My latest Metro column
about laying off the booze was published today. It's my 30th column for the paper which I find hard to believe. I've been doing these for seven months.
As usual a few tweets came in about the column - mainly positive, though a Twitter search found someone who didn't like it, "Oh Metro. RICHARD HERRING IS IRRELEVANT. Why Do You Continue To Employ Him." Good question. I think she might be right, though can I be totally irrelevant? Surely we need some parameters. If the parameters are irrelevance then I am super relevant. That's all I have to cling on to any more. I am aware I am a man drowning in a pool of effluent that I have been fastidiously digging and filling for the last 25 years. If only I had thought to build some steps, but I just dug myself in deeper and now my only hope is to keep digging. And pooing.
But someone else tweeted to say, "Interesting Metro article after your performance at Dhaka restaurant in Walthamstow last Thursday?" (The unnecessary question mark at the end could be used at the end of the other tweet which had left it off proving that the punctuation of the world is a constant quantity - where one man leaves one off, another puts one on without cause).
I have never been to the Dhaka restaurant and Walthamstow is a long way to travel for a night out. But also I was at home last Thursday moving fucking boxes around. I didn't know if I was missing a joke or whether this was a case of mistaken identity, but I was intrigued to find out what I had been perceived to have done. Apparently the person concerned had been thrown out of the premises for bad language, which sounds like something I'd be guilty of, but it hadn't been me. Was it just mistaken identity or do I have an evil twin or has Charley Boorman just gone off the rails?
I've long spoken of my desire to destroy the reputation of the motorcycling ex-actor, but what if he had decided to do the same to me? What if he was going around swearing in restaurants and then leaving saying, "By the way, in case you were wondering where you knew me from. I am Richard Herring from mid 1990s television. Spread the word about what a douche I am." I would have been beaten at my own game.
Whatever the case it's weird to think that there was a man in east London who was convinced that he'd seen me behaving in a bad way and had he not happened to read my article and then contact me he would have continued believing that I was an idiot. Luckily in this case it doesn't matter too much because I am an idiot (though I can't remember the last time that I was so idiotic that I actually got ejected from an establishment), but it's still disconcerting. It wasn't me.
And even though I knew it wasn't me and that I hadn't been to Walthamstow since July there was still a part of my brain wondering if maybe it somehow was me. Had I got so drunk that I had forgotten travelling for an hour across London and going to a restaurant and swearing? Had I got so drunk that I had actually completely forgotten that I had been drinking at all? I didn't think so, but even I wasn't sure. So if even I can slightly believe that I got ejected from an east London restaurant last week then why shouldn't the rest of the world think the same?
I wonder if this doppleganger has been going around for years, tarnishing my spotless reputation and making people think I am a drunken, swearing maniac. Maybe he also wrote that diary from 2003 and planted it in my house to make me think that I had done bad, drunken things when I am in fact above reproach. I am on to you evil twin. I always knew I was too good and pure to do the terrible things that I have been accused of.
At last the high-backed armchair story makes sense.
