Warming Up

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Though not today, my friends. I haven’t got all that much to do for a couple of weeks, as I wait to hear about my sitcom script and for the tour to get underway again. So I hung out with my girls and went to the park to feed the ducks, though the gulls got most of the bread and I think the ducks were mainly geese. But I preferred them to the smaller scavengers who fought too hard for their food, even if, occasionally I had to grudgingly respect an impressive mid-air snatch (I mean catch, not cloaca). Phoebe was unphased by this flock of flapping thieves. It’s odd that we prefer certain types of birds to others. They’re all just rubbish dinosaurs (or possibly super-efficient dinosaurs, you don’t see many diplodocuses around any more), but we’re very much driven by aesthetics and ducks and swans and geese are pretty and gulls are not. And boy are the gulls needy? Ducks are pretty ridiculous when you think about it for a second, but they have a quiet dignity and even though they make a stupid noise and have weird feet, we had come to feed them. No one goes out to feed a flock of seagulls (make your own 1980s pop music reference joke, though don’t be hack and mention the hairstyle - these birds were some kind of smaller gull anyway), we want to feed the ducks. And geese get a pass for being unusual and having weirder feet (seriously check them out, they look like they’ve been made out of long dead skin of a murdered vagrant by a strange artistic serial killer) and swans are the kings of the bread getting because they are regal and beautiful and somehow stay looking clean and white despite living in muddy ponds.

But holidaying from work and holidaying from that for the moment and wondering at my baby turning into a little girl. She’s back to sleeping pretty well which means I am sleeping more, which means my brain is on an evener keel. As we’d walked back from the park my wife remarked that the sun was no longer in Phoebe’s eyes. “We’ve turned a corner,” she observed. And I said that we had indeed. But I was talking figuratively. She totally got it. It’s been tough getting through this first year, at times, but I love my wife and baby more each day

Catie went out for dinner with friends and I’d got my daughter to sleep and some famous people had died, so obviously I got ahead with the snooker. Three frames in an hour or so. One of them was about the worst one I’d ever done. I hope someone does a list of the top ten frames for Chortle when I hit 100 of these. By the end of tonight I was up to 75. The 73rd one will be up soon. It’s weirdly therapeutic playing snooker with myself in the evening, whilst sipping at an expensive whisky. I realised that soon, when Me2 has to retire due to alcoholism and burning himself out in general that my daughter who is a mini-version of myself, can become Me2. Me1 will then be able to forge ahead in the competition and by the time that mini Me2 can defeat him, Me1 will die and so Phoebe will never be able to catch him.

Please buy Katherine Ryan tickets for the 3rd March at the Warwick Arts Centre. She’s nearly sold out the really big room and if she does that then everyone else will be forced to come and see me in the (too) big (for me) room. Also she's really good. It's annoying when you're on tour and a bigger comedian is in town, though my strange audience would not be tempted away by the more traditional big names. It's more annoying when the same venue books two comedians with some crossover in appeal. But thankfully I've managed to attract a few people to come and see the next tour show (but there's room for more, Coventry!)