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We have been pretty lucky parents so far. Our daughter has slept pretty well and not cried very much at all. But this week has been like a spade swung into our faces, as with a snotty nose and a wheezy chest things have not run so smoothly. And just my luck, the worst night so far fell on my turn to look after her. I was still buzzing from the gig and tried to do a bit of work, but at 2am I was getting ready to fall asleep. But Phoebe had other ideas. She woke up in some distress and then cried for the next two and a half hours. Whatever I tried didn’t work and she wouldn’t go back to sleep. Occasionally she quietened down and it felt like the storm might be over, but then she coughed or snot ran down her throat and she was awake and sobbing again. I have always said that I did not want to lose patience with my daughter and that I’d treat her like a persistent heckler (that I couldn’t swear at or get chucked out by the bouncers - though I can put her in a bouncer), but the thing with hecklers is that they don’t generally follow you home and carry on heckling for 150 minutes in your bedroom while you’re desperate to get to sleep.
But also I don’t generally love hecklers (I slept with one once and have never forgiven myself for the betrayal to my profession) and as exasperated as I became, I didn’t lose my temper. None of this was Phoebe’s fault, but as the morning dragged on with piercing and heart-rending tears I weighed up the impact this would have on my working day. Also how was she going to be with this big chunk of her sleep missed out on.
Even though I was a bit scared there might be something wrong I didn’t want to wake my wife and rob her of valuable sleep time too. Eventually at about 4.30 Phoebe and me both fell asleep on the bed. But she was up and crying again at 6.30 and even though she was woozy with tiredness, her cold kept waking her up. So I got up and allowed myself to enjoy the disorientating effects of lack of sleep.
I’ve never been one of those people who liked to stay up to watch the sun rise (or as i’ve mentioned stay up to get lucky - no luck by 12.30am and it’s time for bed. Sleep is better than staying up til dawn with a stranger who isn’t going to have sex with you anyway) and I can’t see the allure of missing out on slumber. I wish I could explain to my daughter that by staying awake she is rejecting the opportunity to enter the world of dreams where she can be a princess, an archaeologist or a rabbit (anything but a rubbish baby, basically), but there was no point in trying. She wanted to go to sleep too. She just couldn’t.
It had been a long day of work and there had been no rest for the wicked and only a bit of rest for the innocent, but it was me that got myself into this ridiculous mess by thinking that it would be fun to shoot my gametes into a place where they could achieve sentience and even after all of this I just felt sympathy and love for my sperm done good.
And though I’d loved to have done some work on my new show in readiness for my preview tonight, luckily both my wife and I are self-employed and at 9 she took over and I went back to bed and slept until 2. Soon we will have got the shifts down so well that we will never actually meet. But we’ve done a great job of getting through this tricky week, when we both have loads of work on and I am sure it will be over soon. Surely by 2033 anyway.
I was a bit disorientated and had no time to do any extra writing, but I enjoyed my gig at the Ho Ho Theatre on Throgmorton Street. It’s right in the heart of the city, close to the Bank of England and the space is in a crumbling cellar room two floors beneath street level in a faded but once stunning building that was once home to the Society of Drapers (or something) and where (according to Boothby Graffoe) Margaret Thatcher invented Mr Whippy ice cream (I think she worked on the team that brought it to the UK, but don’t know if that really happened here).
I loved this mixture of history, grandeur, rumour and decay and somehow called to mind most of the material for Happy Now? even though it’s been a few weeks since I did it. It was a small but fun crowd and Bob Slayer, who is running this venue, is a great British eccentric and worth the entrance fee alone.
Lovely to see Boothby Graffoe too, who I haven’t bumped into for a few years. He’s an ace stand up and brilliant musical comedian - and the music (along with Nick Pynn) is genuinely great even without the jokes. I don’t know why Boothby never became massively famous. But I think it was probably his choice not to. It was the correct choice too.
They are doing some great shows over the next three weeks, so do pop down and check out the amazing gold tiles down the spiral staircase.
I came home and wasn’t at all tired. I have probably flipped over and become nocturnal.
