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After last night’s late night “work” I was hoping for a mini-lie-in (til maybe 8am) but my wife woke me at 6.30 to say that the dog had Jackson Pollocked the kitchen with its faeces. I’d let her out in the early hours when she’d looked desperate and saved an even worse experience and left the door of her cage open in case she got into trouble.
Which was, I suppose, lucky. Even though she’d still managed to puke in her bed
Though with a light hangover and not enough sleep, spending the first 45 minutes of my waking day lapping up dog diarrhoea (with kitchen toll, not my tongue - I’m not weird) wasn’t what I would have chosen to do if I’d had a choice of anything. If I had a choice of anything in the world - anything - I would have been asleep.
Yesterday I was hanging around with Louis Spence and Iain Stirling at the top of the showbiz tree on Channel 5 - the highest number channel there is (apart from Channel 5+1 which I can only dream of being on) and now I was gingerly moving liquid dog shit around my kitchen floor with a non-absorbent enough towelettes (Juan Sheet was not enough, even for one shit).
Wolfie seemed OK despite this incident and I have resigned the fact that my main job is clearing up the poo of the people and animals that I have reluctantly come to love.
If I could go back six years, the me of 2012 would not believe what I have become.
I had a strong day of writing on Relativity. There is still a bit of a way to go on this final script, but I more or less know what needs to happen and can hopefully finish it off in a couple more sessions. There were many times this year that I felt I would never get this work done or maybe it was just that I was strongly resistant to trying, but I think I have pulled it together after many months of working and failing to work and I feel quite pleased with the results. The pay for writing radio scripts is pretty low and yet you have to work just as hard on them as any script and this might be the lowest hourly wage I’ve ever earned (including my 3 weeks working at Axbridge Mushroom farm where I took home £30 a week, due to me being unable to pick the required number of baskets of mushrooms to earn any bonus - largely because there weren’t enough mushrooms to do that). But I am lucky in that I have other sources of income and I have learned from watching and listening to the incredible work of John Finnemore, that you have to care more about the work than the payment. At times I have been an ingrate about this project. I am getting a sitcom made by the BBC, with an incredible cast and I should be over the moon. And I will be, when it is done.
But nothing, I think, can stop me being the kind of person who needs to feel that they’ve left something much too late, before the juices start to flow. Then in a flash of bright inspiration the script appears.
Perhaps luckily for me, I’ve had so many deadlines of this series, that have then moved, that I’ve managed to accidentally get four or five periods of last minute panic.
I went to a Halloween party tonight and wished that I’d had the time and resources to throw together a crazy anti-Hillary and CNN van costume. Instead I went as Sully from Monsters Inc with a Freddie Kruger glove, as that’s what I found in our dressing up box. My wife was a freaky skellington, looking rather like one of the “Part of it” guys from the David S Pumpkins sketch. Luckily that is my exact sexual fantasy, so it was quite the night for me my friends.
We were both pretty exhausted and it was an hour’s drive to the party and back again, but I am glad we made the effort. We partied from 9.45 to 11.30 before having to go home. It’s a bit lame, but for a couple with two kids who live in the countryside and who hadn’t had anything like enough sleep this was a triumph.
Are we back?
No.
There’s another bonus RHLSTP from the Manchester Podcast Festival up for your enjoyment. This one with the world-class stand up Glenn Wool.
Get it here or on iTunes
