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I had the kids in the morning and we packed in a fair amount of stuff including basketball, Monopoly, youtube and video games. There was a bit of a kerfuffle over a box. When you're a child boxes and the ownership of them are important and I'd said Ernie could have a box that had come with a delivery. To be fair this was hard enough for me, not because I love boxes like a child would (and anyone who says I do is lying), but because we're slowly preparing to move house at some still underdetermined point and delivery boxes are often the perfect size for books. So I want all the boxes.
Anyway Phoebe had started cutting up the box without asking Ernie if she could. Perhaps she didn't know it was his box, but perhaps she did. As a parent you've basically got to remain neutral in all disputes, like Switzerland. But a Switzerland that finally nuclear bombs all the other countries if they won't stop fucking arguing. I think Switzerland should be more like that in real life.
Phoebe wanted to make the box into a TV cabinet. I am not saying that my kids are obsessed with becoming famous and being comedians, but it does appear that way from my two days on Substack. Do I want them to become comedians? I don't mind, if that's what they want to do. I am glad I am one, but when I look back at my career it involved an awful lot of unhappiness, depression, sacrifice and loneliness and those are only the bits I can remember because I wasn't drunk.
Both kids ended up playing with the TV box and doing spontaneous news reports about the dangers associated with apples and oranges and always ended in millions of people dying. Again, dark stuff for comedy, but again correct stuff for comedy. Soon as I become too frail/unalive to continue this blog they can seamlessly take over. The freedom with which they improvise and play without any worry about quality is something that it's taken me a lifetime to rediscover. But I think we can agree that there is no longer any fear about being improvisational or keeping up any kind of quality. Shit at a wall, dudes. Shit at a wall.
Would have been a much better name for my blog now I think about it.
I am sure that most kids born since TV became a thing have played this game, but it resonated with me because one of my strong memories of nursery school (along with hating being forced to have an afternoon nap and mum giving me Heinz chicken soup when I was too ill to go in) was that they had the actual casing of a TV, with none of the internal stuff and I loved playing this very game oe being on TV. I was 28 years old at the time, obviously.
As a four year old in Loughborough (or possibly Pocklington - I moved from the latter to the former when I was nursery school age) there was no possible way I'd ever end up on TV and even when I got older and became really interested in the idea of being a funny actor, or writer or comedian there was no conceivable route for me to get on to a real television. But still, I loved just being inside that TV shell and trying to make the other kids laugh. It turned out to be foreshadowing. Just as someone else coming along and then saying they wanted to play in the TV now so I had to get out of the TV proved to be foreshadowing as well.
That TV is one of the very few things I remember about being in nursery school (though one of my earliest full memories - I think from very early in my nursery days - was running or being pushed into a small slide and cutting my cheek open (there's still a little scar) and mum having to come and get me. A tiny little white slide, smaller than an armchair, with a little bend in it. My white whale.
It explains why I've spent my whole life trying to get on telly and vandalising children's playground equipment.
In the afternoon Catie took the kids to a local Bank Holiday fete and I tried to recuperate (having been a little bit out of sorts this week) and finished off what turned out to be t
he first chapter of a short story I've been working on and put it up on Substack, coincidentally about finding my way back to my childhood in Loughborough, but don't worry, I'm not going to be banging on about these themes all the time (as much as you inevitably end up reliving your own childhood as your kids go through something similar, though in impossibly different times).
I also secured another booking for RHLSTP - this one for the Leicester Comedy festival gig on the 15th Febuary 2025, Simon and Chris Donald, who founded Viz will be joining me (as will
John Robertson, creator of the Dark Room) Cool to have the line-up sorted out so early. There's some gaps to fill this autumn (booking this show is the most stressful thing about it) so nice to have the gig that's furthest away all sorted out.
Dates and ticket links here
