Did a bit more work on "The Box Lady and Other Maniacs" today, so have my head stuck back in summer 2003, which given how much of my time was spent in a drunken blur I actually remember pretty well. That July nine years ago
I turned 36, was there when
my ex-girlfriend's son walked his first steps,
went to a daytime party with lots of gay men who danced with their tops off and took
a morose trip to Glastonbury to escape the loneliness and depression I was feeling at the time. There have been some times when I've felt pretty low over the course of Warming Up (though I've generally attempted to keep them from you), but I think this might have been the worst or at least most unsettled and confused months of my adult life. I was properly on my own as my relationship and my main job had finished and I'd just moved house to an area where I didn't have many friends. And I was pretty awkward and clueless about everything, too self-conscious and insecure to do much about the situation, which only made things worse.
I am a bit embarrassed by my cluelessness in all things, given how old I was, but on the positive side I eventually dug myself out of the hole. It's good, in a way, to be reminded of how things were then and if you're in a similar lost and lonely state then try not to let the despair overcome you, because you'll probably find your way out too, but I feel a visceral echo of the unhappiness when I think about it. Given how lethargic and sad and hungover I was I manage to come up with some pretty funny Warming Ups, but I don't buy into the idea that a comedian has to be suffering to produce good stuff. On the whole my suffering meant I was getting very little achieved then, and I think the stability of the last four years has actually facilitated my best stuff. I am certainly wasting a hell of a lot less time getting pissed and chasing women. Not that I am wasting any time chasing women now, obviously. The women all run into my arms without me trying. No, that's not it either. Dammit.
I wasn't consciously trying to reveal how much I was drinking at the time and I certainly didn't think I had a problem with booze (I am not saying I did, but I'd be less certain of stating that now), but the number of entries which mention hangovers is quite astonishing. I was pretty good at drinking back then - on my birthday I drank from 3pm to 3am and was the last man standing at my party - and I am pretty bad at drinking now (though managed to down a fair amount of champagne at my wedding and on honeymoon), but even taking that into account I am either impressed or astonished by how much I was putting away back then. It actually took the fifty solid days of drinking on my 50 dates in 50 days to slightly break me. These days half a bottle of wine can give me a sore head in the morning.
Clearly it's an odd experience revisiting all this and confronting the demons that I wasn't really mentioning explicitly at the time. It certainly makes the proposed book a little bit more than just a presentation of the blog though. To have some retrospective analysis makes an already self-indulgent exercise even more self-indulgent, but hopefully quite interesting too.
Perhaps being a bit more settled means that less interesting stuff is happening to me now (though in the last month I've been a near victim of a sophisticated ring con and saved my wife from choking to death, so married life isn't all dull) and I am wondering if I should bring the blog to a conclusion if and when I get to the ten year anniversary. I am in two minds about it as I think the blog has generated a lot of good material for me and been an interesting exercise, but I do wonder if it's also a quite labour intensive form of procrastination. I can't go on forever, can I? Can I?
Though I am now making an amazing £30 a month from
the kindle version of Warming Up and it would be a shame to let down the 238 people who give 99p a month (hmmmm those sums don't quite add up do they Ian Amazon - maybe I make a touch more than £30, but not a lot more) - but more pertinently I'm not quite sure how I close the kindle version down. So I might have to carry on for that reason alone.
And eventually some of the blogs earn their keep. Here's
the naughty dog Metro column, based on a blog from three years ago. There's a lot of stuff to be mined from these millions of words. Unfortunately like most hidden treasures they are caked in an awful lot of shit.
