Back on the road for a mini tour of Leicestershire. I am playing the Y Theatre in Leicester on Saturday night, but tonight I was in Loughborough Town Hall. This was a mini-homecoming for me as I lived in this town from 1972-1976 and many of my earliest memories occurred in this place
You can read some of them here. It was in Emmanuel school that I pooed myself and blamed it on a naughty dog.
I had had well over 1000 nights of sleep here in my life, but all of them were at least 36 years ago. Tonight I would be sleeping here again (I would usually have driven home but it seemed foolish to do so given I am just a matter of miles away tomorrow). It will give me a chance to look around a bit in the morning and see if any more memories crop up. I am pretty sure my address was 160 Leicester Rd, but someone had emailed to say they think that that address might now be the location of a petrol station. I didn't like the idea of my childhood memories being bulldozed. I drove into town on the Leicester Road, but the house numbers were already in the low 100s when I thought to look out.
Nothing looked familiar to me at all, which maybe isn't surprising as not only have nearly four decades passed (and the town will inevitably have changed) but I was 8 when we left here and the world would have seemed bigger and different to me then. I remembered Leicester Road as a busy thoroughfare and Loughborough as an urban hub, but neither of these things are true (at least not from the perspective of someone who has lived in London for 22 years).
I didn't have too much time to think about it. I had set out late to beat the traffic and arrived in town at 9.30 and was going to be on stage at 10.15. I was pretty tired and appreciated having had a tour manager on my last tour all the more. The driving is one of the most exhausting things about this job.
I told the crowd that I was a one time resident of their town, which I think gave me a bit of license to be rude about the place and asked if there was anyone in from Cobden - my junior school I was at for one year before moving to Cheddar, where I am sure they still discuss my barnstorming performance as the Inn Keeper in the nativity play and my singing in another concert where we did a song that I had forgotten about til this second that went "with one eye on the pot and another up the chimney, with a ra ra ra, ai-diddle-liddle and a ra ra ra" which seems like it might have been a politically incorrect ditty about someone with a lazy eye.
I've just looked it up and presumably
this is the song we sang - it's about a cook with one eye and a cock eyed look. Inappropriate. Ah those wonderful and thoughtless days of the 1970s that so many people pine for. What freedom of speech. To sing and say needlessly racist, sexist and hurtful things with no thought for the consequences. If only we could go back.
After the gig one of the people in the queue said, "I used to live next door to you when you lived in Loughborough." Was it my first love Clare Allen who I used to chat to through a gap in the fence? How appropriate would that be with me doing my show about love?
As it turned out, it was her sister Esther. But I remembered her too and that's quite a turn up to meet someone you haven't seen for 36 years, but who you still recall. I wouldn't have known her if I saw her in the street, but it was nice to bump into her again now. I asked after Clare. She now has two kids of her own. How is that possible? She's only 8 years old.
Why this relentless desire to press onwards, oh time? Why not sit back and smell the flowers for a while. Take a break. As I had driven past old ladies and men on the way in, I considered the fact that when I lived here they would have been in their twenties or thirties. And now after just the blink of an eye in their sixties and seventies. My mum and dad were younger than I am now when they lived here. Now there's a disconcerting thought.
It's not all together unpleasant to indulge in this kind of mordant nostalgia. Getting older is strange, but as has been said before, is better than the alternative and I actually enjoy being haunted by my past in this way, even if today made me realise how unfamiliar my childhood home actually was.
Talking of the political incorrectness of the 1970s
check out this interesting article about disablist language. Worth thinking about. When I was a kid all those racist words that you'd never dream of using were common currency and on TV. It's a shame that these disablist terms are not equally taboo, but still used casually in comedy and everyday speech without any thought for their power to hurt. Like I say it's worth having a think about one's own culpability in this. It sparked an interesting debate on Twitter this afternoon anyway.
