An impressive proportion of the people who contribute to The Sunday Times's "A life in the day of" column get up with the lark. They're off to the kitchen to make cups of herbal tea for their wives or to a gym or some frenetically busy office where they don't drink or even eat. So it was a relief to hear about the lifestyle of Ian Kilmister, otherwise known as Lemmy, the front man for Motorhead.
Now 67, Lemmy says that as long as he's "up early enough to chase a few women", he's happy. "If I'm not chasing em, I'm kicking em out of my apartment when I finally decide to roll out of bed." After 40 years on the road, the stuff in his bathroom "has all been nicked from hotels", he says; his main diet is sandwiches and he doesn't drink coffee for breakfast. "I drink fruit juice so long as it's watered down with a good shot of liquor." He says he starts drinking when he wakes and goes on until he goes to sleep but never gets drunk.
So lunch might be a chicken sandwich, a couple of drinks and a smoke. "I'm on a packet a day at the moment. When I got diagnosed with diabetes a few years ago, they told me to cut down on the drinking and smoking, but I didn't. I'm still here, aren't I?"
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If he has an interview to do, he goes down to the Rainbow Bar and Grill on LA's Sunset Boulevard. (Though born in Stoke, he's lived in LA for 20 years.) There he might bump into his son, Paul. "I'm not sure how you know if you're a good dad, but I think I'm OK. We've swapped girlfriends a couple of times. That certainly brings you closer together."
Sometimes he spends all afternoon at the Rainbow and usually ends up having dinner there. "Maybe spicy chicken and mozzarella sticks. I don't bother with vegetables. A lot of young chicks come up and yeah, they hit on me. They want to know things like what it was like being a roadie for Hendrix. F*** amazing! I got to sit on the stage and watch him He was the best."
Sometimes he ends up "taking a chick back". He's read all sorts of stuff, he says, about how many women he's supposed to have slept with. "I once said it was 1,000 but it's more like 2,000 now." But then he's never married, and he started at 16. "That's less than one a week."
In The Times the other day, Carol Midgley lamented how dull the British middle classes have become. "Job insecurity has created an epidemic of sensibleness." People don't really drink any more, even at leaving parties; the government's attempt to make us think we're all alcoholics seems to be working. "Competitive non-drinking, if you ask me, is more du jour than competitive drinking. The teetotaller at the dinner party is now an inspiration, not a weirdo." In the last week or two, Damien Hirst, Colin Farrell and John Thompson have talked happily about their teetotal lifestyles. Louise Mensch says she's eschewed booze since moving to America. They all sound worth avoiding. I'd rather spend a couple of hours with Lemmy.
Tabloid money: Miliband sails on, blithely crooning, I'll do it my way'
Ed Miliband is fast becoming Labour's new Neil Kinnock, says Trevor Kavanagh in The Sun. "In the past month he has been trashed by Tony Blair, ditched by rich donors and, humiliatingly, rated by voters as even less trustworthy than predecessor Gordon Brown." Through all this Mr Miliband sails on, blithely crooning, I'll do it my way.' He means, of course, he will do it the way he is told to by the trade unions who bought and paid for his shock leadership victory. Mr Miliband is the prisoner of public-sector dinosaurs who now hold Labour's purse strings, dictate policy and choose Labour MPs.
Even Labour's "traditional friends at The Guardian few of them horny-handed sons of toil warn that Labour are losing supporters they have so long taken for granted. The threat comes not from David Cameron, who has his own problems, but from Ukip, who have gobbled up so many Tories and are now greedily eying up the working classes."
"David Cameron and William Hague, neither of whom has ever heard a shot fired in anger, want to end the civil war in Syria by shipping crates of arms to the rebels, including assorted al-Qa'eda supporters," says Tony Parsons in the Daily Mirror. "Good thinking! And exactly like trying to put out a house fire by spraying it with petrol."
"Am I alone in wishing that the Prime Minister would spend a few more weeks in Ibiza with his missus?" asks Rod Liddle in The Sun. Everyone seemed angry that he took a break when the country was "under attack by jihadi savages". But he wouldn't have done any good here far better for him to be bopping in Ibiza's nightclubs. "Governments are overrated and usually do more bad than good. The Belgians recently went more than a year and a half without any government at all and nobody really noticed. Everybody just got on with their lives perfectly happily. I know that was only Belgium, but the principle holds, I think."
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