Been working pretty hard on the book this week. I realise now that today was the day I had promised my editor a complete first draft. I am some way from that, but have done over 60,000 words and am over half way (aiming for about 100,000 or so in total). It is taking me a long time to sort out chapters 4-6, but 1-3 and 7-10 are pretty close. Once I've battled through this difficult early section I am hopeful that the rest will come pretty easy. But it's amazing how much difference having a week to concentrate on this and nothing else has made. With some hard work and some late nights I should get the whole thing finished by the end of May. Which I have to. Not only because it's the deadline but because I will then need to get on with working on "Hitler Moustache".
Talking of which, I have been growing my facial hair in preparation for taking the plunge and shaving back to the toothbrush. I am increasingly reluctant to do this, concerned about how it might actually wreck my life, but I have to give it a go for at least a week or so.
I was going to do it this week, but have a Headmaster's Son show
in Liverpool next Monday and don't want to have to spend five minutes at the top explaining why I look like Hitler. Perhaps this is a convenient excuse and maybe for the good of the show I should just go ahead and do some gigs without explaining it, but I feel certain that it will affect people's concentration and distract them. Which might be OK in a regular stand up gig, but in a show like this one, it might be a problem.
But since the photoshoot for the poster I've been letting my beard and moustache grow again. Last week I got frustrated with the thickness of my beard so shaved that off, but left my upper lip untouched, so all this week, for the first time in my life, I have been sporting a moustache. Which to me is pretty much as weird as having a Hitler moustache, though potentially less offensive.
No offence meant to any of my moustachioed readers but I don't know why anyone would do this to themselves and I think you're all fucking mental idiots.
It's uncomfortable, it's hard not to keep twiddling with it, if you drink a latte it gets all clogged up in there and if you are kissing someone it is comically distracting (which reminds me suddenly of a definition from Gyles Brandreth's Daft Dictionary, "elliptical - a kiss from a man with a moustache") and I keep forgetting it's there. Which is maybe why kissing is so odd, because it feels for all the world like the person you're snogging has a moustache. As it happens in this case, he has, but that's not the point.
And then I got off the bus.
So weird as it was kissing my girlfriend tonight with this furry caterpillar trying to interject itself between us, I wondered how she would feel when I had cut things back to the toothbrush. Would she want to kiss me if I looked like Hitler. "Some people would probably like that," she said, with a heavy subtext that she would not be one of those perverts.
"Will you still kiss me?" I asked.
She looked unsure and didn't answer.
So will having this moustache impact on more areas of my life than I was anticipating. And if I grow it and keep it until July, will I be able to keep it, in good conscience, for my mum and dad's 50th wedding anniversary. I mean a joke's a joke and an experiment is an experiment, but do I want, for evermore, to be staring out from the photos for that event, looking like Hitler. I am not sure I can do that to my parents. I don't want to spoil their big day - yet if I shave it off it's doubtful that I'll be able to grow it in time for Edinburgh (if I want to have one for the show, which is far from certain)
Also the photo is likely to be the one that survives down the generations. Twenty-second century Herrings might look at it to see the whole family together at this momentous event, and then they'll stop and stare and say, "Who's the guy with the Hitler tache? What's his story?"
"Oh, none of us are sure. My grandma said he was weird Uncle Richard, but presumably he was some sort of Nazi or mental patient. He never married."
I won't be able to step out and the picture and say, "No, look, I was a comedian and I did that for about a month, just for a stupid show idea I'd had. I realised as soon as I was forced to do it that it was a dumb idea, the kind of thing a sixth-former would do to try and make some point or other, but it was too late the poster had been printed so I had to go ahead with it. But for most of my life I didn't look like Hitler. Don't judge me on this one moment in time!"
And in any case at that point they'd be getting out the only other picture that existed of me, which would be the poster shot from the Hitler Moustache show.
"Wow, what a weirdo. No wonder he died sad and alone without having had any children."
I suggested to Collings on the podcast earlier in the week that I might approach the Hitler slowly, pulling out one bristle at a time from either end, so I could work out the exact point that it became offensive. But I think I will just have to bite the bullet (sorry, that's a bit sick, given the way Hitler killed himself, I'd hate to offend any of his fans) and maybe after the Liverpool show I will try it out for the rest of May.
I am going to have to shave it off for
the DVD record of Headmaster in June in Bristol and maybe that will be the end of it.
But that will mean I have it for the charity gig I am doing for MIND on the 12th and also for the gigs I am doing in Switzerland towards the end of the month. And I am already anticipating the extra attention a man with a Hitler tache might attract at airport security and wonder if the Swiss will think I am making some comment about their neutrality in World War II.
Why have I got myself into this?
