5582/18602
It’s sort of a bit frightening to see the total ticking upwards. It was at £125,000 when I woke up and creeping toward £150,000 by the time I went to bed. It’s a bewildering amount of money. I remarked at the end of my show that it’s taken me 15 years of lugging programmes around and counting coins into bags to raise a similarly impressive total for Scope, when I could just have sat on my arse for a couple of days repeatedly writing the same date. Bah! Scope haven’t even given me that disabled parking badge either.
I am pleased (if bewildered) about this of course and Refuge are delighted, but I don’t know how I can top this and think that maybe such an incredible result means it’s time to bow out and pass my work to a new generation. Should a woman be doing this task? Maybe. And several other people are doing something similar (if not as brilliantly funnily as I am). Although I think maybe it is a better that a man does it. I got a bit of abuse and I am sure a woman would get more. And it feels like this is a problem for men, one that makes the rest of us look bad and one that we should help clear up. If a man points out to men they are being babies then at least those baby men don’t have the recourse to lay into him because of his sex. It might just make them think twice. The snowflake baby men who insist on bringing themselves up on International Men’s Day (yeah I get the irony, but that’s part of the stupid comedy of all this) make us all look bad. I wonder if the new job might be to get numbers of non-whiny, women-loving, cool men to get behind International Men’s Day and make it a force for good, not a knee-jerk reaction that gets hijacked by jerks. And yes, I know that some men are already doing that. Which is why we have to shut down the knee-jerk jerks who make the day unappealing to regular non-baby men who aren’t intimidated by a day that isn’t dedicated to them.
And I got some grief from the other side too, which was sort of funny too, as it was just whataboutery from the ultra-right-on, most of whom I suspect were also doing nothing except sitting at home and complaining. When they could have been sitting at home tweeting and raising money. Or going out and doing something more newsworthy. Or just doing anything at all, rather than pissing on someone else’s parade by disputing their right-on credentials. Part of what makes this a good thing is that I am not particularly right on. I am stupid myself, just not as stupid as the people who shout before they google.
Nothing stopping annoyed men raising funds for male victims of domestic abuse (though I believe Refuge do some work in this area too), nothing stopping annoyed women doing their own stunts which will raise awareness of the things they care about. Let’s try and work together and apart for the same cause.
It’s an emotional battering day, just in its own right and despite the huge amount of positivity, the negative niggles just added to the slight feeling of deflation that comes with doing something as stupid as this.
But it was nice to be free of the yolk, though I was unsurprisingly pretty knackered. A nice engineer came round to try and sort out our boiler and was very thorough, following several different leads and seeming confident that he solved the issue. My heart sank when I got home tonight after an exhausting drive home from Swindon to see the F28 reading on the boiler again. Will no one rid me of this turbulent boiler? It’s surprisingly depressing to have something like this hanging over you. I’d just like one day where everything in the house was working fine. But the light in our bedroom also seems to have come loose from its fitting and is hanging a bit perilously from the ceiling too. It’s never-ending. I knew being in an old house wouldn’t be easy, but so far (aside from a bit of damp) all the problems have come from the brand new stuff we’ve put in ourselves.
Anyone who claims my international when’s day shenanigans are for self-pubilicty should have come to my quarter full show in Swindon. It was an OK show though. I wasn’t quite as ill as I’ve been in the last couple or having to deal with streaming snot, though there were some weird tech issues - my audience walk in music started playing part way through the first half, there was the sound of running water and the mic was playing up. I started to wonder if all the sounds were actually in my head and the audience thought I was going crazy. But it’s nice to have some stuff to react against. I missed having a tour manager for this one (Welsh Ray had another job in his diary), as it was a four hour drive through terrible traffic to get here and I was pretty spaced out on the drive home - the sat nav taking me down the narrowest of mildly flooded roads as I approached home.
So realising that the niggling issue with the boiler hadn’t actually been sorted was a little kick in the tiny reserve of energy I had left.
