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I was cleaning bird shit off a small slide in the garden when I got a phone call giving some bad news about one of the RHLSTPs we’ve recorded - hoping it might not turn out to be quite as bad as it sounds at the moment, but will let you know - it really took the wind out of my sails. But I carried on cleaning up the bird shit, because however disappointing life is a bird-shitty slide is not an option.
It’s been a while since I’ve felt unhappy about anything though, so that’s positive, but it threw off the rest of my day and life through up a few more annoyances to put in the mix. We got a congestion charge fine through the post (after my wife had got lost in town and momentarily and unknowingly crossed into the zone whilst trying to find somewhere to park) and I got a tax charge notice for an item I had bought from America, even though I’d already paid once and this was a replacement for a faulty item. Plus the whole family is going down with a nasty snotty, sore throat lurgy (again for the first time in ages). All things that on their own might have been mild annoyances, but combined were very irksome. I am also doing a charity event in Cheddar tomorrow where I am expected to deliver a 45 minute after dinner speech, but my dad has requested that I keep it clean - I mean, I’m fucked, right?
But the positive from this is that none of these things are massive disasters (the RHLSTP thing is really aggravating though) and that feeling despondent is now an exception rather than the rule. Last time was when I got fired from the script-writing job in February (and there’s still a little residual negative energy tailing me from that), otherwise things are going pretty well. My career has gone in an unexpected direction and I have forged an unexpected success in an area that I imagined was mainly something I’d be doing for fun, or at best to publicise my other stuff. I am not sure what will happen with my “proper” jobs of stand up and writing. Nicholas Parsons shows that a career can take many twists and turns and that being 51 doesn’t mean you’re even halfway through your career. But then Sean Hughes show that 51 years might be all you get… So what’s the lesson there?
I love that my work is so appreciated by the select band of you who keep me going and that I am autonomous and able to do some very esoteric stuff and you never know, we might be able to turn the podcast business into something where I can eventually make the shows that TV has turned down.
But today it felt like it was too late and my brain too old and tired.
Not in as negative way as that sounds. Because actually the fact that my main achievements today were cleaning bird shit off a slide and helping my daughter to write a story about the PJ Masks and a mouse called something like “Poo-in-a-cup” is much more meaningful.
The time I should have been sad was when my focus was solely on my career for twenty years. And didn’t have anything else.
Luckily I was pretty sad then. That was the default setting. Whereas now frazzled contentment is usually the norm.
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head here.
