I didn't sleep as well last night, whether the cocktails were responsible I am not sure, but although I wasn't 100% sharp I don't think I could be classified as hungover. I was fit enough to start the day with a 30 minute swim in the lagoon before breakfast. I felt tinged with that morning after feeling, slightly regretting what I had done the night before. I am not sure it had been worth it. But then again, with a more reasonable and logical head on me, I realise that it's an arbitrary achievement to have stopped drinking for a certain number of days anyway and it doesn't actually make any difference if I have had a drink.
I didn't feel like another drink and at lunchtime I no longer coveted my neighbour's schooner.
I've been getting a fair amount of reading done. The first book that grabbed my attention is one that doesn't really serve to take me away from my life of my job - it's Arthur Smith's autobiography, "My Name Is Daphne Fairfax". It's another life of a comedian, one who is similar to me in many ways: an Edinburgh perennial, a resident of Balham (as I was for many years), someone who didn't settle down until well into his 40s who liked going out and drinking and having fun but who has also stopped drinking, though for more extreme reasons than I did - even if there was a similar soul-purging ephinany, though his was somewhat more dramatic than mine (he puked up rather than on to a turd). I even get a couple of mentions in the book, though only very much in passing. Smith is from the previous generation of comedians to mine, but he has been a big influence on my own career. He was one of the first stand ups I ever saw and his ethos of writing experimental shows and plays, along with his determination to keep coming back to the Fringe above all else have clearly encouraged me to follow in his footsteps. He is more gregarious than me, I think and more likely to take a chance and lose his inhibitions and end up making friends with strangers (though I suppose I had my moments). But there were quite a few similarities in his life story and mine.
In my own story he is an important peripheral figure who pops up every now and again, most crucially perhaps when at my first Fringe and having seen him on TV and I think compering the first live stand up gig I ever saw, I witnessed him standing at the bar of the Fringe Club alone, looking drunk and seemingly sadly surveying the room for possibilities. I was 19 years old and he seemed like an old man to me then (though must have been in his early 30s) and I was struck with horror. I wanted to be a comedian and here was a successful one. Was this my fate? Would I too be old and standing at a bar drunk hoping to pull?
As it turned out it was a pretty accurate view of how things would turn out for me, though probably not as sad for Arthur or myself as I imagined.
The mentions of me in the book come when he suggests that by the 90s comedy groupies were more interested in the likes of Lee and Herring, Rob Newman and Sean Hughes than him, although I don't think my name at least should be on that list. I am sure Arthur was doing much better than me in that regard in the 1990s, but it's funny to think that he might have been envious of me when I was such a hopeless loser, spending much more time alone at bars than he ever would. The other is during the chapter about his rendition of Hamlet which he wrote with Sally Phillips who I had recently split up with and who vented her fury at me under the not particularly obfuscating pseudonym of "Dick Kipper". Arthur says that he tried to dissuade her from doing this and felt uncomfortable about it, but funnily enough I think I was quite flattered to have figured in the work of one of my comedic heroes and the stuff Sally did was funny (and as much about herself as me). But I suspect that being so central to such a successful show probably didn't help my reputation in the business and more than one person gave me a mouthful for my shoddy treatment of the talented comic actress. Whilst being far from perfect I actually hadn't been half as bad as they thought and the relationship had run its course and we were stupidly young and there were unnecessary histrionics off-stage as well because everything seems so important at that age and as Arthur wisely concluded in a list of positive thoughts, "Because , somehow, Sally will get over her Dick Kipper sadness."
I certainly never bore any ill-feeling to Arthur (or Sally) over the play and was too gentlemanly to give my side of the story or reveal the issues at which Sally was at fault. And I still am. Strange to see it written about in a book though. I imagine most people who read it won't know who Dick Kipper refers to and not because of the sophistication of the pseudonym.
Anyway I found it an interesting and thoughtful book about someone from that first generation of alternative comedians who were more principled and somehow a little bit lazier (in quite a good way) or less ambitious maybe than those that would follow. It has elements that are very similar to my last book and others that are very similar to Stew's. But Arthur is a poet and a lost boy and a much sweeter version of Charles Bukowski (who is also better looking than). He is perturbed by life and death but remains lyrically optimistic even staring death in the face and coping with the loss of others. He hopes that his book will be browsed through by someone in a hundred years time with no knowledge of him or the world he inhabited and I have to say that that is something I often think about too. It's just possible that in 2111 someone will come across a copy of my book or somehow discover this blog and read some of it and maybe laugh or be puzzled or think it's incomprehensible rubbish. It's not about achieving immortality through one's work (which would be pointless and meaningless to you even if you could), it's about the opposite. About having lived and died and been forgotten but still being able to make a tiny connection of some kind once you're gone.
