Meat Loaf was sort of cool in my family until Tom was about thirteen, and someone at school told him he (Meat Loaf) was ‘properly shite’, at which point the great man went onto the banned list of music that could ever be played at Park Cottage, at least in public.
When Meat Loaf died last week, around forty years beyond the reasonable life
expectancy with which any body in that state should stay alive, I listened to the entirety of Bat Out of Hell album on my extended dog walk, and was painfully reminded of the night he indirectly encouraged me to do something unbelievably stupid.
It was 1984, and I was a soldier. I can’t remember the details, other than that they involved me drinking alone and heavily one night in a pub near Andover, having been stood up by someone or other. I can’t even remember why I got so angry, given that me being stood up was not an unknown occurrence: after all, a romantic attachment to an ambitious but spotty junior officer who was about to go to the Falkland Islands for five months was, let’s face it, a bit of a niche offer.
I think that it was the only time in my life that I quite knowingly drunk myself way beyond any legal driving limit. This is not a massively impressive claim, given that my body would descend into an amoeba like floppiness after about four pints, and then narcolepsy after a couple more. I may have topped it up with some Famous Grouse, but it would be fair to say that, by the time I arrived in the car park, I was offering to road safety what the current Prime Minister is offering to good governance, let alone morality.
I just about managed to get the key into the ignition, and slide the cassette into the right hole to start playing Bat Out Of Hell back at me, through the tinny and pathetic door speakers. I just about managed to leave the car park in the right direction for the barracks. I just about kept the car on the tarmac for the first mile or so.
‘Oh baby, you’re the only thing in this whole world That’s pure and good and right’ Meatloaf and I sung together. He probably meant some woman; I meant myself.
‘I’m going to hit the highway like a battering ram on my Silver Black Phantom bike’, he said, as I prepared to hit the highway like a rice pudding in my forty-two horsepower Renault 14. He was probably going 120 mph by the time that he saw the sudden curve, way too late. I was going about 50, but it was still quite fast enough to fly off the road at the left handed hairpin, done with any semblance of control.
I remember the feeling, much like the feeling when I went under water in the Zambezi when the raft I was in capsized many years later: I may have been trolleyed, but I wasn’t so trolleyed that I couldn’t feel the awful pang of having let everyone down, no one more than myself. For a second or so, I waited as I slewed rapidly sideways into the blackness, just waiting for a four hundred year oak to stop the car and kill me. I had quite enough sobriety, and ample time, to feel a terrible sense of regret.
Shortly afterwards, I realised that, far from colliding anything, the car had slid through a gate that was miraculously wide open, without touching any point of it, and had gone backwards about thirty or forty yards into a ploughed field. It hadn’t even rolled. All I can remember was getting out of the car to throw up for a while and, after a pause to get my head back on straight, climbing back in the car to hear my old friend singing the opening phrases of Heaven can Wait.
Since that day, I have never knowingly driven with excess alcohol in my system. Not wholly because I am some moral convert, although I probably am, but because I never again wanted to experience something that was palpably close to waiting for death.
Meat Loaf touched many lives at many points, but he had more than a walk on part in my own.
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