Collings was over at lunchtime to record our 88th official podcast. That's a very high number don't you think. We've done 88 of these things (and actually a few more if you include extras and that rubbish Edinburgh one). What a huge amount of guff we've spouted.
And yet we don't seem to be running out of steam and it was a pretty sold 66 and a half minutes (though the last 5 seconds let us down). I particularly enjoyed the riff about rhino horns being made from matted hair. But then that's just me. It's incredible how much I am up on the news at the moment, what with this podcast, my work on the Russell Howard show and my own podcast. I am better than a newspaper to be honest with you. In fact just before we started I was called up and asked to be a late replacement on the News Quiz. It's six years since I made
my less than impressive debut on that show (and so far my only appearance), and last time I had made the mistake of not being prepared with material feeling I could wing it. Ironically enough I think I would have been fine to do that now, as a more experienced broadcaster, but I couldn't do the show as I was heading off to a wedding celebration in Putney. Still it's interesting how many work offers are starting to come in.
Everyone is married these days except me. In fact some of my friends have managed to get clean through two marriages in the space of time that I have managed none. Today's latest addition to the cavalcade of twats (I am joking) who value hope over experience (I am joking) have been together for ages and seem to me pretty perfectly matched and deeply in love and if I had to gamble on it I would say they might make it through this self-imposed and unnecessary assault course. I didn't say that at the time. I just said "Congratulations". And I meant it too. I love love and I love hope. And who knows what the future will bring?
Which is part of the reason I have probably never got married.
I am pretty old though. I am not getting any younger. Don't want to get left on the shelf.
But the problem is that if I get off the shelf and get married that there's a good chance that the person who took me off the shelf will realise they made a mistake and put me back on the shelf. And then I will still be on the shelf, but now I will no longer have a house. Marriage is a proper full on gamble, and yet what do you win. Happiness? Perhaps.
A family? You know I like kids, but having them around all the time? And having to look after them? Having children is a bit like inviting a complete stranger who is self-obsessed, stupid, incontinent and mentally ill into your home and agreeing to look after them for at least the next 18 years at your own expense, whatever they might do to you in the interim. You don't even get to choose the mental person. They just turn up in miniature form and even then exhibit few of the qualities that they will have as they get older. Why would anyone do that?
Even if it all works out with marriage then one of you will probably die before the other, leaving the other back on the shelf, but now bereft and alone and weeping and inconsolable.
I am a bachelor boy. Like Cliff Richard. In every sense.
Still I was happy that my friends who I both like had bound themselves together in a union with about a one in three chance of not ending in total misery (providing you're the one who dies first) and hope they produce loads of tiny people to make their lives an even greater misery. I shall stare down at them from the shelf. Sad, of course, but at least with a controllable level of sadness that never changes and with no danger of someone just taking all my stuff because we now hate each other.
We're all fucked.
I chatted with a friend who had been one of my flatmates in the first house I had lived in in London. He wasn't one of the original tenants, but had moved in for the last six months of our two year tenure at 32a Hereford Rd, close to Rimpy's Fags, Foods, Non-Foods, Wines and Spirits. I realised with a jolt that the original housemates (of which I was one) had moved into that house in September of October 1989. I have been living in London now for 20 years. That hit me with a bit of a jolt. It had crept up on me to be honest. Twenty years have passed, unmarked.
As I lay in bed tonight I thought about that young man I had once been going to bed separated from me by just three or four miles, but by twenty years. He felt close and yet so far away. I'd never be able to meet him or talk to him or warn him about what was coming up.
I suppose he'd be surprised if he had known that I'd be where I was tonight. He'd be surprised that I wasn't married and that I didn't have kids, I think. I think he'd be amazed by a lot of the things I've done (I've met Jeremy Paxman for Christ's sake) and delighted that I was making a living as a comedian. But in some ways I haven't moved far in two decades and I am not just talking about the short distance between Acton and Shepherd's Bush.
Where will I be in October 2029? Where will I be lying down to rest? Still in London? Still above the ground? I don't think I'll be dead, but there's a good chance that we'll be living like Morlocks by then.
Twenty years is a fuck of a long time. In some way 1989 seems a life time away, but then some of the things we got up to in that house do feel ridiculously recent.
Luckily I fell asleep quite quickly, so couldn't dwell on it all for too long.
