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April Fool's Day has lost its lustre in our post truth world.
April fool! April fools will never die. You fucking idiot.
I spent a lot of the day prepping for a secret zoom RHLSTP with an American guest, who dropped out 15 minutes before we were due to record (to be fair they had had a plumbing emergency). I didn't mind too much. Hopefully we can reschedule (though this was our third attempt to make this happen, so maybe it's not to be) and also it meant I could help put the kids to bed. But slightly frustrating to do the work and not get the chat.
We have plenty of podcast in the bank - enough RHLSTPs to take us to nearly the end of June once we've recorded the last four, so it's not a huge problem. But I could have enjoyed a proper day off.
I slept for 10 hours last night (on and off) having gone to bed exhausted at 8.30pm and I had a bit of energy for the first time in at least a fortnight (though I have been under par since January and am still wondering if Covid has taken more out of me than I realised) and did a big splurge of house cleaning before I took the kids to school. I also risked a personal training session. We took things easy and it was more difficult than usual, but I actually felt much better after. On tonight's dog walk I even ran up the hill, with Wolfie jumping up at me excitedly. I have let my fitness drop a bit this year and am keen to at least get halfway back to where I was last summer.
I have stayed off the booze. It's now 15 months since my last drink and it is starting to feel like I might not ever go back. I've done 28 dry months in the last 39 months (and I think I might have been another month off in the autumn of 2020) and on the whole I think it's been a very positive move. But I am not socialising very much, so it's much less of a factor. We had steak tonight and my wife had some red wine and I thought that that might be nice. But I thought of the hangover and the feeling quickly passed.
I had started watching “The Bubble†this afternoon, because my guest was in it - oooh clue - but only got a little way through. So we watched it tonight. We were impressed with ourselves for getting through a whole movie, though we watched the last 30 minutes in bed. After my own experience of filming in a bubble I thought this was an interesting premise for a film - actors stuck in a mansion hotel as they tried to complete a rubbish film. I thought it started well, but for me it went a bit big and blockbuster and I'd quite liked to have seen a smaller film that examined the scenario in a bit more detail. At least that's the film that I had been thinking of making, but I guess the time has passed. What happened during the filming of our last film would make a good film. We did wonder if we were being secretly filmed when we weren't filming and if that was the film. I wouldn't put that past the director.
Anyway “The Bubble†on Netflix is still OK. Like a lot of Judd Apatow's films it's a bit too long for my tastes, but there's always funny stuff because he's a genius (he wasn't going to be the guest, so I am not buttering him up) and great to see lots of UK talent in the film too, including last Monday's guest Celeste Dring.
A third episode of the RHLSTP book club went live today with Ed Patrick talking about his book “Catch Your Breathâ€
Next week I am talking to Al Murray about his book “The Last 100 Years (Give or Take) and All Thatâ€. If you want to read it before you listen then
you can buy it here (for example)
