I took my first day off since returning from holiday a fortnight ago. It's easy to forget to take a break with this job, and sometimes it feels a little odd slacking off on a Tuesday. But, of course, I work weekends and it's important to not burn myself out.
I went to the cinema at lunchtime and saw the enjoyable "Forgetting Sarah Marshall". Just three years ago I was doing a gig with Russell Brand in a tiny pub in Bristol (before he'd really even broken in this country) and now look at him. Once again I watch my contemporaries rushing away from me, but remember the story of the tortoise and the hare. I still intend to just live for so long and plug away relentlessly that everyone just gets sick of ignoring me and let's me have some success. I will be 90, but I don't care.
I didn't feel jealous though. I thought Russell did a great job. It's good to watch a romantic comedy with some degree of cynicism and which doesn't choke you to death with schmaltz. And there are some very funny bits in it. Not as good as the other films from this stable, but better than 90% of comedy films and as always with a real heart to it.
I went to Wagamama's for lunch. Just after I had arrived I heard a crash and an almost inhuman howl from behind me. I turned to see that a woman carrying a baby had fallen over. I am not sure if the howl came from the infant or the mother despairing at her potentially catastrophic clumsiness, but clearly the little one had taken a bit of a knock and was now crying. Luckily, I think, everyone was all right. But as if bringing up kids isn't hard enough, without gravity stepping in and almost ruining everything. I am always dropping stuff - I really mustn't be allowed to have kids. I'd only break them.
Later on I went for a swim, continuing an impressive week of exercise: I am quite determined to lose even more weight. I wasn't particularly trying to go fast, but realised early on that I was about a minute faster than I usually am and I kept ploughing away without tiring out at all and managed to get my 50 length record down to 29.07 - a good 35 seconds faster than I have done before. To think people (well me) once said that the 30 minute barrier would not be passed, and yet here I am threatening to do it in under 29. My fitness and stamina is noticeably improving. Which is good news for the 90 year old me. He might get to exist and be in that movie. And all thanks to the 40 year old me.
And I don't think we'll really be able to call ourselves the same person. Not only will my cells have died and reproduce themselves many times by then, my brain and my personality will be entirely different. I wonder what kind of old person I will be. Angry and crotchety or happy and corny or ill and moany. There are really only three kinds. I think I will be the kind of old person who makes humorous quips and smiles at the ironies of life. But I think my sense of humour will be different then. I don't think the voice in my head will be the same as the one I have now. I think I will be unrecognisable even to myself. So the 90 year old me (should he live) should thank the 40 year old me for the sacrifices he is making now. But he won't. The cantankerous old cunt.
I watched a programme that reads like a TWTTIN sketch "Michael Barrymore: What Really Happened" which like a TWTTIN sketch signally failed to tell us what really happened. Stew and me worked on one of Barrymore's pilot ITV shows (it was one of our first jobs) and I liked him a lot. He was spontaneous and the stuff they didn't put in the shows was as funny as the best of anything by more cutting edge comics, but he was being shoe horned into Saturday Night Light Ent and so you didn't see so much of that on screen. He was also very supportive of us, given we were nobodies who failed to get any of our jokes into the final show, going out of his way (as I may have mentioned before) at the wrap party to say to the girls we were with, "Stick with these guys, they're going to be big!" Which he may or may not have thought, but it was a lovely gesture. Even if the girl I was "with" was just a friend of Stew's girlfriend of the time, who didn't seem to wish to act on Barrymore's advice.
Like the man presenting the programme, I don't know what happened on that tragic night at his house in 2001 (was it really that long ago?), but all I do know is that it was openly known that Michael was gay long before he came out. It was patently obvious when we were working with him. So his wife's claims that she had no idea were ludicrous. She was there all the time. She saw the young men he was hanging around with. My guess is that they never had anything other than a manager/client relationship and she was very controlling of him. So it might be true that he went off the rails when he left her and she no longer has influence on her, but it's also true that she restricted him artistically and so he was bound to go a bit crazy once he was released from her grasp. And I am just not sure you can trust anything she ever said about him, given that she denied knowing he was gay.
