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So having a baby has not yet made me baulk at the idea of the kind of jokes that I found funny pre-baby. As predicted I didn’t need to have a child to understand that paedophilia was horrific, so the jokes about that that were funny before are still funny. And the rubbish ones are still rubbish. But I am wondering if it’s made me more sensitive to horrible news.
It’s not like I didn’t get shocked by senseless waste of human life before and it certainly wasn’t the case that my own death meant nothing to me, but now I am responsible for a tiny, fragile life and also owe it to that baby to stay alive as long as possible myself, I suppose news like this unfathomable plane crash/suicide/mass murder maybe hits harder than it would. I think I would have been upset that two babies had died even if I didn’t have a baby. But now I’ve got a baby it resonates more. Maybe that’s the first step to stopping finding the jokes I used to find funny, funny. When the crime or incident or whatever the fuck it was is so unnecessary and beyond anyone else’s control it’s just another terrifying thing to worry about. It’s an improbable way to die and it’s unlikely to happen to the rest of us, but I suppose this tragedy resonates all the more because it could just as easily have happened to any of us if we’ve ever been in a plane (or indeed a train or bus or car or anything where we have handed over responsibility to another human being). But am I feeling it more because of the added weight of losing or being lost?
We like to think we have control over our destinies, because for the most part we can muddle through and expect not to be snuffed out for no reason. But almost all control is an illusion and it’s scary when we have that fact presented to us so bleakly.
I was also very sad about the loss of Lil Chris, who I had a soft spot for even before I briefly worked alongside him on “Never Mind the Buzzcocks”. Coping with the vacillations of fame is hard enough even for an adult. I know a little bit about the ups and downs and the difficulties of coping with it all, but I was older than him when I first got on to TV and in my 30s before I realised that there were lows as well as highs. Looking at his Twitter feed you can see he is wearing his heart on his sleeve and being forced to cope with not being the success he once was. None of it is important and it can in any case all return as unexpectedly as it leaves. It takes a long time to realise that and sadly he had his own demons to cope with. I once joked about
how inappropriate it was seeing him flirting with adults in his videos when he looked 11, and maybe that makes it harder to accept him dying in this way, even though he wasn’t a child. I know that this would have upset me a lot if I didn’t have a baby. But, yes, the baby somehow makes all this more poignant. My mum once said that having a child means that even if the sky seems blue and clear that there is always a cloud on the horizon and I get that properly now. The terror of loss or being lost will never leave me until someone, probably me, is lost. And even then the loss will not be of my own self, but of whatever was to come next.
And the sadness stayed in the air even as I headed to the West End Centre in Aldershot for my annual gig where there is always a warm welcome from the staff who have been there as long as I’ve been touring solo. They’d just found out that the guitarist John Rebourne had died. He was another of their regular acts and had played there just a fortnight ago. It was rather moving to see how much the staff were affected by the news, but it just added an extra burden. If I die that’s at least another couple of people who are going to be really upset. I mean it’s an additional incentive not to die. Which is good I suppose.
It’s all about living for now though. And enjoying the time we have. And none of this was really on my mind during the show (though talking about people dying in an explosion resonated a bit more for me tonight and maybe it also had the same association in the audience’s minds. Otherwise though I had fun and messed about and added even more stuff to the Dave Manager bit and accidentally said “dree” instead of “drink and wee” and riffed a bit about spending the interval drinking wee. Like most of my comedy, the best stuff comes out of covering up mispronunciations.
