Tonight's gig in Bristol was less impressive, alas. Perhaps I was suffering from a cumulative hangover, but I was a little below par. It's been the first one for a while where I have struggled, but I think most of the audience still got something out of it.
Still these things happen and I ad-libbed a lot of stuff, some of which was crap, but some of which was good. I liked it when I claimed that I would be crying all the way home to London, with my tears splashing down on my steering wheel and bouncing back and hitting me in the face, meaning I got doubly wet by my own tears, surely the most tragic thing that could happen to a man.
Ah well, not every night can be a hoola-hooping carnival. It's still a little depressing when you know you haven't given of your best. I drove home a little blue, though I didn't cry and if I had my tears would really have had to fly out to bounce back off the steering wheel. There was a diversion which took me off the motorway and I was actually very cheered up when I arrived at a town called
Brinkworth, which had a sign as you entered declaring that it was the longest village in England.
It made me laugh to think that the village prided itself upon this. It might not be the biggest village or the most beautiful village or the best village, but at least it was the longest. Length might not be the thing that most people would judge a village by, but the people of Brinkworth don't care. They know they are the longest village and that's good enough for them.
And perhaps that is a lesson for us all. Maybe we should not judge ourselves by the things that others think is important, but by the thing that makes us exceptional, even if it is not impressive. So whilst I may never be able to claim that I am the best comedian in the world, I could possibly bill myself as the most irritating, or the one with the most powerful tear-ducts. There must be something that makes me best.
We probably all do something like this in our lives, accentuating something about ourselves which is not really at all impressive. And Brinkworth is an excellent word to describe that. Heralding yourself as the longest village, when length is not something that anyone has ever judged a village by, is a "brinkworth" and saying I am the comedian with the strongest tear ducts is a "brinkworth". Maybe you have a brinkworth of your own. It's quite apt because all these things are on the brink of having worth, but have no worth.
And I have to say that having driven through it, Brinkworth village is impressively long.
