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Every time I run round Cheddar reservoir (and probably every time I write about it on Warming Up) I wonder how many more times I will run around Cheddar reservoir. I've definitely done it more times than I am going to do it. I doubt I will do it more than ten more times.
But today was a fun one and a fairly easy five and a half kilometre run from the house. On the way back I bumped into Geoff Quigley, one of my best school friends who I interrailed and hitchhiked round Europe with when we were hopelessly naive and clueless 18 year olds. We poisoned ourselves with raw beans, we ended up in cars with some very strange people, we were sexually harassed and we pretty much entirely failed to even talk to any women. Fun times though.
Thirty-five years have gone by since then, but most of my Cheddar based memories are at least that old (and some go back forty-five years). Later I'd take my kids for a walk round the village and we got caught in the rain. We managed to take shelter on a covered bench next to the bus stop by my old school. It's now a public toilet (an official one - my guess is it was used as a toilet a fair bit back in the day) and the wet kids ate biscuits as an unpleasant smell wafted by and I thought how that pretty much sums up the British holiday experience. But I thought about how on the night that I started going out with my first girlfriend we'd sat on the curb, coyly chatting as my friends larked about in the bus shelter behind us. That was about 38 years ago. What would I think if I could have looked into the future? I'd probably have mainly been amazed that the bus shelter was now a toilet.
The telephone box where I used to ring my parents and shout “Come and get us†in the gap before the pips came in is still there. But it's no longer got a phone in it. It's only about a mile from our house so I wondered why I had to ring my parents to come and pick me up when it was a 20 minute walk. Lazy, lazy children. I bet I didn't even once thank my parents for their dedication. And I am not going to start now.
I did a RHLSTP from my parents' dining room tonight, fittingly with Nigel Planer, whose early work I had dedicatedly watched and catalogued on VHS from this very house. I've only met Nigel once, when Stew and me went to meet him in the early 90s to discuss a possible TV project (he remembers it being a comedy about a Richard and Judy style couple, but I think it was a panel show in which he was going to be a judge), though I did spend some time in his house in the early 2000s without him even knowing. He was charming company tonight and talked very honestly and openly about his early days as a comedian and the behind the scenes politics of the Young Ones. I was slightly hobbled by an internet connection that from my point of view kept freezing and then rapidly catching up again (though don't think this glitch came out on the stream) so there were times when I talked over Nigel, but I mainly just let him get on with it. I think he enjoyed himself and he was pleased about my positive assessment of the brilliant Nicholas Craig.
It will be out as a podcast next Wednesday.
RHLSTP with Jackie "You have no authority" Weaver is now up
on audio and
video 
