5150/18070
My daughter survived the day. So I am off the hook. And if she has brain problems in her future life no one will be able to prove it’s anything to do with me. So I win. 1-0.
It was my 50th New Year’s Eve and when you’ve had that many you’re really not bothered any more. As I have no doubt said 15 times on this blog, I do not like New Year’s Eve. It comes too close to Christmas and I’ve always had my fill of boozing and I hate the enforced jollity of it. I never really got the point of staying up all night (not even to get lucky) and if I do stay up late I want to know that I can get home easily. I am the Scrooge of New Year’s which means I get visited by 4 ghosts (including Jacob Marley) who basically tell me that I’ve got it spot on. New Year’s is shit and only an idiot would enjoy it. Sitting at home watching telly is the best way to do it. And maybe having an early night.
Maybe if New Year was in the middle of July when there’s not many celebrations going on then I wouldn’t mind so much. A nice mid-summer excuse to get drunk and have a day off. Or if we could all choose when we wanted the year to start and have our own celebration so it wasn’t spoiled by everyone doing it at the same time. Like a second birthday.
I tweeted a joke that I knew some people wouldn’t get and that others would take knee-jerk umbrage to, even though they didn’t understand it. As I said the other day I am fed up of self-censoring stuff because of idiots who don’t understand the target of jokes or the release valve nature of comedy. And I knew this joke wasn’t actually offensive. It was, "Looking forward to seeing George Michael and Rick Parfitt on Jools Holland's Hootenanny tonight.” Now even if you don’t know that the Hootenanny is filmed weeks in advance (usually late November or early December from my experience) and that the joke is directed at the programme for its pretence at liveness, then there’s nothing offensive about that statement. It might be confusing, but it could mean anything. Maybe I am anticipating a tribute to those that have fallen this year. If you don’t get the joke, then you can’t even know that it is a joke. So is it wrong to even mention these names in a tweet? In which case all the people doling out the heartfelt obituaries about how every artist who died was their inspiration are in trouble. And I wish they were in trouble. If you want to be a nuisance on Twitter taking the moral high ground then at least collate a list of the people tweeting about their heroes and start having a go at the ones who have an unrealistic number and who clearly weren’t really affected personally by every single death and are thus devaluing the currency of grieving strangers.
Even so a handful of people sent me tweets letting me know that I was low or had over stepped a mark. Unusually I explained the joke to all of them and I think every one got back to me to apologise for or at least acknowledge their misunderstanding.
The lesson is, don’t complain about things you don’t understand. And maybe consider letting more stuff go in general.
Anyway I apologised for the tweet because of course I had spoiled the magical illusion for many that Jools Holland’s Hootenanny is live. And I reminisced about the time that I had been invited as a guest on to the show and then on actual New Year’s Eve had found myself at home, sad and alone with nowhere to go and ended up watching myself on TV, living it up at the pretend New Year’s Eve. It was perhaps the perfect metaphor for the emptiness of show business. Better than doing a sold-out gig and seeing the exuberant audience vanish into the night as I headed off to drink alone in a Travelodge bar knowing that a stranger’s bogey is on the shower curtain in my room.
It was back on New Year’s Eve 2001, before this blog had begun, but I did allude to it in 2003, the last time I was considered famous enough to be invited to the event weirdly it was only once I was off TV that I started getting the invites. I think it was a much sadder experience than I suggest in the blog. Because New Year’s Eve is worse even than Valentine’s at making sad, lonely people feel like shit. You imagine everyone else is out having a great time, but there’s plenty of people out there crying alone. And plenty people out there, at parties, feeling even more alone. It’s a terrible fucking night.
I can’t remember how we spent the night last year, but tonight we stayed in, watched a bit of telly and then went to bed at 10pm. I was super tired after my night of not really sleeping in case my child was about to die. I was half-woken by cheering and fireworks set off by people trying to convince the world that they weren’t dying inside. But for the first time I understood properly that they were dying inside and that I was not. My hopes and fears for 2017 were all neatly stored up within the walls of my home and as much as I have to be terrified of, I am no longer the lost young(ish) man watching an ever so slightly younger version of himself partying, whilst he looked deep into his vacuous soul.
Happy New Year. Good luck. We’re going to need it.
