Life & Society
Julian's week: God has been taking care of me on a daily basis
Published 31 July 2006
The past is making itself known in surprising ways, like shells washed up on the seashore. When I was 16 and full of adolescent angst, I wrote to a Benedictine monk I knew and asked him to pray for me. I met him last week, some 30 years later, and he showed me my original note, kept folded in his diary. He is still praying for me every day. That's over 10,000 prayers, I've worked out. Not to be sniffed at.
I feel rich, in a spiritual, loved-up sort of way. God has been well and truly exhorted to take care of me on a daily basis. If my note had been discarded decades ago I may not have lived such a charmed life. Suddenly everything has become clear. I've just been offered a TV series in which I'll appear alongside Andi Peters and Myleene Klass. If that's not the hand of a benevolent God I'd like to know what is.
Then, quite out of the blue, a nun wrote to me. Something I said in an interview some years ago had moved her to include me in her prayers ever since . . . This explains the panto season in Northampton.
It's only fair that I now start praying for them in return. But I, as we all know, have not dedicated myself to a life of prayer. I am a renowned homosexual. I can't just take to my knees all day long and chit-chat to the Almighty. I have to walk the dog, tend to my lavender plants, meet tedious TV executives, and occasionally appear on stage making lewd remarks. Such is my life. Anxious as I am to dedicate a portion of my time to the Holy Rosary, I'm undecided how to allocate my prayers. I'm obviously going to pray for all my family and friends, world peace and a sexual encounter with Stephen Dorff; but what about the monk and the nun?
It seems ungracious to enquire what I got from them. Was I worth a whole Hail Mary or an entire Glory Be when they were praying for me at their leisure? Or was I just lumped in with all and sundry, along with Northern Ireland and the Middle East?
I don't want to overdo it. I take it for granted that monks and nuns in general have led blameless lives. Their passage to paradise is more or less guaranteed. Mine isn't. So I have decided on one Our Father for the pair of them, and the other ten Hail Marys originally earmarked, I'm going to keep for myself. My need is greater: I'm up for a Toilet Duck commercial next week.
My paternal grandfather, Jack Clary, died in 1952, long before I was conceived over the breakfast bar of a holiday bungalow in Clacton-on-Sea. It transpires that my grandmother gave his old frock coat to the boy who lived next door. The boy grew up, kept the coat to wear while decorating throughout his adult life, and is now retired and living in Norfolk.
This year Jack featured in a TV show I did tracing my family tree. The caring pensioner watched the programme, then dry-cleaned the aged, unassuming garment and posted it to me. I put it on. Fifty-four years after he died - which was five years before I was born - and 21 years before a holy monk began praying for me, Jack's coat rests on my shoulders.
I went to a charity ball at the Grosvenor House Hotel last Saturday. Everyone was very dressed up. Dorothy Perkins must have been picked clean. To raise money for a sterling cause, I signed copies of my book for £10 a time.
Emboldened by the Sauvignon Blanc, a laddish Geordie sauntered over, handed me a piece of paper and asked for my autograph. "I'd be delighted," I said (because Danny La Rue once told me that is the correct response).
"And could you write on it," he continued earnestly, "that Lee has got the best c**k you've ever had?"
"I couldn't put that," I said. "That title is reserved for Stephen Dorff. God willing." Besides, who knows where that inscription might end up in 30 - or 300 - years' time? If we could see into the future none of us would have voted for Tony Blair.
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