I put the blame for this entirely on myself,” says Grace Maxwell, maintaining firm eye contact with her partner on the sofa opposite, Edwyn Collins, the legendary singer songwriter, the man who in the drear days of the early Eighties coined The Sound of Young Scotland.

Collins had a stroke four years ago. It followed several years of high blood pressure and hard drinking, which put his wife and son under years of pressure. Yet illness had an extraordinary effect on their decades-long relationship — Collins probably wouldn’t have made his remarkable progress without Maxwell’s support.

She should be congratulating herself, yet she feels guilty.“Edwyn was in such pain that he was medicating himself and I missed that,” she reflects. “I wasn’t paying enough attention, that’s the only way I think about what happened.

“I should have dragged him to the doctor. I should have known. For goodness sake, my grandmother died of a stroke at 40. Why didn’t I think about blood pressure and all those issues? I was not vigilant, and that’s why I think I’m to blame.

“I look at Edwyn sometimes and think, if only I’d paid attention then we wouldn’t be here . . .”

We’re sitting in a disorderly recording studio in Hampstead, northwest London. There are vintage guitars everywhere and disembodied chunks of amplifier and orphaned piano keyboards. There are Sex Pistols posters on the walls and all the shades of hip, campy trinketry that’s collected by those in the music industry. If a room could resemble the brain of the man who wrote Blue Boy and Rip It Up this is the room. Which is fitting, because round these parts the brain of Edwyn Collins is always the subject under consideration.

Four years ago, at the age of 45, the former frontman of Orange Juice, the writer of some of the most sparkling pop music Britain has ever produced, sustained two brain haemorrhages, contracted MRSA, then spent six months in the Royal Free hospital. Today, though, his speech is knitting into increasingly lengthy sentences and his bizarre laugh, like an asthmatic donkey swallowing a wasp, is unleashed frequently. It’s a pleasure to note how remarkably spry, how hale he seems. “Thank you, I had two brain haemorrhages and spent six months in hospital,” he replies, tentatively, as though a stray thought had just reminded him why he hadn’t been himself of late.

Maxwell, on the other hand, seldom has the luxury of forgetting. The 51-year-old from Bellshill has been Collins’s manager for 25 years, his romantic partner for the same span and, since that nightmarish moment in 2004 — midway between Antiques Roadshow and Sunday dinner — his saviour, nurse, protector, de facto physiotherapist and cheerleader-in-chief. The strokes also bestowed upon Collins aphasia, a condition which radically impairs the comprehension of speech; when he regained consciousness he was able to utter only four words: yes, no — and Grace Maxwell.

Falling and Laughing is Maxwell’s memoir of the struggle she and Collins have undertaken to recover if not his full health then a sort of functionality, a position from which incremental improvements can be made. Maxwell admits the self-pity is entirely hers. Collins adopts a humbling stoicism, a philosophical acceptance of his need to re-learn to walk, speak, write and feed himself: “Truthfully, the book is quite a self-indulgent act,” says Maxwell. “It’s just for me, just to discover if I could do it.”

It’s a given that modern misery-memoirs are written partly to inform those in similar positions they do not suffer alone. But it’s a convention Maxwell ignores: “Edwyn and I are eccentric, there’s no point in us telling others how to deal with this happening in their life. We’re not flag-waving sorts of people, and we still aren’t sure how you deal with it. So it’s very deliberately not a rallying, feel-good sort of book. Beyond my own experience I don’t have much to say about brain haemorrhages.”

In fact, the relationship between Collins and Maxwell looks much as it did before his collapse. The singer was always set apart from others by his celebrity, wit and precocity; Maxwell was always the elder partner; fondly stern, saddled with all the respon-sibilities. “The neurologist takes me alone into a side room,” she writes of receiving

Collins’s diagnosis. “What he tells me I absorb silently . . . I feel an explosion. My blood, surging. My skin tingling, pins and needles. My eyes feel like they don’t fit.”

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