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As I career towards my 50th birthday and start to idly think about what I will be talking about in this year’s Edinburgh Fringe show (yes look’s like I am heading back), “Oh Frig, I’m 50!” it’s interesting to compare my life now to my life 10 years ago (something that I am weirdly able to do on a day by day basis if I really want to go back and read all those blogs). This morning I found myself putting tiny girl’s pants on a toy monkey. Had I done this ten years ago there would have been much cause for concern - where had I got the girl’s pants, why was I putting them on a cuddly toy. But such actions are acceptable now, as I have a small daughter and was just fulfilling her wishes. She had asked for Oo Oo and then pointed at the pants drawer. If she was wearing pants, then obviously her monkey should too. That’s just logic.
I think that somewhere down the line this association was my fault. A couple of months ago I put pants on Oo Oo to try and show Phoebe that wearing pants instead of nappies was the kind of cool thing that her most respected friend would do. But now Oo Oo, an innocent in all of this, often has to put on little girl’s pants, which are still much too big for him/her. I don’t think the gender of the monkey is important. A monkey just wouldn’t wear pants at all. It’s humiliating.
But not as odd as being a sentient adult putting pants on a toy because a tiny child has instructed you to do so.
If someone had told me ten years ago that I’d be doing something like this at 7.45 in the morning (and that I’d be thinking that it was a fucking result that I had woken so late) I would have probably thought, “Oh, I assume that I’ve got a small baby in ten years time. That makes sense."
Weirdly having just checked my blog from exactly ten years ago, I discover that it wouldn’t have been so weird to me at all, as at that time I was in a relationship with someone with a child who was just a few months older than Phoebe is now.
Weirdly enough, ten years ago, I was working on the script of “You Can Choose Your Friends”, which today I was also essentially working on, as I am writing a radio sitcom using mainly the same set up and characters (and to some extent jokes) called “Relativity”. Not a fucking thing has changed. I have been caught in my lie.
But in the coming months, as that new relationship fell apart and I had to face the fact that I was soon going to be in my forties, things would get a lot more wobbly (as you’ll know if you’ve read “How Not To Grow Up”). I had already met the woman who would save my life and with whom I would create this strange human who wants to dress pretend monkeys in human underwear. I didn’t know then that she would do either of those things when we performed on the same bill at this gig - It would have been weird if I’d mentioned meeting her in my blog, but this was the day it happened. But I did like her immediately, thought she was funny, felt a tingling warmth when she was standing beside me after the gig and was disappointed when I discovered she’d slunk off without saying goodbye. There was a candle burning from that day and thankfully it managed to stay alight for the next year in spite of all the disgusting and stupid things I was going to do before we met again.
Anyway, the prospect of turning 50 is not, let’s hope, going to send me spiralling towards self-destruction. Although it’s not a pleasant thought exactly. I think having the pant obsessed child by my side will probably help take my mind off that though.
I plan to do a stand up show every time I hit an age ending in 0, so make sure you come along and see what will be the final part of that two part series in the summer.
I didn’t get too much done today, distracted by commenting on the QPR match via the noises from the ground and by helping my daughter take down the Christmas tree decorations (which basically involved her putting as much tinsel on herself as is humanly possible). But I made a start on rewriting the work done by the me of 10 years ago. And whilst I am slightly dismissive of some of this stuff, I am grateful he put that work in so that I am not totally fucked right now.
