After another very encouraging (though 80 minute) preview in Newbury, I drove through the rain soaked countryside to get to Cheddar, ahead of my gig in nearby Wedmore tomorrow.
It was somewhat eerie to be approaching my childhood home so soon after telling some strangers about my childhood and I experienced discombobulation, a slight case of a kind of mental sea-sickness which seems to affect me when the past and the present collide. Perhaps it's some kind of temporal sickness, and we are all afloat in a sea of time, but it's an odd and unsettling sensation. Or perhaps more accurately the sensation of being unsettled. I felt it when I began looking through my old letters and diaries at the start of this process and I felt it when I saw my childhood sweetheart at a wedding a couple of years ago. To be reminded of a previous reality that you had almost forgotten can be hard to bear. Most comedians seem to concentrate on the light side of nostalgia, the sweets, the kids' TV shows and (if they are me) who remembers the New Schmoo. But there is a darker and admittedly less obviously amusing side to looking backwards, which encompasses regret and unfinished business and repressed emotions. This side of things is though, a Hell of a lot more interesting than Spangles and Joe Dolce (though not as interesting as the new Schmoo and why some cultural phemonena enter the public consciousness, whilst others don't).
These time quakes, that rock your brain are usually brief and your head soon settles, but driving down Shipham Hill, where I used to cycle many times on the way back from my first girlfriend's house and where a few of my schoolmates met grizzly ends in car accidents, I felt the bitter sweet tug of the past pulling at my heart and fucking with my brain. The queasiness soon passed and I was back at home, with my dad making me cheese on toast (which again snapped me back a couple of decades, especially when it arrived on a plate that I would have been using in 1982).
But it's not all memories. When I went to bed, in what had been my brother's room, I noticed that there was a scary doll that I had never seen before, sat on the bedside table, staring at me under heavy lids. I didn't think I would be able to sleep with this strange companion. But eventually I did.
It's going to be very odd doing the show about my childhood, my town and my father in front of local people and my father. I hope they all enjoy it and that the minor revelations I make will be not prove too embarrassing for my folks - my father, incidentally, does not seem to remember the burping incident that forms the spine of the show, but it definitely happened.
Most of all, I hope that I don't get over emotional and cry like a baby. There is a bit of a danger of that, I guess. Especially given that the end of the show is just an ad lib jumble of my feelings at present.
I am sure I will be letting you know how it went.
