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I had a pretty intense morning, starting with a personal training session at 9am. That went OK and I had a bit of energy left, which was lucky as I was heading back to the best place in the world - Letchworth dump. We’ve had our wood store rebuilt this week, as it had gone rotten and I ‘d had to punch the roof in, in order to reach the flue that vermin were using to access our kitchen roof. But it wasn’t just the rotten roof and rest of the structure that came out, two fence panels had been replaced too. So there was a big pile of detritus to get rid of and we had a few extra bits to get rid of. So it took me the best part of an hour to haul it all into the car. I discovered, too late, that the big but of hardboard that I’d put in first was over the catch mechanism for the boot and so I couldn’t get it completely shut. I tried to push it away, but it had loads of wood and fence posts and fence on top of it and it wasn’t shifting.
I slammed the boot a few times and finally got it to a point where it didn’t move when I tried to lift it (though I didn’t try too hard) so I drove slowly up the hill and hoped for the best. The bits of wood were shifting around quite a bit and one piece of wood (that used to be part of a canopy above my daughter’s first bed) keep sliding past my ear. If the boot opened and everything fell out on to the A1M just imagine the trouble that it would cause. Luckily due to my aphantasia I can’t imagine anything, so I drove on regardless.
No disaster occurred and I arrived at the dump to find it much less busy than last time, but just as hot and sweaty. I thought I might need help with some of the larger items, but managed to haul them up the steps and lug them into the huge skips solo. It was incredibly enjoyable. The really good news is that during the work this week my neighbour suggested replacing the whole dilapidated fence, so I will be back here in a few weeks with even more massive bits of fencing to get rid of. Life is good.
I stopped off at the supermarket on the way home, mainly cos I really needed a wee, but picked up a few bits. By the time I was home at 1pm I had been on the go, with a good degree of strenuous exercise, for four hours. Unsurprisingly I was a little bit exhausted and really flagging by the time we’d got the kids to bed. But it felt great to have achieved so much and to have pushed myself physically. I’d also put a fair amount of the logs back into the log store too, some of them during a thunderstorm. I know how to live.
The other day on Twitter Warming Up superfan Jon Burton flagged up what he considered to be a particularly significant incident in my life,
the time I went to see the Christmas show at Ingfield School. He was right about it. It was a life-changing day for me, which is why it became a central plank of my show Lord of the Dance Settee. But what I found remarkable about that entry is how much I was getting done in a day. I was deeply hungover at the start of that day and very nearly missed the train to the school (I think I wrote about that in How Not To Grow Up) and had to run like a maniac, feeling like I might puke at any second. But not only did I make it to the school, I then came back to London, raced a young woman up an escalator (I’d forgotten that was the same day, but that is an incident I often think about too) and then been to a gig, performed, seen a woman playing a saw and got drunk again. If that much stuff happens in a month nowadays I would feel that was a busy time, but for it all to be the same day.
Obviously we slow down over time and 2007 was a particularly crazy and incident filled year (which is why I wrote a book about it), but my mind is blown that I could pack so much in. Maybe I should try and pack a little bit more in to my days now. I still have the energy to do a fair amount, even if I pass out asleep by 9pm.
