Days without alcohol 5.
Confession, they say, is good for the soul. I have been thinking about this lately as one of my other Edinburgh ideas is to do a show called "Confessions of a Stand Up Comedian", mainly because I figure it would make for an excellent poster, spoofing the awful 70s soft porn films. When I looked up those posters on the internet though, I was disappointed to find they were just as badly put together as the films. I thought they might be a bit wittier and prettier than they are, but why would they bother putting effort into the posters, when so little work went into the movies (though it can be fun watching them just to see which otherwise respectable actors end up getting their bums and tits out - et tu, Jill Gascoine?
Anyway, it's another thing to be thinking about and today I wrote up quite an entertaining account of how I came to break my first girlfriend's family's caravan window (the mechanism that opened it, rather than the glass). It is a shameful story and I have never confessed the truth to anyone, not even my girlfriend. I made up an unlikely lie, which covered up the even more unlikely and ridiculous truth.
And I am not about to confess here and now, partly because I will probably try this as stand up and don't want to piss off those people who complain when I reuse bits of Warming Up in my act and partly because I am still slightly ashamed of my teenage actions and don't think I want to spill the beans just yet. Not to hundreds of strangers. And my girlfriend's dad might chance across this and realise what I did and chase be for reparations. But it wasn't, as he suspected anything to do with me trying to sneak her into the caravan as I slept in it overnight (it was in the garden and they kept temptation out of our way by locking me outside!).
So having piqued your curiosity, I will leave the story there for now, if nothing else to prevent Warming Up becoming a strange autobiography of my teenage years (though there's lots of material there - maybe a book in it!)
It is strange that my sense of shame remains over twenty years later though. Shame is an unusual emotion. I suppose it's partly instinctive, having evolved because it assists social cohesion if we feel guilty when we upset others in our tribe. But most of the things we are ashamed of these days seem to spring up from religious ethical systems, that like to pretend we are not animals and thus should hide away our natural functions.
Should we feel ashamed of the times we behave as we are programmed to do through instinct or should we in fact feel proud of ourselves on the occasions when we aren't selfish, mean-spirited and destructively libidinous? Adam and Eve, the first to feel shame, were just acting out of a natural curiosity, that God gave them, knowing they wouldn't be able to resist the one thing they were meant to resist. And I think that story says a lot about the high mindedness of religion, punishing people for being people. And experience shows that the people who police these religions and are the most judgemental are just as prone to giving into the urges. Because they are hard to control and often there is no reason to control or be ashamed of them.
Judge not lest ye be judged. That's what Jesus said, religion fans, in case you've forgotten. And he also said "If a man doth break the window mechanism of your caravan, then forgive him readily and ask ye not whatever he might have been up to to break it."
And it was therapeutic to finally write down the true circumstances, mainly because, really, what happened was not all that bad and was just a bit ridiculous. Confession is it turns out good for the soul. Those Catholics might be on to something. Though of course it they weren't so intent on making us ashamed of perfectly natural behaviour then there would be little to confess. And I would never have broken that window.
My first swim of the year went OK, except that the gym now has an influx of new people who have decided to try and change their lives completely for new year. I hate people like that. Don't they realise that they will be back to their old ways within a fortnight. They think they're going to keep it up all year, but they are living in a dream world! Idiots.
Anyway, it meant there were a couple of middle aged women in the middle lane who should not only have been in the slow lane, but also didn't realise that you swim up the left hand side of the lane and then back on the left hand side so there can be more than two people in each lane and then started tutting and glaring at me when I was actually doing it right and they were doing it wrong. Still they will be gone soon, because New Year's Resolutions are for pussies!
And my giving up drinking was not a New Year's resolution. I gave up on the 31st December, just a random day. So I am still best.
