Daydream Believer: Confessions of a Hero-Worshipper [Paperback]

'Enchanting...while writing a series of richly comic recollections which had me laughing out loud every few pages, he has also written a book with much more underlying seriousness and much more to say about the human condition than any Booker prizewinner could achieve' A.N. Wilson, Country Life 'Intensely comical... contains some of the funniest scenes I have seen in print this year' - Jeremy Paxman, Observer "Although en route we do meet plenty of people more famous... none of them can begin to match the charm of the book's bumbling narrator in his Dickensian progression from weedy daydreamer, to failed solicitor, country squire, genealogist, obituarist and lurker at stage doors. This man is an institution, one of the great English eccentrics of our time.' James Delingpole, Literary Review

'This man is an institution, one of the great English eccentrics of our time.' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Hugh Massingberd has written some 40 books, including works of genealogical reference, studies of royalty and social history and a series of illustrated volumes on palaces, grand hotels and country houses. His five collections of Daily Telegraph obituaries have all been best-sellers. This is the autobiography of a man described as "an institution, one of the great English eccentrics of our time", as well as being immortalized by Private Eye as "Hugh Massivesnob".

'Enchanting ...while writing a series of richly comic recollections which had me laughing out loud every few pages, he has also written a book with much more underlying seriousness and much more to say about the human condition than any Booker prizewinner could achieve' A.N. Wilson, Country Life'Intensely comical ... contains some of the funniest scenes I have seen in print this year' - Jeremy Paxman, Observer''Although en route we do meet plenty of people more famous ... none of them can begin to match the charm of the book's bumbling narrator in his Dickensian progression from weedy daydreamer, to failed solicitor, country squire, genealogist, obituarist and lurker at stage doors. This man is an institution, one of the great English eccentrics of our time.' James Delingpole, Literary Review

Praise for Hugh Massingberd:

'His novelistic delight in human oddity, his capacity, where due for hero worship (particularly of sporting, military or theatrical luminaries) and his delicately anarchic sense of fun ... Among the hundreds of us newspaper hacks today there is a tiny handful of true artists at work. Of this select band, Massingberd is king.' A.N. Wilson

'Although en route we do meet plenty of people more famous ... none of them can begin to match the charm of the book's bumbling narrator in his Dickensian progression from weedy daydreamer, to failed solicitor, country squire, genealogist, obituarist and lurker at stage doors. This man is an institution, one of the great English eccentrics of our time.' James Delingpole --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Hugh Massingberd has written or edited some forty books, including works of genealogical reference, studies of royalty and social history and a series of illustrated volumes on palaces, grand hotels and country houses, great and small. His five collections of Daily Telegraph obituaries have all been best-sellers. The fifth volume was shortlisted for the inaugural Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing in 2000.

'Did you ever know that you're my hero,' warbles Bette Midler in 'The Wind Beneath My Wings', 'and everything that I would like to be...' As a boy in the 1950s and an adolescent in the 1960s I would cover the walls of my suburban bedroom with graven images - cut-out press photographs of cricketers, jockeys, actors, satirists, authors, aristocrats. These were my heroes, an idiosyncratic mixture of idols who appeared to exude the insouciant self-confidence, style, glamour, panache (however flash and counterfeit) that I so conspicuously lacked.

Blushing, buttoned-up, painfully shy and acutely self-conscious, I constantly escaped into a fantasy world where I would be transmogrified into one or other of these heroes - sometimes, with careful editorial adjustments, an amalgam of several. In the title of another cheesy pop son, I was a 'Daydream Believer' - or should that be 'Deceiver'? Facts, figures, rejigged curriculum vitae, timetables and schedules, detailed menus, decorative schemes, even lists of favoured tradesmen were copiously compiled to provide a framework within which the imagination could take flight. After hours of annotation would come days of solitary play-acting, occasionally supplemented by such props as stripy caps and cricket bats, riding whipsm, batons and pretend microphones. The heroes would be 'stalked' outside stage doors, changing rooms, unsaddling enclosures. The object was not so much the collection of autographs - meaningless scrawls soon to be discarded - as the opportunity to be close!
!
to the idol, to bask in his aura, to overhear his voice and drink in every detail of his being.

Such 'trainspotting' might be regarded as a fairly harmless diversion in a teenage fan, something, surely, that he will naturally grow out of. Yet, as I approach my sixties and face up to impending mortality (hastened by a heart condition), I confess I have not grown out of it. Far from it.

It would be comforting to claim that the obsessive creep who emerges from these pages is, to borrow the title of my hero James Lees-Milne's romantic memoirs, Another Self. Yet to this day - thought I like to think I have shed some of my worst traits - I still loiter at stage doors, still spend most of my time transported in daydreams underpinned by painstaking research, still worship an ever-expanding gallery of heroes - now often far younger than myself.

It has taken me a long time to realize that there is something, well, sad (in both the old-fashioned and modern sense) as well as funny (peculiar and ha-ha) about all this. Only recently did I grasp the fact that the word 'fan' derives from 'fanatic'. Yet plenty of hints have been dropped along the way.

For instance, my uncle Hugh - an unconventional diplomatist from an Ulster family, who won the MC in the Great War and later became a Catholic and a Monsignor - found himself intensely irritated by my sycophantic desire to sit at his feet during a bizarre Grand Tour on which he conducted me around the Continent in order to qualify for membership of his comfortingly gloomy club. In between castigating me to other occupants of railway compartments as 'Puritano inglese', he denounced my daydreaming as 'unhealthy and unchristian'.

The belief thatone will somehow endear oneself to a hero by laboriously reciting his achievements is one of the fallacies of fandom. After all, why on earth should he be interested, or impressed, by hearing a litany of material he himself knows only too well? None the less, my urge to sit at my heroes' feet, to purr like a cat in their laps, to place their idealized images on a pedestal and bow down before them - to obliterate my own insignificant personality in their magical glow - remained paramount. The consequences have been dire, embarrassing, frequently farcical. To write about oneself is to reveal more than one intends. Self-deprecation, for example, is often a transparent mask for self-regard ('The Wind Beneath My Wings' is indeed a case in point), and snide score-settling usually blows up in your face. It is not for me, then, to analyse what follows. For all I know, it may well read like the ravings of a maniac, or perhaps it may even strike a chord or two of i!
dentification. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.