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Back to Cheddar today to do my fourth stand up gig since the end of the last tour in June 2018 in aid of the Cheddar Youth Trust. Twenty years ago my dad persuaded me to donate £20 a month to this cause and of course I never cancelled the standing order so I realised today I’ve given this young Cheddar idiots thousands of pounds. And now they expect me to work for free for them too!
My dad also wanted me to take into account that it would be a more elderly audience and so I shouldn’t be too rude - because old people are unaware of rude stuff and mustn’t be told about it. I did quite well with that, settling mainly for Cheddar based material and stuff from my teenage diary, but at the end I did a couple more risqué bits for the younger people in the room (who were probably 50). I had noticed that a form to encourage people to donate to the charity had a form so you could leave a bequest in your will, so I mentioned that and said that I’d been sent to finish a few of them off so we could get their money. It went OK. It wasn’t something I’d planned. It’s nice to make up a joke that works as you’re going along.
I had walked round Cheddar with the dog in the evening. As always I was struck by the many changes that have occurred here in the 44 years since our family moved here, mainly that every available patch of scrubland and meadow has had houses built on it. They’re packed in in a way that defies the memory of how small the old vacant lots used to be, partly by the creation of new roads and cul de sacs. Cheddar was seeming pretty different to my memory. Then at the rec, Wolfie ran towards a group of teenagers who were sitting on the grass, as me and my friends used to do 35 years ago. They petted the dog who ran back to me. “Your dog is lush” shouted one of the girls. And it was wonderful to see that some things haven’t changed and that even those kids might be the grandchildren of my contemporaries, the slang we used has survived. It’s not just the word lush but the particular way it was said. It made me happy. And also sad that those 35 years had passed in a heartbeat and if I’d attempted now to go and sit with the kids and drink cider with them I would have been seen as some kind of weirdo.
The event in the village hall began with 45 minutes from a brass band conducted by my old trumpet/euphonium teacher, Anne Higgs. She’s a remarkable woman who’s been teaching the kids in the area to play musical instruments for over forty years. She won’t have had many more reluctant students than me and watching the talented kids play caused flashbacks to all the events that I’d been called upon to go and inexpertly blow down a trumpet in the early 1980s. I was not good at music and was very reluctant to have lessons or be in the brass band, but somehow I still ended up doing the lessons and being in the band throughout my childhood.
And yet now I slightly regret that I didn’t keep up with the euphonium, which I did start to enjoy towards the end of this long prison sentence.
The kids in the band appeared to enjoy playing though and they were definitely much better than I was. But it all just reminded me of cold Christmas concerts, missing lessons (which might sound fun, but I blame my inability to fully grasp calculus on being called out for band duty) and playing a bum note on my own after the whole band had stopped during some competition on London’s South Bank. I still love Anne Higgs though. What a woman!
One of the audience came up to me before the show and said “Long time, no see.” I wasn’t initially sure who it was and played for time, ineffectively. It was 35 years since we’d last met and with the best will in the world none of us looked exactly the same. But I looked the woman in the eyes and the penny dropped. It was Bridget who I had been infatuated with when we went on a school trip to France. She had been sensible enough not to return my affection, but I think at least had found my attempts to woo were with funny poems and by singing “Like a Bridge-t over trouble waters” (never compare someone you want to impress to a bridge however tempting the near pun). It was lovely to see her again though and she’s still a very beautiful woman. Which is why she attracted the attentions of both the Bros twins when they briefly spent time at our school.
It’s as always hard to countenance how much time has passed since Cheddar was my home. It feels like nothing should have changed. And even though my contemporaries were amongst the youngest in the audience - how can we all be in our 50s now? Makes no sense.
We didn't leave the EU as promised.
