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The first of our family to move out of the Shepherd’s Bush him is gone. Smithers has been taken to my parents-in-law’s house, ahead of the rest of us joining him in a week. The house is quieter without him. But also less covered in acrid wee. Just so we didn’t miss one, he had cleverly done a wee in a little paper carrier bag that I was storing over bags to use when I was cleaning out his litter tray. I mean they would eventually have had wee in them anyway. So in a sense he had done the right thing. And was possibly satirising me for putting his excrement in bags. It’s hard to know.
I haven’t had time to think about the fact that we’re going to leave this house behind in seven days. I’ve hardly had time to plan all the things we need to do. Things are so busy for us both with work and gestating a human child in our stomachs (as I understand it) that we’re going to pay someone to do the rest of our packing for us. We have no choice. And it’s definitely worth it.
I have lived here for 14 years. It’s the longest I have ever been in one place. It’s going to be great to have a new family home that we’ve bought together, but it’s mildly annoying that we will have this interim two months where we are living nowhere. I don’t know how we are going to navigate our way through the chaos of the move and getting everything else we need to get done, done. But as my wife says, I thrive on the stress. I do like having to push myself. But I am getting old and I can’t keep pushing myself this much. Come September when I hope we will be settled into the new house and the first lot of work on it should be done, I think it will all be worth it….
Somehow I am remaining calm and functioning on not very much sleep, but it takes a lot to rattle me these days. And somehow I am making progress on all the things I have to do. I wrote about 6 pages of my sitcom script this morning and the dialogue was coming very easily and I was hugely enjoying it and I did another preview tonight in Maidenhead, which went OK (though got probably the most muted reaction of any preview so far). Afterwards it seemed that people had enjoyed it and it was a hot evening so maybe they were not trying to tire themselves out by laughing out loud.
I was tired too, unsurprisingly, going off on a weird anti-Brexit rant (that was nonetheless fun) and forgetting at one point if I was in Maidenhead or Maidstone. I said the name of the place I thought I was in and then wasn’t sure I’d got it right, so said the other one too, just to be sure.
If I can just stay alive (in the short term at least) then it feels like things are moving forwards in a positive way. RHLSTP seems to be going down very well (don’t tell Adam Buxton, but I think the one that’s just gone out might actually be better than a David Mitchell one), the Emergency Questions book is selling well, Oh Frig I’m 50! is much better than it should be given how much time I’ve had to work on it and the sitcom writing is flowing relatively easily (along with the usual procrastination and difficulty of applying my arse to the seat). And you know my family life is loads of fun and the new baby seems to be fine and blah blah blah, who cares, my career is all that is important.
Next Wednesday I am 50 and it’s time for the half-time report and it’d be nice to get there and think that I have been playing well. I reckon it’s about 2-2 at the moment. Admittedly the wind has been behind me for this half and I am not sure I have the stamina to play all 50 years of the second half. But I am pleased with where I am at. Maybe my sixth decade is going to be the best one. The fifth one, after a shaky start, has turned out to be pretty fucking awesome. I don’t think I can take much of the credit.
Here, in what I laughably still want to believe is the middle of my life I feel I have some perspective on life and where I fit into it and what’s important (ultimately nothing, and yet weirdly that makes the short-term more precious) and how important I am in the grand scheme of things (not at all - but again there is some value on a localised basis). We shall all be swallowed by the void and correctly be forgotten, but let’s enjoy the match being struck and the light burning furiously before petering out.
I am retiring to the country, but I am not retiring. I am looking forward to however many of the next fifty years I am allowed to witness.
Nothing can possibly go wrong.
And the line-up for this series of RHLSTP is now complete. On the 17th July I will be joined by the amazing Robert Webb.
So line-ups are
July 10th Limmy and Arthur Smith (nearly sold out)
July 17th Robert Webb and Brendon Burns & Craig Quartermaine
July 24th Sara Pascoe (nearly sold out)
