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My mind is starting to drift towards the next stand-up show, Oh Frig, I’m 50! I am at that usual but horrible point where I have pretty much nothing and each night, as I perform my intricate and fully-formed routines I wonder how the Hell I am going to come up with anything as funny as this by August. This is probably heightened with a greatest hits show, of course. Every year it just feels impossible that I will have a good enough show in time, but every year, so far, I have managed it. But that fact doesn’t make it any less terrifying. Because what if this year is the year that nothing comes to me and my Edinburgh hour is just me umming and ahhhing and doing the odd bit of failed observation and I get a hundred emails a night asking for their 2 x £15 back.
The magic comedy elves that live in my brain and who feed on deadlines and fear will probably come good again. I have hit a bit of a purple patch in my script writing which is hopefully a good sign. But I haven’t been overwhelmed with amazing stand-up ideas in my blogs, which are, by necessity at the moment, just a catalogue of the dull Groundhog Day nothingness that happens on tour, punctuated by the odd amusing incident at a gig.
I think there’s plenty to be said about getting older and being half a century old and the slide downwards to the grave, but I am certainly not as obsessed by turning 50 as I was about turning 40. And I am not experiencing the same level of panic and confusion that led to me getting into fights and inappropriate unions. Thanks largely to getting into a relationship with my wife less than six months into my forties, this decade, after a somewhat sleazy five months, has been the most settled and happy period of my life. I think I am unlikely to experience a mid-life crisis this time (largely because I don’t think I can realistically claim to be in the middle part of my life any more - we’re heading rapidly towards the denouement). I am happy to have bid adieu to the libido driven, lonely idiot I was in 2007, but he was very good value in coming up with comedy routines. I have a feeling that the 2017 me will be more philosophical and keener to avoid unnecessary altercations, but let’s see. There’s still over three months until I have to face up to the fact that my age will start with a 5 for the first time in 45 years.
I think I am probably calm about it because I simply can’t accept that it is true this time.
I am SO OLD.
The days away from home are passing quickly, with the 4th of the 6 gigs now done. It was a lot of fun to be back in a stand-up club doing this material and what a stand up club it was. The Stand in Newcastle holds to the standard of the other branches of this fantastic company, with the added benefit of some of the best food you will ever get at a comedy club. I had calamari followed by monkfish - both delicious. Even if the comedian is shit, at least you’ll have eaten well. Alternatively, even if the audience was shit, I had eaten well.
I think we all did a good job though. Nothing particularly noteworthy from the gig, though I have started doing a new bit about my attempt to bring in some Peter Kay observational comedy, which I think will carry on expanding over the next few weeks. It’s always lovely to find a door leading to a brand new room in a well rehearsed routine. I’ve found less of them with this tour, but there are some nice new bits developing amongst these old routines.
