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Usually going back to Oxford creates a weird mixture of nostalgia and sadness at ageing, but it was particularly pronounced today as we drove into the city and I realised that it is now over 30 years since I finished my “studies”. Thirty years ago I was already living in London, trying to work out how to get into comedy and I think at this stage working for BT writing the phone directory.
It makes no sense. I sad in Pret a Manger (which I thought was the same building as the old Wimpy or Burger King where I would buy horrid bean burgers, but was in fact next door). I ended up sitting next to two awkward male freshers who looked about 12, but who must have been at least 18 (unless they were Ruth Lawrence style geniuses), as they tried to make friends and chatted about orienteering. I realised that they were basically exactly me and my friend Mike (apart from the Orienteering) in 1986 and finally understood why at this point still five months from losing my virginty and about 18 months from having sex for a second time (with a different woman though, cos I was a STUD).
These boys, getting to know each other and testing the waters of what their friendship might be were in sharp contrast to tattooed and cool female student working on a laptop beside them. But aside from the tech and this being a Pret, pretty much everyone looked almost exactly like the people I was at University with three decades ago. A couple of them were almost clones. A woman looked so like Rachel, the lucky woman who was the second one to experience my incredible love-making that it almost made me cry.
I was an old tear sodden man in the corner remembering things past and crying over a bean burger and a posh woman who hadn’t really been that into me.
The boys reminded me how lucky I was to not be able to go back to those painful times of social anxiety and terror, but I couldn’t fathom where the time went or how some of those memories could be so fresh and yet so ancient.
At the Playhouse as I walked up the stairs to my dressing room I realised that these must have been the stairs where I passed Dave Allen after he’d seen a play I was in, A Month in the Country. I was with my equally chubby co-star Max and Dave Allen said “Here come the heavies”. I was so excited to have this interaction, though too nervous to do any more than laugh and carry on. Weirdly in my memory this stair case was somehow about 50 metres away and standing alone in a tower - I don’t know why. So it shocked me to realise that it was obviously part of the theatre and I had an echo of a memory of the general excitement have having had a shared dressing room in a real theatre - possibly even the dressing room I was in tonight.
The show went really well. Two quite serious podcasts, but with plenty of laughter as I discussed the end of the world with George Monbiot and Parkinson's disease with Paul Sinha. Top notch guests and two strong podcasts which will be on their way to you in many months time.
Expected to feel wiped out but still had some energy left in the end, so hope that tomorrow’s podcasts (and round of PR interviews) won’t be the disaster I feared.
