I managed to catch up on a bit of sleep this morning, not getting up until after 11am, but it didn't do me much good. I was still zonked and living in a time lapse blur, feeling at least two seconds behind the action for most of the day. The flat is a real mess at the moment and I made occasional attempts to move things or tidy up a bit, but barely made a dent. I should have also been learning my lines for tomorrow's rendition of "The Girl Who Smelled of Spam" sketch at the SCOPE benefit at the Hammersmith Apollo, but I couldn't even build up the energy for that.
I'd happily have sat on the sofa all day, drifting in and out of a waking coma, but the wife and I had a Saturday night date. A working one though. We were performing at the Dulwich Festival, which when said aloud sounds like it might not be that good. "Yeah, it's the dullish festival. It's not entirely boring, but it's mostly veering that way." I was too tired to think of that joke before the gig though, so didn't do it on the night.
During the tour living in Harpenden was often an advantage: if I was heading north or west then I got to avoid driving in London and was more or less starting and ending my journeys with an hour in hand. But now I am mainly gigging in London again it's a bit more inconvenient - the late night train rides are contributing to my tiredness (last night we missed the 12.32 train by two minutes, extending our journey by half an hour, meaning we got home at 2). It was quite a demanding drive to South-east London but I only made about three dozy errors and luckily the other drivers that I encountered were more awake than me.
We were gigging in the hall at a girls' school and the walls of the stage were festooned with stained glass windows. It was like they'd decided to put me in the situation that I was most likely to do something terribly, terribly wrong. After talking about vaginal Frubes and anal sex I wondered how my audition to talk at assembly on Monday was going.
As a comedian you always worry slightly about doing a gig in a place where they don't usually do gigs and as we sat in the classroom that was our dressing room we voiced our worries that it might not be a cracker. An impressively slim-line Ed Gamble was compering and he reminded me that the last time he and I had shared a bill was at
the Jamie Oliver Feastival on Clapham Common on a Sunday morning. That had been a tricky one to play and I had nearly been dragged off stage by the organisers for using the phrase "love whore".
Would today be as bad as that? It seemed unlikely as there was at least an audience and they were in a room, facing in the right direction, without loads of other stuff going on around us. But maybe our rude material would be too much for this polite looking audience in this girls' school in this well-to-do suburb.
Not a bit of it - they were very much up for it and we all had a lovely time. The wife did the tricky Saturday night drive through London, but we got home in one piece and then drank wine and some whisky to celebrate six weeks of marriage and to have the semblance of a night off.
