997, to help her to look for a miracle cure.
She had been told she was terminally ill, but to her that was unacceptable, so she decided that instead of dying she was going to get better.
She asked the Anglicans and the Catholics for a miracle and they both said no. According to them, you had to be somebody big like Bernadette Soubiroux of Lourdes to pull that kind of thing off.
Anyway, she didn't care for that answer so she started watching assorted tele-evangelists on the Christian Channel until she found someone who said he could fix her, or rather who could get God to.
At the end of 1996 she was pretty ill but she decided to go see one of the tele-evangelists live at Wembley Arena. Even though there was a parade of people going up on stage at the end claiming to have been healed of this or that, she wasn't one of them and I was pretty skeptical about the whole thing. I thought there was a good chance it was all a load of baloney..
By the end of the following year, she had got a lot worse. She was in and out of the hospice having blood transfusions and she couldn't move around much. Then she found out that Mr TV Healer Man wasn't coming to Wembley this year, and the closest place he would be visiting would be Turin in Italy. Obviously, she wanted to go.
I didn't want to go, I thought the whole thing was bonkers, but I agreed to look into the feasibility of getting her there. She really needed to be transported lying down, and this made aeroplane or train travel either prohibitively difficult or prohibitively expensive. I kept ringing up the train people and I got a different story (and a different price) every time, and with all the changes of train etc I just couldn't see it working.
Her mum had decided to go with her, and so had two elderly evangelists from a local church, but none of them were on the organising committee. That only had one person on it, and that was me.
In the end, after yet another frustrating circular conversation with the train company, I decided the only way to get her there was to hire a mobile home and drive her there myself.
There's a bit in Armageddon where Bruce Willis has just been informed it's the end of the world, and they want him to tell some other guys how to drill into an asteroid. He has a virtual meltdown on camera as he realises that he is the best hope they've got at fixing the world. And so, even though he doesn't want to, he decides to go himself. He tells his daughter that he just doesn't trust anybody else to do it. That's pretty much how I felt. I thought the whole plan of going to Italy with a terminally ill person had been dreamt up in cloud cuckoo land by the cuckoos, but then I had the sudden realisation that unfortunately I was the head cuckoo and it was me that was doing the dreaming.
So we got a load of drugs from the hospice and the doctor, and we got certificates to say we could take them through customs, and we went to Italy and back. We went through the Channel Tunnel and the Mont Blanc tunnel and I saw the Alps and I had a bit of a walk round Turin, and at one point I paid 60,000 lira to hire an ambulance, but it wasn't much of a holiday.
And I still thought the tele-evangelist guy was full of baloney, and after we came back she didn't get any better, and she died about 5 weeks later, on the 12th day of Christmas 1998. I never really believed she was going to get better, because I was in the habit of taking more notice of doctors and nurses than I was of sun tanned blokes off the telly waving the Bible around, and I used to wonder if that was part of the reason why she didn't, but I couldn't buy into something I wasn't sincere about, because that's just how I am.
I am so sorry, Jonathan.
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