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From the glamour of filming my own podcast to the reality of waking up at 7 in the morning to find my daughter has been sick all over herself in the night. I am KEEPING IT REAL. Luckily she was in good spirits and we had a fun morning, before I took her to her football lesson, where she’s been bumped up a class. The fairly dainty and poorly attended beginners class has now been replaced with a more boisterous division, where it’s her and about 10 3-year-old boys. I felt quite intimidated by the baby testosterone flying around in this room, but Phoebe took it in her stride, laughed heartily at all the antics of the older boys and even managed to get into a bit of a tussle with one of them. She’s as tough as nails and scared of nothing. It’s a big responsibility to ensure that she neither loses this energy, or allows it to get out of control.
Am more or less rising to the challenge of all that needs to be done at the moment, though most of today got eaten up with chores. The new Edinburgh/tour programmes arrived, which is always an exciting day. They look lovely. I will try and get the limited edition ones out to donors asap, but you might have to wait until August as having a show is more important than you having the programmes! But I somehow seem to be making good progress on that. Tonight I was at the excellent Bill Murray pub in Angel. They did a kickstarter for a refurb to turn it into a proper comedy club/pub a few months ago and this is the first time I’ve been down to see it. Good to see the £50 I chucked in wasn’t wasted.
They have some amazing bills on, a discerning crowd and the 100 seater space is perfect for an intimate gig. I am doing two more gigs there too. Check out the gig guide.
And though I hadn’t had any time to think about the show properly and hadn’t felt like looking over it on the long and hot tube journey there, and even though I got rained on and was dropping my notes everywhere on stage, it went really well. Definitely the best one yet and a full hour long with ideas to spare. It’s in no way a show yet and some bits didn’t work (this excellent audience served as a brilliant comedy barometer, letting me know what was going to get somewhere and wha really wasn’t), but tonight having over a month to kick this into shape felt like properly enough. And I am gigging nearly every day until the end of July, so I might get away with my usual system of not thinking too much about it in the day and doing all the work on stage. We’ll see. I am quite excited about it. I feel relaxed enough about it not to get stressed about it - to make it a fun celebration of my age and my career - but focused enough to want it to work as a solid hour with a beginning, middle and end and everything in its right place. But playfulness is the theme of the show, I guess, and it’s really fun to keep it playful. I am bamboozled by my age, so maybe it’s good if the show feels a bit bamboozled too.
But met some of the audience afterwards and got some positive responses and also met the people who had played Emergency Questions when they had been trapped by a landslide in the mountains and thought they might be about to die. I still fail to remember the exact details, but I mention them in the book.
By the end of this busy day I couldn't actually work out what day it was. It seemed impossible that it was only last night that I had done the podcast. But apparently it was. I am far from getting through the Herculean task of writing a stand up show, a sitcom series, recording 8 more podcasts and moving out of Hercules Terrace (as well as turning 50, which should happen regardless, but might lead to an unexpected breakdown), but I can only take it one day at a time.
And obey my body when it says enough and tells me to shut down.
