Warming Up

I put the (admittedly quite star packed) RHLSTP Stranger Things notebook up on eBay today. These generally sell for several hundred pounds (I think the first one went for £1500) which is amazing enough, though they do normally contain the autographs of many of the guests. This one includes Sir Michael Palin, Limmy, Tim Minchin and maybe most excitingly Grayson Perry’s, alongside a quick doodle of Alan Measles. I don’t know what kind of value an actual, if rapid, piece of art from a renowned figure like this adds, but it can’t be nothing. Also this book is an interesting social document of the effects of Covid 19, the first part if from live theatre shows and the second half from remote shows (and includes brief notes for a couple of shows that didn’t even happen). It covers almost exactly a year from the Newcastle Stand gigs of October 2019 right up to the podcast I just did with Stevie Martin on Wednesday. Best of all 100% of the profits are going to Refuge.

Despite all this I was still surprised to see the bids race up to £720 within a couple of hours. There’s still over six days to go. I think there is more value in it. If you can make a bid to help push the total up then you will be helping a great charity and will almost certainly be outbid, but don’t take that risk unless you’re prepared to own this extraordinary document. All my show notes, many autographs, actual work of art.

Most of the day was spent prepping (I know, it’s hard to believe it takes that long) for the for 14th episode of Twitch of Fun. I wrote some new jingles, picked out some news story, found a replacement fly for the one that has literally broken into all its constituent parts and thought up a voice for a cuddly new character. I also had to deal with the fall out that 10 days has had on Cocky Carrot. It’s really not pretty. Watch it here or check out the audio only podcast or wait for it to appear on my YouTube channel.

Prep had to stop at 3.15pm as we went into town to go to our first family post-Covid trip to the dentist, where I was told I might require a mouth guard for sleeping to protect my teeth from the grinding that goes on as I process the stressful world. If not, in 30 years time my teeth might be worn down too far and cause me trouble. So I have to gamble £100 or £200 on whether I think I will live another 30 years. I should just spend the £100 on drugs and prostitutes and accept that I have only got 5 years left at most.

We passed an old medieval beamed house on our walk to the dentist, with the walls sloping a little and I pointed it out to my daughter who told me it was like the houses in the Great Fire of London. She then told me how it started and where and how houses were all built close together then, but they aren’t now because of the fire and how the fact they were wooden made them flammable and the name of the baker who caused the fire. It was astounding to be getting such detailed info from this tiny human, particularly given that when I ask her what she did at school she says, “I can’t remember.” I asked her what year the Great Fire of London was and she went for 1992. Which was pretty close. But all ancient history to her.

We then went for a nice family meal at Pizza Express, where the kids mainly behaved well and my wife got a free bottle of slightly nasty Prosecco as her birthday is approaching. Although things were again a little bent out of shape by Covid it was really lovely to do a normal family thing like this. Back when my wife was pregnant I remember looking at other families in a pizza restaurant and thinking that in a few years time we’d be having meals with some as yet unspecified humans. It seemed so far away. Yet here it was. We didn’t get out iPads or colouring books. We just ate pizza together. 

There were a few tech issues with the podcast tonight and the worst one was that afterwards one of us inadvertently switched the feed back in and so I was being broadcast to the nerds without realising. I dread to think what awful things I might have done whilst not knowing I was being observed. But even though the Twitch of Fun is a very sexually charged hour and a bit for me, I think I kept everything in my pants. I mean not everything. That would have been weirder.