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The Bible is all very well, but it would have been much more helpful to get the name and address of the beast, rather than his number. Book of Not Enough Revelation.
Hitchin is where it is at. It is also where I am at. So that's a nice coincidence. Now i only own half a house and am not paying two lots of bills a weight has lifted off me. The weight of a house. Like the Wicked Witch of the East, once a house is lifted off you, you're not immediately back to normal, but you feel a whole lot better that you did when the house had its full weight on you.
I feel I can take it a little bit easy and so this morning I did what I had hoped I'd be doing all the time in Hitchin when I moved here six months ago, popping to a cafe to read a book. Technically reading a book is still work as I might end up talking to the author on Book Club, but it's the kind of thing I'd do if I was on holiday and didn't have the responsibility of looking after kids. And it would be churlish to claim that drinking an expensive coffee whilst reading a book at 11am was work, when most people are doing slightly harder jobs. I could say that about my actual job too.
I think my parents drummed into me the importance of working hard, which is why I've always felt uncomfortable with wasting my days away having fun. It felt like skiving, even though I have a job that has different hours to people like Sheena Easton's baby (and it says a lot about her work ethic that she made her baby go to work and travel alone on public transport)
Most comedians didn't feel guilty for working 20 minutes a night, then getting pissed and spending the daylight hours in bed, but as much as I liked getting drunk and then staying up til midnight to get lucky (but no later), I have rarely just blown off a weekday in order to relax or have fun and always felt like I should be working (even though an awful lot of the time I'd end up doing no work and having no fun and just stultifying in my flat or house). That work ethic is, I believe, probably the main reason for my modest success. Whilst others partied and had fun and made friends and had sex, I wrote sketches for the radio or met up with my writing partner, who was more keen to stay up all night to get lucky and so often didn't show up til 2pm even if we arranged to meet at 10am - he never rang to say he was going to be late, just showed up when he felt like it and then we'd both largely fail to get any work done for the next two hours before going out to get drunk. Even those two hungover hours of work gave us a massive advantage over our even lazier contemporaries.
In those days people got into comedy precisely because they could earn a week's wages in 20 minutes and then doss off. Nowadays people treat it more like a job and a career. Is my 1990s work ethic partly responsible? Where do the dosser comedians go now?
I didn't actually get to read for long, because Catie was in town too and we met up for lunch, which doesn't involve any work AT ALL. We managed to get a table at
Little Monkey Kitchen a terrific tiny Thai restaurant that I am loathe to recommend because it's already pretty hard to get a table there. But they do a ludicrously good value two course lunch (including a soft drink) for under twelve pounds. We sat on one of the pavement tables with the hot Hitchin sun beating down on us (we get our own sun here) and whilst technically I could have done this in my lunch hour if I had a proper job, it felt like a terrific pay off to thirty-five years of constant working to get this hour to ourselves. Ha ha take that squares, chained to your desks and working for the man. I ate some calamari and sweet and sour chicken whilst you also had your lunch.
And it's true you will get to stop working when you're 65 whilst I am going to carry on until I die (at 63), but do a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Sadly I have hated about 50% of my job and it has severely depressed me on many occasions. So do a job you love and hate and about 35 years in you'll get a morning off that you'll really enjoy, before then returning to your psychologically confusing profession and work until you die on stage, where a half full auditorium of people will assume it's a joke and the last sound you hear will be their laughter and your own death rattle.
What I am saying is I had a nice morning off.
Then went back to what I laughingly call work.
I am the only one laughing though, which is a bit of a problem.
