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It’s been all go this week and after accompanying my whirling dervish of a daughter to Little Gym and being both impressed and terrified by the gun-toting police presence at the Westfield, I came home to try and prepare for the podcasts on Monday. Phoebe was having her nap and increasingly that seemed like a good idea, so I lay down on the sofa beside her pram and fell asleep myself. I hadn’t realised how tired I was until I fell into the arms of lunchtime Morpheus (who doesn’t get as much work as his night time brother). Every now and again my body just says, “That’s enough mate,” and shuts down, but it’s good it does that, because I would just keep going on forever. Thank God for death is all I can say.
I tried to fight through the tiredness once the nap was over, but maybe should had cut my losses. The girls went to the park and I read up on Paul Merton and started reading his autobiography. I didn’t get far, but discovered that Paul made his now snooker game out of ping pong balls as a child and also enjoyed his evocative descriptions of a world gone by. He talked about his local supermarket having automatic doors in the sixties and how the public, who had never seen the like, were suspicious of them and old ladies would dash through for fear of being trapped as they closed. That wouldn’t cross anyone’s mind nowadays, but definitely stirred memories for me of witnessing (or experiencing) that.
I don’t know if that will come up in the podcast - there’s a lot to talk about - but it was fun to remember.
Then we walked up the road to the Bush Theatre to watch an early evening comedy set from the frankly excellent Nish Kumar (who lives in the house that backs on to mine and was equally delighted by the closeness of this gig to his home). London is a beautiful place in the sunshine and walking up the Uxbridge Road in the summer reminds me of the time I first moved here and how sometimes this one street can feel like it belongs to almost every continent on earth. I will miss it, to a point, when we finally get on our way.
Nish is going to be a huge star and deservedly so. His set was bang up to date and was political without being polemical and he interacted with the crowd effortlessly, creating a nice double act with a young girl in the first row, who covered the fact that she shouldn’t be in the audience by saying she was “not ten”. And when Nish said that we were all friends, gave him a thumbs up to prove it. He isn’t even going to Edinburgh now, but his show that isn’t going is 1000 times more ready than mine that is. He touched on terrorism and how Londoners couldn’t be cowed by it…
If you get a chance to see him live I cannot recommend it enough. He also has a very handsome brother. But they didn’t want to hang around for a drink because they wanted to watch the football.
We left Londoners drinking in the sunshine and went home ourselves, feeling happy with our lot, delighted we got to have an early night, and thus being able to end the day without realising that some fucking dickheads had done their best to fuck stuff up. But Nish was right, Londoners have too many worries about transportation to put terrorists too high up their list.
But now in the arms of the better known night-time Morpheus, I slept in blissful ignorance of what had happened.
