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It's been a while since I've done a 20 minute slot at a stand up club and tonight I was going to try out some material about testicular cancer. Sounds like a nice recipe for disaster. But luckily it was mainly OK.
I was at Headliners in Chiswick, a club I haven't played for 15 to 20 years (but then it's that long since I've played most clubs) and the audience was mainly up for stuff from the start, though there was one very drunk, though affable, man who wanted to join in with everything.
I was on second and he'd quietened down by then, but I had forgotten how attuned to your surroundings you have to be in a club. Things were going pretty well, though I was aware of some distraction at the back, which it seemed best to ignore. Then midway through a story someone in the front row started moving around. I thought he was getting up to go to the loo so ignored him, but he didn't go to the loo and was checking on his mate. I tried to carry on, but realised that the audience were as interested in the slight kerfuffle as what I was doing as it became apparent that something was wrong. The young man they were concerned about was non-responsive. I was pretty sure that he'd just fainted, but they were now trying to get him to his feet to take him out, so there was no way I could style this out.
Having mildly lost the audience with my lack of awareness, I won them back by gently suggesting he was trying to outdo me by having something worse than cancer and that just passing out was the most effective heckle possible. There's no comeback. Even if you have one the person can't hear it. I then suggested he might have died (we could all see that he hadn't -probably) and that that would be great for reviews of my material, but I insisted I'd only killed one person so it wasn't so bad. I was getting laughs out of a tricky situation and the set, that had dipped a little, picked up. Later a man laughed uproariously at the idea of prosthetic testicles existing. I told him that that was just a fact and if he liked that then I could just give him an encyclopedia and he could just read that and laugh himself silly. That's sort of what my job is though, I observed, spotting stupid things in the world and saying them. It was a lot of fun. Apart from the guy dying. May he rest in peace.
The electric car was a bit low on charge, but I had enough miles to get home. The A1 was closed so I took a chance and came up the M1, which has a few ways home, but I don't come this way often. As the charge got down to 10% I had about 15 miles to go and 30 miles of energy so was confident I'd be OK. But the car started to panic and suggested an alternate route that would take me past a charger. I declined the suggestion, but the car didn't seem happy about it and kept trying to divert me. I kept reentering my address and clicking the option to go home directly, but my car said wasn't playing ball. I assumed I was on a new way home, having just selected the direct route, but I was suddenly going along unfamiliar country lanes. Why would the navigation system know that the battery was low -though not too low to get me to my destination- and then make me drive much further. Finally I got to somewhere I recognised and could make my own way home, but even as I drove down the hill to our village the satnav was trying to persuade me to go to a charger. I had to turn right at the bottom and was 20 seconds from my garage and it suggested I turn left for a 45 minute diversion. Maybe the car saves electricity by denying the sat nav and the sat nav loses its mind. But it seemed like a potentially very annoying if not fatal feature. I didn't fancy running out of power in the middle of nowhere on a single lane road.
Anyway, I should know all the ways home, but I have aphantasia and that makes it tricky. Also I am an idiot.
