Last morning in Cheddar and we popped down the bank to pay in the charity money, with me pointing out the places I remember being all fields, which were now houses and mourning the loss of the scout hut where I had cheated to get my knot tying badge. My wife has this for maybe another 50 years. She is a lucky woman.
After paying in the coins we went to have a look at the town's historic market cross which has recently
been smashed into by a taxi. It's the second time this has happened in recent years, making me think that it might be a good idea for them to relocate this 15th Century monument to somewhere without cars, or at least away from this slightly blind corner. This time round the structure was smashed by a taxi driver who lost control of his car when he sneezed. It's good my whole town exists as a living sit-com, even if we're not going to see the actual sit-com any time soon.
From the reports I had heard I expected the whole thing to have been levelled to the ground, but the majority of the stone circle is still standing, though it's horrible to see it so badly pulverised. Good news for local stone masons though, I guess.
Across the road, the Spar supermarket where Sally Waites family once lived and through the door of which I posted my first love poem is no longer a Spar. I don't remember when it was all fields, but I recall when you could get a can of Panda Pop in there. Not any more.
My dad told me my English teacher Mr Dams, who I had name-checked during the show as the teacher who'd asked us to say "I love you" in various ways in a lesson at school, had been in the audience on Saturday night. "He didn't really think much of your early work," my dad needlessly informed me with trademark Herring candour, "He preferred Reeves and Mortimer. But he thought this show was great." Good to have the full perspective I suppose. My dad told me though, that Mr Dams had no memory of this lesson or of there being a girl who had come down a year in our class. It was possible that the lesson was taken by my other English teacher, Mr Litten or that Mr Dams has just forgotten it all. I don't think it's possible that I have just made the whole thing up as a false memory. But my dad usually disputes my stories - he has no memory of the Ascension Day burp which forms the bookends to "The Headmaster's Son" or of him chasing me up the stairs and me kicking him down. I am certain all these things happened, but who is to say whose memories are right and whose are wrong. Something significant (or insignificant and for some reason burned into the memory cells) to one person might not be of interest to another. I think I have a pretty sharp recall, but it's getting less reliable as I get older, but mainly for things that have happened more recently. My wife, like all women it seems, remembers the exact details of conversations and disagreements we had four years ago and a mental Rolodex that brings these nuggets to mind within nanoseconds whenever they are required.
Nothing lasts for ever. Even 600 year old stone can be destroyed by a sneezing taxi driver, so what hope for the mushy grey cells in our heads?
Another top name added to the Leicester Square Theatre Podcasts - my final guest on 25th June will be comedy genius and all round good guy Graham Linehan -
Book your tickets here. Only £12.50.
