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My kids didn't do anything funny today, the little bastards. Don't they know how hard it is to write this fucking blog?
I packed a lot into the day, but none of it particularly interesting or amusing. Then again I often start out feeling like that when trying to write that shit and then suddenly remember something like
"Someone Likes Yoghurt" and a show is born.
I don't think I'll be doing a show called "I dropped my prescription pills, but a man kindly picked them up and gave them back," but let's see.
I was up early to drive to my old house as a man was coming to put in a new boiler. So far we have weathered the storm of paying two expensive interest only mortgages and sets of bills every month, but we've come in for a bit of a battering for extra payments recently. Hopefully it will all lead to us selling one of the houses (hopefully not the one we live in), but it's a little bit stressful.
I am delighted to be putting in a boiler solely for the benefit of whoever lives here next. Might have been nice to get a bit of use from it ourselves. But fuck it. Someone has to keep the economy going and we did save a lot of money on energy bills thanks to Bulb, so maybe this is only fair.
I had to pick up my prescription too for my blood pressure pills - is it any wonder that I have high blood pressure? (though to be fair, the pills are doing the trick) and thought the surgery opened at 9 so waited in the car outside, writing my funny blog from the days when my kids bothered to try to be entertaining. As it turned out the surgery opened at 8.30am, so I wasted half an hour.
I then popped to the garden centre to pick up some door mats to make the entrance to our old house look more appealing. As I walked through the shop I was listening to an audiobook about the Anglo Saxons and didn't notice a young man following me. He caught up with me and I assumed he wanted and autograph or maybe to have sex amongst the wellington boots. But he worked up the shop and had seen my prescription pills fall out of my pocket and was kindly returning them to me. Which was very lucky. He didn't want an autograph or sex, just to help the bumbling old man who had come into the store and dropped his medicine in a garden centre.
The 1990s me wouldn't believe it. He'd be amazed I wasn't sitting in my flat alone playing Civilisation II for 23 hours a day.
Will that anecdote ever grace the stand up stage? There's no way to be sure. After all, who'd hafve thought that we'd ever film the Motorcycling Clothing Shop sketch? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e0esO33ics
The key to doing a daily blog is to just throw yourself into it and hope for the best. And not feel any shame when it turns out to be useless. I'm not even sorry for wasting your time and in your heart, you know that you are delighted to have wasted it. You would have wasted it in any case. On something less good. That's part of my rewrite of Waiting For Godot, where the tramps have internet access.
And there we have our world beating idea. Just appeared from nowhere.
I bought some mats and some blankets for the kids - they keep fighting over the ones we have so I thought I'd get them their own ones for Christmas. Catie told me later that that was a good idea, but that the blankets I'd bought were too grown up and scratchy. You can't win them all. As this blog proves. It's a self-heckler too. I like it. Or rather, no I don't, it's shit.
At the check out I was served by the young man who had picked up my pills. I thanked him again and he smiled and nodded at me like I was nearly 60 or something. I then knocked over his water bottle with my door mat. I apologised again for causing nothing but chaos. "Don't worry," he said, "It's not as bad as the damage caused by the weather last weekend." Which was true, but to be fair a person shouldn't be able to get anywhere close to that on a single visit to a shop. To even compare me to that suggests I am indeed a walking disaster area.
Anyway, he saved me spending the rest of the day retracing my steps to try and find my blood pressure medicine. Though ironically, that exercise would probably have helped my blood pressure.
I drove back to Hitchin, went to the supermarket, tried to have a coffee in the cafe there as I finished my blog, but there was a big hold up in the queue as the new girl on the till didn't fully understand the festive cake discount. So I gave up and just sat at a table and worked and didn't have a drink.
I got home, did some more bits of work, made a chicken and mango salad for me and Catie for lunch (wait, we're only up to lunchtime) and then was going to do some links for the best of episodes of RHLSTP we're putting out over Christmas, but got a text saying the boiler was ready. I hadn't even had time to empty the car of the stuff that I'd packed up from the old house (sorry for not mentioning that).
The new boiler is lovely and it warmed up the annexe straight away. I felt envious of the people who will get to use it. Unless we never sell the house and those people are us. In which case I feel sorry for them as they will have a warm place that they don't live in and no money.
I came home, unpacked the car. Incidentally one of the boxes contained a smaller box full of sex toys that I'd been gifted by lovehoney after a charity gig and then never used, due to embarrassment and being vanilla and not being sure I wanted a bendy vibrating penis thing up my arse. Maybe my new year's resolution can be to give that a go. I've given up everything else and I can't give up having a bendy vibrating penis thing up my arse, because I've never done it.
I got my links done and a few other things done (not the bendy vibrating penis) and then Catie was going into town for another gig and I had to put the kids to bed. I was so tired that I nearly fell asleep on Ernie's bottom bunk. He's playing Joseph in the nativity play and nearly knows his lines.
I got Phoebe down eventually and had half an hour playing internet poker before I needed to go to sleep too.
Like I said, nothing happened today. Sometimes you've got to write it to find out what you did.
If you're looking for a Christmas gift that doesn't cost much but will keep you and your famiily laughing and chatting over the interminable Christmas week, then why not buy
a copy of Emergency Questions or Christmas Emergency Questions? Great for Secret Santa/stocking fillers too. And all the money goes to making more pods!
This is just one of the limited extras for people who are backing the substack for 14p a day. As always I am going to keep most of this free, but if you have 14p a day spare then you can insert coins to encourage me to write more. It’d be great to have the freedom to try and work more on ideas like this one (though maybe not this one) And if you set 14p a day aside, because it actually only costs 13.6p a day, you’ll have £1.10 left over at the end of the year to spend on anything you want. So we all win.
